Full disclosure: The author is a friend of mine, so I’m biased toward wanting him to be successful. Yet I’m also more motivated to be critical of his work than I would be with a stranger, which is exactly what the buccaneer-scholar approach calls for.

Hopefully the paper edition is easier to install

My experience with the e-book format was disappointing. It uses Adobe Digital Editions software and has tight DRM restrictions - you have to register with Adobe to even be able to restore the book from a backup. The standard installation process failed for me on Windows. I had to search for a manual installation option, which did work. When I registered with Adobe after installing the software, instead of before installing, I was no longer able to read the book, and I had to download it again, which I could only do by uninstalling Adobe Digital Editions and reinstalling it. I was unable to get it to install at all on Mac OS.

When the reader showed the text in one column, it was pleasant to read on the screen. I tended to maximize the reader window so I wouldn’t be distracted by other open applications, which caused the reader to switch to using two columns. There was a wide gutter between the columns but little whitespace on the outer margins. Some illustrations were chopped off on the outer edges in the two-column format, and the page numbers often overlapped the text. When I put the system on standby with the reader running and then woke it up, the reader window always become garbled until it redrew the window.

I was able to read the book on Linux with the Windows version of the reader running under “wine,” though it took some hacking to get it to install. So it actually works better on an unsupported platform than it does on Mac OS, which is supported.

Scholarly Buccaneers

It’s a shame that there are difficulties in the logistics of reading the book, because it’s well worth reading once you get the reader software working or a real book in your hands. In a nutshell, the book extends the concept of “Do what you love and the money will follow” to education - “Study what you love and an education will follow” (my words, not his). Will money come out of the buccaneer approach to learning? Not necessarily, and he doesn’t promise financial success as you might assume from the subtitle. The success James writes about is more about lifelong personal happiness than earning a living.

The “buccaneer” part of the title isn’t just a hollow reference to help sell the book - buccaneering is really compared to the learning process throughout the book. As someone who sings sea shanties and hangs out with people dressed as pirates at Renaissance festivals, the well-researched buccaneer references certainly kept my interest. While James does endorse civil disobedience, he does not of course entreat his readers to follow the buccaneers’ habits of theft and murder, much like the folks at the Renaissance festivals like to sing about adventure but never intend to actually draw blood with the swords they’re carrying. It’s the freedom that the buccaneers exercised that James is after - intellectual freedom - much like Captain Sparrow seeks freedom, and for both James and Captain Sparrow, this freedom comes within a well-established social structure, not the anarchy that you might expect.

James likes to use acronyms to remember lists of words that describe various methods that he uses. This time around, the acronym is “SACKED SCOWS.” I’ve never gotten much use out of his acronyms, but I did really like the learning approach that he describes in detail here. James describes the progression of his career, and how he now builds his credentials in lieu of academic diplomas. I like his strategy of staying in between our expectations and our aspirations for ourselves in order to stay engaged. He admitted that he has had self-doubt, however, and even flaws, which reminds us that it’s okay to be human. There is a good balance of autobiography that his fans will enjoy and general advice that anyone in any field can benefit from.

A few elements of the book still seem unpolished, like the table of clam facts in chapter six that didn’t make sense to me until I read the explanation that came after the table. And the epilogue seems to have the potential to give a touching end to the story, but it mostly left me confused.

I find myself wondering, would I recommend this book to my daughters? I have to admit, my gut reaction to that question is to hesitate to give them a book that says it’s okay to rebel against their teachers and drop out of school if that’s the direction the wind blows them. But my kids were homeschooled for several years, so they have already had a taste of buccaneer scholarship. Alas, when I mentioned to them that I had read James’ book about how to learn like a buccaneer, the response was “Dad, your friends are so weird.”

For more on buccaneer scholarship, see the Buccaneer Scholar web site.

Another big change is my role - sustaining engineer. After hearing from recruiters for years about doing development on embedded systems, I’m finally giving it a try. I am doing support and development, and giving feedback on testing and quality assurance as well.

I’ll be working on updating tejasconsulting.com to better reflect what I’m doing now. I’ve neglected testingfaqs.org a bit, but I do plan to keep it alive and well.

After 16 years as a tester, it was hard to decide to shift to a development role. But I’m really enjoying the technology I’m working on, using Perl and Linux on a complex network topology. I’ll keep you posted.

Take a look at my new Software Alchemy blog on StickyMinds, where the first post explains why my business card says I’m a Software Alchemist.

Of course, I’ll still be blogging here on my site too.

A thing my sister likes to do
Some evenings after supper
Is sit upstairs in her small room
And use her Thinker-Upper

She turns her Thinker-Upper on.
She lets it softly purr.
It thinks up friendly little things
With smiles and and fuzzy fur.

She sometimes does this by the hour.
Then when she’s tired of play,
She turns on her UN-Thinker
And un-thinks the things away.

It’s time to commemorate my eighth anniversary with Tejas Software Consulting, and sixteen years as a career software tester. My traditional Dr. Seuss quote this time comes from the story “The Glunk that got Thunk” that I had all but forgotten was one of the “other stories” in I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! And Other Stories. I like the idea of being able to un-think some of our bright ideas that turn out to not be as bright as we had thought. The story continues with thinking a thought so big and so bad that it can’t be un-thunk, and I bet we’ve all seen a few of those.

One big project took a lot of my time during the past year, a fascinating skunkworks project that brought a new technology into an established organization. As I wound down my involvement in the project, it was being absorbed into the mainstream processes of the company.

I traveled to Toronto twice last year, including one trip during a snowstorm that left me stranded at the airport for two days. It seemed perfectly normal driving in the snow up there, unlike in Texas where even a rain shower makes me worry about who’s going to run into my car. I did a nice whirlwind tour to Boston and Philadelphia that included a leg on Amtrak that left me wishing I could take the train more often. Just last week I returned from the SQuAD conference in Denver, where I was honored to deliver a keynote address, only the second keynote I’ve been asked to do. While in Denver I was amused to discover that Casa Bonita isn’t only the subject of a Southpark episode, but is also a real restaurant. Much of my work was done remotely last year, making it difficult to maintain my elite status on American Airlines.

I enjoyed attending the Association for Software Testing’s CAST conference in Toronto and I’m making plans for the next one this summer, which would be another Colorado trip. The SQuAD conference is the third local conference I’ve been to during my career, primarily attracting participants within driving distance (the others were held by the Triangle Information Systems Quality Association in North Carolina and the Association for Software Engineering Excellence in North Texas). I’m impressed by the quality of these local conferences, and if you have one near you that fits well with the type of work you do, it’s worth taking the time to attend.

I’ve gotten regular positive feedback on testingfaqs.org, which I’m grateful for. I have a growing idea list for expanding the content on the site. Before getting distracted with new things, though, I have to catch up on the long backlog of newly submitted items that need to be posted to the site. I continue to apply very high standards to all of the site’s content, which makes it take longer to get things posted. Even when companies are offering money, I have rejected several ads that are too long (yes, you have to count the spaces too) or that don’t tell you what they’re selling.

My family life continued to revolve around my two daughters’ intensive participation on a competitive gymnastics team. Competitions brought me to many places in the DFW metroplex, plus South Padre Island, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Houston (for those who know what it means - they are USAG level 7 and 8). I got to meet Nastia Liukin a few days before her trip to the Olympics, learned a bit of Russian from Carly Patterson’s former coach, and met Nadia Comăneci when she hosted a meet at her gym. It was a special treat to host the National Danish Performance Team when they came through Fort Worth, and I really enjoyed having two of the team members stay at my house. Skål!

I’ve had some big changes in my personal life recently. I’ve found that the fears that surround a decision about divorce can be worse than actually going through with it. Plus, I’ve had a big insight about how my own head is put together, which you can read about in Testers from Another Planet.

I have become a regular Facebook user, doing my business networking on LinkedIn and more personal interactions on Facebook. It’s been difficult deciding who to connect with on Facebook, since I see many of my business contacts there. I’m pickier about which invitations I accept on Facebook, because I do share personal information there. Facebook has been a nice medium for interacting with friends and family, including several of my former high school classmates that I hadn’t talked to in, well, let’s just say a number of years. :-)

Over on LinkedIn, the Convex Computer Corporation phenomenon lives on, with 353 members now in the Ex-Convex LinkedIn group that I manage - that’s more than 15% of everyone who ever worked for the company. Now 27 years since the founding of the company, and 13 years after its demise, many former coworkers are still in touch. At this point, I really can’t remember who I met when I actually worked there, and who I first met in the legends that they left behind and the reunions we’ve had since we left.

It’s time to get back to testingfaqs.org, and testing, and helping others test better. If I can help you in your work, no matter how large or small the request, please give me a holler.

• Performance Testing Fundamentals
• Testing Tools: Broaden Your Horizons

See the brochure at the link above for more information. The conference is March 11-12, 2009, and I hope to see you there.

I’m working on setting up a few networking gatherings in the evenings while I’m in Denver, one on March 10 for anyone who’d like to get in touch before the conference, and one on March 12 for contractors and consultants to share ideas. Let me know if you want details.