Just a short anecdote today, as I'm suffering from mind erasure.  There's a rich history of ragging on management, ranging from Dilbert to The Daily WTF.  As a card-carrying contrarian, I therefore bring you a tale of good leadership and upbeat endings within NASA.

The story starts out as inevitable tragedy.  A NASA worker wins a federal award, but cannot attend the ceremony because she'll be at a different NASA center that week.  She asks her higher up to accept the award on her behalf.  And, of course, the higher up can now step in and take all the credit, eh?

Here's a short tale about scientific journal editing, to complement my lament about the lack of Editors in Web2.0.  At the risk of being a scientific pariah, I believe some works can be overedited.

After much polishing at my home institute, I submitted a paper for consideration to a scientific journal.  We then went through a quite reasonable set of 3 stages of edits before they declared the paper was accepted for publication.  It then went through one more round of editing by a different editor to match house style.  Then it went to the proofers, for one last round, and I was told it was ready and final.

I'm out of town today, so I'm doing a break from my usual work.  Instead, I thought I'd share these tales of geek love.  First up is a nice fluff piece by Ashley Nelson, 4 Reasons Why Women Dig Geeks. Only 4 reasons (you may ask)? There must be more than a dozen reasons why geeks rock!

Time for a job-hunting question.  Which programming languages can you work with?  It's not the same question as which languages you know, and can be a surprisingly hard question to answer, particularly when you're job-hunting and the issue comes up.  Answering 'all of them' is a bit overconfident, but listing each one can be inexact.

Being a programmer is akin to being an athlete.  You're up to speed in what you do, and easily able to perform in a variety of fields, but have better ability in some areas than others.  A middle distance runner can switch to long distance easily, less so to cycling, perhaps poorly to biathlon.