Project

Thinking deeply is difficult because, well, it requires thinking deeply. So sometimes it is more expedient to just throw thoughts out into the air as seeds for further thought to crystalize around. This is what I will attempt today as the topic is one which the amount of thought to get it correct is astounding.

Warning: For those looking for thoughts on Agile, or Theory of Constraints or Project 2007 you might as well hit the back button right now. I'm straying from the usual project management topics.

North Korea has stated they have tested a nuclear device. Iran has stated that they are proceeding to develop their nuclear capabilities. In a way these are "All-American" sorts of initiatives. They smell of the former brashness and pluck that characterized the pre-worldpower version of the US. From a North Korean perspective, the argument is little different from that of an NRA member who believes that they need a handgun for self-defense in their home and car. I'd venture that Iran sees things in a similar light. The motivations for developing weapons are very similar to those which motivated the US to pursue development in these technologies throughout the 20th century. The motivation appears to be fear, coupled with a desire for self-determination and national pride. It is hard to be more righteous than that. (Note: this is where the lack of deep thought is invoked, there may be financial motivation for North Korea to develop such weapons as they aspire to the retail weapons trade currently dominated by the US and China - but let us leave that alone for now)

Now, I think we can all agree, and in fact most of the world HAS agreed that more nuclear weapons are generally a bad thing. We have signed treaties to limit nuclear proliferation. This is relatively easy to do once the basic motivations have been fulfilled. The US for example already has nuclear weapons. The US already has a powerful position in the world and has enough self-determination and national pride to go around. The US is relatively free of fear as well. I say relatively because fear is never entirely absent, but it looks to me that fear has been on the upswing this century. I'm not sure I see that going away soon. But overall, I think it is great that a large portion of the world's governments agree to this basic principle.

So what would be the best way to deal with the issue of those who do not agree with this principle? I would think that at a minimum, any approach should address the motivations of the countries pursuing this approach. If fear is a factor, then reducing fear would appear to be a productive step. Unfortunately, the US has not pursued reducing fear. Or if they have, it has not been public. In the famous "Axis of Evil" speech, George Bush painted a big red and white target on the upper half of the Korean Peninsula and around the countries of Iran and Iraq. It then unilaterally attacked Iraq. If I were Iranian, I'd wonder "are we next?" and indeed many Iranians I've talked to in this country have wondered the same thing. To them, having nuclear weapons is a matter of self-defense, just as the US development of nuclear weapons was a matter of self-defense.

Now, there is the issue of appeasement. I'm not sure how to address it, probably because it is so free of clear definitions. To some it is being "soft" or accomodating the desires of another country. It got a bad name because a country which was on ann expansionist tear was dealt with in this way and was allowed to continue their trajectory of annexation and conquest. One can see that appeasement is probably a bad way to deal with cancers or other growing things. Indeed, it seems that at least at one point in time, Iraq was expansionist and appeasement would have been a poor way to deal with that. But are Iraq and North Korea pursuing expansionist policies? Is there any realistic chance that North Korea will attempt to annex parts of China, Russia or Japan? Would nuclear weapons help them along this path? What about Iran? Iran seems content to stay within their own borders and build alliances with surrounding countries rather than invading and occupying. Indeed, one can see that the approach of occupation is a difficult one at best.

Given this state of affairs, is an approach of escalation and vilification one that will reduce the motivations of Iran and North Korea? To me it seems quite the opposite. There are many who would deem South Korea's "Sunshine" policy to be a failure in light of current events, but I think that if it is, it is because the approach is coming from the wrong party. The root of fear in North Korea is fear of the US, not fear of South Korea.

Now a disclaimer. North Korea is guilty of terrible abuses of its people perpetuated by a series of leaders of questionable sanity. The suffering of people in North Korea is immensely sad. I can't say that I know anything good about the current leadership in Iran either. But, cornering a paranoid, vicious anxious dog is more likely to provoke a bite than treating its anxieties in a productive manner would ever be. It is not a time to fight fear with fear.

Steve at Google has posted something thatlooks like it is getting a fair amount of attention. The basic thesis is that Agile is just a pretty handkerchief for the consulting wizards to wave over a hat as they make their client's money disappear but that Google has discovered the "good" agile in the form of free food and public recognition for shipping yet another beta thingie. According to google steve, google project management consists of task queue, an endless trough of tasks to choose from.

