High quality barefoot running video of Dr. Mark Cucuzzella on beautiful rolling countryside at Antietam National Battlefield.

Nice form video posted by Merrell:

I purchased this artwork by Rokoko at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar in Austin, Texas.

The text in the artwork begins with "I am the Right Foot".



I liked this painting because of the vibrant colors and because many of the phrases go particularly well with barefoot running:

Funny video of Julia singing and dancing the Father Abraham song:

Video of my lovely wife (aka Dr. Kristen Stoner, flute professor at the University of Florida), performing the Martinu First Sonata, I. Allegro moderato, with Tim Carey, piano, at the Florida Flute Association Convention. January 29, 2011:



Additional videos of the second and third movements:

In a previous post about attending the Agile 2010 conference, I included some quotes from Arin Sime who presented a talk on using range estimates rather than single-point estimates:

  "Single point estimates are almost always overly optimistic."

  "There is a limit to how well a project can go, but no limit to how many problems can occur."

There are many examples out there to show that single point estimation is hard and in fact most people are pretty terrible at it.  See the "Further reading..." section at the end of this post if you are in doubt about estimation woes.

I was able to convince our team to use range estimation rather than single point estimates in our most recent team project. The project in question was building a small datamart that will become part of our larger data warehouse efforts. We received a data feed from an external source and processed it through ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), with most of our work in the "transform" portion of the process. The deliverable was a series of reports on our web site and we now have the data loaded for any future ad-hoc queries.

 

In our project plan we recorded three values for each task:

  1. Minimum - this would be most people's initial single point estimate

  2. Maximum - maximum reasonable value if things went really wrong with this task

  3. Two-Thirds method - the calculated point two-thirds of the distance between the minimum and maximum.

 

To calculate the two-thirds point: