edward spurlock

I’ve been reading Joel Spolsky’s blog recently, going back through the archives, and I found this gem of a post from about a year ago:

How to be a program manager

What does a program manager do?

1. Design UIs
2. Write functional specs
3. Coordinate teams
4. Serve as the customer advocate, and
5. Wear Banana Republic chinos

…

It is possible to be an effective program manager without being a coder, but the burden of earning the respect of the programming team will be higher.

…
How do you learn to be a Program Manager?

Mostly, becoming a program manager is about learning: learning about technology, learning about people, and learning how to be effective in a political organization. A good program manager combines an engineer’s approach to designing technology with a politician’s ability to build consensus and bring people together. While you’re working on that, though, there are a few books you should read:

As far as I can tell, Scott Berkun’s book Making Things Happen is the only book that’s been written that pretty much covers exactly what a program manager has to do, so start with that. Scott was a program manager on the Internet Explorer team for many years.

Another big part of the program manager’s job is user interface design. Read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, then my own book User Interface Design for Programmers.

Finally, and I know it sounds cheesy, but Dale Carnegie’s 1937 book How to Win Friends & Influence People is actually a fantastic introduction to interpersonal skills. It’s the first book I make all the management trainees at Fog Creek read, before anything else, and they always snicker when I tell them to read it, and love it when they’re done.

Huh.

I’ve been having a big pity party over the past year and a half.

I’m too old.
I don’t have a degree.
I’ve got a crappy dead-end job.
I can’t get a real job without a degree.
I can’t afford to get a degree.

Anyway, what the hell could I do? In my 30 years of working for a living, I’ve not seen anything I really wanted to do. I’ve gotten involved in things like technical writing, involved to the point of forgetting to go home at the end of my work day — but I’d need a four-year degree to go anywhere with that. Back in college, I got involved like that with computer programming - but I’d need a four-year degree to go anywhere with that, too.

But that list — design UIs, write functional specs, coordinate teams, serve as a customer advocate - I could DO that! I could even wear Banana Republic chinos (although I usually buy Dockers).

I may look into becoming a software Program Manager. I’ve got “month-end” coming up next week at work, but after that, I’m going to pick up Scott Berkun’s book and see if being a Program Manager still seems like a good idea after reading that.

The Truth About Weightlifting and Weight Loss

…the American College of Sports Medicine…notes that “resistance training does not seem to be effective for weight reduction … and does not add to weight loss when combined with diet restriction.”

…So what’s the prescription most likely to produce the results you want? Clocking up more cardio minutes…So how much do you need to do? There has been much controversy over this and research in this area is just starting to accumulate. But the evidence from well-designed studies shows that you can absolutely lose weight from cardio workouts alone.

I’ve been low-carb dieting, riding to work 4 or 5 days per week (8 miles each way), and doing weight work 5 or 6 days a week (alternating exercises between pushing and pulling movements) for the past 5 weeks. I don’t know if the weight work is making a difference, but when I stopped going to the gym when I had overtime at work, my weight loss seemed to stall out.

However, I don’t think I’ll quit the weight training. After all, as the article says,

But that doesn’t mean that lifting weights is a waste of time. Resistance training has been shown to improve health risk factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol, bone mass and insulin resistance.

And it keeps you strong, probably decreasing your injury risk while you’re racking up all those cardio minutes. And it’s especially important to lift weights if you’re dieting, since resistance training can help preserve lean body mass, most of which is muscle, that’s normally lost when dieting alone.

Now, if you’ll excuse me — I have to go work out.

Intern Nation:

With revenue-challenged employers, fewer opportunities, and even less demand, postgraduates and laid-off, mid-career professionals from Boston to Silicon Valley are hardly loafing. They conduct surveys, develop products, strategize funding, manage books, and spearhead social media branding-for free.

Welcome to Intern Nation, where postgrads pay $9,000 to work for free and serial interns build their skills in back-to-back unpaid gigs so they can one day secure a paid position with low wages that may take them years to remedy. It’s a world where interns replace employees who go on maternity leave, fill in for an entire staff of let-go workers, and represent brands online in “intern jobs.

