Korner Talk

Coming this summer on the heels of the A-Team movie is another 80’s classic, The Karate Kid. The remake stars Will Smith’s son as Daniel-san, Jackie Chan as Mr. Miyagi, and  Beijing as the Valley. I’m not sure this 21st century remake can match the original but it looks like a lot of fun. Youtube won’t let me embed the video so the link is below.

Sweep the knee!!!

Trailer

I saw this article from the LA Times on another blog today about how two bike messengers chased down a would be bike thief. The best part of the article:

As the thefts have increased, some people have taken matters into their own hands. Last month, bike messengers downtown caught two suspected thieves, teenage boys who attended a local Catholic high school, and stripped them down to their boxer shorts before taking their cellphones, backpacks and clothes.

Hurray for vigilante justice!

The article also brought back memories of when my bike was stolen right from under me. For those of you that haven’t heard this story before, a bunch of cholos* stole my bike one day while I was playing tennis. I didn’t think about locking up my bike because it was inside the tennis court right next to me. I couldn’t believe it was happening when the cholo walked into the tennis court and rode off with my bike. After I realized what was happening, I gave chase for about a block but gave up because 1) he was too far ahead and 2) what was I going to do after I caught up? Take him and his homies on?

Bottom line: Do not support those that lean like a cholo and buy the thickest u-lock and chain to lock up your ride!

*I didn’t realize that people on the east coast or people outside of SoCal in general don’t know what a cholo is until a friend who has been working out in NJ told me so. Here’s the def from urban dictionary for those of you who might not have had the pleasure of encountering one <clicky>.

One of my own tenets of software engineering is to iterate, iterate, and then iterate some more. By iteration I mean design, build, test, ask for feedback, and repeat if necessary. The feedback part is important. When I’ve strayed from this path of iterating and asking for feedback – something that I’ve done way too many times – I’ve always been bitten. Hard. When I do follow through though, I’ve found that my projects come out more robust and functional. A product that works and does what the end user wants makes everyone happy.

I’m bringing this up because of this article I read about Panjiva, a startup that built a search engine that allows businesses to search for and vet suppliers. Part of their story is how they spent over a year building their search engine only to find out that it didn’t do what their customers wanted. Imagine if you were the VC who just gave them a $5 million infusion. Quote a commenter, “After months of development, it never occurred to either the Harvard guy or the MIT guy to test their code with a real query? An investor had to suggest it? Hello? This is not giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the folks graduating from America’s elite universities.”

Luckily for Panjiva, they went back to the drawing boards and cranked out a search engine that worked. Lesson learned: ask for feedback earlier in the development cycle. It’s a painful lesson to learn and one that we sometimes forget about in the heat of development. Just ask Google.

When I went fishing, it seemed like I always caught a fish when I least expected to. Today, I landed a couple of big ones and I’m smiling ear to ear.

Coming back to my desk after checking out a piece of equipment at work, the last thing I was thinking about was my admission decision from Smith. When my Storm alerted me about a new email, I thought that I might have received another junk email from Patagonia telling me about the Winterfest sale. When I saw that it was from UMD, my mind went blank for a second. My excitement mounted with every sentence that I read until I got to the part that said, “Your’e in”.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic. The first thing that I did was email my gf about the news. The second thing that I did was ponder whether I should send a thank you letter to the admin folks and follow it up with a question about graduate assistantship. My attention returned to work however because I had to leave work earlier to take my sister to the airport.

When my Storm went off again, I was once again surprised that the email was from Smith. This time, the email was about an offer for graduate assistantship. At that moment, I got out of my chair and did some fist pumps.

So what now. I’m still waiting for the Owen and Broad decisions to roll in and I want to see what the offer is before I make a final decision. Meanwhile, I’m going to be making plans to attend the Admitted Student Weekend event @ Smith which is scheduled for March 5-6th. And with one admit on the books, I’m going to start looking into an exit plan for work and a plan for how to spend my time after leaving work.

Today was a good day. Things lined up just perfectly. Hell, I even scored a pair of shoes that was 50% off at Patagonia. Score!

When Tiff told me that she hadn’t seen the A-Team movie trailer yet, I felt that I needed to spread the word about what might be the biggest event since Obama’s inauguration. Seriously folks, set aside some time to watch the movie this summer. If you are an A-Team fan, this movie should be on your “things-to-do-before-I die-list”. If you’ve never heard of the A-Team, shame on you! Head on over to Hulu, catch a few episodes, and ask yourself why you lived for so long without knowing that if you have a problem, and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire The A-Team.