Lancer Kind

The real life situation was cliche enough for a movie (I’ll talk about the movie later):
An actor who played in cowboy movies was president of the US and was insinuating that the next toughest country was evil. Both sides had the firepower to destroy the world many times over. But then a movie came out on ABC and changed everything. A movie that produced a “what if” vision so terrifying that the US government and people started to carefully think about the consequences of attempting to destroy those they called evil.

Check out Alexander Veer’s writeup about how the movie The Day After changed everything in a powerful wave of activist science fiction.

It was 2009 (late) before I started watching the animated series Star Wars Clone Wars. The show had been running for a few seasons already. In fact, the animated series has been imagineered in a few different flavors: a movie released to theatres, a Cartoon Central TV series, and an Adult Swim styled cartoon movie.

Frankly, Lucas Films has made it an organizational mess. It took me a few hours of IMDB, Wikipedia, and Google research to figure out what there was to watch and in what order to watch them. Here is my prescription for catching up in four steps.

Step 1, watch the live action movies

The first two movies are the setup for the cartoons. Their names are: Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. These are usually held in high regard by fans of the franchise (such as those who write on https://thedirect.com/StarWars/ and the like). If you are a very orderly person, you may opt to not watch episode 3 until you do steps 2-4. But I’m not very orderly so I recommend watching the live action movies first, and because sometimes it’s nice to know where a character is headed, and then watch that character at an earlier time and see how he struggles along that path. I love watching these movies with my whole house audio systems. They make the movies so much better.

Step 2, Go for an Adult Swim

Lucas wanted you to have something to do after watching Episode 2 Attack of the Clones in 2002, until he released Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith. So he gave you cartoon shorts. They were released in 2003, 2004, 2005 as teasers (sometimes on TV, sometimes in the theater). Notice the “Adult Swim” rough and minimal style of animation on the front cover. This series of shorts (also called the “micro” series) was later combined to make a large narrative about what Anni had been up to between Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. I enjoyed watching it very much. It’s an example of doing narrative with sparse dialog and lots of showing.

Step 3, Star Wars: Clone Wars movie

Notice the distinctive difference in animation on the movie poster versus the “Adult Swim” style. This movie was used to kick off the TV series in Step 4.

Step 4, Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series

This TV series ran immediately after the animated movie and is still running today (crica 2010). The animation style is the same as that of the movie. As of now, only two seasons are out in blu-ray.

Now go to Amazon or NetFlicks and find ways to enjoy the Star Wars experience! (Sorry, JarJar Binks is still included.)

The advent of the Internet has increased the rate of information flow. We used to wait a month for a new magazine issue or a week for a favorite TV episode. Nowadays, you need the help of a site like this to even stand a chance of being able to keep up to date, with entire new TV shows being released nearly every day! It has become apparent that life now progresses at Internet time. Online magazines report not only daily but when the story breaks. You can watch movies on-demand rather than run to the video store or wait for it to show again on HBO.

Moreover, on-demand streaming services like HBO Max, Netflix, Amazon Prime have totally changed the way that we are able to enjoy TV shows and movies. You can learn more about HBO Max and check out some of the latest TV and Internet deals here: https://att-bundles.com/. Above all, with exclusive TV programs and films now arriving on streaming services, it is interesting to think about what else the future might hold for streaming. Also, many of the movies on these platforms are only available for specific locations. But you can watch these movies or series by using VPN services and then log in to the application. Alternatively, you can download these movies from external open-source media platforms like Kodi. It is essentially a tool to bring all your content together in one place and share it across numerous devices. But it’s important to use VPN services with Kodi to create a secure connection between your device and its physical servers. Well! If you don’t know how to install vpn on kodi, simply visit the blog pages, where you can find step-by-step instructions to do that. Kodi apps can be vulnerable to a variety of hacks, especially if you’re interested in various third-party add-ons that provide a variety of additional features. If you’re downloading an older version of an add-on or it lacks the necessary security certificates, a Kodi VPN might always provide an extra layer of privacy.

Anyway, according to The Singularity, with technological advancements doubling for the past centuries, we might eventually reach a point where the change in streaming will become so rapid, that society will become wildly unpredictable. This point is called The Singularity.

Once The Singularity hits, your favorite TV show will finish its entire season BEFORE you’ve seen the first episode. This is upsetting because the last episode will be in a new HD format of a 1080googleP, and although it was amazing, it’ll be a commercial disaster because no one knew about it in time to watch its ten second season. (It jumped the shark in the ninth second.)

So before the disaster that is The Singularity, enjoy your leisurely Internet age of daily magazines such as Daily Science Fiction. Visit their website and subscribe, for free, and receive science fiction short stories. The eZine has just started up and will be releasing stories to their subscribers late this Summer/Fall.

One of the stories they’ll send you is a story I wrote called Bit Storm, which received honorable mention in The Writers of the Future contest. Diff makes a living setting up and maintaining an AI for a financial company. He makes the acquaintance of a greifer who goes by Slick Devil who challenges Diff to prove him wrong, that war is a natural and necessary in society and the skilled survive to prey on the weak. Although Diff tries to steer clear, Slick Devil involves him in a disastrous Halloween stunt that risks people’s lives.

As I’m sure there will be stories about life during and post Singularity, it would be irresponsible not to subscribe to Daily Science Fiction. You owe it to yourself to learn as much as possible before The Singularity is upon us. (People addicted to iPhones and PvZ is just a coming herald.)

Subscribe soon, before Daily Science Fiction becomes Hourly Science Fiction or, shudder, Quantum Science Fiction.

Sometimes a writer’s day job can really help him write. It all started in 2000 when Asim Jalis, a friend of mine, kept pestering me about how to apply eXtreme Programming (XP) to writing. I say pester, because, like an a fly buzzing around the room which had grown a mouth and spoke with the voice of James Earl Jones, he kept challenging me until I tried to do things like unit test writing, pair write, and a bunch of other crazy. (Asim, when you become wildly popular and rich because people want to put recordings of you on their ringtones, you can pay me back.)

So we applied some of the XP practices to writing projects with a little success. But it never revolutionized my approach to producing writing.

Later, after years of doing Agile Consulting, I’ve learned other Agile processes that weren’t so tailored to the task of engineering software. Scrum is a great process that can be applied to the production of anything that you can make a list of “what you want.”

I decided to write a novel that teaches those in the software industry how to use this process, but in an entertaining way. A more direct way would be to become friends with Asim, find friends like Asim, hire me as a consultant, or hire an Agile consultant. But if you can’t do that, then you can learn the principles of Agile development from my novel Agile Noir, which you could read on a flight from Florida to Seattle and ALMOST get the same entertainment value as hanging out in a coffee shop with its author, or his friend Asim (he prefers his name pronounced Awesome, by the way).

What’s so novel about an Agile novel? Well, Agile Noir is the only Agile business novel out there. There are plenty of non-fiction books about Agile but hey, everyone–even non-Agile people–will enjoy reading a novelization about Kartar, a project manager, and how he uses Agile processes to save his project and his life. That’s pretty novel! The other novelty is that Agile Noir is being writing using an Agile process called Scrum. And where XP didn’t fit the writing regime very well, Scrum worked very nicely. For me, plotting a novel came pretty naturally once I knew what I wanted to say. However, if you are in the process of writing a novel and require a few pointers, then head to jerichowriters.com for some useful tips.

Writers who may wish to use Scrum for their writing projects, Agile practitioners who wish to read an informal case study on applying Agile to writing, and readers who are interested in learning more about Agile, will be interested in the “making of” Agile Noir that starts at this page: Using Agile to write Agile Noir. You will find links to photos and videos of me going through the process of using Scrum to write my novel. And since the writing of my novel is still in progress, this page about the making of will continue to grow in an incremental fashion until Agile Noir is finished.

So check it out if you’re interested in Agile, in writing, or wondering what happens when you have friends like Asim who speak dramatically like Darth Vader. All the time. 😉

As a writer, I spend a lot of time explaining things. With my preferred medium of the written word, I wrote a story to explain what it would be like to have a conversation with moss (Moss Memoirs) for example.

As an Agile consultant, I explain to my client how to organize their software development teams so they can produce their products in a predictable way. This is often a key factor in the creation of any successful piece of business software, and you can read more about small business software if you’re looking to educate yourself on that. After ten of years experience of doing that, you have all the Q and A down and can quickly help your client through the pitfalls of doing their job differently. You also notice familiar patterns: this client wants to do Agile only to make his boss happy, this other client wants to change their practices without actually changing anything, and this client is willing to try Agile but worries they could lose what tenuous hold they have on keeping their project from spiralling into chaos. If you are in the marketing department then you may want to click here to find some trustworthy and supportive software that gives marketing departments, data analysts, and fulfilment operations the capability to deliver accurate and optimized data. Having good quality software is crucial to ensure that your business runs smoothly. Something like the low-code software development platform “MODELO” from VANTIQ will be extremely useful. It’s also advised to be prepared for when the business grows. As the company gets bigger, there will be more demand. Sometimes, higher demand can result in various issues and outages. To try and keep on top of potential outages, it might also be worth looking into other pieces of software, like office 365 reporting software for example. This can help admins to work out the cause of the problems quickly, reducing the time spent fixing them. This helps businesses to ensure their operations can run effectively.

I spend 90% of my time covering Agile 101 type topics with each new client. What can I do to ‘up the game’ of an entire industry?

Educating the masses with a book is a scalable approach. But there are already a lot of Agile books out there that people aren’t reading.

Perhaps they aren’t the right kind of books. The Agile advocates are reading Agile books, but the people who aren’t doing Agile and don’t enjoy reading about engineering processes in their spare time, aren’t going to pick up a book on Agile. But maybe I can trick them into learning, by writing something entertaining that includes learning about Agile….

What’s a Business Novel?

A business novel is a work of fiction that is designed to illustrate business concepts. The business concepts are non-fiction and effective in the real world. The scenario surrounding the concepts is fiction. Think of it as a detailed case-study that contains more information then a real case-study can possible have (the author knows what characters are thinking and all the details of the situation).

What’s the difference between a work of fiction and a business novel? The goal of a fiction novel is to entertain. The goal of a business novel is to educate. A work of fiction is shelved with its genre (The Pelican Brief is in the Thriller section, for example) where a business novel will be shelved in its non-fiction area of expertise. The business novel I’m working on, Agile Noir, will be shelved in the computer/business section, next to the copies of eXtreme Programming Explained, Agile Software Development with Scrum, Waltzing with Bears, and Who Moved My Cheese? (another business novel).

In any discussion about genre categorization, not everyone agrees. American, a journal of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has this list of The Ten Best Business Novels but none of them are business novels. I can’t fault their taste in books. What’s listed are science fiction, thrillers, and mysteries that are set in business environments. A few others are classic industry novels (novels designed to make social commentary on/about people and their industry). I think that author Neal Stephenson would disagree at listing his Cryptonomicon as being a business novel. (I love the book.) Me agreeing with anything the AEI (a conservative “think tank”) has to say is likely never to happen. (My rule of thumb–anyone who uses the US flag in their logo, who is not a governmental agency, is out to manipulate you into thinking they would be better at governing.)

Jeff Cox, author of the best-selling business novel, The Goal, has an article about business novels that is spot on. He knows what he’s talking about. Here is a similar article about business novels is by a consultancy formed around corporate education. They have this nice quote on their website: “Remember – Readers are Leaders.”

As for me, I’ll continue to writing Agile Noir, a story about Kartar, an embattled project manager who works for a Casino in Vegas. As his Waterfall project (non-Agile) gets further and further behind, he discovers that his budget is financed by the mob and will have him killed if he can’t deliver on time. After some setbacks that are classic to the Waterfall software development life cycle, he meets Agile consultant and coach Agilena, an intelligent and beautiful woman, who tries to give Kartar the advice he needs to turn his project and life around.

I’ll be sending book proposal to publishers of business books, many of whom don’t understand business novels. Then it will be my job to explain how together we can profit by publishing non-fiction dressed up in a fictional outfit, and hope I don’t have to write a business novel about the efficacy of business novels.

You can read early drafts of Agile Noir at my Stimulants Online page.