Bryan Minihan

Conflicted…

bjminihan — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 02:38:20 +0000

Interestingly, in order to save people’s lives and become a doctor, you need eight years of training and regular licensure by both state and federal authorities. You take an oath to protect human lives at all costs.

Yet, to purchase a machine gun and enough rounds to kill a herd of buffalo, you just need a clean record and a few days to wait around.

On the other hand, every gun-owner I know is extremely vigilant and responsible with their firearms. I wouldn’t deprive them of their rights after Friday, any more than I would de-license every doctor after a few bad-apples abuse their patients.

To answer the question, “why would anyone need combat weapons?”, I say, “because we are Americans, and we push everything to its extreme.”

If you’ve never fired a 50-caliber machine gun, M16 or automatic weapon, you might not understand the very specific kind of adrenaline from having that much firepower at your disposal. Most aren’t even used for hunting, but target practice (you don’t want to clean up after a deer-hunt with an AK-47).

I know it’s difficult to relate to, but we Americans push the limit of every one of our past-times (football, politics, scrap-booking, you name it)…and gun ownership is no different. While some of their politics may be different than mine, most gun owners take their responsibilities as seriously as most doctors.

If I’m not mistaken, most, if not all, of these tragic shootings have started with the murderer stealing, borrowing, or obtaining their weapons through loopholes.

So to me, the problem stems mainly from the wrong people getting access to otherwise legally owned weapons, at the (horribly) wrong time.

We don’t need government to fix this – the video-game and motion-picture associations voluntarily regulate and label their products (or they used to), to avoid regulation and censorship. So, too, can gun-owners take it upon themselves to form a protective pact, oath, whatever is necessary, to ensure that none of them ever lets their weapons fall into the wrong hands.

That should include some guarantee that all weapons will be kept secure from children, criminals, and the mentally ill.

Violation of that pact could (should) result in the suspension of the owner’s purchasing ability until the danger is removed from the person’s home, or the weapon can be proven secure.

There’s no reason the ~150mm gun owners in the US can’t police themselves and do a better job looking out for each other (after all, every one of these crimes makes all gun-owners look bad)…they just have to want to protect lives more than they want their guns.

Painful…

bjminihan — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 02:37:42 +0000

Knock knock
Who’s there?
Don’t take my guns!
Prayer in Schools!
Gun Control!
War on Christmas!

When I was a kid, one of my favorite cartoons was “The world of tomorrow”, because although it was funny, it made me wonder what fantastical, unimaginable things would be not just available when I was older, but so commonplace that I would take them for granted.

Things like hover cars (where’s mine, by the way?)…a frying pan that flattens your bacon…a cucumber-burping machine…everlasting gobstoppers (snozzleberries? whoever heard of snozzleberries???)….to name a few…

Who, in their wildest dreams, ever considered that massive shootings would be in “the world of tomorrow”.

I get it. Oh God, I get it. We’re in pain. It’s too difficult to think about what actually happened, so we need to turn this into something that it isn’t. We need to be angry at someone besides the lunatic who just brutally murdered 26 teachers and children.

It’s unfathomable. It boggles the mind. When my mind even drifts there…thinking of my own children, and those of my friends and family…the looks on their faces…oh lord…watching the door open, a man with two rifles walks in the door….the disbelief…the horror slowly creeping into the teachers’ eyes when the muzzles draw up to one side of the classroom…sweeping acr…

Oh damn.

I need to be angry. I need to be REALLY angry, and take it out on someone, some thing.

Someone deserves to be punished for this.

Badly.

And yet…

I’m powerless. Helpless. I can do nothing, but hold my loved ones close, hold my children even closer. Probably watch more closely when they cross the street for a few days. Maybe even pick them up earlier from school for the next week or so.

In the end, though…powerless.

So yeah…I get it. We want to fight for our rights. We want to scream and yell and end friendships, if need be. We want people to get it into their thick heads that they’re wrong, and we’re right because…dammit…someone killed twenty fucking children.

But…in the end…they’re just words.

Helpless.

…

So here’s the deal.

I’m against gun control. My family hunts, and they ALL treat their weapons with the respect they deserve.