The problem with these sorts of comparisons is that they lead to the logical fallacy wherein by agreeing that one side is bad, you are sort of agreeing that the other side is good. Kinda like the armadillo telling the gila monster "you are ugly so I am beautiful". This claim of google's self evident "beauty" based on the fact that google is currently rich and generous so it MUST be uncategorically correct is commonly known as hubris and there are likely a few Greek tragedies where only a few names would need to be changed to match the current situation. Not that the Greeks were the only ones to recognize it. Take a look at a couple of recent silicon valley situations like that at Intel and perhaps HP and you see things like Craig Barrett reaching back into the bag of tricks which he believed got him where he was in an unsuccessful attempt to bring back past glory by going "back to basics".

This sort of "we did it before so we can do it again" thinking is probably something foreign to the mostly young crowd at google, but I had the foolishness of this handed to me on a plate when I attended a yoga class today. Yeah, I might have done it before, but I'm a long way from doing it again. There is hard work ahead. Chanting a slogan was no help. Ooooommmm. Ooooouuuuchhhh

But google steve does have one point right. People. People are essential to almost every human endeavor. Having the wrong people is generally a bad thing. Having the right people is nearly unstoppable. Now, a qualification. "Right" does not always mean the same thing. I am not the "right" person for a number of things. For the most part I know what those things are and I avoid them. You won't catch me on a basketball court anytime soon, but if you lost a necklace in the warm waters off the shore of a sunny Greek island and need help finding it, I can probably be quite handy.

So now enough of emulating the long-winded short-pointed prose of google steve. I'll bring it to a close. There is no magic. There are only people. Good people and bad people. It is hard to tell which is which. Sometime the team works best if there are people on it who are completely different from you. Likely a team of a hundred copies of you is going to have a pretty wide blind spot. Find the people, find what they want to do. Help them do it by any means necessary, food and fleece jackets seem to get google steve going, so try that if he is on your team. Avoid pushing your team backwards and/or sideways. Clear the path and kick the dead rats out of the kitchen.

Yesterday I buried my dog. A patch on my left thumb is worn raw from chopping through the hard clay soil. I was almost alone while digging, observed only by my dog wrapped in a white towel resting in a cardboard box - his eyes unclosing from now until forever. 14 years ago he would have been helping me, scratching at the ground and almost laughing. Last week he would have been sitting somewhere near, close enough to hear with his pointed ears, close enough so he knew I was there and I knew he was too.

It seems I've always been working to keep him close. He was getting in my way when I built his first dog house, but deemed it too far away to actually sleep in. He was near when I built a fence to keep him in, a fence to keep him from running and exploring when I was not home. Next to the fence I planted the same bougainvillea whose purple petals filled the hole I dug.

He was near when I built the gates to keep away the postman who tormented him daily, daring to walk up the driveway and touching the mail slot. He was near even when I walked with him. Of course his version of "near changed over time. What was once half a mile or so shrank to a block and by last winter he was close enough to share the same umbrella when it rained. I had almost retired his leash except as something to carry in the event of meeting nervous passerby's who thought I was walking with a baby wolf.

He was not the kind of dog to sit on your lap. He did not like being held unless it was on your lap while you were driving but even that changed two days ago when he stayed close and lay calm and quiet in my arms. Every minute he got closer, until he was gone. Well, not really gone, but all I have left is what he left inside me. It is a poor substitute.

As the years pass plum leaves, and rose petals and wisteria blossoms will fall over him and he will be quiet and close forever.

There is one best way to manage projects. There is one best way to plan. There is one best way to develop new products. There is one best way to engineer software. There is one best way to drink beer. There is one best way to clean the shower. There is one best way to get kids to behave. There is one best way to pray.

Well, on second thought, maybe not. Though you don't hear that much from people. More common is the evangelical acceptance and propagation of "a way" as being the best or only way. People like to be in the group that "knows how to" do something. People enjoy the assurance that they are "right". It is comfortable to be in the middle of a herd of wildebeast when there is a lion on the left and a leopard on the right. Of course some don't also, but that is OK too. Lions have to eat.

These thoughts pop out of my head after reading a couple different things. The first, David Anderson's plea to the Agile community to broaden the description of what "Agile" is to the point where it is almost everything (presumably with the goal of gathering more and more wildebeast into the fold - can you make cheese from wildebeast milk?) - a sort of ideological gerrymandering I think, in which rather than a process, "Agile" is defined as the result. The second a discussion on the New Grange mailing list about the nature of expertise.

Of course, like all thought, the bread rises before it is baked, so I have no special treats from the oven for you yet, but perhaps you can take the half-baked dough and cook it in your own oven. Think about what sort of soil conditions you have around you and what sorts of plants will flourish in it, and which will die. Think site-specific. That is one way to go about it.

