Cold Reading

Since Monday, I've been in bed with a cold. I've been able to do a lot of reading and emailing and other computer stuff, because I have the wireless connection to my QualiBook (the laptop). I started and finished Scott Adams' "God's Debris: A Thought Experiment", which is certainly worth discussing. Maybe I'll get a chance in our housewarming party on Saturday.

Yes, after four months of moving, we finally managed to invite people over and organize a big party. Curiously enough, the last housewarming party we threw, was exactly six years ago, to the day! We are nothing if not consistent. At the end of November 1999 we moved to Witten, Germany from Tampere, Finland and we had the housewarming party 1-Apr-00.

I'm also reading Jerry Weinberg's "Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully", Stephen R. Covey's "The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness", Jonathan Margolis' "Cleese Encounters" and "It's Dark in London".
I borrowed a few Marshal Laws from Yrjö and I'm starting with "Fear and Loathing".

I have to remember to update the website, because the postman brought finally my Umsatzsteueridentifikationsnummer. Impressive word!

Getting into SHAPE

On Saturday, I finally sent my paper for the Conquest 2006 Conference. I'm pretty happy with the paper. It is called ""Tick-The-Code" Inspection: from Fixing Fallacy to True Prevention". It talks mostly about organizational and other problems to software quality. Especially treated is the culture of busyness, always having too little time to do the Right Thing. It leads to a culture of fixing and as the competition requires better and better quality, companies try all they can to test and fix. Unfortunately, it is a losing battle, and the Way of Quality would be to concentrate resources on prevention. I argument how the code inspection properly executed can help to create constant opportunities for improvement in the code, which a quality-conscious team grasps and utilizes.
I sure hope the paper fits into the program of the conference.

I'm in the middle of switching web servers. I've reserved a host on a German provider called 1blu. Let's see, if I can get my domains moved tomorrow.

I've joined the SHAPE forum of Jerry Weinberg. I'm sure it will contain interesting topics to read about. I hope I will become more effective by participating.

Kegeln

Yesterday, the Quality Special Interest Group of Bochum organized a bowling event. To be exact, the sport was the German form of bowling, Kegeln. This time Markus couldn't join us for lack of time.

Afterwards, we went for the buffet in the Indian restaurant Taj Mahal. This time they let me stay.

Joys of Jogging

Temporary (?) insanity struck me on Friday and I agreed to go jogging with Yrjö on Sunday. In between I noticed that I don't really have any running shoes, other than a pair of old sneakers, which I've used in house improvement mostly. They are covered in white paint stains, which apparently only "adds to my street-credibility."
The Jahrhunderthalle (Century Hall) is close to where we jogged.
After a 7-kilometer jog, I was beat and sweating. The hardest hurting place were my feet. The shoes had rubbed my feet leaving a small boil on the left foot and a huge one on the right one. Both were filled with clear liquid as if you'd really like to know.
What makes me wonder about the temporal nature of my insanity is that I'm hoping that the boils will heal in time for next Sunday and I can go jogging again.

Bits and pieces (of code)

Weekend is here again. For me the weekend has become the time when I get most of my writing done. I know I won't have to do with any official business, because everything's officially closed. This week went somehow very quickly, probably because of the extraordinary day at CeBIT on Monday.

Yesterday, Kaj came to visit and work for a bit. We inspected a few hundred lines of code and even found one clear bug. It is not often that bugs present them out in the open like that but this time it was clear. Accessing an array with '-1' as index isn't often correct. We used all the Tick-Its to check and had to spend at least two hours each to go through two cards each. The checking was useful and we found lots of good ticks. I'm sure the author will be happy to improve his software based on the ticks.

After the checking and excellent dinner by Virpi, we played a game called "Dream Factory". It's a board game in the world of Hollywood films. (It's on somebody's TOP-5 games of Reiner Knizia.) You get to produce real scripts with a cast and crew of your choice. If you make a really good film with an excellent script, a world-class director, three-star music, famous actors and maybe a visit from a guest star, you'll probably win a lot of film awards. Sometimes the films have such a curious cast that you would actually want to see them made! Casablanca with an all-female cast would certainly give the story a different spin, don't you think?

I've been writing a bit. The Conquest paper has been printed at twelve pages, needs graphics and feedback, but this week I've left it alone. Next week, I'll read it myself and will put it together for submitting. I ordered and received the book "Finding Flow" from Amazon.de this week. A package from Amazon.co.uk has also been dispatched. I've been teasing Virpi about it. I haven't told what I've ordered but I'm sure she'll like it.

