Kimberly is now a published author

Wow - I'm so proud. Kimberly's book "The End of the Trail" has been published! Ok, so we had to pay to get it printed, but I believe it will be available at one of the library's in Okc or Edmond.

It's all about the Trail of Tears and actually contains some important facts. Like the president that signed the ?bill?order? to relocate a lot of the indigenous people of America to Oklahoma.

It makes me wanna get a sharpe and change my shirt to look like this:

Susan's Graduation

Susan is now a high school graduate! There were about 19 of us there for the ceremony.

I was pretty stressed about getting downtown and parked and then from the parking garage to 235 afterwards. Turns out, that part was the easiest.

I guess I was responsible for finding out where to go once we got into the Cox Center. I had only been there to go to a home and garden show. We finally made it to some decent seats after 2 or 3 wrong turns.

Afterward we all made it to El Parian in Edmond and had a great dinner. Except for Yana - I guess she shouldn't have had the guacamole. After a little coaxing from Laura, Susan stood up and thanked everyone for showing up. She did a pretty good job, I guess all those presentations at school paid off.

Susan managed to get $240 and some other great stuff.

There is no God, and I can prove it!

Ok, I lied. You can't prove the non-existence of something.

My main complaint these days about Christianity is Intelligent Design (aka Creationism). I've wondered for a long time, why couldn't God have used evolution to create Man? Why would God have left evidence of evolution in the ground? Just to confuse us? Why would God have made it appear to us that the earth and universe are much older than what is in the Bible? Oh ya, we don't know Gods plan. Good answer ;-)

Evolution is not a theory. Wow, this guy nailed it (clipped from http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html):

Let me try to make crystal clear what is establishedbeyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms.

- Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol. 35 (March 1973) reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983

The attempt to get religion taught in public schools has forced me to become a Pastafarian (www.venganza.org).

I should remember - don't talk about politics or religion (or abortion (aka justifiable homicide) which is both at the same time for some people). Obama in 2008!

EPS Indian Education Program Awards Banquet

We all attended the Edmond Public Schools Indian Education Program Awards Banquet this evening.

The evening started with a slide show of the activities the group was involved in over the last year. There were pictures of the the kids at the 6th Annual Oklahoma Native American
Youth Language Fair where several kids won or placed in the different competitions. There some pictures of the Hand Game event we attended last month. Mrs. Yellowfish even said, 'here's a good picture of the Sheldon family'. My favorite picture was of Susan receiving the $100 savings account at the American Indian Chamber of Commerce of Oklahoma. Or maybe it was Kimberly guessing during the Hand Game.

We then had a great catered dinner of turkey, ham, and BBQ brisket.

Then the awards started. Susan was the first. She got a certificate, $10 gift certificate to a local book store, and Pendleton Laptop Backpack! The backpack is awesome! There must have been 30 kids that received certificates and gift certificates - Kimberly included.

Then Mrs. Yellowfish gave out presents and thanks to all the teachers that have helped with the programs tutoring program. The average NDN student in Edmond ranks in the 90th percentile at their ?school?grade? which sounds really great to me.

The Superintendent of Edmond Public Schools jumped in and thanked Mrs Yellowfish, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. ??? for all their hard work and asked for a big round of applause. I was surprised that he showed up. Very nice.

Finally, Mrs. Yellowfish told anyone who has a birthday in May to come up and pick a door prize, then June, then anyone who wears glasses, then everyone else. She has way too much swag!

Funny story - I wish I could remember Mrs. ???'s name - I mentioned her earlier. Anyway, after I ate dinner, I went back into the room where the food was to refill my drink and Mrs. ??? and Mrs. Smith were the only ones in there.
I said, "thanks for doing all this for us, I really appreciate it".
Mrs. ??? said, 'You're not leaving are you?"
"No", I said.
"Good, because we might ask for our food back if you are".
She sounds like a good person to get to know!

Agile & XP - can it work when porting an app?

I'm not much into the Agile & XP type of things - pair programming has a lot of value, but I don't do it much. The Stories (sort of like a Use Case?) seems pretty good - especially the testable part - very nice. Leads you into TDD development. Again, I don't really do TDD but I probably should - except when porting complex Cobol code with a small amount of time to do it.

I've been chatting with RC about the RT team and their approach to porting their application. They seem to be treating this port as 'new development' and are looking for an 'owner' who can help them develop stories that eventually become code.

The main problem I see is the legacy code is the 'owner'. So we need people to 'mine' the legacy code in order to develop the 'stories'. I'm wondering if the RT team is doing this? I doubt it. They appear to want to talk to people and develop stories this way. The problem is, no one person knows the app well enough. There are way too many one-off's.

From what I've heard and seen, the rest of the process doesn't seem bad - pair programming, testable stories, war room, etc. I wish they were using Fitness for real - I'd like to see that - seems like it would be difficult.

So what do the 2 people who read this think - I'm way off, dead on, somewhere in between?