I'm not unhappy with being a software consultant...
However I am miserable that rates have crashed, that work is scant and abusive, that my IRA has been obliterated, that stupid people still run this zoo, that my healthcare costs keep rising, that I'm being taxed to pay for stupid foreign wars, that billions of dollars were plundered from the economy by corporate fraud and so far we've busted Martha Stewart, that a neo-con fascist coup has occurred and is winning in my home country, and I'm really unhappy with the thought that the ONLY thing I have to look forward to is that in 25+ years or so, after my last paycheck has been spent, I can put a gun to my head and begin a very brief 9mm retirement...
Nope I'm not unhappy with software, I'm sick and tired of the whole entire complete FRAUD that is life on planet earth...
I'm all for space exploration but I've HAD IT What the F%#k is wrong with you clueless geeks over at NASA? Get a friggin PR clue and get one fast!! Listen to me:
- STOP calling press conferences to announce that a golf cart rolled 88 feet! - STOP naming every F%#king rock and crater on Mars; give the objects catalog ID numbers! - STOP with the music every morning! It's a friggin rover - it really doesn't care about the music. Just stop it... - STOP with the floating astronauts playing with soda and bananas! Just stop it... - STOP making stupid EXPENSIVE recommendations about sending humans to Mars.
- DO fight for CHEAP robotic probes. - DO make an issue about killing the Hubble before it has a replacement. For F%#k sake it's the single best return on investment NASA has ever had, and you idiots are letting it die without a fight!* - DO take credit for the tens of thousands of useful everyday things and technologies that have spun off from NASA work! - DO hire an image consultant QUICKLY!!!
*I'm serious about the Hubble. How much would it cost to push the Hubble into a high orbit so that future generations could recover it as a museum piece? Why not launch a PR campaign to push the Hubble to this high orbit? We let Mir die and now it's GONE! Don't let Hubble burn up! If we created a charity to "Save the Hubble" NASA would get TONS of well deserved free publicity. But nooo instead we're gonna endure endless press conferences about rocks with names like "Bonneville"!!!
Uhhm, I hate to bring this up but has anyone considered the cost of insurance for all of this stuff? $65,000+ worth of incidientals would just about double anyone's homeowners policy.
And, just curious, how were you planning to get song birds through customs by X-Mas? Helllooo --> mandatory 30 day quarrantine and there are only 7 shopping days left sport! Don't even think that you're going to have song birds without a hefty donation to the customs officers holiday ball!
What about attorneys - I mean you don't really believe 8 maids are going to milk anything without a few workers comp claims - do you? And god forbid someone get sick from drinking the milk the 8 maids milked; mega lawsuit dude - and mega attorneys fees. And have you ever seen a pissed off swan attack a human? I saw it once on a golf course and it was nearly fatal for both the swan and the golfer - does your homeowners cover swan injuries and/or injuries to swans? Do you have any idea how long and expensive a swan-slaughter trial is these days?
And speaking of lawyers, did you think your wife was going to stand obediently by while maids and dancers start shacking up in the garage? Noooo way sport. After thousands of dollars of marriage counseling the whole scene is virtually guaranteed to end in divorce. Then you will turn to drinking and drugs to deal with the fact that your ex-wife was banging her attorney the whole time she was sucking you dry of half of everything you busted your ass for. Oh and then you'll turn to alcoholics anonymous and psychotherapy in a last ditch effort to pretend you can recover from this episode.
No dice sport. By the time New Years rolls around you'll be shopping for a gun and some bullets. Then you'll do something stupid like shoot your wife and her attorney and then yourself. Then you'll be in hell all alone while listening to her forever getting off in the backseat of what was once your Mercedes...
Feed, transportation, lost wages, workers comp, taxes, insurance, attorneys, divorce settlements, psychotherapy, death - nope the 12 days of Christmas are not for me sport. Let me keep Christmas in my own way --> A lighted palm tree, a beverage, and a rent-a-babe named Bambi dressed only in a red had and a ribbon...
For X-Mas sake! Just declare all SPAM a terrorist attack designed to make all people in America angry and disgruntled. Then sikk John Ashcroft on the spam bastards - they'll be destroyed in a week...
Hahahahahaha! And when the Sun sets on Solaris down go the Java programmers!!!! I knew I would be glad I stayed away from craplets and beaners!
Yepp C# looks alot like Java, okay well it's a complete and total rip off of Java with some VB features thrown in, but it's got a sweet.NET infrastructure under it that Java doesn't have and it's made by a company that might actually be in business 5 years from now. So you coffee drinkers you'd better get.NET!!!!
Okay I need some legal help here; why can't we make this case:
1) Corporations ARE NOT citizens. Corporations are distinct legal entities created by an act of Congress with the explicit intent of protecting the conspirators behind the "corporate veil" from ever possibly being held accountable for their actions.
2) As corporations are seperate and distinct legal entities from their owners the civil rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to the corporation {aka corporations may not vote}.
