Humor Random Comments Thread

[Urwumpe]

I've always loved the tale of that X-15 flight, it getting too high and Armstrong landing a very long way from where he planned...

Didn't he land on Rogers Lake (on which Edwards also is located) in a northern direction after the most dramatic "overshoot", which required him to fly straight for a much longer time before doing a huge high-speed turn and then Armstrong landed smoothly on Rogers with the last bit of maneuvering energy left?

He was especially praised for staying calm and focused during the incident, despite already seeing the pacific ocean ahead of him.

 

[jedidia]

Everybody's on vacation, and I find myself in the position of having to decide whether to introduce some questionable architecture or start refactoring, which will make me overshoot the sprint.

I hate making decisions without having anyone to consult. :uhh:

 

[Urwumpe]

Everybody's on vacation, and I find myself in the position of having to decide whether to introduce some questionable architecture or start refactoring, which will make me overshoot the sprint.

I hate making decisions without having anyone to consult. :uhh:

Well, if I am working agile, I NEVER overshoot a sprint. I don't even think about it. I rather take a blame for questionable architecture or dubious implementations. Or for missing features in a sprint review.

I would leave refactoring to the next sprint then and make sure your product owner knows why you are doing it and why feedback from the sprint retrospective requires you to refactor an implementation.

 

[jedidia]

Well, we're the product owner, so that pressure isn't that bad...

 

[Andy44]

Well, if I am working agile, I NEVER overshoot a sprint. I don't even think about it. I rather take a blame for questionable architecture or dubious implementations. Or for missing features in a sprint review.

I would leave refactoring to the next sprint then and make sure your product owner knows why you are doing it and why feedback from the sprint retrospective requires you to refactor an implementation.

This is me reading you guys' comments:

 

[Artlav]

This is me reading you guys' comments:

AGILE terminology, it's the "how to be an efficient programmer in three easy steps" methodology which is in fashion this demi-decade.

They tend to change every 3-4 years and none of them ever worked, for fundamental reasons, but people still keep trying to make one for well over half a century by now.

 

[Urwumpe]

They tend to change every 3-4 years and none of them ever worked, for fundamental reasons, but people still keep trying to make one for well over half a century by now.

Seriously, the classic agile methods like Scrum or Kanban are working fine and have already solid project data behind them proving their value. The experimentation is now in larger scales... like NASA developing SLS and Orion using agile project management.

Another field of current research is having agile subprojects in classic waterfall or V-Model projects.

 

[GLS]

Seriously, the classic agile methods like Scrum or Kanban are working fine and have already solid project data behind them proving their value. The experimentation is now in larger scales... like NASA developing SLS and Orion using agile project management.

Another field of current research is having agile subprojects in classic waterfall or V-Model projects.

And we all know how that is going... :uhh:

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Wow, got the new radiator fan for my car in less than 24 hours, free shipping (the supplier is in my state, but that's still really good). Tore everything apart, installed it, reassembled it. Last item was reconnecting the battery, and of course the rusted terminal clamp broke. Had to wait for my wife to get home so I could get to the hardware store and get a new one, then install that. I then had to take it on a long fast test drive to get the engine temperature up, then pulled into a parking lot and waited. Heard the fan kick on and the coolant temperature dropped straight away. I love making order out of disorder.

 

[Urwumpe]

And we all know how that is going... :uhh:

Not worse than other NASA projects... quite contrary. Despite the political chaos around them, they are running pretty good. But I still doubt its easy to develop hardware by agile processes. You can't refactor hardware easily.

---------- Post added at 10:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:13 AM ----------

We have a serious case of flooding here in my state now, after torrents of rain. A lot of roads closed now on my way to work, but I made it. They even closed the new section of the A39 here, never happened since they opened it about one decade ago.

The city of Hildesheim is preparing for a possible evacuation, the downtown of Goslar has been closed to traffic, a local hotel is getting evacuated. The Innerste river has reached a new historic peak level upstream of Hildesheim, with 694 cm (EDIT: Correction. A few hours ago, it peaked at 714 cm, but now its dropping slowly). The previous record was 675 cm in 2007. Bad Salzdetfurth is de facto a peninsula now, most major roads to it are flooded.

 

[jedidia]

The current freefall strip sums up humanity in a few eloquent words, as it so often does... :lol:

 

[Urwumpe]

To quote Dr. Jones: "This belongs in a museum".

The German government has bought the rusty hull of the Boeing 737-200C D-ABCE "Landshut" for 20,000€ and prepares its transfer from Fortaleza, Brazil, to the Dornier Museum in Friedrichshafen. The "Landshut" was kidnapped in 1977 during the "German Autumn" period by Palestinensian terrorists, which demanded German RAF terrorists to be freed from prison, and was later freed during the first operation of the newly-formed special forces unit GSG-9.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_181

 

[Andy44]

The current freefall strip sums up humanity in a few eloquent words, as it so often does... :lol:

Given that we only have no other abstract-reasoning, spacefaring species to compare ourselves to, I always wonder why anyone thinks these things are valid. In Star Trek Klingons are "warlike" and Vulcans lack ambition and imagination, which all lends to the "humans as leaders" aspect of the show, conveniently for budget reasons as the majority of the cast needs no weird makeup...but in reality humans are all the good and bad things we imagine aliens to be.

Somewhere I read that squirrels are actually among the most violent of animals towards each other, maybe more so than humans or chimpanzees. And yet humans (and chimps) are still scarier to me, for reasons of circumstance.

 

[C3PO]

Somewhere I read that squirrels are actually among the most violent of animals towards each other, maybe more so than humans or chimpanzees.

Don't forget pandas and bottle-nose dolphins.

 

[jedidia]

but in reality humans are all the good and bad things we imagine aliens to be.

Of course they are. It's a time-honored trope of science fiction to externalise human traits onto aliens.
But it's just as time-honored to reduce the traits of humans in a scifi setting to what we wish the true human nature to be, or what we perceive it to be. The strip in question merely matches my own perception of human nature quite well, so I like it

 

[Quick_Nick]

Here's a really neat interactive look at game theory:
http://ncase.me/trust/

It plays well in my phone browser.

 

[Fabri91]

So today during my daily commute a hot air balloon almost came down where I work:

A retrieval team was following and was apparently a bit worried:

 

[Andy44]

Seeing a hot air balloon is a wondrous thing. It's the most random method of travel and the oldest form of aviation, and it always reminds me of whimsical stories. The rare nature of the event keeps it special.

Same goes for airships. Seeing a blimp unexpectedly buzzing your house is a special event.

 

[Urwumpe]

Some friends of my family own a hot-air balloon, I often had the chance to help them take-off and land - this landing is spectacular, but not a problem. I remember one great flight, which nearly ended in a forest, but with the bit of gas left in the bottles, the pilot managed to make it rise again for a short hop of about 100 meters and then land in a nice flat field, which made the recovery of the balloon easy.

My father was one of the passengers and it was a perfect day to fly: clear sky, little wind, but rather cold temperatures above the ground - they made it almost 1000 meters high on that day and flew for many hours, we never lost sight of the balloon that day... and landing took a while. I remember that from getting the call that they are now going down, to finally landing, it took about one hour. We had been driving quite some time to the final landing site, though my first guess where the balloon is about to land wasn't even bad... I had been ahead of the recovery van until the final hop, then I sadly took the worse ways of two and arrived 30 seconds later.

 

[Quick_Nick]

Hot air balloons sometimes deploy from and stop by a spot right outside my apartment, as I found out this past winter.