About writing, there are a couple of short articles in preparation. I seem to get good ideas, but taking them further is rather more work. But I think that would be the right way of it. If ideas come easily, but it is hard work to make anything ready, I'm fine. I can always work harder. But I cannot force ideas, if I'm not inclined to having them.

For now, have a nice weekend!

My Cebit report

I spent yesterday with two friends, Kaj and Yrjö, in Hannover at CeBIT. We took an early train (6:05AM) to Hannover and came back sometime after 10PM. The day was long, with a lot of walking and sitting in trains.

On one stand, there was a man explaining how their company is represented all around Germany ('bundesweit') and now that Vienna would possibly join, too, it would be something more than bundesweit, searching for a term without luck. "Depends on how you look at it," I remarked. I found it funny.

On the Parrot stand, we found a few interesting Bluetooth products and an old colleague from Bochum, who moved to Paris. Jens-Uwe seemed to be doing fine and was justifiably proud about the stand.

In the afternoon, after kilometers and kilometers of wandering past stands of less and less interesting products, we were just crossing the Benq Siemens mobile phone department. A young woman approached me and asked me in German if I'd like to take part in a survey. I agreed, and she asked me several questions, which I answered as best I could about the stand and the products displayed etc. The best question was "How long did you spend at the stand?" and after many probing questions for which I had given exact answers, it was a bit funny to answer "30 seconds". The woman didn't waver, just asked if she could round it up to a minute, to which I agreed. In the end of the interview, she asked me for my name and email address and suddenly noted that "German is not your native language? I didn't notice." Although I had given only short answers but the reaction still made me very happy. To be able to speak German like a German, that's something.

The funniest things about CeBIT were the "Management Execution Systems". I half-expected to see guillotines and gallows in the hall, but they were nowhere in sight. Perhaps these most effective systems were kept secret and only shown to invited guests behind closed doors.

Comedy in the bog

The Conquest paper is at 5300 words. I made good progress today, although most of the day was spent shopping and putting posters up on the walls. Frank, Dean and Sammy are now in an excellent place in the music corner. Unfortunately, Wallace and Gromit had to be evicted from the same wall. Spiderman will get to hang from a window, as it happened to be a two-sided poster. Laurel and Hardy will be sitting on a park bench in the guest toilet door. So when you visit us you'll be in good company. Even there.

"Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone method" is excellent! By the way, "Fieldstone" in the name is no name, it really means stones on a field.

Matthes called today, which made me happy. He has red, curly hair, and is the youngest and only boy of their family. He's funny, intelligent, plays football, goes bowling and is exactly - to the day - two years younger than me. We worked side by side for more than five years. I called him my physically closest colleague, for years the distance between us was not more than two meters. I wouldn't let anybody else call me "Missy". Now he works for a company called Visteon and lives in a place called Titz-Müntz. Good luck finding that on a map. Look at Germany near the border of Netherlands. I better send my love to the lovely Sonja, as well.

Dear Diary...

"Weinberg on Writing" instructed me to make a journal of my writing day, so here goes:
7:30 The alarm clock goes off.
8:00 got up, ate breakfast with the newest Finnish Aku Ankka (Donald Duck), read "Weinberg on Writing", showered and got dressed.
9:10 Checked my email. There was only one.
9:15 Started to continue writing the Conquest conference paper.
9:20 decided to create new ideas. To see where I was and how to continue. I seemed to be slightly stuck. I used the Goldilock's questions: "Are you stuck because you have too many ideas?" No, "Are you stuck because you have too few ideas?" Yes, I only have one. "Are you stuck because you have just the right amount of ideas, just like the little bear's porridge was just warm enough?" No, one's not enough.
9:45 Had collected enough ideas and organized them in a mind map on paper. Was ready to write.
10:30 At 3300 words. Helped my wife, Virpi to reorganize the wash room. (It's a room full of maybe-needs. If a thing is a never-need, it ends up in the cellar. Maybe-needs we keep across the corridor in the wash room, because maybe we need them suddenly.)
12:10 Had lunch. Had two pieces of toast like almost every day.
12:35 Tried to clarify the first monthly sales tax declaration. Not possible. Installed two new programs and tried them out. One of them works, but can't figure out what to fill in. Called our advisor. No answer.
14:30 Put several pictures up on the walls and changed a lamp on a ceiling.
16:40 Wrote.
18:00 Finished exhausted and hungry at 4350 words, wrote a few short character sketches, which I've always wanted to collect, but only realised now that I could and should collect them. Who knows when I'l be able to use them. I've missed so many wonderful character descriptions by now...
18:30 Caught our advisor and agreed to ring again tomorrow morning at 9:00. The tax declaration is due tomorrow.

