School can be boring.

Let me put the emphasis where I mean it: school can be boring. So can work. So can life.

I'm not going to say that the purpose of school is to be tedious. But learning and mastery aren't supposed to be effortless. You have to learn things that maybe you don't want to because they're a) foundational and b) important. For a child, it'd be great to stick only to what interests you and skip the math drills. And it's tempting to think that a child-centered education might result in more engagement and thus more learning.

But that's not how life works. You can't only work on the fun projects at your office; someone needs to wipe out the toilets; and there's always paperwork to be filed. There's going to be a boss and he's going to tell you to do things. If you cut and run because man that guy's always droning on about the proper sequence to assemble the widget, then you're not going to be employed for long.

Knowing how to handle being bored and follow directions is a life skill. Finding the value in relationships with people unlike yourself (or maybe even beneath your level of intelligence) will serve you for the rest of your life. School is a great place to acquire and practice those skills. If you indulge your child's self-absorption, you're not doing him any favors and disappointment is going to be a theme throughout his life.

On the other hand, the fact that the Foundation for Economic Education still exists 65 years after its start and recently hosted Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute pleases me greatly.

This is hard to watch.

Last night was the annual Go Daddy Holiday Party and it was the best one yet!

The theme was USA and it was held at Chase Field, where the Arizona Diamondbacks play. The grounds were literally the USA, with different sections themed to different parts of America. In the middle was an enormous Statue of Liberty with hot dog carts around it and an incredible selection of desserts. Around the edges were the following:

• Hollywood: a huge backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, two huge Oscar statues with the Go Daddy Guy's head instead, a star walk with Go Daddy Girls names in front of a movie theater façade, fake paparazzi snapping photos as you walked down it, culminating in a Chinatown shop where you could get vegetable lo mein or chicken and broccoli in a Chinese takeout box
• New Orleans: a façade with a sidewalk lead to a restaurant front with jambalaya and shrimp po boys and a "Cafe du Go Daddy" serving beignets, an enormous Mardi Gras float with attendants throwing beads
• Stage: Big Swing and the Ballroom Blasters sung the national anthem (followed by the release of a bald eagle who flew around the stadium) and several classic covers, Dierks Bentley, Trace Adkins, Kid Rock
• Mount Rushmore: a "sand" sculpture with the heads of the Go Daddy Girls instead of the presidents, Bob Parsons' custom motorcycle collection
• Las Vegas: casino tables, all-you-can-eat buffet, a Dance Heads booth
• Hawaii: surfing simulator, tiki hut serving tilapia tacos and ribs, enormous Go Daddy sand castle
• San Francisco: Alcatraz prison with two cells for picture taking, a cafeteria line serving turkey, mashed potatoes, and corn on prison trays, an enormous Golden Gate Bridge re-christened the Go Daddy Gate Bridge, a huge Buddha sculpture in a Thai setting serving the Chinese food from Hollywood, photo shoot set up with props
• Indianapolis: Danica Patrick's Indy car and Nascar stock car, remote control race track with eight stations controlling miniature versions of Danica's stock car, a pit simulator for quick changing of tires

During the intermissions between the incredible acts, Bob Parsons would give out money assisted by the Go Daddy Girls. In a welcome change this year, the whole process was significantly more automated. The Go Daddy Girl would press an big red button and a name would randomly appear for Bob to read out and it would also show up on the Jumbotron. He gave out over $1.1 million in prizes in $500, $1000, $2500, $5000, and $10,000 increments with the taxes fully paid.

My bosses' boss Neil and I were talking about how great it is to work for a company that had to build a machine to make cash gift distribution more efficient. "We couldn't give the money out fast enough," said he. "So we built something to make it quicker." It was perhaps the most surreal moment when you stopped to think about it.

In sheer scope and diversity, this party easily topped last year's. Two years ago, they filled the stadium with falling snow. Last year, it was an enormous Ferris wheel in the middle of the stadium. This year, there was a bald eagle, the Statue of Liberty, the bridge replica, the sand sculptures, and three huge entertainment acts. It was a tremendous party and I'm so proud to be a part of Go Daddy!

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of GoDaddy.com, Inc.]

Reading about Google X and now Google's attempt to horn in on Amazon Prime, I have to think that this is a result of their culture. It's really great that they're ambitious and open to anything but these efforts have consequences.

