Gunman Says Sound of New Jersey Made Him Snap A Texas jury on Wednesday found Thomas Mitchell guilty of aggravated assault for shooting his girlfriend because he thought she was about to say the words “New Jersey.”

What would he have done if she said “Niagra Falls”?

Joel on Software – The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with my development team,” the CEO thinks to himself. “Things were going so well when we started this project. For the first couple of weeks, the team cranked like crazy and got a great prototype working. But since then, things seem to have slowed to a crawl. They’re just not working hard any more.” He chooses a Callaway Titanium Driver and sends the caddy to fetch anÊice-cold lemonade. “Maybe if I fire a couple of laggards that’ll light a fire under them!”

Meanwhile, of course, the development team has no idea that anything’s wrong. In fact, nothing is wrong. They’re right on schedule.

I learned this lesson as a consultant, when I did a demo of a major web-based project for a client’s executive team. The project was almost 100% code complete. We were still waiting for the graphic designer to choose fonts and colors and draw the cool 3-D tabs. In the meantime, we just used plain fonts and black and white, there was a bunch of ugly wasted space on the screen, basically it didn’t look very good at all. But 100% of the functionality was there and was doing some pretty amazing stuff.

What happened during the demo? The clients spend the entire meeting griping about the graphical appearance of the screen. They weren’t even talking about the UI. Just the graphical appearance. “It just doesn’t look slick,”Êcomplained their project manager. That’s all they could think about. We couldn’t get them to think about the actual functionality. Obviously fixing the graphic design took about one day. It was almost as if they thought they had hired painters.

I’m smiling & nodding as I read this. That’s exactly what I’ve seen in meetings as I demonstrated some new feature. They didn’t care about the functionality, but spent hours discussing one pixel on the screen or what color a button should be.

The Nation that Freaked Out

We’ve been at war with terrorism for about five months now, which may come as a shock to you if you’re an eccentric hot air ballooner just coming down from your ridiculous two year trip around the world. In which case, let me tell you, we’ve been doing a lot of freaking out. We’ve almost stabilized, so I’ve categorized the specific types of freaking out we did and possible ways to avoid them in the future just in case terrorism wins the war and we end up living in a world where it’s required by law to be terrifying.

14777 ª February 14 5:26 AM. It’s a sad day for country music. Waylon Jennings, singer, songwriter, and outlaw, passes away at age 64. [MetaFilter]

I’m not into country music, but I always liked Waylon & Willie

DMCA Declares Serial Cables Illegal?. I’ve recently had an interesting run-in with the DMCA… apparently, US Customs has rejected entry of a PC<->Sega Dreamcast serial cable into the US, supposedly due to copyright violations. This cable was to be used for Dreamcast programming for the Real-Time Systems class offered at my university. This seems to be a clear case of the DMCA abridging a perfectly valid educational use of a perfectly legal piece of hardware. I’ll be keeping the most recent version of my story here; otherwise see below for what I currently know. [kuro5hin.org]

Justice for ALL Concerned?. No-one can have escaped the recent television news focus on former Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. His tribunal for war crimes is the first of its kind since the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials held in the aftermath of World War II. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in 1993 after Resolution 827 was passed following concerns surrounding reports of rape, ethnic cleansing and mass killings [kuro5hin.org]

14774 ª February 14 3:36 AM. Does anyone care that nobody needs to sing well anymore? Spot-on piece about the way that digital music tools aren’t just making rotten singers sound OK (with software that shifts their pitch upwards), but good singers lazy (“hey that’s fine, just copy’n’paste it into the next chorus”). And removing the excitement from studio performance. Is the only honest response to this electro-fakery to go all Daft Punk? Or am I just an old Stevie’n’Retha’n’Marvin nostalgist? [MetaFilter]

14772 ª February 13 11:11 PM. Is Justin Chapman a misunderstood genius (at age 7) or just an average little boy pushed beyond reason by an abusive, mentally ill mother?more thoughts inside……with thanks tocrabwalk.com [MetaFilter]

Big Brother is watching you read. Increasingly, the government is demanding that bookstores reveal what books their customers have purchased. Bookstore owners and privacy advocates say that’s scarier than a Stephen King novel. [Salon.com]

14771 ª February 13 9:49 PM. Was the fix in on 9/11? My guess is if the accusations the author makes are true we’ll never know, but if just one of them is true… [MetaFilter]

Every one of the hijacked planes should have, and would normally have triggered interception proceedures before it was even apparent that there were hostile intentions. In the cases of the first two planes, it may be possible to argue that the fighters might not have arrived in time to complete interception before the collisions with the WTC, but there is no doubt that in both cases, attempts at interception should have been well under way by the time the collisions took place.There is no excuse for the fact that interceptions were not even attempted. In the case of the next two planes, there is absolutely no excuse for interception not having well and truly taken place before the final results.