There are lots of schools of management, and many of them are wrong.

I frequently see a management philosphy used called "ask questions instead of giving direct orders". Click on the link to see all that Google has to say about it.

The idea here is that the average employee is so emotionally fragile that you can't give them a direct order. Instead, you have to dance around the issue in order to trick them into thinking it was their idea.

You've probably seen ads like this all over the place. You may or may not have heard that a number of them are scams of downright criminal proportions.

Even when such plans are legal, they don't really work. They don't because there is no magic cure for obesity. If there was, we wouldn't have a problem with obesity, because pretty much everyone wants to be a healthy weight.

My best friend, Jamie Lackey, recently launched her Bursts of Light Kickstarter. She's looking for funding to compile a fiction anthology.

Losing weight is one of the great challenges in the United States and many other countries around the world.

This comes up time and time again. I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert on computer interface design, however, I do spend a lot of time using computers, writing software for them, and helping other users with problems.

A recent topic at work is the implementation of undo on our web application. I'll skip discussing the challenge of making undo work accurately on a multi-user application, and go right for the throat as to why I think it's bad form to consider undo the correct option in this case.

It's April. What does that mean? It means it's time for me to bitch about taxes again.

It's amazing, that for twenty years now, I have made an effort every single year to make this as easy and painless on myself as possible.

I'm not talking about saving money, or getting the biggest deduction like most of the pathetic U.S. ... I'm just talking about making it easy to get the shit paid so I can get back to my life.

What's most amazing is that I have failed every single year for the past 20.

... but hopefully not a dollar short.

Yes, it's another podcast!

I hope you'll forgive the delay, but I've had to shovel my driveway every single day since last Friday. It's more time-consuming than you might think.

Anyway, enjoy our take on Heinlein's 5 laws, what to do with your endings, and how to make readers care about your story.

Well, we got another few inches of snow last night, but far less than the doomsayers were predicting. Anyone run out of toilet paper yet?

I came in to work early this morning. It was worth it. With the roads nearly empty, I was able to fly along in my Subaru ... skidding everywhere, snow flying ... with no worries that the other drivers would ruin my fun.

Got just a bit of snow over the weekend, and getting just a bit more now.

I'm sure lots of folks north of me are laughing at how inept Pittsburgh is in dealing with a paltry 20" of snow. But this is a 5 year storm (i.e. a storm that only happens, on average, every 5 years) and the city's infrastructure is really only designed for the average storm. Seems kind of stupid to me, but I only pay a small amount of taxes compared to everyone else, so nobody cares about my opinion.

Anyway, my house looks beautiful covered in snow. Looks like the cover of a christmas card:

This weeks Triangulation podcast revealed something that was surprising to me: most writers don't work anywhere near as hard on their stories as I do.

This wouldn't be surprising to me if the other writers I was talking to hadn't been considerably more successful than me.