Jason Bock and Ted Neward did a good job summarizing specific talks, so I won't duplicate that effort. Overall, I loved the conference, it was revitalizing for me. The speakers varied greatly in their presentation skills, but I actually liked the "texture" that gave the conference; you definitely didn't have …

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Yesterday I went swimming on a coral reef in 100' visibility with whales singing so loud that I almost expected to see them underwater. For the next 3 days, I'll be in Seattle, where I assume they have this thing I hear about called "heating."

Actually, after canceling the trip …

Definitely looks worth checking out:

I used to live several miles from Harvard Square, which was (a) a destination in and of itself and (b) the last stop on the Red Line (back in the day). I used to live about 5 minutes from the Belmont Center route, which ran occasionally, and about 15 minutes …

Mitch Barnett responds to \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink%2cguid%2cfde0f610-3773-47b8-9be6-d6e5a8a76858.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">No Silver Programmers with a discussion of visual programming in BizTalk:

[Y]ou drag n dropped onto the canvas (kinda like Visio) and then you would set a bunch of design …

Philip Johnson tells me by email of Hackystat:

[A]n open source framework for collection, analysis, visualization, interpretation, annotation, and dissemination of software development process and product data....

Hackystat aspires to be the "Apache" of software engineering measurement systems: open source, standalone, scalable, extensible, and platform and technology neutral.

Our …

This is a photo by Wayne Levin, an incredible photographer who stars in a new video for Hawaiian tourism

While I'm at it, this is one Wayne took of Tina, bluewater freediving near a fish-aggregating buoy:

In email, Charles Gallo makes a point regarding "No Silver Programmers":

I think the HUGE difference between the mean programmer, and the silver bullet programmer is NOT how fast they can code "x" function points. The HUGE difference is when they sit down to solve a problem, and they can …

I'm now reading Dan Simmons' The Terror on my Kindle. He's a very competent writer, and perhaps it's his very slow, very claustrophobic build-up (which he'd d*** well better pay off) that makes it so noticeable, but I have to say that I'm very aware of a certain "running on …

Andrew Dalke reminded me of an essay by Stephen J. Gould (discussed at:

http://www.michaelshermer.com/1996/10/bicycles-baseball-bacteria-and-bach/ and http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/1997/01/outspoken.html) about the decreasing deviation in performance as a field matures. Relating it to the old studies on programming productivity …