My cousin sent this one to me ages ago:

This bloke's in bed with his missus when there's a rat-a-tat-tat on the door.

Because Passover begins at sundown. Use the Weather Now sunrise calculator to figure out exactly when that is. (It's 7:25pm in Nashua, 7:29pm in Chicago, and 7:39pm in Monterey, Calif., for those keeping score at home.)

It's chilling, actually, but if you read Seymour Hersh's latest column in the New Yorker closely you get the impression that Bush is planning yet another disastrous war. Even Vizzini knew not to get involved in a land war in Asia; the President (1,014 days and 4 hours to go) is contemplating his third.

My project manager sent around this link to Joel Spolsky's rules for software management:

I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point.

I totally agree with Spolsky's list. I have never been on a project that scored better than 7 until now (which scores 9, IMO, but we're moving toward 11), and only one, ever, has answered "yes" to #8 (quiet working conditions).

The latest campaign of the Christian right is to get colleges to grant them exceptions to their broad anti-harrassment policies. The L.A. Times reports on a suit against the Georgia Institute of Technology:

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

It's opening day at Fenway Park today, and several of my cow-orkers are going. Fortunately, Anne gave me a perfect gift before I left for New Hampshire, so I fit right in.

I promised earlier to discuss the joys and sorrows of traveling for business. I had some time this morning in the airplane to do so.

One of my favorites:

Old man Moskowitz was getting along in years. He decided to retire and let his 3 sons run the company (which manufactured a wide variety of nails). The sons thought they could increase market-share with some judicious billboard advertising.

The President's approval rating has fallen to 36%, its lowest ever, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll out today:

• Just 36 percent of the public approves of Bush’s job performance, his lowest-ever rating in AP-Ipsos polling. By contrast, the president’s job approval rating was 47 percent among likely voters just before Election Day 2004 and a whopping 64 percent among registered voters in October 2002.
• Only 40 percent of the public approves of Bush’s performance on foreign policy and the war on terror, another low-water mark for his presidency. That’s down 9 points from a year ago. Just before the 2002 election, 64 percent of registered voters backed Bush on terror and foreign policy.
• Just 35 percent of the public approves of Bush’s handling of Iraq, his lowest in AP-Ipsos polling.
• Just 30 percent of the public approves of the GOP-led Congress’ job performance, and Republicans seem to be shouldering the blame.

The MSNBC report includes a quote from a Republican pollster repeating the canard that it's not as bad as it seems because the Democrats don't have much of a plan. But we do have a plan. Our plan is to fix the enormous damage to our international reputation, our economy, and our political institutions that the GOP has perpetrated on us. It would appear that 64% of the public think that's plan enough.

We spent two hours yesterday debugging some code that kept firing early. It wasn't clear to anyone, including the people who wrote it, why this happened. We patched it with the C# equivalent of duck tape, but really, it still doesn't work right.

This incident shows how important it is to know what your code is supposed to do, and not to accept the code if it doesn't. Many tools exist to help—most notably, unit-testing tools like NUnit—but they have trouble with the specific problem that we encountered: events fired from black-box controls.

I will have more to say about this later.

Before nodding off to bed tonight, on a whim I searched Google for a funny story I remembered hearing on WFMT-Chicago's Midnight Special many years ago.

The New Year's Eve Midnight Special always ran long, and always played a bit called "Moose Turd Pie." Thanks to Google, I finally found out where it came from: U. Utah Phillips, who even has a link to the bit on his site.

This is what the Internet is all about.

The New York Sun is reporting that President Bush authorized leaking Plame's identity, at least implicitly, according to the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby:

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.

Whether or not this is true, it's interesting to watch the administration's in-fighting get to this level. One hopes the electorate remembers, and understands, in November.