So today, there is a new trailer for Expanse Season 5 and it is looking good. There is also a trailer for BBC America's "Discworld" ""adaptation"" """The Watch""". It is not looking good. I shall instead link to a video that sums up my reaction in one very long use of a short rude word.
Season 5 of the expanse ... Oh yeaaaahhh! The Earth is going to rock! Spoiler Amos & Peaches on a ride-along. Yay. (Peaches is his nick-name for Clarissa Mao). I have to dig my copy of Nemesis games out and give it a re-read.
American skittles have the purple colour as "grape" flavour! What fuckery is this? Blackcurrant is by far the best skittle flavour, it's not even a contest! No wonder their country is in such a state! Imagine growing up without blackcurrant skittles! Madness!
Blackcurrants were banned in America to protect the forestry industry because they were spreading a fungus that attacks the most common lumber tree. https://www.businessinsider.com/blackcurrant-america-vs-europe-2016-10?r=US&IR=T
Ok. Personal mindf*CK. Yesterday I spent time browsing the company 'Agile' knowledge base learning things about scrum, Banian and such. Today I'm considering using such things to go through my pile of shame. Then I realized that such approach make more sense for minis than it would in anything I have done so far in this company.
What I'm curious about is, years ago Skittles had vitamin C. A normal bag had 50% of the USDA recommended daily amount. Now, the skittles packages say 0 vitamin C! Where did the vitamin C go? What grand plot is afoot?
It leads itself to another WTEff: "By the 1800s, America was cutting down white pine forests for timber at such a rapid rate that the nation's nurseries could not keep up. So farmers began turning abroad for cheap tree planting stock." So the reason why it was banned was because it will kill white pines. The same white pines that are already condemned by the same industry that that make the berry banned ^^
Do remember this is America where nothing stands in the way of glorious Capitalism. Also this was America in the 1800's the West was untamed and we thought all our natural resources inexhaustible. Of course this attitude is what led to the extinction or near extinction of many plants and animals such as the beaver and buffalo. Fortunately we had Teddy Roosevelt show up turn in the 20th century and lead the conservation movement, so that some of this magnificent landscape was saved for future generations.
Indeed, but honestly I just stop at the paradox itself here. It reminds me something similar but more actual. I've seen a very interesting documentary about the bee mortality (maybe 2-3 years ago). Among other things, it contains an interview of a professional beekeeper (a US one as a matter of fact) who explains that his hives get more and more loss every year. In the same time he explains that the more he move them (from one state to another along the year) the more stressed they become. And the more stressed they are, the more they tend to die. The WTEff here was the logic of the beekeeper: - to get more money he needs to move more his hives - the more he moves them the more loss he get - less hive means more work to get the same money - more work means more travel - more travel less hive - ... You get the idea. Want struck me when watching it, was: if someone in the world should be concerned about bee mortality (at least more than the average Joe) I would have thought that it will be beekeepers. Apparently I assumed too much.
Man I hate Agile with a burning passion. If I start thinking about miniatures in terms of Agile I'll stop enjoying this hobby
Yeah, Agile is a piece of garbage. Too bad some 3-5 years ago almost everyone thought it's Holy Grail of IT. I've seen enough poorly executed scrum for a lifetime. Still, setting weekly goals could really help me with my pile of shame.
Never used any agile method per se myself. Just used common sense and good practices that can be considered as agile in non agile environments. I agree it's no holy grail but I won't condamn any of those methods. What I will blame is people using any trend method as an excuse to continue not to do their job properly and forcing others to do even more. I don't think agile can be use by anyone that is not able to work properly first. I've seen too much 'magical solutions' put in place to know how it ends.
This. At some point, we started to joke that only thing from agile that was truly implemented was lack of any documentation (in other words: nobody wanted to write any documentation, so they just said it's "agile approach" and called it a day).
My current issue is management trying to apply the agile approach to everything, and what I do does not lend itself to agile at all I get requests for things that are needed within hours, days if I'm lucky. There is usually barely enough time to open a ticket, let alone have a whole "sprint". Add to that that the client never knows what they want and always requests changes after the fact and it breaks down. In the end we are still developing with the waterfall method, just adding a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense at the top.
I continue to read the knowledge base and I understand more why I had the same feeling about "agile" first. As for many things, there is a context to use it (it for production work, don't try to apply it for something else when you don't already master it) and there is some pre-requisites/statements (transparency, dedicated team...) that most people won't sick to. But there's also other things that suffer the same "holy grail"/"magic solution" symptom : - ITIL : I was told "I will make each one of the team trained to ITIL". I said "Ok, but you know the required policy will never been implemented here". So I get the Powershell training I struggled to get for years instead. - QA : I was recently asked to perform an "audit" AND implement the corrective actions (for those not familiar with the concept : one person makes the audit, then someone else implements the result THEN the first one makes a second audit to check if corrective actions are indeed applied).
Someone explain to me what's scrum and Agile, I tried to look it up on wiki but I bounced off a mass of marketing-bullshit speak.
In short it's a type of project planning that's short on paperwork and long-term planning, and heavy on short-term "sprint" planning that is suitable for designing software as it increases the amount of time people spend working instead of meeting or documenting. In long, it's a mass of marketing bullshit.