3) As the rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to corporations, the constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech does NOT transfer from a corporate owner to its corporation. {aka the CEO may call me incessantly as an individual but the corporation, and all employees acting on behalf of the corporation, do NOT have the right to call me incessantly}
4) As corporations have been acting unconstitutionally all of this time they must cease and disist immedaiately AND they must pay us all compensation for the unwarranted abuse that we have suffered to date.
So how come we can't make this case?
--Richard
Okay I need some legal help here; why can't we make this case:
1) Corporations ARE NOT citizens. Corporations are distinct legal entities created by an act of Congress with the explicit intent of protecting the conspirators behind the "corporate veil" from ever possibly being held accountable for their actions.
2) As corporations are seperate and distinct legal entities from their owners the civil rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to the corporation {aka corporations may not vote}.
3) As the rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to corporations, the constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech does NOT transfer from a corporate owner to its corporation. {aka the CEO may call me incessantly as an individual but the corporation, and all employees acting on behalf of the corporation, do NOT have the right to call me incessantly}
4) As corporations have been acting unconstitutionally all of this time they must cease and disist immedaiately AND they must pay us all compensation for the unwarranted abuse that we have suffered to date.
I disagree. If you read my post entitled "Why are people surprised by this" you will see that most of humanity is scheduled for extermination later this century after the robots arrive.
As far as the new jobs are concerned - smart robots can fix themselves and each other, thus eliminating the repair person job and the need for the help line...
Once we build the first generation of robots its all over for most of us...
I mean jheeeezzzz people really. This has been coming for decades. My Sociology teacher was talking about this stuff 15 years ago. This isn't news. Once the robots arrive we are no longer needed. Didn't any of you get the memo? I quote from my as yet unpublished book "The book that explains the total fraud that is everything that is happening to the bottom 99% of us who were stupid enough to be born into the bottom 99% class":
Class Wars: The class wars are over and the top 1% won.
The New World Order: 1% owns everything and the rest are screwed. The leftover 99% are slated for death in the late 21st century in a series of "wars" and "accidents". The mass exterminations are necessary in order to reduce the pollution caused by the, now unnecessary, troglite lillipution masses. For only after the flotsum has been erradicated can the remaining 1% truly afford to continue the lifestyle of lear jets and yachts
Of Politics and Government: American politics is a myth. Both political parties are working in cooperation to help the super-corporations move us toward the new world order as fast as possible. This is easily proven by studying the one and only economic indicator that matters: "the great slide" indicator. The slide indicator measures the lifestyle and personal wealth of the bottom 99%. Since the 1963 coup this indicator has been pointing down and has been picking up speed. The indicator has not wavered regardless of which of the two corporate sucking political parties hold office.
There is nothing that the bottom 99% of us can do about any of this so shut up and enjoy the slide.
Carriers may be useful in wars against third world countries.../
That's precisely the kind of war we are planning for for the next few decades. The current plan is to decimate little countries in the name of peace and freedom while simultaneousely plundering their oil and diamonds...
And maybe after the Philosophers come up with a game philosophy SOMEBODY will define a common set of key controls so that I don't have different throttle and weapons key templates for all of my flight sims!!!!
And speaking of flight sims whatever happened to the Jane's/EA gaming colaboration? Am I ever gonna see a flight simulator better than F-18???
For crying out loud, just dig the bodies out of the pond at Roswell, show everyone the "Sport Model" spacecraft and then the non-believers will know that we used alien technology and that we really did go to the moon...
A bobble head doll of the CEO? That's pretty friggin lame and VAIN! I'd set it on fire and let itbobble and smoke outside of the CEOs office...
At my first job out of college we went to the X-Mas lunch with 140 employees. When we came back from lunch most of us had corporate logo watches but 36 people got pink slips. Merry Christmas and Happy job Hunting...
Anyway I went independent contractor a few years ago and the pay is MUCH better and there are no "to be broken in the future" promises of comp time or stock options. Pay me and I'll write code, all others be gone...
Of people and projects and the use of tools and technologies:
Let's see... Two contracts ago I was on a team of developers who had one hammer in their toolbox: COM. I pleaded with them to limit their use of COM but they went on a rampage. They wrapped ADO in a COM based object/relational DB abstraction. Then they used the COM based DB wrapper in their COM based business tier to talk to COM based Active-X controls in the UI. I pleaded with them to use MTS, distributed transactions, and stored procedures as the system was a distributed client/server app; but I was told that transactions and stored procedures would add too much overhead. COM, COM everywhere and no transactions in sight! Result: A slow, giant, buggy, leaky, unstable 4 tier COM based pig of a system that has major database issues. I finally couldn't take it anymore and so I gave notice after 1.5 years on the project. I left there 2 years ago and today they have sold the thing to one customer - who is extremely unhappy...
