Dreams may become true.

After a lot of past peer pressure -or I think it was peer pressure, it was 12 years ago- and recent boredom, I watched Lord of the rings. After 2 weeks, I've covered almost 40 minutes from the first movie already. So far Magneto cannot handle a small piece of metal, the bad guy from Matrix has more hair and less glasses and every midget is hungrier than Oprah during Ramadan (or the rest of the year).

In the first 40 minutes there's less action than in the starting credits, but I have 3 more hours to watch, so fingers crossed for a late-bloomer. But what I've found very exciting already is the lack of racism. It's not like those bigots in Avatar where everyone is tall and blue, except for the bad guy that tries to exterminate them and that Mexican lady (that was a tricky one you racist bastard, Mexicans are not a race. You didn't even blink). Ironically, the only guy to save Avatar from racism is the one that tries to exterminate the blue guys in order for the white guys to get some grey rocks. I guess it's okay to try and destroy a race for your own good (worst case scenario, people might say you're greedy). But if you do it for you AND your kind then it becomes racism and it is very frowned upon. Maybe the moral of that story is that racism is okay in small numbers? Hmm... let's rather move on towards a more comfortable conclusion.

In order to do away with racism, we have an eclectic goblins, orcs, elves, midgets and others I do not remember very well because they look the same. There's also the lesbian dragon that saves gray-beard from white-beard, or that immortal fit lady who gives up on immortality to be grow old near a human -there are even some humans, too. She doesn't know some male humans don't want to grow old near women that start growing old as well. Luckily, she can buy magic rings online that can keep the magic a bit more magic for a longer time. Based on the mature content rating, this option is not approached, but it could be a good idea to milk the franchise when the producers run of ideas.

Anyway. We have goblins, we have elves, hobbits, fairies and so on. And now for the most important part: there's at list one black or Asian person. Or a ginger. That's it. Problem solved. It doesn't matter everybody else in that race is white, as long as there's at least one character of a different color -preferably one that also has a line in the movie- it's all good.

We also learn that cooperation between races is good. Although they don't put their nuts in them, elves interact with trees better than squirrels ever will in real life. Goblins and orcs have sex in a basement (that reminds me of some corporate parties), apparently against their will because they don't seem to happy (corporate party déjà-vu) and this leads somehow to significantly taller super warrior killing machines. Another example is that you have greater chances of success when you stick together with other kinds (for instance, if you want to destroy a small piece of jewelry in a volcano).

Based on what I've seen so far, I'm happy with the level of diversity in the movie. From the first 40 minutes I can probably make an educate judgment about a movie that's almost 4 hours long as long as Frodo doesn't turn Walt-Disney on the elves. Assuming he doesn't, LOTR sets a high bar that other movies should follow.

In the upcoming remake of Jungle Book there should be at least a monkey with feathers, for diversity. We need to remember not all monkeys are the same; in some corporations, some have parking space reserved closer to the elevators and better chairs. And Baloo should be able to breathe under water. This way we avoid both fish racism and the stereotype that fat people aren't good at many things. The snake will probably be in HR. Political correctness all the way.
And maybe the tiger could wear a posh hat or hipster scarf, so people can't say he looks too much like the zebra.

P.S. Every movie has a prequel these days and there could be one for Jungle Book, too. It can be a movie where 2 people are having sex. Or -for diversity- maybe a few others join in. Nine months later the parents abandon the baby in the woods, but it's all good; we all know the baby will be okay as predatory carnivores take care of him.

Actually, I have no idea if there's a remake of the Jungle Book. And if you don't agree with the title of this post, you may imagine it's something about movies (Have you just checked the title again?).

Because you're also important when you're not in the office. Rather more important than when you're in.

As far as Out-Of-Office (OOO from now on, for brevity) messages go, my creativity pool for an original one (to avoid the monotony and dullness typically associated with such OOO notifications) is almost drained at the moment. For some well-defined -unless specifically vague- reason I will not be in the office for a certain amount of time, and somehow this requires to trigger a notification to you. Is it maybe because this is the only place where I can read, reply to and delete emails? Possibly. Wouldn't it be great if there could be other places, such as at other offices, in hotels or at home where I can read, reply to and delete emails? Actually no, it wouldn't. Sometimes it's really great and relaxing to be able to avoid their ubiquitous presence and the obsessive compulsion to read them and reply to them. Or delete them. Well, this isn't such a relaxing occasion. So I'll read, reply to or delete your email. Probably not as soon though. But possibly even sooner, as sometimes when I'm in the office I'm really busy reading, replying to or deleting emails. Or doing some other things. Come to think of it, my presence in the office is not really directly correlated to the speed of reading, replying to or deleting your email, but it's probably good netiquette to inform you that I'm OOO. Maybe it would be even nicer from me to take a proactive approach and inform you in advance the next time I'll be OOO? Full details and everything. This notification is just reactive, and maybe not as nice. Well, remains to be seen, I guess. We never know what the future has reserved for us. Nobody knows. If they tell you otherwise, they're lying. Or they've invented time travel. But time-travel is impossible given our current technological possibilities. And you could only do it backwards (or forward; not exactly sure, but it's only one of them), according to Stephen Hawking. He is a great scientist. So being a bit cautious when people tell they know the future is a safe bet for now. I'm not trying to stall by making you read a slightly longer than usual OOO notification hoping in the meantime I could get back in the office an read, reply to or delete your email. Honestly, I do not. Yours, $myName

This is an older post, but I forgot to click the button which says 'Publish' in order to publish it. However, it's still valid.

In case you haven't seen Breaking Dawn - Part 1, it's not a porn series about a girl, as the capital letter might suggest. It's a horror movie, or so I thought. It's the first movie that I've seen in the Twilight saga. A saga is when you can't do something at once. Once you have a sequel you have a saga. I didn't have high expectations, but I was tired from walking all day in a foreign city and thought I could kill some time and good popcorn with a bad horror movie.Only it's not a horror movie as in possibly some suspense and scary soundtrack. It's rather horror as in a priest winking or Sarah Jessica Parker no matter what she's doing. It has vampires and werewolves, but it's not horror. It's a love story. Between a vampire a human who has been wanting to become a vampire for the past movies. Which I hadn't seen, but it's easy to catch up. Just like with porn, you don't come here for the plot.
Everybody in the movie is looking good, especially vampires and werewolves. The vampire dad looks like Tom Cruise with bleached hair, after a stroke, and is looking younger than his son. The female vampires are generally hot, except for the that looks like the Olsen twin after the car crash. They are filthy rich, are well educated and live in the woods.
The werewolves are a bit trailer trash, but fit. When they turn into wolves, they get considerably larger and saber-tooth fangs. They are not as rich as the vampires and seem to have more conflicts.
At the beginning of the movie the girl gets married to the vampire. Her former werewolf boyfriend is a bit pissed but still comes to the wedding, only to be outraged that she hasn't been mutated yet. Apparently, this can kill her. If she'd been already mutated before the wedding, this would have been somewhat OK, but they don't mention why. During the honeymoon she gets pregnant and a peasant woman feels the baby is a demon. As the pregnancy goes on in the vampires mansion (where they have state-of-the-art medical equipment, as vampires usually do), the werewolves become agitated and there's a conflict as the ex- decides to help the human (and vampires). At the end she dies (wait before you cheer happy end). There is a fight between werewolves and vampires, and at the end the ex- becomes the new leader of the guidos/werewolves and the dead mother gets back to life and red eyes.
Some parts of the story may not be very accurate, as I haven't seen the previous movies and I fell asleep a few times. But I can tell you this: if you're pregnant with a vampire and get sick it helps to have some fresh blood around the house.

They always come at night. Or during the day.

They come with critical issues, or at least that's how they see them. It's your fault. It's not them, it's you. You've got to fix it. Now! ASAP!

You have to. Because they're always right.
And by the time you alt-tabbed to something more interesting, they've already escalated.

You may think it's all bad, but it's not. If you're the support monkey, you get a bit intimidated in the first days. Maybe some tears at night, too, for the faint of heart. Before too long, though, you get used to it; the yelling, the phones, the meetings, it's all white noise. Say yes no matter what customers and managers ask to keep the conversation short, ask for logs, tell them to do stuff to pass the time and keep them busy, provide solutions, say yes again and alt-tab to something more interesting; case closed. Don't get too involved, learn to play games discreetly at meetings, remember to take your sexual harassment and corporate conduct training, and life can be sweet.

If you happen to run the monkey cage, however, you struck gold. Outrageous pay, stock options, huge benefits. You don't even have to take the sexual harassment trainings, and if you're high enough on the ladder you may even get caught and get away with it. Jackpot!

Here's an easy recipe to make a successful support center:

1. Come up with a product that businesses need and adopt (not that easy).
2. Don't mess it up for a few years (not that hard).
3. As soon as it bakes to enough mass adoption, quickly take it off the oven and swap it with the support center (easy and cheap; many developers cost more than fewer support monkeys).
4. When the support center has risen nicely, quickly cut it in thinner and thinner slices and replace/add a new one in the ASAP APAC region (piss easy and even cheaper; support monkeys in the US or EMEA are expensive; those in APAC, not that expensive).
5. You're almost done. Remember to sprinkle new versions on your products every few months to keep it fresh, because nothing keeps customers and monkeys busy more than upgrades (optional but recommended).

That's all there is to it: a successful support center in 5 easy steps. To spice it up a little, you may throw smaller companies in to the mix every once in a while. You may buy now and align them to your company's strategy (and charge support for those, too) or compete with them in 5 years.
Serve chilled, on a yacht.

Twitter. I don't have one.

Hello, I am pretty russian girl, bored tonight... What?... No, this is not why I wrote. Would you be interested in a Swiss watch? Can't afford it? It's cheap. Still can't afford it? Contact my uncle in Nigeria, he will help you. And maybe he'll have sex with you, too.

When even nasty girls that send you spam don't want to have sex with you and you can't even afford a fake Breitling, maybe you spend too much time on twitter.

OMG, it's the acronyms!

Sometimes rappers use spelling to showcase their skills: criminal record (P.I.M.P), bad spelling (D.o.double-gee) or, for lack of imagination, their name (M.e.t.h.o.d.). Sometimes it's funny and sounds cool, but sometimes it's just retarded (yeah, pimp, I mean you).

Sometimes IT people use spelling to showcase their skills as well. It's not as stupid (yeah, pimp, you again) or as funny as in rap music, but sometimes it can help you stand out. Of course, a geek uses only the acronyms, without the embellishing epithets; he's not a ho-pimping-CCNP or an RHCE that's done time, yo. This additional info would make resumes stand out, but probably not in the desired direction. HR is not MTV. Alth... no, nevermind.

The problem is that, just like in rap music, acronyms do not quite reflect reality all the time; they may be the only interesting bullets in your resume and land you on the job. Or you may not have them on the resume, although you have the skills, and don't get the job. In the latter case it only affects you, in the former it can affect others.
A guy I used to work with once interviewed for a DBA position. For the "technical evaluation" this lady pulled a book and started asking him SQL questions. She asked, he answered, she checked his answers in the book and then asked again. Things were going great, until one answer was not like in the book, and things didn't go so great after that. His answer was correct but it wasn't "like it says here". A classic wtf moment. Any attempts to explain were in vain, so he tried to get the best of this, as him getting the job was already out of the question at this moment. He took the book from the table, and said "OK, I will ask you some questions now, just to see how well you actually know SQL". A few embarrassing moments later, the interview was over.
Most likely the job went to the first candidate that had read the book (or to the CEO's nephew).

Reading books pays off, after all.

Tall blue guys and a not-so-tall green guy

People are getting suicidal after watching Avatar. A good thing, you might say, it's called natural selection. (Or as the Germans put it, Die hippie!)
If we sit down and think of it for a while is a big if, because thinking is so rare these days. But assuming we do, a few things come to mind.

Life in Pandora would be nice for a while, as she was created by Zeus as a beautiful, attractive woman. However, in the long run, you may hear from Epimetheus or get a nasty box that Wikipedia calls a jar.
Back to the movie, Pandora is not really such a great place after all. There are some glow-in-the-dark flowers, some beautiful trees but there's also a lot of nasty animals and other dangers. The Amazon forest looks nice on Discovery, but try living there for a while; there's no electricity, internet, if any, would be outrageously expensive, it's hot, it's moist, there are tons of insects, snakes and other predators. And, worst of all, there are megacorps cleaning it all up, because wood is, you know... profitable. Admittedly, you don't have floating mountains and flying dragons, but it's okay if you have vertigo.

It's not all bad, though: the hairy USB port that seems to be compatible across all species is a great thing and would make many things much easier: we wouldn't need to whip the horses, we could find our way in the forest, Lassie would save the day earlier and I wouldn't be ripped off by paying a fortune to Nokia for their incompatible discontinued chargers. So yes, a truly universal port, that's what I'd like to have. No more German or French lessons, no more fifteen adapters, 8 remotes and no more Sony Memory Sticks.

And assuming Pandora actually existed it's almost certain humans would ruin it the minute they set foot there. Remember what happened not so many hundreds of years ago, when the Indians from the tribe of the Native Americans and the Caucasian white man met in the land of the free (unless you were a slave)? One minute they were roaming the land, riding their mustangs, hand in hoof with the buffalo, the next minute it's all moonshine and casinos. The nice Pandorans would turn into Native Aliens, stop walking around naked and go to pick cotton faster than you can say Leonard Peltier. People kill themselves because they can't go to Pandora, but guess who'd storm to the drug cabinet if they did.

If we go there, a suitable character to invade this beautiful alien world would be the new Universal Soldier. He's not really suitable at all, but I mentioned a midget in the title, so there you go. Of course I didn't see the movie, that would be worse than Denzel Washington as the bad guy, saving the Bible.