I'm always curious about how you arrived here. It seems that the majority find their way through a search on google. The reason I know this is because I take a look at the log files from my server. If someone got here by clicking on a link somewhere, that referring site shows up in the log. Each log entry looks something like this:

192.198.152.98 - - [21/Sep/2006:14:33:37 -0400] "GET /blog/archives/design/bob-colwell-on-computer-architecture.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12958 zo-d.com "http://www.google.com/search?q=bob+colwell&btnG=Search&hl= en&lr=" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7" "unknown"

We can look at this and see that it the server is configured to write out in "combined log format". There are a few interesting things in this entry (and I'll skip the boring things) The first part is the IP address. Intel owns the IP addresses from 192.198.128.0 to 192.198.177.255 so I'm pretty confident that this is someone at Intel hitting the site. Moving to the right we see the file that was requested. And then skipping further right we see a URL which shows the referring site. In this case a google search for "Bob colwell".

Sometimes the referring URL tells us more. For example: http://www.google.de/search?q=%22Theory+of+Constraints%22&hl=de&lr=&start=90&sa=N tells us that it wasn't until the tenth page of results that this site showed up for a search on "Theory of Constraints". It also tells us that the person was searching on the German google site. Looking at this tells me that I should probably try harder if my goal is to be a useful and popular site for people looking for information about "Theory of Constraints".

The problem is that there are so many lines in the log file which don't contain referer data, or which tell me that the style sheet was used that it is difficult to pick out the interesting parts. The easiest way for me to do that is to have software do it for me. I use a this process. Save the log file to my computer as a text file. Previously I'd just open it in excel and then filter, but the weekly log is longer than excel can hangle, so the next step is filtering it by using grep. Note: Excel 2007 will solve this limitation by moving to a limit of 1 million rows - but it won't be out until next year) If you are using a mac or linux you can just open a terminal window, but for a windows box you may need to install windows grep or another program. Once you do that simply type something like: grep /search? logfile.txt > searches.txt. This finds all lines containing /search? in the file and then writes them to a file called searches.txt. The > tells it to write the result of the search into the file which comes after it.

That cuts the number of lines down to a manageable number and shows only those which match the characteristics of a search. Almost all search engines use the word "search" in their results, so this will also show yahoo and msn search results as well.

After this, just open the text file in excel. It should recognize it as a text file and open the conversion wizard. The lines are space delimited so check delimited and the space box and then you have all your data in excel to browse through or analyze.

This same technique can be used to filter out any sort of data in the file you like. Just change the parameters you are feeding to grep.

Or at least poking the periscope above the water. This week sees 3 new Project Server authors (presumably on a dare from Brian Kennemer). For some reason all of them have double letters in their names just like Brian...

Dr. Ed Hanna http://projectified.typepad.com/dr_ed/:
I'm expecting good things from Dr. Ed. His writing is very clear and is based on real issues people have. I think this is the most useful kind of writing even if I do not indulge in it myself :-)

His first post is about how things are features not bugs "Users are constantly finding “imagined bugs” in the software that—on closer inspection—are really not bugs at all. These problems are just a result of the way that they are misusing the application.". Ed, I agree with you. Many times people think microsoft project is doing something wrong when it is really that they just don't understand project. For example, write-only properties can't be read because they are write-only. You can't be silly and think that you can read what it is before you operate on it! Likewise, I have no idea why people think that the "effort-driven" box would be the equivalent of making a task fixed-work.

Ok... maybe I'm being too subtle here and on the internet no one can see you smirk. There are a lot of things Project does which are counter-intuitive or just plain wierd. The sad thing is that after using Project for years, they start to seem normal. When users don't "get" the application you can either blame the user or the application. Like the poor craftsman, I prefer to blame the tools - but always with a healthy dose of explanation about why Microsoft Project might not do things the way you expect it to. Making the application easier and more understandable should be a goal of the development team. Understanding the workings of Project should be a goal of the users. Hopefully they will meet in the middle.

Anyway, sorry about going off about this. That wasn't my intent. Dr. Hanna, Congratulations on your new blog. I hope to see more!

Kermit Llaurador - http://projectified.typepad.com/boricua/
Kermit's blog so far is just a placeholder. Looking forward to seeing a post or two here.

Reid McTaggart - http://projectified.typepad.com/reidsprojectworld/
Reid has recently guest posted for Evil Dr. Porkchop. The topic was a great example of how a couple of custom field formulas can be used rather than a macro featuring one of my favorite constructs, the nested Iif statement, and it is a long one at that:

Iif([% Complete] = 100,99,Switch([Enterprise Text1]=”Exclude from Phase Calculation”,100, [Enterprise Text1]=”Inception”,1, [Enterprise Text1]=”Planning”,2, [Enterprise Text1]=”Execution”,3, [Enterprise Text1]=”Closeout”,4))

Thanks Brian for encouraging these guys. And best of luck to all of you.

Is it just me who thinks things are moving slowly? I know they have to tie the release into the release of Office 2007 which was pushed out just like Vista, but the public presence and excitement around Project 2007 seems almost non-existant after what was going on earlier in the year. No one I know seems to be doing anything active with the beta. Maybe it is just summer and things will pick up in the fall.

Looking at what I've been writing here I'm as guilty as anyone. The annual abalone dive should signal an end to this lethargy... or perhaps the start to an even slower fall season! But at least outside the project management world there is stuff going on. For example, click over to my other site and read an article I put up about how to clean an abalone.

Check it out..

Pencil From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search

This article is about pencils, a type of pre-historic ooze that squelched out of cracks in the protozoa of the time. It was comprised mostly of richard Gere's DNA, spliced with that of Pamela anderson. It's Chemical name, bollocksius crapola, is derived from the combined talents of the two individuals from whom the DNA was taken.

Pencils are boring. They destroy morale and must be kept out of the reach of children. Never leave a pencil unattended. Pencils are high maintenance and explode when exposed to sunlight. Declare war on pencils. Pencils are the root of all evil.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil

I disagree with the exploding in sunlight part. Actually I have a soft spot for the dastardly implements - especially the 0.9mm variety.

You know you are getting old when candy you bought for a nickel when you were a kid is 65 cents. In comparison moving from 9 planets to "maybe 12" with potential for millions (imagine the wheelbarrow you would need to carry that many planets!) is bound to happen over a few billion years, but is not something you expect in a single lifetime - but it has.

The International Astronomical Union is working out a defintion of "planet" in order to cope with some recently discovered objects which are larger than Pluto and are orbiting the sun. Apparently, until now there has been no scientific defintion of planet. But the discovery in 2005 of 2003 UB313 (nicknamed Xena) which orbits the Sun every 557 years or so has pretty much forced the issue.

Now at their annual conference, the IAU has issued some guidelines for the definition of planet:

1. A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.
2. We distinguish between the eight classical planets discovered before 1900, which move in nearly circular orbits close to the ecliptic plane, and other planetary objects in orbit around the Sun. All of these other objects are smaller than Mercury. We recognize that Ceres is a planet by the above scientific definition. For historical reasons, one may choose to distinguish Ceres from the classical planets by referring to it as a “dwarf planet.”
3. We recognize Pluto to be a planet by the above scientific definition, as are one or more recently discovered large Trans-Neptunian Objects. In contrast to the classical planets, these objects typically have highly inclined orbits with large eccentricities and orbital periods in excess of 200 years. We designate this category of planetary objects, of which Pluto is the prototype, as a new class that we call “plutons”.
4. All non-planet objects orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies”.

For a more scholarly take on the rules and the potential loopholes in them I encourage you to visit Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy".

UPDATE: Things change. Pluto is no longer a planet

Someone was wondering the other day whether the limit on tasks in project would be constrained by the possible number of Unique ID's. They were concerned that the unique ID might be stored as a 16 bit number and that they could conceivably reach it over time. I am reasonably certain that the unique ID is at least a 32 bit number but since it is not documented, I thought I'd do a little test. To test it I tried to construct a project with more than 2^16 tasks (2^16 = 65536 )

My approach was to code up something which would add as many tasks as I wanted. Because there is always a concern that this might take a while I had it write to a log file along the way. And to get an idea of how long it would take I added a time stamp mechanism. What I found was what I expected... long before you get to 2^32 tasks (4,294,967,296 to be precise) you run out of time. Project becomes so sluggish that it becomes unreasonable to work with.

The reason is that Project stores the project in memory and that as the file grows larger, it becomes much more processor intensive to do anything with the file. To illustrate what I mean, here is a chart showing the time required to add tasks.

The straight line shows that as the file size grows, the time needed to add tasks increases almost linearly. The result of this is a power curve for the cumulative time required. Here you can see that it took about 45 minutes to add 30 thousand tasks. Extrapolating along this curve, adding 65536 tasks would take about 4.5 hours.