My last contract was an aircraft carrier combat system. 220 developers had been playing in Rational Rose for 1.5+ years when I showed up. They had modelled over 5,000 classes and had not modelled anything called "Weapon", "Sensor" or "theShip". They used Rose to generate their C++ code for HPUX and VxWorks and they used TCL/TK to do their UI. Frankly, if there a was a fork in the road these guys took the hard way every time. Result: the system is an impossibly huge nightmare that runs on dying platforms and depends on a dead UI language. The company has run out of money to finish the system. The staff has been cut from 220 to 50 and no deadlines have been moved. None of my friends who remain on this project work 40 hour weeks...
Currently I'm on contract to do a UI by X-Mas. I just fought a 2 week pitched battle with pig headed engineers over whether or not we should use C#, VB, or MFC to do the UI. I finally ended the battle last week when I walked into a meeting with working screens coded in C#. The UI is mostly finished and all are very impressed with my work. But I have been unable to convince unwilling, MFC loving, pre.NET era engineers of what "Managed C++" is and so I'm currently coding an unnecessary Managed to UnManaged code layer so that C# can talk to unmanaged C++ on the back end...
I guess what I'm saying is that the biggest thing I've run into in the last few years is people who have very real design decision making power but who don't have a good background in what tools and technologies are available. I see projects blunder into Death March situations because the people working on them are unwilling to keep up with technology or are unaware of what tools are out there...
I work like heck to keep up with the times. I wish more people would read books like "The Pragmatic Programmer" and take them to heart...
I worked at Dow Jones Inc. for three years (Yes I had to wear a coat and tie). When I came on board I was to take over a system that EDS had developed for DJ. That system was the worst piece of dog crap I have yet seen in a career that spans 12 years! The suit wearing "right thinking" morons committed these and MANY other agregious sins:
1) Hungarian notation ala EDS: m_szkVchar32LastName == a string member variable that is a key field in a database table of type vchar with a size of 32 chars. More than 100,000 lines of code were written to this standard.
2) Repeatedly claimed to have talented object oriented developers on their team. After meeting with people that didn't know the difference between static/non-static variables and didn't see any need for private variables I began to ask around. Of the 7 people developing the system for us none had ever worked on a C++ project before; in fact they all had begged to move beyond Cobol and so they were given a C++ re-training class and then put to work on DJs project.
3) In spite of the fact that their code linked to the Rogue Wave class libraries (which has a string class) the EDS people wrote their own string class that had a hard coded STATIC buffer[50]. I'm not kidding. This code was checked into source control and used by one of the developers in several places on the project. I got much credit for fixing many unexplained pseudo random bugs in the week+ it took me to eraticate this class from the system...
My personal favorite:
4) They selected the "UniSQL" database as the database for the system. UniSQL was a broken down object relational database that did not support hot backups. One of the project requirements - stated in the requirements spec - was for 24/7 operation. Well our 24/7 system had to come down for 4-8 hours every time we wanted to back up the database because the database didn't support hot backups. Finally about a year after we had taken ownership of the system we called UniSQL for tech support only to find that the tech support number was disconnected and the company had gone under. Some digging on my part revealed to my boss and my boss's boss that EDS had been the largest investor in UniSQL...
This is what you get when you pay $1.5 million+ for twits wearing suits. All of the above mentioned business and software practices were perpetrated by a bunch of suit wearing goons. The project's lead architect, who was a classic example of an idiot that could speak well to managers, wore a 3 piece double breasted suit - extreme even for EDS.
When I see computer people in suits I can't help but to think back to the total incompetence that I suffered under during the unfortunate time I had to work with suit wearing, right thinking, EDS losers.
Actually the self organizing stars probably means that you were watching one of the Grateful Dead movies. I forget which movie it is but one of them begins with a formless Fantasia like light show as the band is making "warm up" sounds. Then the light show morphs into the band itself onstage and Jerry G. says "Are we rolling?" {Then me and six other housemates busted out in laughter and frisbee playing that lasted for the next seven hours...}
The socks turning into meat probably means you were hungry. Be careful out there though --> only let your {ostensibly sober} trip master operate the fiery grill device; fire hot, fire very hot!!
Sorry to hear you are scaling back on SETI. My home PC is cranking away right now while I'm at the office - even after I read the/. article about the guy whose PC fan died and nearly burned down his house...
I also read the/. story - very good one - from the scientist who said that SETI probably was a waste of time because any civilization that uses radio frequencies would probably quickly evolve onto something better; thus there might be many many civs out there but they might miss each other as they each pass through their radio wave phase {or any other phase} at differing times.
With all that said I'm still trying because, frankly, I'm stuck on a world of mostly religous nutcases and it appears that somewhere between corporate fraud, government stupidity, born again 'holier than though' christian psychopathy, Zionism, Islam, terrorism, and general human ignorance and hubris I find myself "living in interesting times". I want off this rock - and YES I keep a towel, some beer, and some nuts in my trunk!
--Richard
P.S. More on ignorance: The U.N. routinely does polls of citizens from many countries in the world. As of 1990 a whopping 90% of responders were aware that the earth is not flat...
