The Ashdar Partners Blog

As I do some posting on another site, I've been running the   BGR live stream of the Sony Playstation 4 launch   on my second monitor and I've got something to say. I'm not a "gamer". I stopped playing games back in 1999 when I found that I had lost yet another weekend to Quake and Tomb Raider. I spent innumerable hours playing Quake, TR, Doom (and many others -- the late 1990s were kind of slow for me, socially speaking) on my Micron Pentium II. Before that, Falcon 3.0 (and Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D) on my Northgate 386/33. In medieval times, Ultima on my Mac Plus and Adventure on my Atari 2600 occupied my time. I was never all that good, but the games absorbed my brain in a way that TV never did. I had to stop playing games because I didn't do much else in 1999, besides go to work.   Since then, I have watched developments in game hardware and software from the sidelines. I do have some observations about the situation with the forthcoming PS...

I did a fair amount of work with Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day, writing spreadsheets for other people. (I was paid and everything. Amazing.)   Tracking down errors in those spreadsheets was always a pain in the neck. Time has marched on, mercilessly. 1-2-3, Symphony, Jazz, Improv and even Quattro are just historical footnotes now. I haven't built a serious spreadsheet for anyone since 1991. I do use Excel, more as a "user" and not as a developer. I've never really dug into any of it's debugging features. For my own purposes, I use the relatively anemic Google Spreadsheet because it's good enough 90% of the time and I always have a browser window open.   I've often wondered (a nice word for "daydreamed") how people debug complex spreadsheets. Spreadsheet power users, while they can spell SDLC and know their way around a VLOOKUP(), do not strike me as the types who have backgrounds in TDD.   Apparently, I am not the only person who won...