Monday, February 27, 2006

 

Wyman's Third Law

Wyman's third law (see Wyman's Laws) states:

This law actually has two messages:

  1. You should have in place appropriate mechanisms to know when something goes wrong before your customer does. You can't rely on your customer to be the canary in the coal mine.
  2. If, for some reason, you don't know that something has gone wrong, you should make it very easy for the customer to let you know they have a problem.

This New York Times article, Your Call Should Be Important to Us, but It's Not, brings the second point home.


Friday, February 24, 2006

 

Why Can't Blogger Spell Blog?

Well here I am just having completed my first post. Wanting to create a good impression, I ran the post through Blogger's spell checker. What is this!? Blogger doesn't think "blog" is a word! I can understand it not recognizing "cathartic" -- that's a pretty big word for a dumb old computer programmer like myself. But "blog"?

 

Why This Blog?

I've managed to put off blogging for quite some time now. It's not that I didn't have anything to say. I can be quite outspoken at times. It's not that I don't think I have useful things to say. Many people think my observations are right on target. It's not that I'm a poor writer. I've been told I can be quite articulate at times (for someone who went to an engineering school).

It's just that I've reached the stage in my life where I'm starting to realize there's a bunch of stuff I'd like to do and damn little time to do it. I figure, if I'm lucky, I've got about 20 good years of work left in me. That's after over 40 great years of work. Here I've got all this good stuff rattling around in my head and it's about time that I spread it further than my workmates.

So here I am. Forty years ago I was a brash young kid who thought he knew it all. After forty years of experience, I'm an old codger who knows he knows it all. Well, not exactly all -- but a heck of a lot more than I did then.

So hopefully, this will be a cathartic experience for me and, perhaps, an interesting one for those of you who happened to stumble on this site. Enjoy!

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