No joke: I lost 35lbs in 4 months and the worst side effect was the one morning I awoke from a dream of Heather Lockleer feeding me pieces of garlic bread and beer...
In January 2000 I went on a "hard-core" Atkins plan. I READ THE BOOK, I got my Vitamins, and then I cleared the house of carbohydrates. Then I got serious:
I went on the induction plan and kept my carbohydrates under 20g per day. And as much as it pained me I had NO booze for the first two weeks. I got back into, and STAYED on, my exercise plan of two miles 3x per week on my Nordic Track.
I only eat breakfast on weekends but breakfast was eggs and sausage or a cheese omelette; plus an occasional dose of Atkins pancakes.
Lunch at work was a salad of Romain lettuce, cheese, hard boiled eggs, black olives, and chicken breast.
Dinner was meat {easy for me as I am a big carnivore and not much of a pasta fan} - Lobster tails, crab, steak, rack of lamb, swordfish, salmon, garlic roasted chicken, Atkins meatloaf, or Atkins fried chicken. On the side a dark green veggie - usually asparagus smothered in Hollondaise sauce.
Snacks were almonds, beef jerky, cheese, sausage, pork rinds, or Atkins bars.
I kept this up until a vacation in mid April and I was never hungry. And from January to mid April I shed 35 lbs. After the two week induction period I allowed myself as many Vodka & Diet Tonics as I wanted; Atkins doesn't forbid alcohol after the two week induction period. I'm definitely in the low carb camp:)...
--Richard
P.S. I kept the weight off until earlier this year. As of today I've krept up 10lbs {due to 1) I stopped exercising when I got the flu a few months back, and 2) I've been drinking beer with coworkers after work}. Next week I'm going to go back on Atkins for a month or so and get back into my exercise routine, mmmmm lobster in butter... I'll keep the weight off because I have the power!
We've been far too restrained in this war on terrorism! Let's go conquer the Islamic world; then we can use the male slaves to haul us around in rickshaws and the female slaves, well I leave their good use to your imagination!;)
I apologize for the length but I have something to say about this topic:
Well let's see, I've been doing this C++/Oracle/SQl Server thing every day for 11+ years now, sooo:
First Job: Manager was highly technical. Great gig for me because he let me play and play; I learned alot. After 4 years of bonuses and pats on the back, the job ended in a rapid 3 month assault on my work habits. For example my "tardiness" was not an issue for 4 years - then suddenly it was a BIG issue {this from the boss who said "I don't care when you come and go I just need it done"}. Why and how did this happen? Because I refused to hand edit a report to change numbers so they were more like what the customer expected. The hand edit was needed after I discovered a nasty "off by one" bug that caused miscounts of dozens at the territor level, hundreds at the region level, and tens of thousands at the national level. My manager acknowledged the bug, told me to fix it, and then had me rerun the reports --> the reports were hugely different from the previous quarter's reports and so some "fixing" was needed to make the data more like what the customer wanted. The incidental fact that these "numbers" dictated salary and bonuses for a sales force of hundreds mattered not - the customer expected numbers that looked like the previous quarter and that's what they got. Nope, I don't think that the company that hired me out of college exists anymore...
Second Job: Two highly technical Manager(s) - they fought over me endlessly; it was fun. Why was it fun? It was fun because 1) Those guys both ran interferance - my job was to write tight code, their job was to make sure I had adequate time to do it, 2) They were TECHNICAL. Result: a very stable product that everybody liked {no really it does happen}. In general it was a Fabulous workplace with a really hot receptionist. Then the phone rang for more money...
Third Job: Maybe you've heard of them --> www.wsj.com. Yepp I helped the Wall Street Journal build their web site. Semi-technical manager whose favorite quote was "the day you see me writing code is the day we're all screwed". Okay workplace, with 2 hot babes in daily view. But there was one problem: my manager - who I did and still do like - had the horrible trait of liking incompetent a$$holes. I had a good run at Dow Jones but I have heard that my ex-manager's career has taken a nose dive --> it's hard to soar with eagles when your goto people are turkeys. The most important thing I learned at Dow Jones was that consultants make twice as much money for doing the same work as I do. Soooo, on a whim, I packed up my beamer and my babe and we moved out to CA where I would become a consultant...
Contract #1: 4 months to write a multi threaded MFC GUI that worked with.tif images and Oracle databases. Nope, they hadn't fleshed out the design before I arrived; we went from requirements gathering to design to customer sign off to finished GUI in 4 months. Yes I made it, but I almost landed in prison. The problem? A somewhat competent but HUGELY arrogant buttwipe of a PM. This guy's picture is next to the word "hubris" in the dictionary. His favorite thing was unannounced "dog & pony" shows where he would routinely berate people for not showing any progress. This PM also suffered from the trait of liking a$$sholes. His favorite boy was a devout Iranian muslim who drank heavily, fondled women, and lied lied lied. Muslim boy made one mistake though; he tried to get me in trouble with the arrogant PM. You see, muslim boy had written the coding standards document. I was standing in the room when muslim boy told the PM I was not writing code to his standard, to which I replied: "I am writing the code as close to your standard as I can, but my code interfaces with your code and your code is not written to your standard. If you would like to spend a moment I can go print out a sample of your code and we can review it in front of the PM." Muslim boy shut up after that day. But anyway, the PM was an a$$ and he always listened to Muslim boy's advice. As a footnote there was a position open a few weeks ago on dice.com at this company for an MFC Visual Studio v5.0 person who "could fix things". Hubris is a ver bad thing to have when you work in software...
