Irony

All movies today are remakes or sequels. The movie industry has learned a lot from the porn movie industry, apparently. And while I doubt we'll see D.I.L.F. Vader gagged and Yoda explaining how his light saber turned midget-green in Episode 48: Soccer-Granny Leia, I don't have an interesting ending for this phrase, actually.

One interesting thing about remakes is that characters keep up with modern times. Jedi masters dress like pimps, talk like chavs and advice pushers to think about their life. Spiderman gets pissy and everything in general is post-911. The Duke will probably quit smoking, the Godfather will shop at Walmart and Jaws will be very boring due to global warming. And even the next Batmobile will be Superman-friendly.
Jake Torrance gets a GPS but he'll still freeze his ass in the maze because he doesn't know how to use it.

In the movie Sleepers, 4 boys do something stupid and they're sent to juvenile jail. They get molested there by the wardens. The only person to understand, help and protect them is a priest. As I said in the title: irony... If they were to do Sleepers 2, De Niro could cover Bacon's part, too.

Internet cent-et-un

During a presentation I've attended last Friday some guy said it's easier for you to write code if your native language is English. Folks from other... points on the map may argue, but their Engrish is intelligible, so who can understand them anyway? Wait! Before anyone gets offended (I'll get to that in a bit) I don't agree with that guy (and now we can move on to some proper offense), but the French do.
There are many examples to easily dismiss the theory, and keep in mind in some cases even the alphabet is a lot different to the English one. But the French, being... well... French, decided it's true and in order to fix the discrepancy all things must be French-accessible. Which means that if you happen to have une carte mère or un souris that's not recognized by Fenêtres, you need to télécharge and installe les chauffeurs in order to make it work. Chances are you won't find them on Minitel though, and you'll still need to go on the Internet for them (if Al Gore is the father on the Internet, probably Pif or Rahan is the mother*).

This is a true story: about 7 years ago, during the times when sound was not onboard by default, I had bought a Muse card from Hercules. I remembered this story today, just like other people remember when they're 40 how their uncle used to touch them (7 years ago)...

If the guys at IBM that invented the hard-disk had worn berets and eaten baguettes, we'd probably have called them disques durs (and if they were invented today, we'd probably call them हार्ड डिस्क). Luckily for the rest of the world, they didn't. And this is why they're not pink and don't smell like flowers.
Let's just stick to hard-disk, a bit of consistency didn't kill anyone. My native language is not English, but it's easier to type hdd than looking for keyboard shortcuts for crazy letters or drawing nunchuck shapes that express the platter.
If you wonder if I'd ever work in France, the answer's "Hell, oui!". Good food, 50 days vacation and other 300 days off per year for various saints. Plus, it's safe, no hackers there; every piece of code starts with #include <sacrebleu.>, because the French don't believe in the letter h, and it crashes before interpreting GOTO virus vilain.

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* Fun fact: while you're on the internet, look for "find Chuck Norris" on Google.fr. The result will read "Le Google ne recherche d'Inspecteur Farfouille, car il sait que vous ne trouvez pas Inspecteur Farfouille, il vous trouve".
Remember to always use un pare-feu when you go on the Internet

The management consultant hits the fan.

I read the other day somewhere some lady's recipe for being successful and happy with your work or something in 6 easy steps. This lady is a management consultant, so anything she says must be insightful, intelligent and very useful in your career. The first insightful, intelligent and very useful idea is that it's all a matter of attitude, of the way you think about your day the first moment you wake up. If you think "I'll be unhappy", your day won't be that great. If you think "It'll be fabulous", it will certainly be this way.
First of all, if you think your day will be fabulous you are probably gay. If you're offended by the word, think it's an adjective and keep a joyful attitude.

Second of all, so far I thought my day sucked because of some idiots that happened to be a part of it.
No matter how nice I try to imagine my day will be, chances are I won't be banging a hot secretary during lunch break, take a piss in the conference room, quit my job and get home to my mansion in a 911 to never work again. I tried so hard to imagine this, but nothing so far. Usually the secretary comes to me because she forgot her password or needs for the hundredth time to see how to book the conference room in calendar.
The closest I got once was to quit and go home in a cab because it was raining as hell.

There are 5 other ideas marked with headlines in a different font -in bold, of course- and with very nice bullets, so I had to stop reading. Anyway, my guess is that lady consultant is very ugly. Otherwise she could have come up with a single, very easy step.

Going mainstream

I don't have any idea what I'm going to put in this, but I like the title; it draws attention and sounds interesting; I guess I am an awesome writer. Today's story is how to make everyone pay attention to your presentation during a meeting as quickly as possible.

Hmm... There are several ways, but I think the easiest one is to take your penis out. Especially if you're a woman.
Unless you're American. They respect your right to express yourself. Unless you're an Arab.

