the master stroke

I often get asked about leadership and how I exemplify this. My favorite answer comes from a lesson that I obtained from my father, Harold Tufty, who learned it himself as a teenager when he was an arborist at the National Cemetery in Arlington Virginia.

There was this older arborist who once asked my dad to cut a branch way out on a skinny limb. It had to be cut on the very end of the branch so as to allow for keeping the most living part of the branch and the best growth for the tree.

When my dad thought this to be too dangerous and refused, the teacher told him to "just watch this". Little by little the older, heavier arborist snuck out on this precarious limb and cut it at the specified location, just at the correct spot.

Going out and doing things the correct way, taking calculated risks, is what sets a great arborist apart from a good arborist. Indeed, this was the master performing the master stroke,

windows 7 phones

Went to a windows 7 phone developer's user group last night. One guy there had a little game that he developed so we took the xap file and put it on one of the phones and could play it. It did not do much, but it was pretty cool.

In the time remaining, we (not with pair programming, but with horde programming) developed an app of our own. It moved a paddle around the screen depending on where you touched. Rather than just jump to the spot, we moved there slowly with a velocity component. We then pushed this to the phone and it was working - all in less than an hour.

So now I am thinking about two new apps - alison and abcounter. More on this later.

Links page

I wanted to post a few links that I have found useful.

Silverlight training

How to make your blog suck less