The Stravager

Once there was a village of sheep herding people surrounded by rolling green hills filled with little white puffy four legged animals called "sheep,"  For the most part the owners of the sheep would just let them wander through the hills untended while they stayed in their houses watching little 3 minute videos of cats riding robotic vacuum cleaners.  But one little boy loved watching the little white puff balls wander around eating the grass. One day the little boy spotted a wolf sneaking up on the herd.  He ran to the village elder and told him about it.  "Really?" said the elder.  "Sounds pretty far-fetched to me.  I don't think that wolf eats mutton.  More of a chicken killer I think." and he went back to watching a video of a kitten sitting in a small box.  The boy decided to go make sure the wolf really was just a chicken killer.  The wolf slinked up to one of the oldest, weakest sheep and killed it.  Then he dragged i...

Everyday there is a s new outrage.  The steady stream of stuff coming from the White House and congress that we should be losing our minds about is starting to wear me down.  After going after Clinton (both of them) for stuff that should not have been scandals and just barely bad decisions, the things that the right is willing to turn a blind eye about would be breathtaking if it wasn't so commonplace.  It reminds me of what it would be like if I lived in a place that had nothing but dramatic sunsets and grand canyon Swiss Alp views all the time, only in reverse.  At some point you'd get jaded.  If you lived in a miserable dung heap of a rainy smelly desolate back woods back alley you'd get a little callused right.  So this is not paradise or Hell, but it's relentless and unless we start picking our battles we will get wore down.  We need to stop giving a shit that the deputy spoke liar was sitting on her knees on a couch in the Oval Office when Trump...

I have a job that has the potential to put other people out of work.  My job is introducing automation into the software testing industry.  It doesn't have to put people out of work. It could let people do more interesting work.  But I fear that many of the people in positions of power in the software industry see the automation of software testing as a way of reducing the head count. I think this is the same mistake that was made by companies who thought the introduction of office automation (copy machines, fax machines, copy machines that could send faxes, etc,) was going to make it possible for a single person to do the work of 2 or 3 people.  So instead of having that person type things in triplicate several times they could do it once then stand at the copy machine for a while.  What this should have done is allow that person to spend more time interacting with the customer or collaborating with team members on innovation.  Instead, they got over work...