Weekend Reading: The Need to Decompress Edition

This week, I've had a far too close for comfort view of the project management problem of people working too many hours. The person in question doesn't report to me and there isn't much I can do about the problem. So I am watching the fallout happen, and trying to mitigate its damage on my own projects (and protect my own team).

Needless to say, this is frustrating, and has left me with more than the usual need to decompress tonight.

So, instead of the interesting and thought-provoking links I intended to share, I'll give you things that have cheered me up this week.

Rands had a great post about project management, in which he writes many great things. I think my favorite is when he writes that project managers "are chaos destroying machines, and each new person you bring onto your team, each dependency you create, adds hard to measure entropy to your team. A good project manager thrives on measuring, controlling, and crushing entropy."

I am in the midst of reworking my team's title structure (one of those things that doesn't matter unless it is really wrong, and then it becomes a staff retention risk), so I started joking that I was going to ask for the title of "Entropy Crusher." But Mr. Snarky heard that as "Ensign Crusher," and with all due respect to Wil Wheaton and the character of Wesley Crusher, that sort of changed the joke. I just consider myself lucky that no one on my team has started making "make it so..." jokes.

A post at Scalzi's place lead me to this awesome song and video:



And Mr. Snarky sent me this video:



Anyone have any other fun, heartwarming, or otherwise smile-inducing things to share? Put a link in the comments.