Going a bit further and adding the 1 million tasks which Microsoft claims is the limit for Project we find that it would take about 70 days. Along the way, we can look at the memory used by Project. I noted that as the number of tasks rose, the amount of memory that project utilized increased almost linearly as well. 30,000 tasks consumed 90 Megabytes of memory. If we extrapolate to 1,000,000 tasks that works out to 3 Gigabytes. And, in this case, the tasks consisted of just a name, no resources, no assignments, no dependencies, no notes, no formatting.

The point of all this is that Project is constrained more by the hardware you run it on than it is by any sort of fundamental limits to the data structure.

Tonight when I'm not working I'm going to try and see how long it takes to add 65K tasks. I expect it will take a few hours if my machine does not crash first. Of course I'm running this on my laptop with a 1.86GHz processor so a desktop machine will be faster. I do have 1GB of RAM thougn so if I run out of this and the computer starts paging to the disk then it will take considerably longer.

If you are curious about how well your computer performs, you can use the same code I used to check. It is probably best if you save any work and do not run this at a time when you expect to do anything else with your computer.

Sub PerformanceCheck()
'a simple tool to check the performance of Microsoft Project
'Copyright Jack Dahlgren, August 9, 2006
'for more information go to:
'http://zo-d.com/blog/archives/microsoft-project/microsoft-project-performance-limitations.html
'Note: entering a total test size of greater than a few tens of thousands
'will occupy your machine for a considerable amount of time!
Dim i As Integer
Dim j As Integer
Dim step As Integer
If MsgBox("Warning! May Crash Your Computer. _
Save ALL Work Prior To Running This Macro!", _
vbOKCancel, "Warning!") = vbCancel Then
Exit Sub
End If
'open a new file to insert tasks into
FileNew SummaryInfo:=True, Template:="", FileNewDialog:=False
OptionsCalculation Automatic:=False
'get values for upper limit
j = CInt(InputBox("Enter the Total number of tasks you want to test for.", _
"Test Size"))
'get step size for log file
step = CInt(InputBox("Enter how many tasks for each interim performance check" _
& vbCrLf & "example - 1000", "Step size"))
'create a logfile and open for writing
'the logfile goes in the root directory
Dim MyFile As String

Dim fnum As Integer
Dim randID As Integer
randID = CInt(100 * Rnd())
'create filename with randID as a quasi-unique Identifier
MyFile = "c:\" & j & "tasks_performance" & randID & ".csv"
fnum = FreeFile()

Open MyFile For Output As fnum
Print #fnum, "performance test, " & j & " tasks"
Print #fnum, "Number of tasks:, Cumulative Elapsed Time:"

'get the start time of the test
Dim start, finish, current
start = Timer

'add tasks up to the total number
For i = 1 To j
'if the current task is divisible by the step size
'then write an entry to the log file
If i Mod step = 0 Then
current = Timer
Print #fnum, i & ", " & current - start
'reset the start to eliminate any time wasted writing to the file
start = start + Timer - current
End If
'add the task
ActiveProject.Tasks.Add (i)
Next i
Close #fnum

On Error GoTo myerror

myerror:
MsgBox i & " tasks in " & current - start & " seconds"
Close #fnum

End Sub


This will give you a rough idea of how project performs on your computer. It is highly dependent on how much memory is available and how much processing power you have available. As a result, your findings may be different from what I have found by a large factor.

UPDATE: Of course things can always go faster. In this case I added a bit of code to turn off recalculation OptionsCalculation Automatic:=False and the required time to add 1,000,000 tasks drops to about 250 hours. 65536 tasks should take around an hour.

UPDATE #2: Adding 70,000 tasks took an hour and 13 minutes. The Unique ID field did not break. The empirical formula on my computer with Project 2000 for elapsed time is approximately 9E-7 * (number of tasks)^2. This translates to 250 hours to add a million tasks. Updating a million tasks on a weekly basis would be approaching the far edge of ridiculous. Such a thing is not the job for MS Project.

In reviewing the PMI Practice Standard for Scheduling I came across their proposal for which components would be required for a schedule to be considered "minimally acceptable". The good news is that most of these fall out of any modern scheduling tool such as Microsoft Project or Primavera Project Planner.

The bad news is that at least if you use Microsoft Project you need to use "Physical Percent Complete" methods to update your schedule. The recommendation is that the concepts of earned value be used to fill in this field. Project in the past has had some difficulties with the use of Physical Percent Complete instead of just using Percent Complete or updating through Project Web Access. It has been a while since I've looked into those issues, but it looks like the time has come to do some testing.