Contract #2: Signed a 6 month contract and rode the gravy train for 1.5 years before I couldn't take the stupidity anymore. Highlights of the gig were the time that the developers decided that the best database choice would be Object Store, but Marketing over rode developers and so we found ourselves writing an object-relational wrapper on top of SQL Server. The NON TECHNICAL PM didn't know the difference and we were unable to convince him that he should push back on this decision. Then there was the great "transaction controversy" where me with 8 years of databasing experience was over ruled by someone with {I'm not kidding} 3 weeks of database experience. The decision was made that MS transaction server, and transactions in general, would be too expensive and so they would not be used when transferring data across a wireless connection from a hand held to a SQL Server box. I was unable to convince the completely NON technical PM of the seriouseness of this situation. I finally couldn't take it anymore so I left. It has been 1.5+ years since I left and this product is currently installed at 1 user site and they are having "database problems"...
Contract #3: Best PM I ever worked for. The problem was that a staff of 220+ ADA programmers was making their first attempt at an OOP C++ application. The bigger problem was that project management {way high above PM level} forced an arrogant trash talkin OOP mentor onto the PM {trash talker: one who sounds great to high management but who is otherwise incompetent}. The mentor was supposed to know something about OOP and architecture. The mentor took a combat system which could have been as simple as "ship, sensor, track, doctrine, weapon" and he turned it into an unmitigated disaster of more than 8,000 classes that featured such classes as "TransitionFromStandbyToSafeNotComplete" and "ChecksumCalculator" - the latter being a class with one method --> calculateChecksum. But in every high level meeting that I attended there was my PM, who was quietly sitting in the back of the room rolling his eyes at the sh$t that was excruding from the OOP mentor's mouth. During one particularly bad sh$t storm with many high {I mean real high way above PM} level people in the room the mentor was arguing for the inclusion of another half dozen classes {with one method each} into the project. Well, I had a helluva gin hangover that morning and I wasn't in the mood for a sh$t bath and so I blurted out "yeah, yeah, yeah, and 8,000 classes later you have a system". The mentor didn't know what to do or say so he walked out of the meeting. My PM was beaming from ear to ear. Within 1 month the mentor was gone. Did I mention that my PM was both TECHNICAL and POLITICAL? Best PM I ever worked with and I will be working with him again, hopefully soon, in the future.
Contract #4: Short term biotech embedded. As I type this I am waiting for a meeting to end so that I can be tasked. I was going to play golf this summer while waiting for the economy to come back and rates to improve. But the phone rang. So I talked to these people. I'm here for 1.5 months. The work is good so far and my PM has had a large hand in writing the code - he's TECHNICAL. This contract will most likely lead to.NET work in the future - and I will most likely want to come back and help out.
Anyway, sorry about the length but IMHO being technical DOES matter. But the best PM I ever had was both technical and political...
How about we put in an RFC for e-mail passwords. I give out the e-mail password to anyone who I would like to get e-mail from; any e-mail that arrives without my e-mail password is discarded at the server.
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I'm not unhappy with being a software consultant...
However I am miserable that rates have crashed, that work is scant and abusive, that my IRA has been obliterated, that stupid people still run this zoo, that my healthcare costs keep rising, that I'm being taxed to pay for stupid foreign wars, that billions of dollars were plundered from the economy by corporate fraud and so far we've busted Martha Stewart, that a neo-con fascist coup has occurred and is winning in my home country, and I'm really unhappy with the thought that the ONLY thing I have to look forward to is that in 25+ years or so, after my last paycheck has been spent, I can put a gun to my head and begin a very brief 9mm retirement...
Nope I'm not unhappy with software, I'm sick and tired of the whole entire complete FRAUD that is life on planet earth...
--Richard
I'm all for space exploration but I've HAD IT What the F%#k is wrong with you clueless geeks over at NASA? Get a friggin PR clue and get one fast!! Listen to me:
- STOP calling press conferences to announce that a golf cart rolled 88 feet!
- STOP naming every F%#king rock and crater on Mars; give the objects catalog ID numbers!
- STOP with the music every morning! It's a friggin rover - it really doesn't care about the music. Just stop it...
- STOP with the floating astronauts playing with soda and bananas! Just stop it...
- STOP making stupid EXPENSIVE recommendations about sending humans to Mars.
- DO fight for CHEAP robotic probes.
