I was chugging along nicely, then I lost my connection, and now the connection is gone forever. Or at least until I can get to the remote computer. I am now sitting in an empty classroom at Saint Thomas, waiting for Yuna to appear. The class was short. Actually, I didn't think it was at all. I mistakenly thought that this evening was the night that the mid-term was due and that we didn't have to attend. So I came a bit late, but it is a good thing that I came.

I was remoted into my computer at work, but I lost the VPN connection and haven't been able to get in since. So, after futzing with that for awhile, I am now resigned to blogging, which is something that I should do anyway.

I just got an email from Tom and Rose, who are cruising and are in the Dominican Republic. They sent the link to their cruising blog. Now, being in the Dominican Republic--that's interesting.

I am getting kind of tired. I stayed home from work today, parting because I was afraid that I was getting an ear infection like what Madeline has got, partly to work on my take-home mid-term which actually isn't due until next Monday. But I can move on now. I am ready to go back to work. I ended up working about half the day anyway, working on a production problem, an aftermath of the disaster recovery exercise from this past Saturday.d

Well now, that is cool. I rebooted to Kubuntu and relocated to the computer lab, since that is where Yuna will be looking for me. Sure enough, I can get on the Saint Thomas network. That's is preetty good. Those college geeks who like linux have come through.

Conflict over the design strategy. My management has come to some sort of understanding with the PMO and related departments about the design of a solution. It is my fear that these "understandings" from management's perspective are based either incomplete or inaccurate information. I have come to this conclusion after discussions with technical peers who raise serious and valid concerns about the high-level approach presented by management.

Yesterday, I made a nice little Visio drawing and used to discuss the design issues with a peer whose technical opinions I respect greatly. His suggestion was that, as designed, things would not work well. His recommendation:get an exception. I went to our boss and the PM with the reasoning for getting an exception. Both came back with the same response: That was the very first thing that they looked at and decided against it. So, at least I am getting up to speed.

Next, I brought up to my management that we should do the two big chunks sequentially, not in parallel. The chunks are: the design response and UAT acceptance of the new mainframe app, and moving of the business unit's functions out of UAT and into a production "customer setup" environment. That was shot down too. No sequential. Parallel it is. All this simply confirms that my task now is to quantify the effort in more detail so that my management can get more resources--or at least try. And that is confirmed by my management.

I am going through anything I have--emails, draft documents--to try and nail down requirements. I am entering them into RequisitePro and a place to keep them.

I decided that I am going to blog it. What I mean by that is I am going to blog my project management class project. Some reservations: confidentiality for my company and how it will work for my instructor. This could be a very short-lived experiment, based on the feedback that I get from him. First, a test to see if this will publish. It did.

Objective: writing here will contain no direct references to people, companies, or products. Even if it doesn't work for my professor, this is a good way for me to think through things, and keep track of ideas and actions.

One thing that I realized yesterday was that in order to get to consensus and management agreement on the Software Project Management Plan, I need to draw pictures, create a PowerPoint presentation, get buy-in from my technical peers on an approach.

I have been interested in the process of creating a Work Breakdown Structure, fascinated with the idea of Post-It notes on a whiteboard. I asked my instructor about that after class last Monday, and he pointed out that Microsoft Project's Ganntt chart displays dependencies and critical path, though critical path calculation is not turned on by default. Nonetheless, I did play around with Visio and a WBS, and got the connection between MS Project and Visio working. That is probably as close as I will get to the big visual of the Post-Its on the whiteboard.

I am converting a template Statement of Work (SOW) to the SPMP. While doing this, I am referring to the annotations. Now that I am done with that, I am thinking requirements, thinking a charter. Especially after the following incident.

I worked on a nice Visio drawing of a high-level diagram of the system to be modified. My reasoning was to put on paper in front of people the extend of what is involved. I took that drawing to a colleague, someone experienced technically and who has been at the bank for years. His response was of the order "that won't work--try to get an exception." Emailed all of the above to my boss, who reminded me that those discussions are done--there will be not exceptionis.

One thing that occurs to me is that I feel that decisions are always fair game for being revisisted. As new information becomes available, it might actually be wise to adjust.

Anyway, now that I have the SPMP roughed out, now I am very motivated to get my management to sign-off on what they want to be done.

Last night, I watched The Manchurian Candidate on TCM (which has become my favorite movie channel). I have of late been remiss and reluctant to sit down and blog. The sense of inertia has been great. But I just got done googling the movie title, wondering, and not being sure, when it was made. If it was made in 1964, that would be one. If it was made before 1963, that would be quite another. 1962. The book was published in 1959.

I had never seen the whole movie. I knew it was difficult. Dorothea had agreed to watch it with me. She made it to the first shooting, and left. The children, including a school friend of Madeline's and now neighbor, were downstairs watching DVDs of episodes of the The OC. So I brought the old, portable TV up, plugged it in to the cable extension that usually lays coiled up under the couch, and set it on a chair. The movie was from 1962, the couch from 2000, the TV from 1989, the chair from 1936.

The parallel that I draw is between the movie's line, delivered by the Angela Lansbury character, something to the effect that the security state that will come into being will make that would make "martial law seem like anarchy." The Wikipedia article on the book refers to the Second Red Scare --McCarthyism. I suppose that the first Red Scare is that after the First World War.

And I cannot help but juxtapose this with The New York Times editorial on the current inaccurate use of the term Commander-in-Chief for President Bush. Bush is not my Commander-in-Chief, because I am not in the military. But it is the creep of sloppy language that gives him, and the government, more authority, or the appearance of more authority, then they have or deserve. So, while the The Manchurian Candidate has spooky parallels to the Kennedy assassination, it continues, 45 years later, to have spooky connotations.

I realized yesterday that I missed the memorial service for a Friend's mother. And I skipped the Adult Education about Vocal Ministry today. I did get greeted in the hall after Meeting by Sandy, who had emailed me earlier, after I got an email from Anne who was (happily, for me) indignate that I hadn't had a welcoming ceremony. There was a welcoming for Bob last week. He'd transferred his membership from Minneapolis. They had cake and ice cream for him. I told Sandy, in response to her query as to what I would like, that I "am a middle-aged, over-weight, pre-diabetic" man who doesn't really need any cake or ice cream. What I would like is singing. So, maybe on February 18th, the next third First Day, we can have a singing at the Meetinghouse.

• Fungi


• Animalia


• Monera


• Plantae


• Protista

Nomenclature International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)

• Uniquness


• Universality


• Stability

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Taxonomy Primer

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I define information architecture as: “the art and science of organizing information so that it is findable, manageable, and useful.”

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So I added SelectMethod=Cursor; to the JDBC info in the web.xml and it worked. Cool that Tomcat autoupdates when you change that file.

So, it is the JSP book that seems to have the most direct example of what I am looking for. So that seems to mean taglibs and Beans.

Last night, I got the Chapter 12 database example to run. So, now back to the authentication. I am using all the bad developer things like a single database connection, not a connection pool, and descriptors on the web.xml file, not LDAP authentication.