The key to success is focus and persistence. In life, you won't achieve anything unless you've defined what you want and then work at it. It's the same in business—perhaps even more so. While an individual can dawdle about in a fog and still get enough to eke out an existence, a business that acted like that would fail much more quickly. The marketplace does not reward complacency or mediocrity, not when there is competition or profit to be had.

I look at Google and see them inexplicably trying to copy Microsoft. Microsoft has two cash cows—Office and Windows—but is desperately paranoid that they're running out of milk. So it does exploratory ventures into console gaming, Internet search, cloud computing, smartphones, tablets, health care, and so on. Similarly, Google has two cash cows—search and advertising—but is easily distracted by sexy, new possibilities. The new shiny for them has included mapping, email, social networking, health care, power metering, bookmarking, photo albums, blogging, browsers, smart phones, video, 3D modeling, telephony, and so much more. Interestingly, both companies have entered these new territories primarily through acquisition.

It's important to note that these two companies are wildly successful and I am a fan and happy consumer of many of the technologies I label as distractions. It's entirely possible that all of these side businesses will turn out to be useful hedges against eventual losses in the core business.

But maybe they'd be more successful if they put all that effort into the core businesses and did their expansion in an aligned fashion. For example, Microsoft has an associated enterprise server business that takes advantage of their Windows operating system work. Google's foray into smartphones provides another vehicle for their advertising business. But even the longest of the long views can't explain space elevators.

It's fashionable to talk about Apple at this point. They are renowned for their focus, cutting products to keep things easy to understand. Further, you can see a progression from the iPod to the iPad and the latter as the fulfilled vision of the former. It takes tremendous dedication to keep plugging away to realize that vision. Along the way, Apple has expanded into adjacent territories and built them into decent side businesses that reinforce the core line. iTunes, the App Store, and iCloud make iPods, iPhones, and Macintoshes more valuable and desirable.

I've heard this business model described as the "stadium" model. You get people into the ballpark and then you provide all the concessions so they don't have to leave to get their needs satisfied. This strikes me as a great way to maintain focus yet still have ample room for growth.

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple years how prophetic Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is. Many have noted the parallels, but one that I haven't seen made anywhere are the ones between Colorado of the book and North Dakota of today.

In the midst of a widespread recession, North Dakota is booming. The oil industry is leading the way with ripples in air traffic, rail traffic, lodging, and even higher education. It's attracting industry and the industrious just like Colorado did in the fictional work.

In the book, what did Colorado desperately need? Reliable rail transportation. The government and its crony capitalist collaborators fought tooth and nail against the heroes of the story, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, as they tried to supply it to the state.

And in real life, we have the spectacle of Obama "delaying" the start of the Keystone XL pipeline. Aside from linking the booming shale oil industry in Canada with the Texas refineries, it was also going to be a vital transportation vehicle for the Bakken Formation.

I'm more than a little worried to see what else might come to pass from Atlas.

It's really tough: I read Steve Yegge's description of the perks of working at Google Kirkland and I'm torn. On the one hand, damn! Can you imagine working in a cushy environment like that? It's the lap of luxury and you don't even have to be a billionaire to enjoy it—you just need to get hired by Google!

On the other hand, damn! Can you imagine working in a cushy environment like that? It seems like you'd get so soft because of the coddling and you'd really have to work to avoid feeling entitled. It seems that Aaron Swartz may have been on to something with his critique of life at Google. It certainly appears that Larry Page might have second thoughts.

Personally, I like the work. All the music studios, dog parks, gyms, and such seem like distractions from work. Don't get me wrong: you definitely should take breaks but a walk would suffice. Moreover, free food and all the rest cost a lot of money. It doesn't come out of salaries or capital expenditures, seemingly, but it's got to come from somewhere. My guess is that Google's generating cash out the wazoo and the cost of perks is not yet registering on shareholders' radars.

The effects of this sort of coddling poses a real threat both to Google and the employee. When there comes a time to reduce the perks—and that seems inevitable—the business risks alienating employees who have come to expect the perks. For the employee, he or she will have a difficult time at the next company if they can even find one comparable in pay. Personally, I say no thanks. I'll take my generous pay, excellent benefits, flexible schedule, and reasonable perks any day.

I have been following TDD since the days of extreme programming, as I am always interested in better ways of doing software development. At first blush, test-driven development sounds like manna from heaven: it embraces YAGNI as a guiding principle and focuses on comprehensive unit testing.