Intelligent evolution

In the beginning was the word. And God turned it into an amoeba. The amoeba agreed and said "Word". Then it grew up and turned directly into human, as frogs and monkeys have nothing to do with it. Dinosaurs are also ruled out, since they cannot fit the garden of Eden. Man -let's call him Adam- then had a woman and a bit later the snake had her too and gave her an apple -probably an iPod shuffle- to shut her up. And probably some STDs, but this is still open for debate (yes, only that, because all other stuff is so well established, verified and beyond any doubt).
As we all know, once you get an iPod you have instant great personality so she gave Adam a bite and left him with an ugly scar. Then they had make-up sex and had one son. And then they had two, and then only one again. As there were no other women, the son had sex with his mother and had a lot of sons and daughters. And so the world began.

While this theory of massive inbreeding may explain why we have politicians and lawyers, it leaves pretty much everything else uncovered. On the other hand, evolution is more reasonable, because I want my offspring to be Optimus Prime with Wolverine claws and Chuck Norris facts.

And bald, just to piss him off.
I'm going to be a great dad.

There's no such thing as a can closer

There's no sure way of avoiding spam, but there are 3 easy tips to avoid 90% of it: have a big penis, a college degree and an expensive watch.
Being gay or a woman also helps. Staying offline, being illiterate or a vegetarian helps, too. Come to think of it, it's pretty easy to avoid spam. We shouldn't complain.

And yet, there is a kind of spam that irritates me more than the pretty Russian girl bored tonight, the Nigerian lawyer or the Australian lottery: it's spam that comes from within the company.
They know where I work, they know my email address, they don't even give me an unsubscribe link. And they use a lot of pictures.
The bad part is that it's not even interesting. It's not about a cheap Rolex or videos of naked celebrities. It's not about making money quickly, although they actually know how to do it (it's by underpaying other employees). It's about great sales, fantastic acquisitions, corporate initiatives that would turn me into a happy monkey, about women leadership in the workplace and other crap (by the way, I'm not against women leadership, but if we're all equal how come I never get emails about men leadership, too?).

I'd read emails from the CEO if they mentioned how to get a big house or at least the Rolex. I'd click on the links in the email from the CFO to see her naughty pictures from the Xmas party. I'm kidding, of course: we didn't have an Xmas party. It's crisis, remember?
The closest they ever came to something interesting was when they mentioned sexual minorities. I read that one, but it didn't have links to seeing them in hot action, or at least a toolbar to help me look them up on the intranet. They just mentioned we had them. Yawn.
I still wouldn't read emails from Sales, though. They don't even know it's crisis, and their numbers are spectacular.

And one more thing to add injury to the offense: they don't even bother to guess or mis-spell my name, it's not even Dear Corporate Monkey or Dear Addressbook. My notification emails about server X high on memory or database Y low on disk space are more personal, interesting and honest. It's more boring than death-by-Powerpoint. But it happens in Outlook. And more often. And is giving me headaches. Do you know where I can get cheap Vicodin?

Movies, part 2

In teenage movies the outcast geek gets his ass kicked till the end and then a short line says He pursued his dream and made a multimillion dollar software company by the age of 30. In fact, chances are he's still living with his mom and downloading porn. I'm all in for downloading porn, but this is not the point.

This summer I went with some friends to a festival in a small town.
We got there to find out our reservations were nowhere to be found (just like Indians). We looked one up in local guide and managed to find one. Rooms were cheaper than in our nonexistent reservation, so everything seemed to work out fine. However... (what, were you expecting something bad?), it did, as we found out the bands were staying in the very same hotel. We were just heading to see NIN, when someone recognized the vocalist from Primal Scream in front of the hotel. And next morning we noticed Robin Finck leaving his room, which was 3 rooms away from from my mine. We met him again a bit later in front of the elevator. As I'm a polite person, I approached him and asked if it was ok to harass him. He smiled, I said I didn't want to bother him with autographs on my tits, I congratulated him for the show (one of the best concerts I've been to), then I said I also liked him in GnR and left outside where someone in our group was smoking.
A few minutes later we also noticed Trent, but he was with his wife (or girlfriend, I have no idea) so we kept the distance. I imagine on the way to the airport Robin said to Trent "I have 2 fans here. That's 2 more than you have".
The next morning, the same situation, but a bit different, with The Prodigy. Keith didn't want to hold the elevator for me (although there was plenty of room), which is probably the norm for chavs. I saw them again at the reception, we were checking out at the same time. I'm sorry I didn't have the inspiration to ask them for an autograph on a roll of t.p. I had with me to clean something at the engine.

What can I say, just like in the movies...