j e s r u s h . c o m

NPR recently aired an incredible story of a NY man who was mugged on his way home from work.  Listening to the audio is the best way to hear it, but a teaser to get you started:

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

Continue reading at NPR…  Wow.

This overlooked film comes out of nowhere and sucker punches you were it counts. Joan Allen plays a mother of four teenage daughters who is abandoned by her husband when he runs off to Sweden with his secretary. She and her children struggle to cope with the subsequent chaos while Allen becomes increasingly angry and slips into a deep depression. It’s a really well done study of the stranglehold which anger can put on human life and of the importance of perception. We saw this in the theatre and folks were so moved that they actually clapped out loud when the credits rolled. That doesn’t happen often. A must see!

For a long time, I would walk or drive by panhandlers or homeless folks and ignore them. Everyone else did it, so it seemed like an acceptable response. And there are so many great rationalizations: They must be lazy… why don’t they just get a job? There are organizations out there who would take care of this person if they would merely cooperate. These guys make hundreds of dollars a day. If I gave them money, they would just use it to get high! The list goes on and on…

But the more I studied the life of Christ, the more uncomfortable I became with my response. One day I had a breakthrough epiphany. It seems so simple and obvious in retrospect, but for some reason it had never actually materialized in my mind: If Jesus were walking or driving by, it’s simply impossible to imagine Him ignoring these people.

If Christ wouldn’t ignore them, then I couldn’t either. So I started carrying around little cards with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of local charities. Whenever I met somebody around DC who needed help, I gave them the cards and offered to pay cab fare to get them there. In my naivety, I was stunned by the response: Most of them had already been to these places and nobody wanted to return. Back to square one.

I still felt like I had to do something, so I started giving them money. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Whatever I had handy. One day back in college I was walking down 16th street with a friend when I gave some guy twenty bucks because I didn’t have any smaller bills. My friend looked at me like I was an alien, “Don’t you know he’s just going to spend it on cigarettes and alcohol!?!?” I thought about it for a moment, and said: “Well, so was I.” This was college after all, and I had recently become obsessed with cigars and apple pie shooters. But his comment nagged at me anyway, what if I was fueling some horrible addiction?

Time passed and I kept giving money and kept worrying about it. Then one day I had a Eureka moment. I reached into my wallet to help some guy and realized it was empty. In my embarrassment, I gave him the only thing I could think of: a Starbucks gift card I’d gotten for Christmas. It later occurred to me that the only thing he could really do with that card was get some coffee. It wasn’t worth enough ($7) to trade or manipulate. I connected the dots and realized that the fast food joints were starting to push gift cards. Everyone likes McDonalds, and McDonalds is everywhere.

So I bought ten $5 McDonalds gift cards and stuck them in my car, wallet, jeans… everywhere I could think of. I started handing them out to people. The look on their faces was all the confirmation I needed: They were thrilled. And I didn’t have to worry that the money was going towards some drug habit. Brillant. I found out later that some of the charities were giving out gift cards too, especially cards for supermarkets. Though I’ve never run into any person or organization giving out cards for a quick meal.

I realize that the problems of panhandling and homelessness are a lot bigger than the question of what someone is going to eat tonight, and serious resources must be dedicated to sorting out those issues. And it’s not just about money, these folks need human love and spiritual support as well. But when it comes to the hungry guy standing on your corner right now, I think Christ would address him, and I think gift cards are an elegant way to help do so. I encourage you to try it.

Bruce Schneier has got to be one of the smartest men alive. He runs a computer security company called Counterpane, but has outgrown his roots and become a kind of modern Cassandra, poking hole after hole in the systems and policies which we rely on to protect our world.

In his monthly newsletter–which is a must read–he writes about fraud, thievery, spying, scams, terrorists, war, bombs, forensics, airports, privacy, healthcare and just about everything else. But he’s not one of those paranoid crazies, in fact he’s frighteningly realistic. Awhile back he wrote this about the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina:

Improving our disaster response was discussed in the months after
9/11. We were going to give money to local governments to fund first
responders. We established the Department of Homeland Security to
streamline the chains of command and facilitate efficient and
effective response.

The problem is that we all got caught up in “movie-plot threats,”
specific attack scenarios that capture the imagination and then the
dollars. Whether it’s terrorists with box cutters or bombs in their
shoes, we fear what we can imagine. We’re searching backpacks in the
subways of New York, because this year’s movie plot is based on a
terrorist bombing in the London subways.

Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and
gets people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios,
and we’re going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines
are wasted if the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.

Our nation needs to spend its homeland security dollars on two things:
intelligence-gathering and emergency response. These two things will
help us regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second
helps both against terrorist attacks and national disasters.

Katrina demonstrated that we haven’t invested enough in emergency
response. New Orleans police officers couldn’t talk with each other
after power outages shut down their primary communications system –
and there was no backup. The Department of Homeland Security, which
was established in order to centralize federal response in a situation
like this, couldn’t figure out who was in charge or what to do, and
actively obstructed aid by others. FEMA did no better, and thousands
died while turf battles were being fought.

Our government’s ineptitude in the aftermath of Katrina demonstrates
how little we’re getting for all our security spending. It’s
unconscionable that we’re wasting our money fingerprinting foreigners,
profiling airline passengers, and invading foreign countries while
emergency response at home goes underfunded.

Money spent on emergency response makes us safer, regardless of what
the next disaster is, whether terrorist-made or natural.

This includes good communications on the ground, good coordination up
the command chain, and resources — people and supplies — that can be
quickly deployed wherever they’re needed.

Similarly, money spent on intelligence-gathering makes us safer,
regardless of what the next disaster is. Against terrorism, that
includes the NSA and the CIA. Against natural disasters, that includes
the National Weather Service and the National Earthquake Information
Center.

Katrina deftly illustrated homeland security’s biggest challenge:
guessing correctly. The solution is to fund security that doesn’t rely
on guessing. Defending against movie plots doesn’t make us appreciably
safer. Emergency response does. It lessens the damage and suffering
caused by disasters, whether man-made, like 9/11, or nature-made, like
Katrina.

If that isn’t wisdom, then I don’t know what is. Checkout Bruce Schneier, you’ll be shocked by what you learn.

David Christiansen has a great post over at techdarkside entitled, “What IT Should Learn from GoDaddy.com“. In it, he argues that IT departments should offer pre-spec’d, preconfigured, “cafeteria style” offerings to their internal organization. A la:

• Standalone High-Speed-Production-Server: $16,000
• Standalone Medium-Speed-Production-Server: $11,000
• Virtual Medium-Speed-Development-Server: $6000
• Storage Space: $5000/TB

The idea is that your infrastructure team would go out and spec out these configurations for typical applications, add some overhead (say 15%) to cover cabinet space, UPS, etc., and then offer them to all departments for whatever applications they want to run.

Christiansen argues that departments will be more likely to use these configurations (rather than going through the trouble of spec’ing something custom) because they are readily available buffet style, like a cafeteria.

What I love about this approach is that it clearly places the onus for paying for the gear on the originating department (so the gear doesn’t somehow come out of IT’s budget!) and that it increases visibility into the inner costs and workings of the IT hairball. This is a great way to take your users to the next level in understanding their infrastructure needs.

Recently I sat for and passed the project management professional (PMP) exam on my first shot. Given that 40% of test takers fail, this was nothing to shake a stick at.

I got a lot of advice from people on how to pass the exam. Having been through the whole experience, I think some of that advice was actually flawed. There is a whole sea of people out there who are thinking about, studying for, or restudying for (after failing) the exam. So I wanted to share a few tips which worked well for me.

• Don’t memorize the ITTOs. Everyone kept telling me to memorize all of the ITTO’s (inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs). So about three months beforehand I dutifully starting making flashcards with the process on one side and all of the ITTOs on the other. About two weeks later, I decided this was ridiculous. Who can memorize 400 items? This was horrible advice–ignore it (and see next tip).

• Focus on EXPOSURE instead of memorization. The exam is multiple choice, so you don’t need to be able to completely reproduce the ITTOs on a blank sheet of paper from memory, you just need to be able recognize them by name and associate them with a process. The key to doing that is repeated exposure from multiple angles. Use multiple books, multiple techniques, and multiple mediums (audible, read the PMBOK glossary, play a match game, write them, type them, draw them, speak them). Basically just activate as many different parts of your brain in learning them as possible.

• Don’t buy Rita Mulcahy’s PMP Exam Prep Book. Everyone and their dog told me to buy this book. I did and it’s good. Huh? Then why would I say don’t buy it? Because it does everything well and nothing great. The layout is pretty good, the instruction is pretty good, and the practice questions are pretty good. If you work *really* hard, you can pass the exam with just this book! But why work harder than you have to when two other books are better? See the next two tips.