Oh yes, I am such an awesome writer.

A long long time ago lived a beautiful princess... and one day she got married

Since it all happened a long long time ago, she should be dead by now. The average life expectancy for a princess is shorter than "long long". And is she were still alive, she'd be one old ugly princess.

On a more cheerful note, there's this financial thing going on these days and it affected the company so badly that upper management barely managed to buy a new fleet of cars for the upper management before letting the employees know there are some sacrifices to be done until it's gone. There's a Faith no More concert this summer I'd like to go to and I hope it's all over by then so I can go to my boss and take a few days off without having him saying it's the crisis and I need to work hard.

Also happening this summer is a wedding of some guy I know. This isn't actually the first wedding in my circle of friends but I haven't been invited to the others so far because my attendance would have caused uncomfortable situations for the bride.

This guy and I go a while back and I like him, but his wedding I do not. There's something extremely irritating about weddings, starting with them being scheduled way ahead, at least 3 months to a year. If you know you'll take vaccine shot in 100 days you have to think about it from time to time and it just sucks, even if it's good for you. Just tell me the wedding happens tonight and that's it.

For the happy event I'm supposed to wear a tie and shirt. Doesn't matter it's mid-summer and 45°C, you have to dress nicely because everybody else will dress nicely. I haven't worn a suit in 3 years, and I don't even have one in my wardrobe anymore; the last one I had was an old-fashioned one and I had it from an uncle. I only wore it at job interviews (some of them successful) and funerals (none of them successful) but it stopped fitting me some 10kgs ago. I think I still have some dungarees somewhere, though.

You can't have a proper wedding without music. For a little experiment, put 10 people in a room with some music and chances are you'll end up listening to some crap in less than 10 minutes. Even if the majority agrees on the selection and enjoys it, I'm probably in the minority and it will suck for me anyway.
Since you have more than a hundred people at a wedding and some of them are quite old (parents, grandparents and other relatives unless the groom and bride are both orphans) so it's a very grim outlook.

But just before the actual wedding, there's the... yes, you've guessed it, it's the church going. I won't get into the idiocy of this tradition, but the ceremony itself is more boring than an accountant's 72-slides PowerPoint. Should it be a christening, at least there's a chance you'll see the toddler piss on the priest at some point (if the priest's Catholic he'll probably get even in about 5-8 years). At a wedding all you get to look at is a crowd listening to an old guy dressed like a pimp. And if you're lucky to be close to one of the weds, you'll end up carrying a huge candle or some flowers during the whole ordeal. When you finally get out they'll kiss and everyone will be throwing rice on them.

There's your wedding. When someone in your circle of friends gets married, expect others to follow. Soon.

Merry Christmas, Bluetooth Fairy

Aaaah, the season of giving, the season of being generous... with myself.

OK, enough about Christmas.


I learned another great thing about me as a corporate... person: I can tell the future. I can predict (with a margin of error of less than 2 weeks) when my General Manager's BlackBerry breaks beyond repairing. Yes, it's when a new model comes out.
The cause of accident (quote from the receipt from service): signs of liquid submersion, melted internal connectors (and, as you'll find out, a few external ones also), some alien guano, the Windows-Blue-Screen-of-Death, the Xbox-Red-Ring-of-Death and BlackBerry-Green-Screen-Of-Agony. Yessss, such an unfortunate accident.
Of course, I have to transfer all the content to his new shiny toy (the perks of being senior sysadmin). Usually easy, but when one of the mini-USB pins is... gone, it gets a bit tricky. It's time to go for the ultimate solution, it's time for Bluetooth. Now, if you ask the people in sales, this wonderful technology makes them look sooo coool. If you ask me, I am not so happy with the 855 extra COM ports in Device Manager.
Anyway, one reboot and one Desktop Manager installation later, it's time to sync. A bit over 1GB. Watching the progress bar is an exercise of patience, boredom and pain (in this order).
Oh, I forgot to warn you folks, there is no punch line for this story, nothing funny about it. It sucks from the beginning to its very end.

Midlife crisis?

Turning 30 tomorrow. Hmmm... 15% of my life already gone.
93% left to go (I saved when the progress bar was at 7% just in case, I can reload from there).

If people ask me if I'd do things differently should I be given a chance, I answer them.

[What, you thought I'd tell you?]


Who knows, maybe I'd be a better father and husband. Maybe I'd have a better job. Maybe I'd have a nicer house. Maybe I would be a nicer person.

