Monday, April 08, 2002
Had a wonderful dinner with Melissa on Sunday night. We used up a gift certificate at Ciao Bella. In addition to appetizers and a Caesar salad, I had a delicious ciabatta-crusted walleye. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I opted to save about half of the meal for my lunch today.
Fast forward to today: I stopped at the house for lunch to follow the very specific reheating directions provided by our server (best with a bit of oil in a fry pan), and realized (d-oh!) that I'd left the to-go box on our table.
Disappointed, I called Melissa at work to tell her that I'd forgotten my walleye at the restaurant. She said she thought she'd seen it after I got my credit card back from the waitress. That got me thinking that maybe I'd actually left it in the car, or had put in in the trunk. We kept talking on the phone as I walked outside to check.
Melissa said that she might have the restaurant's phone number somewhere around her desk. I told her that it wasn't that big of a deal. Nope. It wasn't in the car, either. "Bummer," I said. "That's really disappointing."
Melissa suggested I call the restaurant again, or maybe stop by. "Somebody there might have seen it," she said. I repeated several times that I was disappointed, but it wasn't that big of a deal. To which she consistently suggested that I call or drive back to the restaurant to get it.
I thought, if somebody has seen it, they probably just threw it away. But somewhere in the depths of my brain, a lightbulb popped. "Umm..." I said, "I'm talking about my leftovers. The walleye. Are you talking about my wallet?"
We were still laughing about the miscommunication later that evening. Just goes to show how easy it is to carry on a conversation, even if two people are talking about completely different things.
From Scripting News AND the ever linkable Mark Caufman: A Unified Theory of Software Evolution from Salon.
The software development process ... [is] feedback-driven and biased toward increasing complexity. Figure out how to control the various feedback loops -- i.e. market demand, internal debugging and individual developer whim -- and you can stave off crippling over-complexity for longer periods of time. What's more, you might even get a sense of the underlying dynamics driving the system.
Added a new story. On the one hand, it confirms my previous suspicion about shortcuts, because I can simply add it by typing the new title: Culture 101.
Also added it because I want to continue documenting thoughts around what a great company looks like. I'd started this last back in January. Expect it to be a living document, with constant revisions and enhancements.
And this is a test to see if a previously created story already has a shortcut, or if I need to back-cut: "Peer Pressure At Five".
Hrm. Looks like I need to create a shortcut for that particular story. Tried a couple of different cases, so I don't think that's it. Even edited the story and "republished" it.
Testing out the latest feature in Radio. Here's a quick shortcut to Scripting News.
Copyright 2002 © Robert K. Brown