- DO make an issue about killing the Hubble before it has a replacement. For F%#k sake it's the single best return on investment NASA has ever had, and you idiots are letting it die without a fight!*
- DO take credit for the tens of thousands of useful everyday things and technologies that have spun off from NASA work!
- DO hire an image consultant QUICKLY!!!
*I'm serious about the Hubble. How much would it cost to push the Hubble into a high orbit so that future generations could recover it as a museum piece? Why not launch a PR campaign to push the Hubble to this high orbit? We let Mir die and now it's GONE! Don't let Hubble burn up! If we created a charity to "Save the Hubble" NASA would get TONS of well deserved free publicity. But nooo instead we're gonna endure endless press conferences about rocks with names like "Bonneville"!!!
Shhheeeezzz...
--Richard
Uhhm, I hate to bring this up but has anyone considered the cost of insurance for all of this stuff? $65,000+ worth of incidientals would just about double anyone's homeowners policy.
And, just curious, how were you planning to get song birds through customs by X-Mas? Helllooo --> mandatory 30 day quarrantine and there are only 7 shopping days left sport! Don't even think that you're going to have song birds without a hefty donation to the customs officers holiday ball!
What about attorneys - I mean you don't really believe 8 maids are going to milk anything without a few workers comp claims - do you? And god forbid someone get sick from drinking the milk the 8 maids milked; mega lawsuit dude - and mega attorneys fees. And have you ever seen a pissed off swan attack a human? I saw it once on a golf course and it was nearly fatal for both the swan and the golfer - does your homeowners cover swan injuries and/or injuries to swans? Do you have any idea how long and expensive a swan-slaughter trial is these days?
And speaking of lawyers, did you think your wife was going to stand obediently by while maids and dancers start shacking up in the garage? Noooo way sport. After thousands of dollars of marriage counseling the whole scene is virtually guaranteed to end in divorce. Then you will turn to drinking and drugs to deal with the fact that your ex-wife was banging her attorney the whole time she was sucking you dry of half of everything you busted your ass for. Oh and then you'll turn to alcoholics anonymous and psychotherapy in a last ditch effort to pretend you can recover from this episode.
No dice sport. By the time New Years rolls around you'll be shopping for a gun and some bullets. Then you'll do something stupid like shoot your wife and her attorney and then yourself. Then you'll be in hell all alone while listening to her forever getting off in the backseat of what was once your Mercedes...
Feed, transportation, lost wages, workers comp, taxes, insurance, attorneys, divorce settlements, psychotherapy, death - nope the 12 days of Christmas are not for me sport. Let me keep Christmas in my own way --> A lighted palm tree, a beverage, and a rent-a-babe named Bambi dressed only in a red had and a ribbon...
--Richard
For X-Mas sake! Just declare all SPAM a terrorist attack designed to make all people in America angry and disgruntled. Then sikk John Ashcroft on the spam bastards - they'll be destroyed in a week...
Hahahahahaha! And when the Sun sets on Solaris down go the Java programmers!!!! I knew I would be glad I stayed away from craplets and beaners!
Yepp C# looks alot like Java, okay well it's a complete and total rip off of Java with some VB features thrown in, but it's got a sweet .NET infrastructure under it that Java doesn't have and it's made by a company that might actually be in business 5 years from now. So you coffee drinkers you'd better get .NET!!!!
--Richard
Okay I need some legal help here; why can't we make this case: 1) Corporations ARE NOT citizens. Corporations are distinct legal entities created by an act of Congress with the explicit intent of protecting the conspirators behind the "corporate veil" from ever possibly being held accountable for their actions. 2) As corporations are seperate and distinct legal entities from their owners the civil rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to the corporation {aka corporations may not vote}. 3) As the rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to corporations, the constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech does NOT transfer from a corporate owner to its corporation. {aka the CEO may call me incessantly as an individual but the corporation, and all employees acting on behalf of the corporation, do NOT have the right to call me incessantly} 4) As corporations have been acting unconstitutionally all of this time they must cease and disist immedaiately AND they must pay us all compensation for the unwarranted abuse that we have suffered to date. So how come we can't make this case? --Richard
Okay I need some legal help here; why can't we make this case:
1) Corporations ARE NOT citizens. Corporations are distinct legal entities created by an act of Congress with the explicit intent of protecting the conspirators behind the "corporate veil" from ever possibly being held accountable for their actions.
2) As corporations are seperate and distinct legal entities from their owners the civil rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to the corporation {aka corporations may not vote}.
3) As the rights granted to corporate owners do NOT inherently transfer to corporations, the constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech does NOT transfer from a corporate owner to its corporation. {aka the CEO may call me incessantly as an individual but the corporation, and all employees acting on behalf of the corporation, do NOT have the right to call me incessantly}
4) As corporations have been acting unconstitutionally all of this time they must cease and disist immedaiately AND they must pay us all compensation for the unwarranted abuse that we have suffered to date.
So how come we can't make this case?