• DO Buy Andy Crowe’s How to Pass the PMP Exam on your First Try. This is probably the best organized study guide for any exam that I’ve ever read (SATs, GREs, MCSE, etc.). Within minutes of cracking the cover, your head is completely wrapped around the enormous task at hand. Crowe is the king of context, priority, and focus. Every section without fail asks the same questions over again: What is it? How important is this on the exam? When is it used? Reading this first saved me so much time which I would have wasted studying material of minimal importance. Unfortunately, the weakness of this book is that the teaching instruction is not especially good (for example the section on critical chain is a disaster), but Crowe is so darn good at putting the entire PMBOK into perspective, that I consider this indispensable for the exam.

• DO buy O’Reillys Head First PMP. This book is the polar opposite of Crowe’s book. The crazy format (”the latest in cognitive research!”) makes it seem utterly, completely unorganized. I constantly found myself wondering, where am I? What process is this? Am I dead? But its saving grace is the teaching instruction, which is insanely, magically, alarmingly good. These guys could teach a small child earned value. So if you pair this book with Crowe’s in a tag-team approach, then you get two books which do two things really, really well. Crowe gets your head around the exam and gives you laser-like focus on whats important. Head First teaches you everything you don’t know. Together, they’re better than Rita.

Continue to Lessons Learned Part 2…

Ever since college (and rowing), I’ve always been a runner. I used to run to get fast, later I ran to keep off weight. When you look at the charts, running burns an insane amount of calories compared to other exercises. But I’ve finally realized what the problem is with running: You can’t run at 50%. I can’t run lightly. There is something about the motion of running that just makes you go all out.

Running is great for weekends when you’re rested, but what about after work on a Thursday night when you’re dog tired? When it’s just not possible for me to run “lightly,” the sheer effort of it all (running at 100%) becomes a disincentive to actually doing it.

So I recently broke down and bought something I never thought I would buy: An exercise bike. The Schwinn 112. How is it? I love this thing! Yes, it doesn’t burn as many calories as if I were running (about 265 calories per half hour vs. 500 running), but the simple fact that I can bike when tired w/o giving myself a heart attack makes all the difference. There is no mental or effort barrier to working out.

The Schwin 112 costs a mere $300, has an electro-magnetic resistance wheel (the same kind of wheel you find in high end gyms bikes), is reasonably sturdy, and assembles in an hour. This thing is a great value…

A story: I was once a team member on a project to move an office from one location to another. Even though there wasn’t enough equipment and people to fill all of the available office space in the new location, the project manager insisted on taking advantage of management’s good will and the available resources to build out the unused space.

Several months after the move, employees began complaining about high noise levels. It was determined that the cubicles were too noisy because the ceiling was highly reflective, the cubicle walls were short, and the cubicles were too close together. All of the cubicles office wide—including all of the unused build out—had to be replaced with taller walls and moved farther apart. Fixing the unused build out added about 35% additional cost to the change.

This was a classic case of “overbuilding,” the tendency to buck rolling wave planning and build things now which aren’t needed until much later. You see this all the time in IT Infrastructure projects. A small business learns that a bigger competitor has a high-availability SAN. Because that little business might someday have hundreds or thousands of customers and because they want to “keep up” and look “big,” they spend big money on their own SAN.

Next thing you know, a tiny IT staff has to manage a super-complex system in which they are using 10% of the functionality. Three years later, when better, simpler, faster technology rolls out, they’re stuck with the existing system.

How do you avoid the overbuild mess? By taking the building-block-approach to infrastructure design. A topic for another post…

Cornelius Fitchner has an interesting story over at the always excellent project management podcast about his discovery of David Allen’s infamous book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Allen has basically turned a simple idea into a cult following. It works like this: Instead of filling your todo list with major tasks and projects, focus instead on defining the next step. So for example, instead of listing:

• Go to dentist.

You might break that down into “next steps”:

Go to Dentist

• NEXT STEP: Obtain access to my PPO website through HR.
• NEXT STEP: Use the online directory to lookup a local dentist.
• NEXT STEP: Book appointment and add to calendar.
• NEXT STEP: Alert boss: I’ll be out half-day

Does this sound trivial? It did to me the first time I heard it. But I kept hearing people talk about GTD, and ended up finally breaking down and trying it one day. Just as Cornelius described in his podcast, I was shocked by how effective it is. There is a strange psychological boost that comes from concretely defining your next step, it makes you more likely to actually do it.

