Gas (DIS)Advantage Homes

When we baught our house in 2000, it was touted as Gas Advantage Home. Natural gas was touted as the best residential energy buy. People even recommeded to run additional lines to the dryer unit and buy gas powered dryers. The U.S. Department of Energy says natural gas homes consume 35 percent to 45 percent less total energy than comparably sized all-electric homes. But the prices for the residential average price of natural gas has sky-rocketed from $6.50 to $15.33(Source http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents.html). Our heating bills have gone up from $75 to $200+ and this winter experts are forecasting an even higher increase. With this price spike, the homes should be classified as a Gas Disadvantage homes. Watch out for the “Gas Advantage Home” logo on construction signs and in real estate magazines and start avoiding them like a plague.

US Financial markets obsession with Greenspan

Why is the US financial markets so much obsessed with Greenspan. Let the man do the job of managing the interest rates. Every month or so, the week prior to and the week following the FOMC meeting there is this frenzy of news/notes/analysis/economic theories and what not as to what this guy is going to do. Mr. Greenspan has been the chairman since 86, but I think this obsession with him only started in the late 90 and 2000 era. Especially right after the meeting, people try to disseminate every sentence of his and try to make conclusions on what he meant. I think the only reason why Greenspan defaults his speech to this complexity and vagueness is because irrespective of what he does, the economy will takes its own path that nobody can predict and thus he can cover his A^^ by giving out not so clear statements that can be interpreted in many number of ways.

Bad state of the dollar bills

I do not use cash in most transactions but in some cases where I have to use it ( most fast food restaurants ) I have started seeing a trend in getting back highly soiled and dirty bills ( $1 and $5 especially ) back in change. This never used to be the case when I first came in 93 and even as late as 2000. Most of the time I used to get decent quality bills as change. Reminds me of my times back in India ( 12 years back) where this was the norm. In fact it became so unmanageable that the Indian government banished the bills for 1,5 and even 10 I think and have substituted them with the coins.

Human nature for blaming

Here is an analogy to the blame game between problems that occur in IT and when terrible natural disaster like Katrina or Mumbai monsoon rains occur. During natural disasters people start blaming various government departments or even specific individuals for long ignoring upgrades. Similarly when a bug is found in production, who's to blame? Is it the tester for letting the defect slip through? Is it the developer for introducing the bug into the code into the first place? Is it the analyst who neglected to anticipate the myriad ways in which the system could be used? Or is it the project manager who did not allocate enough time for testing? Clearly there is an element of accountability on behalf of the entire team, but this fact is too often obscured by the need to find fault. I guess it is just human nature to try to place blame. Imagine the productivity improvements we can get if people do NOT focus on the blame game, but if the blame analysis efforts can be channeled through to better avoid future problems from occurring.

How to bring a new person upto speed in a development environment

Here is an idea. If the development environment does not have any Unit tests, start him/her off to write Unit Tests. This will help improve the stability of the system, get additional documentation, have some of their real-world work to evaluate, and they can learn about the system in pieces...
If the system already has unit tests, check what the existing code coverage is and provide a resonable new target % to achieve code coverage upon with new Unit Tests. This is a bit more tricky and would require some hand holding.