“I felt sorry for myself when I saw my small paycheck, until I met a man who got no paycheck at all.” Or something like that.

1. Lose weight – hey, you can’t have New Year’s Resolutions without this one, right?
2. Exercise more – see above!
3. Network more – I’m going to be composing an email to my LinkedIn network members (individually addressed, of course) introducing this New Year’s Resolution.  If you’re reading this before Monday 1/5/09 and you’re in my LinkedIn network, consider yourself forewarned!
4. Write more — I learned months ago that writing Amazon reviews can do great things for one’s personal Google rank.  Ditto blog activity.  So why haven’t I blogged and reviewed more since my technical graphics class ended on December 12th?  No good reason.

According to the latest IRS data, people making $31,988 or more are in the richer 50% of Americans.

I’m abo-ove aver-age! I’m abo-ove aver-age! Woo Hoo!

This just confirms a recent thought I had. Ever since I was laid off from my best-paying job back on October 1, 2001, my wife and I have struggled to make ends meet. More than once in the past seven years, I’ve said to myself, “I just wish I could be doing as well as the average guy.”

It hit me recently that, what with the recent waves of home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, bank failures, unemployment, and hurricane evacuations, I AM doing as well as the average guy! And better than a lot of people.

Of course, I thought that it would be because my situation improved. Maybe I should have been more specific with my wish.

Happy Birthday, Ed! It’s the big 49 today!

Where I’m at:

• I’ve been working on losing weight since January. I started at 229 pounds. Through portion control and increasing my exercise (mostly riding to work and back — what else would you expect from The Guy With the Bike?), I got my weight down to 206.5 pounds by July 18. At that point, I wanted to make sure my weight was under 200 pounds by my birthday, so I switched to a low-carb diet (Targeted Ketogenic Diet, or TKD). Today, I’m at 192.5 pounds, which is a definite success at something, anyway.
• I’m coming up on my second year in my job as a “Computer Operator” for a company that archives financial data. My main duty is performing Quality Control — that is, I open archive CDs and DVDs to make sure the information is readable and searchable. I also do Web Quality Control — I compare the input data received from our customers with the output data that the company hosts on its Web servers. I took the job while trying to decide on a new career. While updating some of the “hand-me-down” documents there, I discovered that I really enjoy writing documentation and instructions. That’s what led me to sign up for technical communications classes (see below).
• I’ve been married to my wife Carol for over 15 years. She’s not working outside the home right now. Her daughter, my stepdaughter, is a consultant and Web site designer in Denver, Colorado.
• My wife and I are working on a Web site design for the needlearts and quilting shop owned by one of my wife’s friends. Right now, we’re trying to get the previous designer to approve transferring the domain to a new registrar, but she seems to be away on vacation. Unfortunately, there is a quilting “shop hop” coming up VERY soon and the owner would like to have an updated Web page up ASAP.
• My wife and I have two cats (Talbane and Geronimo) and one car. That one car is one of the things that makes me The Guy With the Bicycle. Well, that, and the price of gas (around $3.60 here in Austin today, down from over $4.00 earlier this summer).

It will be interesting to see where I’m at next summer this time, when I turn the big “5-0″

Adults love to ask children idiotic questions so that we can chuckle when they give us idiotic answers. One particularly idiotic question we like to ask children is this: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Small children look appropriately puzzled, worried perhaps that our question implies they are at some risk of growing down. If they answer at all, they generally come up with things like “the candy guy” or “a tree climber.” We chuckle because the odds that the child will ever become the candy guy or a tree climber are vanishingly small, and they are vanishingly small because these are not the sorts of things that most children will want to be once they are old enough to ask idiotic questions themselves. But notice that while these are the wrong answers to our question, they are the right answers to another question, namely, “What do you want to be now??

Daniel Gilbert

Stumbling On Happiness