And thanks to Backpack, the process of managing these steps (and my todo list) is infinitely easier. But that’s a story for another post…

Deep down in the poorest recesses of Washington DC is a remarkable little organization called, ‘A Simple House.’ It’s a volunteer-based ministry where the full time staff live in group houses, work without salary, and engage in what they call, a “ministry of friendship.”

Friendship ministry–in their view–consists primarily of serving the poor through acts of faith, love, and charity. If you’ve ever seen the movie Patch Adams, and remember the way Robin Williams lights up all those lives at the hospital, then you’ve got the right idea.

These folks are literally walking the streets of southeast dc. They’re doing good work and they’ve got some amazing staff. If you have a few extra prayers or dollars, you might send them their way. As part of their commitment to simplicity, they work with no more than three months operating expenses. Highly recommended!

Finding good new music has gotten really hard lately. Sometimes I feel like I’ve heard everything, like there is nothing new left to discover (or at least nothing I would actually like). Enter CD Baby. This site is different from iTunes and all the rest: it’s all brand new independent artists which you’ve never heard.

But it gets better. Anybody who has taken a dive into independent music knows what a mess it can be… you’ve got 10,000 bands and no idea what they sound like. There might be some stuff you would like, but how do you actually find it?!? CD Baby has finally solved this problem. On their main page, click the sounds like button, and you get a huge lists of known bands which in turn lead you to bands which sound like them. iTunes, Amazon, and everybody else have been doing “You might like” recommendations for years, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done with independents.

For example, I went down the ’sounds like U2′ road, and stumbled on this band Signal Goodbye with this track which you can listen to. And you get instant MP3 downloads. Brilliant.

In Steve McConnell’s classic, ‘Rapid Development,’ he talks about the benefits of versioned software development.

The basic idea is almost a kind of psychological trick: Instead of promising one version with five features, you promise five versions with one new additional feature in each. Either way, the customer expects they’ll end up with the same thing. But by doing this, you force the customer to ruthlessly prioritize the most important features into the early versions. Guess what happens next?

By the time you’re into version two or three, the customer realizes that what they planned for versions four and five is all wrong. They need something different. So plans can be adjusted and the new revised requirements can be met. Now imagine that we had originally built the entire application (all five features) in one version. At this point, the code for the original features four and five would have to be thrown out, and the new revised features would have to be built.

The benefits of versioned development are obvious. But after watching this process unfold a couple of times now, I’ll go a step further: Not only does versioned development bring the utility of rolling wave planning to bear on software and reduce wasted effort, it reduces work entirely. What do I mean? I mean that I’ve seen customers end the project early because they realized that the functionality in version one, two, or three meets their needs entirely. They certainly don’t need the features originally planned for versions four and five, but nor do they need a different set of features.

And as everyone knows, project size has a linear relationship to risk. If you can reduce the size of your project with the psychology of versioned development, then you can reduce your project risk. Your project is more likely to be successful. Beautiful…

I don’t pay much attention to children’s poetry, but I heard a segment on NPR about Calef Brown’s new collection, Flamingos on the Roof, and it was too good to pass up. I can’t really explain it, but I love this stuff. A sample:

10-Cent Haiku

I sat down to write a haiku
it seemed like the right thing to do
I wouldn’t need very much time
no need to bother with making it rhyme
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a dime
this is my 10 cent haiku:

shiny, silver friend
i will never let you go
Look!
An ice cream truck!

Listen to the story and several more poems at NPR, and hear what might be the best title for a poem *EVER*: “Biscuits in the Wind.”

Someone pinged me for book recommendations on learning Java the other day. I’m no programmer, but two books have given me enough know-how to work with programmers.

Absolute Java by Walter Savitch is what we used back in school (albeit an earlier edition). This is a solid book and kids have been learning Java from Savitch for years and years now. Besides it has a jaguar on the cover. You can’t go wrong with that.  The only problem with this book is that it squeezes in too much material.  For example, chapter 2 (two!!!) has a discussion on mantissas! NOTE TO TECHNICAL WRITERS:  Just because its in the API or covered in a reference book, doesn’t mean it has to be in your instructional book!

Head First Java by Kathy Sierra is this completely ridiculous–but completely effective book which employs the latest in “cognitive research” to help you learn. Translation: It’s CRAZY. Think handwritten comments, scribbly arrows, crossword puzzles, mix & match, etc. This didn’t exist when I learned Java but I’ve since purchased a copy to refresh.