I’m for prayer in schools (hey, the more the merrier), but we’re not just a christian country, so allow all prayer of all kinds, please.

I say Merry Christmas. I say Happy Hannukah. I say what people want, because it makes them smile, and I love Christmas. Unrelated, but hey, it’s come up.

But…we have to get a few things perfectly straight:

America will never force every American to own a gun, so until that’s the case, we will never have that utopian reality of “if good people had guns, criminals would be nervous”. Stop asking for it. It won’t happen. Ever.

The end of prayer in schools was not the beginning of gun violence, because prayer in schools was never required (tell me when, and I’m happy to be wrong). So the lack of prayer in schools has absolutely nothing to do with what happened yesterday. If you believe God let those children die because we don’t allow prayer in school, then you believe God is a petulant, bitchy little whiner who exacts revenge in the most brutal way possible because he’s not ‘popular enough’ – no wonder fewer people believe in your God than you’d like. If you’re curious, MY God turned those teachers and first responders into heroes in the face of unspeakable horror, and started this discussion with all of you…so I’ll keep following mine, thankyouverymuch.

As for actual gun control, I don’t really give a damn whether we have more gun laws. I just want it to stop. Anything and everything that furthers that purpose is up for discussion. Everything and anything that diverts us from that course, is off the table. In a perfect world, every gun owner would take it as his civic duty to treat his weapon as a lethal firearm, in the hands of the innocent and the perverted, alike. If that means that the National Rifle Association takes it upon themselves to fix this problem through a massive education program, and binding requirements to protect guns from the above folks to allow membership, then that would be just fine to me. I’d love that, and we wouldn’t need any more laws. I’d even join the NRA.

Please, for the love of all that we hold dear.

Please, just make it stop.

How to answer the “Users fear change, so don’t change” mandate

bjminihan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:47:11 +0000

User’s fear of (and frustration with) change is very real, but more often than not, the SPONSOR’s fear of upsetting customers far surpasses the user’s fears.

I’ve worked with dozens of executives, stakeholders and sponsors who sit behind or above very large applications, who have forbidden changing existing features because “users have gotten used to the way things are (broken)”.

9 times out of 10, if you dive into their fears, you’ll find that it’s not actual change they are afraid of, but the lack of *control* over change. That’s because system change and communication is managed very badly in many (MANY) organizations, and is almost an afterthought in all but the most controlled software environments. People just don’t have time or funds to staff software groups with change control experts, so people pitch in when they can, with as much as they can offer.

That often results in poorly or highly technical release manifests that excruciatingly detail every tweak and bug-fix, without giving anyone a sense of “what really happened to my product!”

Furthermore, 9/10ths of the development process takes place behind the scenes, and is usually packed to the gills with tons of work getting everything right for the next release. Even in a very customer-driven agile process, only a few customers are even aware that new changes are coming, and that’s just because they’re heavily involved in the day to day process. Everyone else is blissfully unaware of the “changes” coming down the pike.

However your SDLC works (with or without direct customer feedback), you won’t change your stakeholders’ minds with statistical evidence about change, because those figures can’t possibly be relevant to your particular system and lifecycle.

Instead, I would probably provide an analysis of how your organization manages change, to your stakeholders. Identify weaknesses and how you can address them, to make change more acceptable and comfortable both for your users and your stakeholders.

I’ve been told so many times that anything shorter than a six month release cycle would absolutely terrify “the users” (this, coming from executives in charge of customer service). However, you can improve the change control process so that it a) uses both proactive and passive communication to keep everyone informed, 24/7, b) provides a clear, predictable, transparent release process that everyone understands (e.g. last day of every month), and c) enforces a zero-tolerance policy on bugs making it into production. If you can do these things, there is no reason whatsoever that you can’t release new features not just every month, but every morning.

You would be amazed at how psychologically uplifting it is to be able to move real business value out to your users every single day. The weight of all those months of work, building up to one or two monumental releases every year is incredibly demotivating to everyone involved. I’ve seen it too many times over the past 15 years, and I’ll never go back to the bi-annual or annual release cycle again.

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bjminihan — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:00:25 +0000

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bjminihan — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:13:53 +0000

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bjminihan — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:11:58 +0000

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