Searching for Tom
I attended the “Searching for Tom” exhibit this morning at The Museum in Kitchener with my daughter and one of her friends. I had been very excited about attending as I am a big Tom Thomson fan and similarly enjoy the work of some of his good buddies in the Group of Seven. My initial reaction was some degree of disappointment stemming largely from my expectations of a larger exhibition of his works. Perhaps this is typical of someone who isn’t a regular patron of the arts and...
Read MorePlaying With A Lead
Early last month, the Canadian National Junior Hockey team lost the gold medal game 5-3 to Russia at the annual world junior championship tournament held in Buffalo. There was much anguish across the land not so much because they lost, but because they had it won and then gave it away. You see, the Canuck lads led 3-0 at the end of the second period. That’s a decent lead and it was a lead they had built up by playing very well to that point in the game. The Russians scored twice in a...
Read MoreHow To Benefit From Running Projects You Know Nothing About
I have heard it suggested that PM’s really don’t need to know much about the essence of a project to manage it. Their role isn’t to be the expert (or anything close to one) but to simply plan and manage the project work towards its ultimate objectives and goals. I have a problem with this. I have been a PM for enough years to have learned that on projects where I knew very little about the guts of what needed to be accomplished, it was a whole lot more difficult for me to manage, and I...
Read MoreData Driven Projects
From the dawn of programming time, one of the holy grails that programmers have chased is to avoid hard-coding data values into program code if at all possible. Since most significant applications use some form of database management system, software applications can be developed that are extremely flexible because their behaviour can be changed by manipulating the underlying data, rather than program code. Over the past ten years, I have worked on a ton of projects where application changes...
Read Morethe Babe Meets the President
On a steamy day in Washington in the 1920’s, Babe Ruth was introduced to the President. His greeting? “Hot as hell, ain’t it Prez?”. Beautiful. Interestingly, there is much confusion within that oracle known as google as to who the president was that day. Many sources contend it was Calvin Coolidge, while others suggest Warren Harding. Either way, the Babe’s quote stands as a great one.
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