Then had a wonderful supper with prociutto é melone, ravioli é mozzarella é pomodoro, i.e. ham and honey melon then stuffed pasta with mozzarella cheese and tomato.

So in retrospect, I managed to write about two and a half hours. It's actually quite good in this phase when we still have to deal with new things from becoming self-employed and having moved. Later it will be easier...

How not to behave in a sauna

We went to the movies yesterday. In the evening in Endstation-Kino in Bochum-Langendreer (small kino of about 100 seats near a small railway stop) a Swedish-Finnish film was playing. The film was called "Populärmusik från Vittula" and it was surprisingly funny. It takes place in the north of Sweden, near the Finnish border, in a place called Pajala. The dialog in the movie was mostly in Swedish with Finnish lines in between. I wasn't sure how well I could even follow the movie with German subtitles, but it went fine. Sometimes I would read the subtitles, sometimes they would just be mixing me up and I'd try to focus on listening.
Probably the funniest scene takes place in a sauna, where the drunken men (well, it was a wedding, after all) are competing who can stand the hottest temperatures. All the men of the two marrying families, a Swedish one and a Finnish one, are in the sauna. There's a lot of talking and water thrown on the stove. Slowly but surely all the Swedes are bowing down and hiding in the lower benches where it is not so hot. Two Finns are left on the highest bench and they pour the rest of the water bucket on the stove with these legendary words "Somebody should tell the Swedes that before taking a sauna, it should be heated". After enduring what must be hellish hotness for about five seconds, both heroes must give up and seek asylum lower in the sauna. The Swedes declare an undecided at that moment.

I've started to prepare for the Conquest 2006 conference. It takes place in Berlin in September, but the papers need to submitted by April. I intend to submit a paper this time (first time for me). The paper doesn't have a title yet, but it deals with code inspection, the fallacy that you can insert quality by testing, the problems of code reviews traditionally. I try to keep it within limits and not put everything I know into it. The limit is 12 pages, so far I've done 4. I hope to do a couple more pages this week and another two-three next week. Then I need to draw the graphics and I'll be ready to submit it in good time. Then I hope it gets accepted and I get to talk about it in Berlin later this year. I've also never talked in an international conference before. About time, wouldn't you say?

I received a book delivery today. Weinberg's newest "Weinberg on Writing", one of his best "The Secrets of Consulting" and a psychological book by Csikszentmihalyi called "Flow" arrived today. Writing interests me, as that is a top priority now that I'm not teaching. The third activity I need to perform in this new role is to sell my trainings. That is not far from being a consultant and I though Mr. Weinberg's advice could be useful. Flow is even more interesting. I've noticed that code inspection is a good opportunity to sink into flow, if properly done. Flow is the state of such concentration that it can be considered to be true happiness. Nothing else matters, but the code and the task is clear; find problems in it. It is intellectually challenging and the person performing it likes to use his brain. It seems to be a perfect fit. It said somewhere that "athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling". I intend to find out if that applies to software people, too. All the evidence is for it. Sometimes I've been coding for maybe half an hour, when two hours have passed in real life. My stomach is growling and I feel hungry. When you're really concentrated, for example writing a blog entry, you don't notice time passing. You don't care, you don't need anything else, you're happy. I have to read the book to find out if that's what they mean with "flow", but I'm pretty sure it is.
I urge my trainees to create an environment where they can sink into this flow when they are checking code. You need to have no other needs, you must not be hungry, thirsty or tired, you shouldn't be interrupted, so no phone, no email, no text messages allowed. I'm sure the book will give me more hints on how to make it more sure that flow is achieved. We want to achieve flow because when a person is at his happiest, he's also at his most productive. He'll find the most ticks that way.

By the way, I finished "Life of Pi" today. An EXCELLENT book. Here the author tells how he wrote the book.

Next week, I'll visit the Cebit.

Bird flu, are YOU chicken?