Father. I've got my hands on a few mating seasons -some of them not involving my hands- but no offspring so far. I'm good. No kids, no complaints; so I'm doing fine. No room for improvement here. Unless...
I could be a better Father. And better shaped, too. If I stopped eating all that candy and started giving some of it to the children I'd be way slimmer. And would have way more sex. Yes, that kind of Father. If you think it's sick (Disclaimers don't look good in the middle of the story, but yes, I think it's sick too) remember you sent your poor children to church in the first place, you dumbass. How about letting them go outside and play or maybe read instead? It's double win for everyone.

Husband. I'm single now, and not even 30 yet (that's tomorrow), no reason to hurry or get depressed now. I'm not a woman.

Better job. Suffice to say I work in IT, so there are a lot of places where I could make more money. I could be in Sales, but unfortunately I have a personality. There are a couple of things I am good at (so Marketing is not an option, either), but most of them will be obsolete in six months. I could be a successful lawyer, or I could have a career in HR, but I already mentioned I'm not into screwing people against their will.

Nicer house. A lot of room for improvement here, definitely: at least 2 bedrooms (yes, that lazy) and an extra bathroom. A yard with some trees would do nice too, thank you very much.

Nicer person. Well, if this post has offended you in any way, you're either too religious, feminist, lawyer, you have a terrible sense of humor or any combination of those. It's your fault that you don't like me, not mine. I'm a pretty nice person, really.

P.S. If you really are in HR, I could really use a better job. And a bigger house.

The end of the world...

If Schrödinger could think outside the box he'd have probably end up making soup ads, and the paradox would have boiled to when hot water becomes soup. (It's probably when you throw in the carrots. Like in the original scenario, when, if you stuck a carrot in the the cat's ass, the it dies or enjoys it. If it's an emo cat, it enjoys it because it finally dies from it.)

On a different note, I've been on the road for a month, during which I almost missed the end of the world, because people in the country (where I spent most of that month) don't really care about the LHC (chances are you're looking the acronym up, too). They were more concerned about not being able to run Yahoo Messenger after the new and improved WAN was implemented.

Back to the city, where people are concerned about the end of the world and so they look for answers from witches on tv at prime-time.

Now that the new infrastructure in place, it's time to deploy the new ERP. I'm senior, so I get to do the more interesting part of the whole process: imaging a couple of servers (about 15 minutes watching the progress bar fill up) and, at the end, mapping the printers. 50 printers, for almost 150 users. You cannot script any of this (you could, if you are to listen to the vendor. But actually, you can't).

And you cannot get the users to read the manual. I bet I'll have to explain the same thing at least 80-90 times.
Maybe the end of the world is coming. Do you know any witch that knows how to do Remote Assistance over slow WAN links? (new and improved comes at a cost, and we're cheap.)

Army clothes may look cool, but not on your fat teenager ass

Likewise, There are 10 kinds of people... t-shirts are funny, but not when worn by people that have no idea what it means (or googled for the explanation before buying) and RTFM doesn't make me laugh when I see it on a colleague who looked the acronym up from her 8-toolbars-browser.
Why don't you stick to the things you're good at? You never hear sysadmins say VAT or balance to sound cool. And when they say registry, it has a different meaning.

So, please, don't put "I'm a hacker" on your clothes when you can't even find out your own machine's IP unassisted.

If you insist on expressing your personality by having some text on your chest, at least don't steal from people you're secretly hating whenever you see "Access denied" instead of NSFW clips. Use your imagination for a change. Who knows, it may be funny or interesting. (Seriously now, we all know it won't...)

Go for "I know your salary", leave "I read your email" to guys that don't take 20 minutes to open their own mail. (And yes, they know your salary, too...)

As for me, I prefer blank t-shirts.
I have no personality and I'm cheap.

Something else

If I were to have an accident that would prevent me from reading for a year or more, I'd be completely left behind at work and most likely moved from the server room to the helldesk cage. There's so much new stuff that replaces the old and not-so-good-anymore stuff, that keeping up is a job itself.

I can survive my job most of the time, but sometimes it feels it's just too much.

Should I be preparing sausages, or milking cows, I wouldn't have to learn every day about new technologies. Milk production does not double every 18 months. If you want to secure the sausages you can simply put them in the fridge or kick the dog out. Consumers aren't interested in virtualized cows, and moving from 32 to 20nm casings won't impress anybody. Not even the dog.
Also, the cows are quieter, more gentle and way more intelligent than their counterparts in the Marketing department who call all me day about "important" emails they cannot print (yes, the printer had been unplugged to make room for the cellphone charger).

Back to the topic, if there's something else I'd like to do, it would be a short cartoon series about a crap-eating super-hero dog. I have enough scripts for at least 50-60 episodes, and the whole thing would be a smash. It's got suspense, action, drama, and at the end the good prevails (she dies).

If you're an animation studio and into my idea, drop me a few lines.
If I don't answer right away, I'm probably gone to plug back that printer.