It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a manager in possession of a project, must be in want of a project schedule ( With apologies to Jane Austen ). On large projects for the US government there is an "Integrated Master Schedule" (IMS). The IMS is often used as a report deliverable, and so is updated monthly for the customer to see it. I have found that the IMS is most useful as a working document. This is for two reasons: 1) it saves me all of the time to update the IMS for the customer because it's already updated for me, and 2) the IMS is recommended for a reason, and I try to take full advantage of it. 1937 Panama Canal schedule My peak time using IMS as a tool was doing new product introductions for military landing gears. At that time I had several simultaneous projects, all requiring Department-of-Defense-compliant Integrated Master Schedules, which included a 14-point compliance check as well as a variety of metrics that defined the "health" ...

The Overthinking It podcast expressed some thoughts on procrastination that I hadn't heard before. They describe procrastination as a successful tool for dealing with anxiety, and relate a story about parenting that feels very familiar.

This week's Economist includes a column "Are superstars as good when they move jobs?"  It highlighted findings that superstar employees aren't instantly superstars at new companies because that out-performance came from the superstar working with the support team they've built. Everyone needs a team!

As I've been defining my "brand" of what I do well, one of my early attempts at a brand was "force-multiplier" or a creator of force-multipliers. I've found that most people don't have the (normally military) background to understand the term right away, so I wanted to write about how I came to the term. For me, it was webcomic Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler .

Earlier this year, I learned that the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park are not actually Velociraptors. Their size, characteristics, and behavior were modeled on a real dinosaur, but "Velociraptor" was a cooler name. *Mind explosion noises*

I love movies. I grew up in a house with a large collection of tapes and DVDs and enjoyed watching movies from both the current time and older movies from my parents' generation. As I've become a parent, I often think "is this movie something I want to share with my kids someday?" Today is about the movies that I've looked at and said, "...Yeah, that can disappear from living memory." These are movies that I enjoyed as a kid or teen, but they have aged very poorly.

As I've been looking for my next role, I've had to think about what my "ideal job" might look like. I've also had to think about what my "superpower" is: what I uniquely bring to a hiring organization. I don't know that I have a complete answer, but I reached a few conclusions recently. My ideal job is to take on a broken-but-fixable organization and bring it to where it doesn't need heroism to survive day-to-day. My superpower is to create the organizational bandwidth to make that happen.

Self-driving cars have been a dream for generations, and nominally self-driving cars (in reality they're often remote-driven) are on the road today. But self-driving cars react to problems in ways fundamentally alien to how humans react, and that leads to my theory: regardless of their accidents-per-mile or accidents-per-hour statistics, the accidents they get into will be ones that humans would have trivially avoided, and so self-driving accidents will provioke additional outrage. The solution going forward is better driver-assistance rather than self-driving.

I've gotten a broad view of the various aircraft out there today, and have been involved in the design or manufacture of many too. All photos are mine or public domain.