My brother-in-law, Terry is a devout vegetarian. Has been for years. The other day, he was eating some takeaway, I guess, and wondered which vegetable is white, soft and tastes like chicken. Well, it turned out that the vegetable he was eating was indeed chicken.

Can you think of anything more ironic than an ardent vegetarian catching the bird flu like that? (Terry's fine, by the way.)

I remember, a couple of years ago it was the mad cow disease. I knew people who stopped eating minced meat because of the media. It probably lasted for two weeks. Now it seems we are all doomed because of the bird flu. People have no idea how they can catch the disease, or even if they can catch it. Cats are now to be kept inside all the time. They can catch the disease if they eat an infected bird, apparently.

I wonder how real the danger can be and would the news be any different if there really was a deadly virus spreading like an epidemic? There are going to be many more catastrophy movies made in Hollywood in the next few years. The international atmosphere of fear sets the scene for those kinds of movies, just like the fears of nuclear destruction in the eighties did. Or are worlwide epidemics just so fashionable, because of Hollywood?

Mostly I think that worldwide epidemic or a pandemic would be outside of my Circle of Influence and it doesn't really help me to worry about something I can do nothing about. I might as well worry about the new baggage retrieval system they got at Heathrow. Instead, I choose to improve and entertain myself by reading books like "The Eight Habit" and "Life of Pi".

A Swedish Post

I still don't want to mention the bitter defeat in the Olympic final of ice hockey. The games are behind now, and Finland got silver. But no gold in these winter games. Strange, that.

I think I'm either growing old and absent-minded or I'm just unstructured and therefore tend to forget things. Last week we went to Ikea in Essen. Normally we visit the one in Dortmund, because it's closer but they didn't seem to have what we were after. So we drive to Essen and spend a whole afternoon going around the store, eating Swedish meatballs and finally ending in the warehouse, where you get to pick out the big furniture boxes yourself. We wonder if we are going to be able to fit all those shelves and cupboards in the car and I'm confident as always that they fit. So we pack two carriages full of cardboard packages and head for the cashier's. We unload the little stuff on the belt and I then concentrate on the two carriages, which are quite heavy and hard to control alone. Virpi stays and pays.
There was one small package that we needed to order and we'd get it from the warehouse. The staff would bring it and shout out our number. That was funny already, we had the hugest packages that we had to pack in the carriage ourselves and one tiny package wasn't available there, so we'll have to wait. I move the carriages one at a time closer to the benches where we'll wait. Virpi comes over and is worried about on of the carriages. I get that too near the bench and we sit down.
The man at the desk tells Virpi that they will call out the number once it arrives. After ten minutes we notice a small package is delivered to the man's table. Nothing happens. No numbers get called, not at least ours. Nobody collects the package. I'm sure it is ours. We wait. After about another ten minutes, the man suddenly notices the package and asks "who brought this here?" Still no other reaction. No number gets called. At this point, I decide to go and collect the package. I get closer and notice that it is our package, just like I thought. I tell the man that it's our package, he takes a look at my paper and I get it.
Now that we have everything, we move to packing the car. It isn't easy, the longest package is over two meters long. We turn both the right side backseat and frontseat down, but it's going to be a tough fit. I can hardly reach the handbreak now, because the package is so heavy and wide. Virpi sits at the backseat and we're off.
Carrying everything up (thank god we have a lift) is not too difficult. In the evening, I start to build the small cabinet. Halfway to building it I notice that some part is missing. We quickly realize that all the little bits and pieces are missing. THEY MUST STILL BE AT THE BELT! We paid for them but never collected them. The whole IKEA experience had been so coma-inducingly stressful.
Of course, we have to go back. Next day, we head back to Essen and find out that it is quite common to forget the little things. They have a special notepad (A4) half-way full already for this year! Every page fits probably 15 customers, there were probably twenty pages filled out already. That would make about 300 forgotten purchases, in two months! Every shopping day 6 people forget that they've bought something more. Anyway we got what we came for, and we made a complaint about a missing part, which I discovered only because I started to build another piece of furniture after I noticed I couldn't finish the small cabinet. I actually couldn't finish any of the furniture, but I tried. That wasn't all, however, we made another round around the shop to buy a shower curtain and a few other miscellaneous bits and pieces, which had slipped our minds the day before.
Those two days of IKEA were very effective. After that I had several days worth of building. Some blinds are still to be attached, but all cabinets and showcases are ready and showing. Even the missing pieces arrived today in the post. I really hope it takes a long time before I have to go back to IKEA...