--Richard
I disagree. If you read my post entitled "Why are people surprised by this" you will see that most of humanity is scheduled for extermination later this century after the robots arrive.
As far as the new jobs are concerned - smart robots can fix themselves and each other, thus eliminating the repair person job and the need for the help line...
Once we build the first generation of robots its all over for most of us...
--Richard
I mean jheeeezzzz people really. This has been coming for decades. My Sociology teacher was talking about this stuff 15 years ago. This isn't news. Once the robots arrive we are no longer needed. Didn't any of you get the memo? I quote from my as yet unpublished book "The book that explains the total fraud that is everything that is happening to the bottom 99% of us who were stupid enough to be born into the bottom 99% class":
Class Wars: The class wars are over and the top 1% won.
The New World Order: 1% owns everything and the rest are screwed. The leftover 99% are slated for death in the late 21st century in a series of "wars" and "accidents". The mass exterminations are necessary in order to reduce the pollution caused by the, now unnecessary, troglite lillipution masses. For only after the flotsum has been erradicated can the remaining 1% truly afford to continue the lifestyle of lear jets and yachts
Of Politics and Government: American politics is a myth. Both political parties are working in cooperation to help the super-corporations move us toward the new world order as fast as possible. This is easily proven by studying the one and only economic indicator that matters: "the great slide" indicator. The slide indicator measures the lifestyle and personal wealth of the bottom 99%. Since the 1963 coup this indicator has been pointing down and has been picking up speed. The indicator has not wavered regardless of which of the two corporate sucking political parties hold office.
There is nothing that the bottom 99% of us can do about any of this so shut up and enjoy the slide.
--Richard
Carriers may be useful in wars against third world countries.../
That's precisely the kind of war we are planning for for the next few decades. The current plan is to decimate little countries in the name of peace and freedom while simultaneousely plundering their oil and diamonds...
--Richard
And maybe after the Philosophers come up with a game philosophy SOMEBODY will define a common set of key controls so that I don't have different throttle and weapons key templates for all of my flight sims!!!!
And speaking of flight sims whatever happened to the Jane's/EA gaming colaboration? Am I ever gonna see a flight simulator better than F-18???
--Richard
For crying out loud, just dig the bodies out of the pond at Roswell, show everyone the "Sport Model" spacecraft and then the non-believers will know that we used alien technology and that we really did go to the moon...
Dude,
A bobble head doll of the CEO? That's pretty friggin lame and VAIN! I'd set it on fire and let itbobble and smoke outside of the CEOs office...
At my first job out of college we went to the X-Mas lunch with 140 employees. When we came back from lunch most of us had corporate logo watches but 36 people got pink slips. Merry Christmas and Happy job Hunting...
Anyway I went independent contractor a few years ago and the pay is MUCH better and there are no "to be broken in the future" promises of comp time or stock options. Pay me and I'll write code, all others be gone...
--Richard
How do you get drunk off of Silver Bullets? I have tried many times but after a full day of drinking and gaming I still only have a buzz on...
I am going to try again this Thanksgiving weekend and maybe this time I will spike my bullets with some Vodka...
--Richard
Hmmm,
.NET era engineers of what "Managed C++" is and so I'm currently coding an unnecessary Managed to UnManaged code layer so that C# can talk to unmanaged C++ on the back end...
Of people and projects and the use of tools and technologies:
Let's see... Two contracts ago I was on a team of developers who had one hammer in their toolbox: COM. I pleaded with them to limit their use of COM but they went on a rampage. They wrapped ADO in a COM based object/relational DB abstraction. Then they used the COM based DB wrapper in their COM based business tier to talk to COM based Active-X controls in the UI. I pleaded with them to use MTS, distributed transactions, and stored procedures as the system was a distributed client/server app; but I was told that transactions and stored procedures would add too much overhead. COM, COM everywhere and no transactions in sight! Result: A slow, giant, buggy, leaky, unstable 4 tier COM based pig of a system that has major database issues. I finally couldn't take it anymore and so I gave notice after 1.5 years on the project. I left there 2 years ago and today they have sold the thing to one customer - who is extremely unhappy...
My last contract was an aircraft carrier combat system. 220 developers had been playing in Rational Rose for 1.5+ years when I showed up. They had modelled over 5,000 classes and had not modelled anything called "Weapon", "Sensor" or "theShip". They used Rose to generate their C++ code for HPUX and VxWorks and they used TCL/TK to do their UI. Frankly, if there a was a fork in the road these guys took the hard way every time. Result: the system is an impossibly huge nightmare that runs on dying platforms and depends on a dead UI language. The company has run out of money to finish the system. The staff has been cut from 220 to 50 and no deadlines have been moved. None of my friends who remain on this project work 40 hour weeks...
