Does the Safety Pin actually make us feel safer?
This time you stop yourself. You don’t want your inquiry to be met by a patronizing sigh of impatience or another explanation about ship dates,…
3rd Rock From The Sun Is Underappreciated
At this stage in the meeting, you like to look supplicants in the eye and say, OK, you’ve given me a date and a budget….
An Overly Close Reading of the 90s Television Series Martin
Next year, you’ll burn a little under a barrel of cash on Oracle. One barrel isn’t that bad. But it’s never one barrel. Is this…
What can you really do when a natural disaster happens?
Here is what you’ve been told: All of the computer code that keeps the website running must be replaced. At one time, it was very…
The Family That Plays Cribbage Together
There are lots of other neighborhoods, too: There are people who write code for embedded computers smaller than your thumb. There are people who write…
What’s Different About Indonesia and Malaysia?
Coders are insanely expensive, and projects that start with uncomfortably large budgets have an ugly tendency to grow from there. You need to understand where…
Fighting Fire with Fire-Breathing Dragons
The CTO was fired six months ago. That CTO has three kids in college and a mustache. It was a bad exit. The man in…
The 10 Best Scenes from “The West Wing”
In some mysterious way, he outranks you. Not within the company, not in restaurant reservations, not around lawyers. Still: He strokes his short beard; his…
How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall of Western Civilization
This man makes a third less than you, and his education ended with a B.S. from a large, perfectly fine state university. But he has…
Just How Bad Is the Santa Barbara Wildfire?
You have a reputation throughout the organization as a careful person, bordering on penny-pinching. The way you’d put it is, you are loath to pay…