In case you are interested, here are the required components. I've marked the ones which the schedule tool should calculate for you automatically:

• Activity ID - Calculated
• Activity Label - Manual
• Baseline Data Date - Manual
• Project Calendar - Manual
• Project Start Constraint - Manual
• Critical Path - Calculated
• Data Date - Manual
• Activity Actual Duration - Calculated
• Activity Baseline Duration - Calculated
• Activity Original Duration - Manual
• Activity Remaining Duration - Manual
• Project Actual Duration - Calculated
• Project Baseline Duration - Calculated
• Project Original Duration - Calculated
• Project Remaining Duration - Manual
• Activity Actual Finish Date - Manual
• Activity Baseline Finish Date - Calculated
• Activity Early Finish Date - Calculated
• Activity Late Finish Date - Calculated
• Project Actual Finish Date - Calculated
• Project Baseline Finish Date - Manual
• Project Early Finish Date - Calculated
• Project Late Finish Date - Calculated
• Free Float - Calculated
• Total Float - Calculated
• Milestone - Calculated
• Activity Physical Percent Complete - Manual
• Project Physical Percent Complete - Calculated
• Project Name - Manual
• Project Schedule ID - Manual
• Project Version - Calculated
• Finish to Start - Manual
• Activity Actual Start Date - Manual
• Activity Baseline Start Date - Calculated
• Activity Early Start Date - Calculated
• Activity Late Start Date - Calculated
• Project Actual Start Date - Calculated
• Project Baseline Start Date - Manual
• Project Early Start Date - Calculated
• Project Late Start Date - Calculated
• Unit of Measure - Manual
• WBS ID - Manual

It appears that one of my abalone shell photographs got posted on a Korean site. So I turned to google translations to see what they were saying. To my great surprise they were saying:

"Becomes intoxication and to bedspread ^ ^ marine products series thiss time which it sees the expensive clam (there is not creepy visual)

The bedspread which is not the possibility of stopping an ocean living thing loading. When the international situation which is not countermeasure or the women or the young students encounter to read a news and the feeling picks and also the fortune [toy] sees these pictures and exclamation the feeling carries will be born with more or less but Deyo. Even to various minutes there will be a minute is like that effect and. Of course current problem or the historical problematic Edo it wants intruding and the finger does not get the dreamy frame well! the reel only is not being taken up the place desire which is intention.

Aem the thought is born in indebtedness but also the monster monster man series which to the [su] comes out to the [phu] sees revival will do again. Inquiry possibility it was low but…

It sleeps,… To bedspread time Deyo which is not the creepy thing. In the marine products is expensive the crossroad name difficulty food the ramyon ear shell [keyss] [cyo].

It probably is like that why, if it does not know and the army bedspread which the enormous marine products prescribed form does plentifully in California. ; ; ; The dignity California ear shell the length becomes 23cm B. The winter bud hour Ah San ear shell shell where we are familiar size comparison it puts in inside the hazard California mountain shell, [noh] [ass] the [cyo]. It is once checking trying [keyss] [sup] [ni] where the abalone porridge which it sells from California probably is cheaper." (source: http://djuna.cine21.com)

It probably is like that why if it does not know. Google translations has a loooong way to go. And lucky readers I should have new abalone and sea urchin pictures to add to the monster monster man series at the end of the month!

"When it seems that a new man or a new school has invented a new thing, it will only be found that the gifted among them have secured a firmer hold than usual of some old thing." Walter Sickert

Walter Sickert was a British Impressionist painter, not a TOC critic. He is perhaps most famous due to speculations that he was "Jack the Ripper".

So ends aphorism week. I need to think of a new thing for next week.

"The beginning of error may be, and mostly is, from private persons, but the maintainer and continuer of error is the multitude" Sir James Hales

James Hales was famous for a couple of things, contesting Henry VIII's will and for his "self-murder". The judge deciding whether his property should be forfeit to the monarchy upon his death (suicide was cause for forfeiture of the estate at the time) famously wrote:

"Sir James Hales was dead, and how came he to his death? by drowning; and who drowned him? Sir James Hales; and when did he drown him? in his lifetime. So that Sir James Hales, being alive, caused Sir James Hales to die; and the act of the living man was the death of the dead man. He therefore committed felony in his lifetime, although there was no possibility of the forfeiture being found in his lifetime, for until his death there was no cause of forfeiture."

Aphorism week continues through Friday