Far too much development is anticipatory, with overengineering the usual result. Faced with huge, complicated code bases (or the prospect of them when commencing a new project) it is tempting to order TDD as a check against that temptation. In my experience, though, the overengineering mindset does not go away under TDD—it just transforms into a zealotry towards code coverage.

And that is my biggest gripe with TDD: creating unit tests feels like development and looks like development but it isn't development. It is very easy to get into the business of producing unit tests rather than releasing product. (I say this as someone who presented a class on unit testing at a company conference in 2008. I did a pragmatic style of TDD for approximately 2 years around that presentation.)

Assuming then that you can rein in that tendency to strive for 100% code coverage, the next biggest problem with TDD is that the biggest part of an application lives on the client—mostly outside the reach of the xUnit systems. Obviously there are ways to attack client-side unit testing but they are all inherently brittle due to cross-browser issues and sometimes frequent changes to user interfaces. As Web applications become increasingly client-based, more and more development is outside the scope of TDD. (Or within scope but at considerable cost and effort.)

I have become disenchanted with TDD and its ilk over the years for these reasons. In my opinion, the best way to improve quality is to build time for developer testing into the estimates and hold developers accountable for quality product. Emphasizing cross-browser and functional testing at the developer level before a handoff to QA has resulted in better quality in my experience than a doctrinaire emphasis on unit testing and code coverage. (Accountability is another subject entirely and I have a lot of thoughts surrounding that as well, which I'll share someday. Read Codermetrics by Jonathan Alexander for more along those lines.)

I've finally decided to take the plunge: I'm installing a Linux distro as a VM on my Mac.

I have resisted doing this for years and years and years. I've long thought that going Linux just meant that you're doomed to perennial tweaking and figuring out incompatible drivers. I don't give a rip about either of the "free as in's" when it comes to operating systems—I'm an unabashed Mac user, I pay for all of my software, and my programmatic life is completely Windows-based.

So why am I doing this? And why now?

Python.

I have been reading some really intriguing books on data analysis, social networking, and monitoring and all of the examples are in Python. I've always been tempted by Python the language and Python the community, and I've even made minor forays into that world. I know that Mac OS X is a great platform for Python but I have zero familiarity with Linux.

In the end, if I make anything significant, I'm going to want to host it on Linux so why not start now. With a virtual machine, I can duplicate my final environment without polluting my Mac or worrying about the differences between the two. I initially looked at Ubuntu but I think it's really more of a consumer-grade distro whereas I want raw server.

A colleague at work said that he uses CentOS; I figured that's as good as any and he certainly knows more than I do. So I downloaded CentOS 6.0 minimal and I'll see how it goes.

After leaving Blogger years and years ago, I tried many different blogging engines (even developing my own, so to speak). None of them were as safe as my old way of just FTPing HTML files up to my host. Movable Type was the closest since it generated HTML files—it was like a hosted version of Blogger.

The downside was (and still is) that it runs on Perl. I'm not a PHP developer by any stretch, but I can fend for myself in WordPress when I have a task in mind. Perl, though, is just inscrutable to me; I don't have time to learn it and what little I have read doesn't make sense.

So why stick with it, especially in light of the recent malware attack? I briefly toyed with Textpattern last night but the thought of redoing my blog, site, and essays in yet another CMS left me stone cold. I've been down this road before and I just don't have time for it any more.

I've got so many other better things than to endlessly tweak my Web site. Perhaps I've matured in that regard. Or maybe part of maturity and wisdom is a jaded fatigue with youth's flitting.

I apologize to anyone who has visited my blog in the last five days. I was running old Movable Type and someone exploited it. I got added to Google's malware warning service, unfortunately, so you might see some warnings until the request for review is complete.

It looks like it's time to figure out how to lock down Movable Type so that this doesn't happen again—it's such a pain to upgrade that there's always going to be some lag time between security release and updating.

My wife was an elementary school teacher prior to having our children. She said that she considered starting a new career instead of going back into education; she thought of nursing as a profession, preferring to deal with blood over dealing with the parents.

She sent me this opinion piece about "what teachers really want to tell parents" today and indicated that it was spot on. After reading it over, I can say that I have seen a lot of these behaviors and issues in my interactions around the school.

One big omission from this list is to separate your identity from your child's performance. I think this is what underlies so many of the other negative behaviors enumerated in that article. From my vantage point, half the time these parental flareups look like "I'm not the type of person who would have a child that turns in a half-assed science project" or "My child must be gifted because I am gifted." Kids fail or are of normal intelligence—even your unique snowflake—and you're just driving your kid's teacher crazy.

