Friday, May 28, 2004

Today was the first time that I was called to jury duty, even though I’ve been eligible for almost half of my life. I always dreaded being called when I was a consultant because the $10/day didn’t cover a day’s meals, let along the revenue I would miss as the sole breadwinner of the family. However, much like the body puts off illness when you just can’t afford to take the time (stress has its uses), my dread seems to have put off my jury duty ’til I had a full-time job with enough redundancy to live w/o me for a day or so.

Even when your job pays, most folks seem to want to get out of jury duty in any way possible. George Carlin says that the best way to get out of it is to admit to the judge that you know how to tell if someone is guilty, “It’s all in the distance between their eyes…” Personally, I’m a believer in America’s system of justice (I’ve often fantasized about a life as a prosecuting attorney and as a judge), so I didn’t mind serving my turn on a jury. Unfortunately, it was not to be. While I went down to the court house, my number wasn’t even called to appear on one of the two juries needed today.

Doing a little math, I found out that the overall odds of me actually being on a jury were actually pretty low. Here are the stats:

• 47 people showed as potential jurors on 2 juries

• 28 were called for the 1st jury, of which 12 were needed

• 15 were called for the 2nd jury, of which 6 were needed

• According to the State of Oregon Washington County Jury Director, 70% of people that show up for a trial see the assembled jury and decide to take the plea bargain after all

• Therefore:

  • Folks called to jury duty that were actually put on a potential jury: 91.5%

  • Percent of juries, once formed, that are used: 30%

  • People called for a jury actually placed on that jury: 42%

  • My chance of actually serving on a jury today: 11.5% or less than 1 chance out of 8

  • The opportunity to make the US justice system real for the brothers Sells w/o them actually committing a crime: priceless

I get to read all of Eric Sink's pieces before we publish them, so I got to follow the link to the trailer for Commedian before you guys did (although the movie's been out for 2 years, so you had a bit of a lead...). While I like Jerry Seinfield and I've placed this movie next on my NetFlix queue, I can't believe that it'll live up to the trailer.

As Don pointed out, I missed one of the new companies spawned by DevelopMentor alum: Barracuda.NET, a training company founded by two of the friendliest and funniest instructors you will ever meet (and to whom the Visual Basic community needs no introduction): Ted Pattison and Jason Masterman. Right now these two are specializing in SharePoint training, including remote training (I want to know how they do that!), but I expect them to branch out into all kinds of interesting stuff.

Steven Edwards is an OSS guy working with the Wine guys to build a new version of Windows from scratch called ReactOS. They’ve got 20-30 people, they’ve been working on it for a few years and they’re 6-8 months away from getting client-side of networking to work to the point that it supports HTTP.

Oh my god.

Why would anyone want to waste time doing this? I don’t even like to build my own autocomplete listbox when it’s already been done and that’s only about 12 lines of .NET code! Why the hell would anyone want to build Win32 all over again, let alone Win16 (what the Wine guys do)?!? We have all these programmers with all this free time and all they can think to do is to clone OSes and applications that have already been built? Why not add something new into the world?

I just don’t get it…

If the reality is anything like the concept videos, I want it!

Wei-Meng Lee takes a first look at the WinHEC build of Longhorn for O'Reilly. It's a user-centric look at Longhorn, but I learned stuff. : )

As another company started by a DevelopMentor alumnus, Wangdera is the union of two consultants so perfect together, they actually got married (I believe it was a marriage arranged by their respective clients, but they’ve come to love each other : ).

In addition to being an MIT grad (they turned me away), a DevelopMentor alumnus of great repute, one of the chief developers on the next-gen MSDN web infrastructure, Craig is also the official, self-appointed sellsbrothers.com grammar checker, which should be worth your business all by itself!

And while we're on companies formed by ex-DevelopMentorites, check out Relevance, LLC, a software contracting and content creation firm founded by Stuart Halloway and Justin Geghtland, the former DevelopMentor CTO and Head of IT, respectively. Justin was the co-author of the VB.NET version of Windows Forms book and Stuart did some very cool Gen<X> work, so I'm big fans of both of them. Relevance has been around for a while and are already doing all kinds of interesting projects, but if you can get them for your interesting project, you won't be sorry.