Information Technology Dark Side

Your Job Stinks but You Can’t Leave, What to Do?
It can be a desperate feeling; you’re making just enough money to be fairly comfortable but you hate your job. What should you do? You almost don’t want to rock the boat by interviewing for new jobs because you don’t want to perpetuate the [...]

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Most career advice sucks at least 50% of the time. Context matters when it comes to advice because most career problems aren’t simple enough for generalities to work very often. Buy a house. Have kids. Don’t lease cars. Good advice? Sometimes, not always. For career advice to be really useful, it has to context imperial. [...]

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I’m pretty much allergic to any form of requirements documentation. Change control makes my skin itch, and big up front planning makes me vomit. But I also am not totally comfortable with winging it all the time. As a project manager, I need to get a sense of how big the project is, what are [...]

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Man, it sucks to get hacked. It’s the second time it’s happened to me, and I don’t like it. This time the mess took longer to clean up - I owe a big thanks to Bill Young, the best developer ever, for fixing me up. Thanks Bill!
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A few days back I blogged about hating my Blackberry??????. That was, in hindsight, a big mistake. You see, Blackberries, and cell-phones in general, work off of a thing called Karma. And my rather unkind post about my beautiful little cell-phone-PDA-email-internet-browsing piece of electronics was a big batch of bad, bad karma. So bad, in [...]

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Today is my 35th birthday. It doesn’t feel particularly old to me, but it does feel like a milestone. It feels like I was supposed to have done something with myself by this age, that I should be more than just a tiny little cog in a gigantic, complex machine. I think it’s natural to [...]

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Tuesday night I spoke at XP Western Michigan, an XP user group in Grand Rapids Michigan. Here’s a link to the presentation - “Pulling Your Head Out of Your… Budget: Mental Re-tooling for Agile Project Management.” It was a great time - thanks to XPWM for having me out and to Matt Heusser for introducing [...]

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Eleven years ago I sat behind my first post-college desk. On it sat a Sun SPARC 20 workstation, a powerful Unix machine, with a 21″ CRT monitor above it and a 3D input device beside it. I don’t remember what the input device was called - it was a round ball you could push, pull, [...]

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Jacob Taylor Christiansen - 8 lbs 10 ozs. Born on Tuesday, coming home today (I hope).

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This blog is, at the time of writing, hosted by GoDaddy.com. I didn’t choose GoDaddy because of their commercials, which I think are pretty stupid, but because they were the cheapest hosting I could find at the time I switched.
I wish IT infrastructure groups were more like GoDaddy in a couple of ways. Here they [...]

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