I'm not a perfect father, but I feel the best about my parenting when I'm letting them sort things out for themselves. It is very hard to not intervene when they're struggling, but that struggle is necessary for them to truly own their knowledge or wisdom.

Concerts suck. I go to them to support the obscure musicians I enjoy but I don't relish the event like many do. The music often overpowers the singing, it's all too loud, and it's a crapshoot whether they'll play your favorites.

I'll take a recorded, constructed—hell, produced—track from a studio over the same any day of the week. That's why live albums absolutely mystify me.

I belong to a lot of social networks. Pretty much any time I hear about a new one, I sign up for the "bbrown" username. I have learned my lesson about waiting to register for these things: having a common first name and surname, the late bird gets the "bbrown217" or other such contortions. (I almost had bbrown.com, after Burr-Brown was acquired by Texas Instruments in 2000. I checked every day waiting for the expiration hold to come off. Every. Single. Day. Except on my birthday, that is, because I was busy. Guess when the hold came off. I still bristle at that loss.)

But I have to say that I don't have much passion for any of them. I like Twitter a lot—mostly because there's a high signal to noise ratio on the people I follow and the 140-character short form makes it drop-dead easy to write something. But mostly I don't care for them because your content is locked away, subject to the whim of the provider to allow you to export it out of its cage.

I may be biased, but owning your own domain and hosting your own content is the best and safest form of expression. As long as you pay your bills, no one can really silence you and you—mostly—get to decide what the public can see. On the social networks, other people can decide that your views are "hateful" or "spam" or "worthless tripe" and get it taken down.

Over here, though, I get to say whatever I want however I want. This is my soap box.

In my time on the Internet, I've seen many sites come and fade into obscurity. I've seen social networks actively worked and then slide into disuse—fallen prey to passing whims both personal and corporate. This Web site's been active for the better part of 9 years now and there's no reason to suspect that it won't be around for another decade or two.

Pascal's Wager of Social Networking: setting up integrations so that posts on one social network automatically get cross-posted to every other social network.

GAH! If you can't pick one place for me to read your content, I will pick one place where I will follow you and hide all of the others.

MC Frontalot just released Solved, his fifth album (CD? Set of downloads?), and it's an excellent piece of work. (If you're in Phoenix, you simply must attend his concert on September 10th. I've been to all of his other shows in town over the years and they're wonderful.)

Here's how I'd rank his CDs:

1. Nerdcore Rising
2. Solved
3. Final Boss
4. Secrets from the Future
5. Zero Day

Solved is just that good! Now, there's great songs on every one of the previous albums, so this is just a perspective on them as an aggregate. I've listened to it about a dozen times since I got it—like many of Frontalot's works, you have to ease into them.

Here's my rundown of the best of Solved:

1. I'll Form the Head: I watched Voltron every morning as a child and this song just cracks me up. Money line: "I think it's time that we combine and rip this thing to shreds / but only if you promise me that I can form the head!"
2. Captains of Industry: I'm also a fan of MC Lars, so this collaboration worked really well for me. I really like when Frontalot begs for his audience to actually compensate him for his work. Money part:

   Try to sell music, they look at you funny.
   Not a transaction that necessitates money,
   not with the true cunning of the kids in the know.
   But you look at them cheering -- notice what? They don't sew.
   Don't go to the print shop and silkscreen their own,
   yet they're always needing something to cover the torso.

3. Stoop Sale: very catchy tune. Frontalot doesn't often journey into the storytelling genre, but he's a master at it when he does. Money line: "And that's when you have to endure / the regret that accompanies said decision-making: / all the other wishes in the world that you've forsaken."
4. Just Once: this track is a crackup—could this be a problem he'd like to have? Money line: "Just once, I don't want to hump tonight. / Why can't we hang out and talk?"
5. Front the Least: a track of modesty. Money line: "And the worst thing about my mistakes is they're all reruns."
6. Nerd versus Jock: playing to the audience, to be sure. Solid effort. Money line: "Look at now: demand for nerds. Old jocks: stock on clearance."
7. The Sketches: this is the first album of his where I don't generally skip through the interstitial sketches. They're funny and I'm glad to have been introduced to Wyatt Cenac.

I'd recommend this CD to anyone intrigued by nerdcore hiphop, the genre of rap that MC Frontalot created in 2000. He's an amazing wordsmith and produces some really funky beats as well.

