avocado8

iWhat?

At dinner tonight, the Beaner says, "You know, Apple's making a lot of 'i' products now."

Me: "Oh yeah? Like what?"

Beaner: "Well, there's the iPad; that's new. And there's iTunes; I think that was probably their first 'i' product."

Me: "I think iPod and iTunes came out around the same time."

Al (to me): "Where did he learn about the iPad?"

Me (to Al): "No idea."

Quiet as A...

Due to a schedule change with our nanny, Al and I are now responsible for picking the Beaner up from school on the days when he gets out at noon. We split duties, each taking a different day.

Last week, my day was a particularly hectic one, so instead of bringing the Beaner home and waiting for Shawna, I brought him to work with me and asked Shawna to pick him up there.

We stopped at Ralph's on 43 to get the Beaner a slice of pizza and an apple juice, and then we went back down to Awesome Central, the area in the SW corner of 15 that we've claimed for co-working for the past few weeks. Awesome Central was full, since the whole team was in the office, so I pulled up an extra chair so close to mine that I would have been elbowing the Beaner constantly if I moused on the right side.

He happily added sticky notes to the board (items like "I alweys love you mom <3" and just plain "<3"), and then he just sat there, happily eating his pizza while I tried to solve a Production problem. A few minutes later, I was describing said problem to another team member as resulting from "users pressing the buttons continuously like monkeys" (completely mixing my metaphors in the process—I was thinking of both rats pressing the feeder bar to get a pellet and monkeys on typewriters banging out Shakespeare) when the Beaner totally startled me by going, "ooh ooh eee eee aah aah."

I jumped, and the rest of the team laughed. I'd totally forgotten he was there, despite his proximity. A few minutes later Shawna txted me that she was in the lobby, so I packed the Beaner up. On the way down, I commended him for his good behavior and remarked that he was so quiet and well-behaved that I'd forgotten about him.

"I was as quiet as a chicken," he said proudly.

In my head I was thinking, "chickens make 'bock bock' noises. They're not particularly quiet." But then he clarified.

"Chickens are the quiet ones. It's the pigs who speak, right?"

Agile in Action

Recently I started a new Flickr set called Scrum in Practice, and I've been using it to collect photos of my team (and others at CIM) practicing, as the name suggests, Scrum.

Even more recently, a colleague came down to take some photos of us working for a presentation one of the executives was planning to give. He's a better photographer than I, so I can't wait to see what he got... and of course I immediately wished I could include his photos in my Flickr set.

Aha! I thought: I'll start a group, and I'll call it Agile in Action. Sadly, the name was already taken, but the upside is that it was taken for the same purpose: As a way of sharing the working environments and artifacts of Agile teams.

There are only 11 members of that group now, and only a few photos in the group pool, so I'd like to make a pitch to other Agile practitioners who use Flickr to join and send photos of your teams, your work setups, your Kanban boards and burndown charts, or any other Scrum/Agile artifacts you've found useful. I'm not a group owner or moderator (and therefore I can't change the generic group icon); I'd just like to share ideas with other practitioners through photographs. Won't you be my ScrumNeighbor?

Invalidity

Tonight Al asked me to order something online for him from Brookstone. I found the site relatively easy to navigate, and I even successfully found something extra we needed to get up to the $100 minimum for free shipping. Then this happened:

Me: Arrrgh! ENTER A VALID LAST NAME? I'LL SHOW YOU 'VALID'!

Al: [without looking at me or screen, leaps out of bed and starts for door, then pauses] Do you want me to get one of my credit cards, or are you going to remove the hyphen?