Kyle Dickerson – Page 80 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Achievement Unlocked

June 10, 2015 4:56 pm

We had our little graduation ceremony today for the National Security Leadership Program that I’ve been participating in over the last year. The result is being awarded a Certificate in National Security Affairs.

We got to meet with the Lab’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology, Patricia Falcone, who handed out the certificates. She came to the Lab just a few months ago from the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. She knows Mike!

The certificate program consists of four graduate courses: Deterrence and Coercion (focusing on nuclear weapons), The Role of Intelligence in Security Affairs (focusing on intelligence agencies and operations), Terrorism in Today’s World, and National Security Policy (history, structure, application of U.S. national security organizations).

It was definitely a different way of looking at the world and a very different way of writing papers. A lot of time the papers I wrote I felt ended up being a bit hand-wavy, but then I’m used to writing papers where you have hard data with which to argue your point.

I have no idea what will come of my having participated in this program, but it was a good experience. I enjoyed being back in a class room setting to really focus on interesting topics and at the same time I’m really glad I’m not a full-time student anymore. It was really nice to be able to intelligently and maturely discuss controversial topics of national policy in a setting that doesn’t devolve into name calling or logically defunct arguments.

Having been through it, I kind of wish passing these courses was a minimum requirement for any politician elected to a national office.

Spammers ruin everything

June 8, 2015 4:18 pm

I’ve been forced to disable comments for older posts because there has been a spammer or spambot sitting on the site submitting garbage comments about every 10 minutes since Friday.

I’d prefer to not make you answer CAPTCHAs in order to post comments, but parasites like spammers ruin everything that isn’t locked down.

For now, older comments will be disabled (comments on current posts are still available though).

Software Wine-Tasting

2:14 pm

In the software world there is a term, “dogfooding,” (shortened from “eating your own dog food”) which describes the act of a team / company using the very software they build–usually as a critical part of their daily work.

That is, if you’re the GMail team and you want to produce the best GMail service you can, you want your software developers, designers, managers, etc. all using GMail on a daily basis. This will expose them to rough edges that need to be improved and the raw exposure will hasten the work to fix issues. It also serves to show confidence in the product. You might be suspicious of the quality of GMail if you heard that all the people that work on the product use something else.

This is all well and good for the kind of software that your own team can use on a daily basis. But what if your software isn’t an email client, or an instant messenger, or a music player? The software I spend my time building is not software that I have any reason to use. The customers/users are a specialized group of people.

I was having a technical discussion today with a group of software developers on this subject. We recognized that dogfooding our software didn’t make any sense in our environment, but it did make sense to sit down with our users and observe how they use the software and what seems to be confusing or slowing them down. I described this process as “wine-tasting.” We’re not consuming the product, we merely sample it in small quantities to try and understand it better.

So there you have it: if you can’t dogfood your software, you should at least by wine-tasting it.

Let’s Go Fly a Kite

May 25, 2015 8:16 pm

It was windy and cool today so we met up with some friends and went to the park for the evening. We picked up some dinner on the way to eat at the park and then play. This park is up on the side of a hill overlooking the valley near the municipal airport so we got to watch the vintage B-17 and B-24 bombers flying around (Part of the Wings of Freedom Tour).

We brought our turtle kite that we’ve only successfully flown once. But, there was plenty of good steady wind today and we had no trouble getting it up in the air. Heather thought it was amazing.

Enjoy some more pictures:

I’m a tortoise! And Fentons!

May 24, 2015 9:00 pm

A couple of weeks ago I was lamenting to Jess that we needed to _do_ something. So on Friday the 15th she suggested I take the afternoon off from work and we go to the Oakland Zoo, so we did. Heather had a blast, as she always does. One of her favorite things to do is to hop across the “lily pads” in the kids area. Which she did for like half an hour and made a friend with another little girl. Then she lost her balance and stepped into the pond and soaked her shoe, sock, and pant leg. Which is why she’s only wearing one shoe in these pictures.

Her favorite thing to see was the zebras, but we also stopped to watch the lions, giraffes, camels, and elephants. I had read somewhere that elephant sounds were used as the basis for the Tyrannosaurus Rex sounds in Jurassic park. Well, while we were watching the elephants one of them made this low growling kind of noise which made me think of that tidbit because it was spot on. It’s apparently also true, a lot of other animals were used to (and usually heavily modified).

It was after the zebras that we headed for the children’s area where Heather soaked her foot. After that it was off to see the tortoises and lemurs. Luckily, it was a cool day and the tortoises were lounging in their shelter with the heat lamps. Luckily, I say, because at one point Heather took off running and climbed into the tortoise enclosure before I caught up with her (through one cable-fence and over a short wall; tortoises don’t really need much to keep them in). She only got one leg in before I grabbed her but she was ready to bolt.

After retrieving her we pretended to be tortoises:

And then we rode on a (fake, obviously) tortoise.

The zoo closes at 4 so we headed to as-seen-in-Up! Fentons for dinner and ice-cream:

The movie makes it look like it’s off by itself in the suburbs. That’s a lie. The food was pretty good regardless, but a little pricey for what it was.