I am very excited by Gary Johnson—he's the best candidate I've come across since Steve Forbes. Moreover, he has all the pedigree you'd want in a presidential candidate: two-term popular governor, successful businessman, outdoorsman, and no hint of scandal.

Everything I've heard from suggests that he's the best of Ron Paul without all the crazy. He wants a self-interested foreign policy; supports abortion rights; wants to abolish HUD, the TSA, and the Department of Education; and thinks the government has no business in traditional social conservative issues.

Unfortunately, he's been routinely ignored by the media. That doesn't bode well: it seems like the media wants the Tea Party portrayed as being represented by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Sarah Palin. The thinking seems to be that independents will recoil (rightly so) at those candidates and end up selecting Mitt Romney during the primary.

That would be a travesty, as Johnson is the best choice for Tea Party types. He doesn't want to enforce any religion or morality, and he seems to understand the role of individual rights in government. Also, he has an actual plan for balancing the budget and a track record in New Mexico for cutting spending.

In moving my blog from Quick Blogcast to MovableType, I had a chance to revisit my decision to enable comments. Comments are always a mixed bag: the price of good discussion is eliminating comment spam—the blog's version of "broken windows." We've had decent success at it over at The New Clarion, but it took a long time to tweak the blacklist to get where it is today.

In the meantime, I had also started using Twitter quite aggressively. That is, essentially, a broadcast medium: you say things and people listen to them. There is some interaction but the key difference is that it's not exactly public.

That's the part about comments that I don't like. If you want to discuss some of my work, send me an email. If you want everyone to see your thoughts about what I've said, get your own forum. I don't care to host the opinions of those that disagree with me.

I have no regrets about turning off comments—I even did it over at Found on the Web. I spend zero time doing moderation and the extra work to send an email (while also not getting to vent in public) has severely limited the vitriol and bile.

I read Michael Lopp's book Managing Humans shortly after being promoted to development manager back in February 2011. At the time, I was really excited at the opportunity but also nervous about the unknown.

His chapter on one on ones (also available online at his blog) was an inspiration to me. In all my work life, I'd never really had a one on one—much less a regular one. I had rationalized it that I didn't need the regular feedback and that I would just go to my manager with any problems as soon as they happened. But Lopp was adamant about their value so I gave it a whirl.

Six months later and I am completely enamored of my weekly visits with the six developers reporting to me. Four of those work at two different locations from me so I drive down there to meet face to face. I think it's absolutely vital for addressing things as they come up but also to be that presence in their lives that's lost by not working at HQ.

I have tried a few variations on the theme to see what works best. I originally had them scheduled on Mondays, but found that that took me out of the office when a lot of decisions needed to be made to start the week out right. I have since moved them to Friday afternoons; that freeing up of my Mondays was a godsend. Plus, talking about the week in retrospect on a Friday stirs up some of the vividness that a relaxing weekend can dull.

Today I conducted what I regard as my first significant contribution over what Lopp said in that chapter: a performance review. Yes, he indicated that one format a one on one can take is the mini-performance review but that was just stylistic. I actually conducted a performance review using the same template as our annual one. I went over each category and discussed the good, the great, and the could be betters using concrete examples from the month.

I really like this idea because it allows us to note areas of concern long before the annual review and work on them month to month. Ideally, they either never make it on to the annual review or they're used as a reference point to indicate growth. Either way, it felt really proactive to say, "Keep doing that and you'll get an Excellent rating!" or "Let's work on this behavior for the next month and see if things improve."

It is more work, to be sure. But management is about growing your team and getting them to produce the best within themselves. If you wait until the annual review to give them this sort of feedback, you're doing everyone a disservice—heck, even quarterly seems like forever at Internet speed.

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

Modern, massive-scale manufacturing is a sight to behold. When you go to a grocery store or a retailer like Wal-Mart, there's such an incredible diversity of product that it's easy to take it for granted. But then think that there's 36,148 other grocery stores just like this one or 4,400 other Wal-Marts in the United States. The scale of it is mind-boggling.

I was reminded of this recently when I listened to an episode of the podcast EconTalk where the host interviewed someone from Frito-Lay. The guest described operations at the Modesto, California factory and I couldn't tear myself away!

Images of chips whizzing by at 60 MPH while a computer scanned for defective ones flooded by consciousness. Luckily, I found some video that approximated several of the processes he discussed. What an operation to behold!