You’re how old? 19! Jeebus, you’re the Sidney Crosby of Jazz, I guess. This album is surprisingly great. Although I would say it’s really the baritone sax of Pepper Adams that makes this album as good as it is. Still, friggin’ 19???? Overall this is a keeper — 4/5 stars

What a great album. I think the AMG sums it up best:

Blue Delight is a great late-period Arkestra recording, notable for several reasons: 1. This is a very large, impeccably recorded Arkestra featuring special guests Tommy Turrentine and Don Cherry AND a number of Arkestra alumni returning for the date. 2. Although synthesizers are present, the majority of Ra’s solos are on piano. 3. John Gilmore solos on nearly every cut. 4. The band swings mightily from start to finish. Blue Delight also features a program of a handful of standards mixed with Ra originals that don’t head too far into outer space

I know I am. It started off innocently enough. A newspaper RSS feed here, a magazine one there. I soon got enough to start using Google Reader to aggregate them all. Then it started to take a turn for the worse. I started accumulating feeds left and right. I was simply compelled to consume more and more information. I became hyperinformed.

I tried various techniques to reduce the amount of messages such as Marking as favorites and reading later and Yahoo! Pipes reduction.

But then it dawned on me. While most of what I was reading was only “good” (interesting, relevant) for a day at most. I found when I had saved an article and gone back later to read it off my queue it was news from 5 days ago that had gone irrelevantly stale.

I am currently experimenting with creating a very, VERY sparse group of feeds that will not go stale and have a high SNR. Whilst using (relying) on (a small group of) twitterers and personal friends’ word of mouth. A week into this experiment and all is well. Actually I have a lot more free time on my hands. Enough to start tumbling again anyway…

According to a post at the VCTB, they are rebuilding Intellisense. All I can say is, it’s about time and I’ll believe it when I see it. etags works great for me. I incur the rebuild penalty when I’m idle and finding is instantaneous. If you can beat that, I’ll stop renaming my feacp dll to feacp.stop sucking up my cpu.dll

Awesome 80s thrash disc. I haven’t heard this one in a long time. Check out the scream on the title track. Impressive!

A while back I ranted on Design Meetings are A Waste of Time. As luck would have it, I just had an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. I had a new design idea that touched many areas of my company. We have a server side group and a client side and subgroups within each. Following my tips, I was able to have very substantive design meetings without bikeshed arguments and derailments.

In analyzing this, I derived the follwing formula:

P_b = Nϕ

where

P_b = Probability of a Bikeshed meeting

N = Number of people at the meeting - meeting organizer

ϕ = Frequency of bikeshed meetings at your company

= # developers who think they’re experts / # of actual experts

In other words, keep the N low. In doing so I found that I was able to isolate the bikeshedders. This way they could only derail a minimal amount of meeting time.

Not to toot my own horn but…it worked. I got very constructive feedback from the actual company experts and marginalized the bikshedders. I am now proceeding with minimal interruption.