Books 2012

My numbers were not nearly as good as the year before.  I was down by about 2300 pages.  I could blame it on being laid up in the hospital, but the time stuck home alone should have resulted in more read, not less.  We'll have to blame Minecraft and Skyrim and getting rid of satellite television which surprisingly didn't result in less television, but more.  On a positive note, it's got me recommitted to read about 50 pages a day this year.

11,735 pages.  Average book size of 366.7 pages.  Average rating of 7.28.  Down half a point from the year before.  32 books.  Largest one 954 pages.

Favorites?  I loved the Leviathan Books Mean Mr. Mustard pointed me at.  Eryn and I reread them out loud  after I was out of the hospital.  Tied together the pre- and post-accident periods.  And the Leviathan Awakes series, which isn't related at all, but is hard SciFi which I miss and usually only get from Iain Banks.  I gave The Rook a 9, but that's one of those cases where at year end, I'd probably bump it up because I enjoyed it so much compared to some of the other highly-rated books on my list.  Long Earth, excellent.  I didn't expect it to be normal Pratchett, so I wasn't disappointed.  Eryn and my wife read it aloud and loved it.  Eryn reread it and wrote an extra chapter as a school project.  Wool - excellent series, although the hype had me worried.  John Dies at the End.  Not a 10.  But it was what I wanted to read at the time and it's very good.  Just don't expect that level of goodness out of the sequel (which I just read in 2013 and didn't like nearly as much as John Dies at the End, soon to be a motion picture!).  Emperor Mollusk vs. The Human Brain.  I just enjoyed the shit out of that one, despite him stealing a bit out of my book before I've finished writing it.  Eryn read it and loved it.  I think she may have read it twice.  And of course, Tritium Gambit.  Written by a friend, but written very well and a great way to start the year.  I notice I don't have his sequel in here, even though I read it.  I'll have to get that into 2013.

Despised of 2012?  Flying the Face of God by Nina Allen.  Fortunately, it's a short story at a site that refused my short story.  That's not why I hate it.  It was just bad.  So it made me feel bad about being rejected.  The Strain Trilogy.  It just got worse and worse and more "we're going to turn this into a movie"-ish.  It just pissed me off.  Not original in any way whatsoever.  And yet I read three.  Guess I could have been a monk as this was sort of my own hairshirt for the year.  And Robopocalypse might be a surprise as many people liked it and it's going to be a movie, but I found it mostly boring, not particularly creative/new, and just sort of a waste of time.

Scotts Short List Current Year

Title	Author	Rate
Enrique's Journey	Nazario, Sonia	8.25
Long Earth, The	Pratchett, Terry	9.00
Leviathan Trilogy (Leviathan, Goliath, Behemoth) - REREAD WITH ERYN	Westerfeld, Scott	9.50
Geekomancy	Underwood, Michael R.	7.50
Caliban's War (The Expanse)	Corey, James S.A.	9.25
Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse)	Corey, James S.A.	9.25
That Which Should Not Be	Talley, Brett J.	8.75
Too Many Curses	Martinez, A. Lee	7.00
Rook, The	O'Malley, Daniel	9.00
Oblivion Society, The	Hart, Marcus Alexander	6.00
Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas	Scalzi, John	8.75
Soft Apocalypse	McIntosh, Will	9.00
Wool: Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)	Howey, Hugh	8.50
Confessions of a D-List Supervillain	Bernheimer, Jim	8.25
Harvard Business Review: May 2012		8.00
Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon	Ghiglieri, Michael P. and Myers, Thomas M.	7.50
Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, The	Greene, Brian	8.25
Emails from an Asshole: Real People Being Stupid	Lindsay, John	7.25
Night Eternal, The: Book Three of the Strain Trilogy	Del Toro, Guillermo and Chuck Hogan	3.00
Fall, The: Book Two of the Strain Trilogy	Del Toro, Guillermo and Chuck Hogan	4.00
Strain, The: Book One of The Strain Trilogy	Del Toro, Guillermo and Chuck Hogan	5.00
Gates: A Samuel Johnson Tale, The	Connolly, John	7.50
We Kill Monsters	Leone, Christopher and Laura Harkcom and Brian Churilla	3.00
Helm, The Volume 1 (v. 1)	Hardison, Jim and various	4.00
At the Mountains of Madness	Lovecraft, HP	7.50
John Dies at the End	Wong, David	10.00
Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain	Martinez, A. Lee	8.75
Robopocalypse	Wilson, Daniel H.	5.00
Leviathan Trilogy (Leviathan, Goliath, Behemoth)	Westerfeld, Scott	9.50
Damned	Palahniuk, Chuck	6.00
Flying in the Face of God	Allen, Nina	2.00
Tritium Gambit	Hyrkas, Erik	9.00

Midwest Burlesk 2012

On Saturday night, despite being ill of health, I went to Best of Midwest Burlesk 2012 with Ming, Kyle, my father-in-law, Greg, and Matthew.  I'm not sure what Greg thought of it.  He was the new guy, and it's always difficult to get a read on anyone's first time at BOMB.  He said he enjoyed being asked to go and had a good time - so I'll assume he was.

We were two up on my wife's night at BOMB.  She didn't have the live band, The Southside Aces.  We did, in their long johns.  She didn't have Nadine DuBois MCing.  We did.  As the main host, accompanied by a variety of other hosts.  My favorite extra host was Big Mama Red.  She entered an aisle on one end down front and slowly talked her way to the middle where she leaned over a guy who enthusiastically decided a bit of a motorboat was in order.  She laughed at him when she backed up and told him to stand up and turn around.  He had a big goofy grin and the most serious case of glitterface you've ever seen.  She continued to talk and slowly move toward the other end of the aisle, and close to the end, midword, just bent over and licked a bald guy on the head, back to front, and then a little extra for good measure.  She borrowed wine from another table claiming he'd been very salty.

My favorite acts?  Ray Gunn dancing with an image cast on sheets. Impressive.  Looked like it took an amazing amount of work.  I hear my wife's crew was taken with his little red pouch.  The Beaujolais Sisters and their banana song about the banana between the branches.  I can't find the lyrics on the web, unfortunately.  Peach Pies Caburlesque out of Madison, Wisconsin, with their mustaches and 70's jackets. One of them had this Butthead look on her face, mouth open, upper teeth showing, that was hilarious.  And Midnite Martini and Buster Hymen, who did an amazing Hello Kitty act.  She came out in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit.  Danced around with her Hello Kitty, and finally threw it in her toybox.  The Kitty came alive and danced with her until someone off stage handed her a shirtless Ken doll.  Hello Kitty was irritated, so he began to strip...right down to his Hello Kitty softball-sized stuff head on a jockstrap.  Nadine encouraged everyone in the audience with children to consider their Hello Kitty backpacks.

The locals did some very nice work as well: Coco Dupree, Nadine, Tila (not local, but local enough I've seen her many times), Sweatpea, Ophelia Flame.

My sister might note I left out the cross dressing Mistress Victoria DeVille who sang the Little Mermaid's Part of Your World with a gay-marriage political theme.  Enjoyable, and the big costume made it more integrated with the show than this YouTube performance.  But to me it didn't feel like burlesque - more like something I'd go to the Gay 90s to see - which could be a lot of fun, it just wasn't what I was expecting.  However, Mistress DeVille seems to be a staple at burlesque around town, so maybe I've just always missed having male cross-dressing at my burlesque (which is decidedly different than what the Peaches were doing, for instance).

So overall, fun.  Despite being a bit ill and forgetting to get a beer before a show where there wasn't an intermission and a bit of disappointment that it's become hip enough that it's noticeably more expensive than in the past.  Ming was less enthusiastic, but only because the woman next to him was whistling so loud he was going deaf.  He claims that's why he's making this face, although she doesn't appear to be whistling that I can see.  Just quietly reading her program.  I think he was just putting on a posture so Julie doesn't know he was checking out her legs.

Look at how happy he is to see her backside...you know, so the whistling is over.  Why are you keeping your program strategically positioned, Ming?

Code Freeze 2012 Continuous Delivery - II

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Code Freeze 2012 Continuous Delivery - I

I went to Code Freeze 2012 at the U of MN this week.  I've been going for years and although some years are better than others, I generally walk away with something worthwhile.  This year's topic was "Continuous Delivery", a subject I'm very interested in as, before I was moved off the desktop products I was managing, I was trying to get them up to speed with Continuous Build and Continuous Delivery.  There were almost 13 separate products without unit test that were deployed to the desktop: e.g. 64 bit windows, 32 bit windows, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Office 32 bit, Office 64 bit, Office 2007, Office 2010, and a variety of other configurations.  One of the more amusing days was when a customer called to complain that our product didn't work quite right under Parallels.  As if we'd tested that configuration given we weren't testing anything other than manually over a two week period.  Embarrassing.

The conference was better than usual, with presentations by Jez Humble of Thoughtworks, Michael Nygard who wrote Release It!, Jenna Pederson (can I say cute local developer and not get in trouble? She's more than cute...her brain is cute, as proven by her blog and, I could add, Jez Humble was good looking as well, and had a better accent...perhaps that protects me from developer sexism), David Hussman (he of the many "dudes"), and John Penix of Google.  It made me appreciate that no system was so legacy-ridden or large that it couldn't be refactored.

Jez Humble (not a consistent blogger) of Thoughtworks was not only informative, but incredibly funny.  He's a walking series of sound bites on legs.  One of my favorites was about Agile, "Everyone's taking orders standing up instead of sitting down."  Or, "We shouldn't have to come in and sit in a data center for the weekend.  Life shouldn't be like that."  Word.  And, after talking about a dev ops moment in which dev ops said "no thank you", he clarified, "They were operations people...they were not that polite."

Jez talked about lean software development, quoting Eric Ries, a proponent of a Minimum Viable Product.  For those of you in agile, this is the concept that you should always have working software.  And just enough.  I'm a huge proponent of this.  It's perhaps the most important aspect of agile to me.  If you have a project, then you should have short cycles where you provide something that works.  Might not be perfect.  Might not be what you want in the long run.  But it's a deliverable that if you were to put it in front of customers, it might make money.  It gives you a plateau where you can decide whether to continue at all, take a break, fire your developers and hire new ones...some location where you can make a decision and still have something in hand that is concrete.

He talked about flickr.com, where they do 10 releases a day.  When Yahoo picked them up, they tried to change them, but were changed instead.  As is appropriate.

He talked about Poppendieck's Implementing Lean Software Development and the idea that you can measure your product by the amount of time it takes to change one (1) line of code (pg. 59).  Based on the products I managed, 24-48 hours minimum, even if all the Directors and VPs are available.  That's too long. The line should change in 1-2 hours, and the build/test/deploy/test should take another 2 hours.  Max.

And Jez talked about how continuous delivery is composed of three major parts:

• Automation
• Patterns and Practices (the subject of his own book about continuous delivery)
• Collaboration

Sounds about right to me.  If you don't include the perspiration.