Currently I'm on contract to do a UI by X-Mas. I just fought a 2 week pitched battle with pig headed engineers over whether or not we should use C#, VB, or MFC to do the UI. I finally ended the battle last week when I walked into a meeting with working screens coded in C#. The UI is mostly finished and all are very impressed with my work. But I have been unable to convince unwilling, MFC loving, pre
I guess what I'm saying is that the biggest thing I've run into in the last few years is people who have very real design decision making power but who don't have a good background in what tools and technologies are available. I see projects blunder into Death March situations because the people working on them are unwilling to keep up with technology or are unaware of what tools are out there...
I work like heck to keep up with the times. I wish more people would read books like "The Pragmatic Programmer" and take them to heart...
--Richard
I worked at Dow Jones Inc. for three years (Yes I had to wear a coat and tie). When I came on board I was to take over a system that EDS had developed for DJ. That system was the worst piece of dog crap I have yet seen in a career that spans 12 years! The suit wearing "right thinking" morons committed these and MANY other agregious sins:
1) Hungarian notation ala EDS: m_szkVchar32LastName == a string member variable that is a key field in a database table of type vchar with a size of 32 chars. More than 100,000 lines of code were written to this standard.
2) Repeatedly claimed to have talented object oriented developers on their team. After meeting with people that didn't know the difference between static/non-static variables and didn't see any need for private variables I began to ask around. Of the 7 people developing the system for us none had ever worked on a C++ project before; in fact they all had begged to move beyond Cobol and so they were given a C++ re-training class and then put to work on DJs project.
3) In spite of the fact that their code linked to the Rogue Wave class libraries (which has a string class) the EDS people wrote their own string class that had a hard coded STATIC buffer[50]. I'm not kidding. This code was checked into source control and used by one of the developers in several places on the project. I got much credit for fixing many unexplained pseudo random bugs in the week+ it took me to eraticate this class from the system...
My personal favorite:
4) They selected the "UniSQL" database as the database for the system. UniSQL was a broken down object relational database that did not support hot backups. One of the project requirements - stated in the requirements spec - was for 24/7 operation. Well our 24/7 system had to come down for 4-8 hours every time we wanted to back up the database because the database didn't support hot backups. Finally about a year after we had taken ownership of the system we called UniSQL for tech support only to find that the tech support number was disconnected and the company had gone under. Some digging on my part revealed to my boss and my boss's boss that EDS had been the largest investor in UniSQL...
This is what you get when you pay $1.5 million+ for twits wearing suits. All of the above mentioned business and software practices were perpetrated by a bunch of suit wearing goons. The project's lead architect, who was a classic example of an idiot that could speak well to managers, wore a 3 piece double breasted suit - extreme even for EDS.
When I see computer people in suits I can't help but to think back to the total incompetence that I suffered under during the unfortunate time I had to work with suit wearing, right thinking, EDS losers.
--Richard
Actually the self organizing stars probably means that you were watching one of the Grateful Dead movies. I forget which movie it is but one of them begins with a formless Fantasia like light show as the band is making "warm up" sounds. Then the light show morphs into the band itself onstage and Jerry G. says "Are we rolling?" {Then me and six other housemates busted out in laughter and frisbee playing that lasted for the next seven hours...}
The socks turning into meat probably means you were hungry. Be careful out there though --> only let your {ostensibly sober} trip master operate the fiery grill device; fire hot, fire very hot!!
--Richard
Hey,
/. article about the guy whose PC fan died and nearly burned down his house...
/. story - very good one - from the scientist who said that SETI probably was a waste of time because any civilization that uses radio frequencies would probably quickly evolve onto something better; thus there might be many many civs out there but they might miss each other as they each pass through their radio wave phase {or any other phase} at differing times.
Sorry to hear you are scaling back on SETI. My home PC is cranking away right now while I'm at the office - even after I read the
I also read the
With all that said I'm still trying because, frankly, I'm stuck on a world of mostly religous nutcases and it appears that somewhere between corporate fraud, government stupidity, born again 'holier than though' christian psychopathy, Zionism, Islam, terrorism, and general human ignorance and hubris I find myself "living in interesting times". I want off this rock - and YES I keep a towel, some beer, and some nuts in my trunk!
--Richard
P.S. More on ignorance: The U.N. routinely does polls of citizens from many countries in the world. As of 1990 a whopping 90% of responders were aware that the earth is not flat...
To date I have designed and built 4 warp drives. Unfortunately all have disappeared during testing...
No joke: I lost 35lbs in 4 months and the worst side effect was the one morning I awoke from a dream of Heather Lockleer feeding me pieces of garlic bread and beer...
:)...
In January 2000 I went on a "hard-core" Atkins plan. I READ THE BOOK, I got my Vitamins, and then I cleared the house of carbohydrates. Then I got serious:
I went on the induction plan and kept my carbohydrates under 20g per day. And as much as it pained me I had NO booze for the first two weeks. I got back into, and STAYED on, my exercise plan of two miles 3x per week on my Nordic Track.
I only eat breakfast on weekends but breakfast was eggs and sausage or a cheese omelette; plus an occasional dose of Atkins pancakes.
Lunch at work was a salad of Romain lettuce, cheese, hard boiled eggs, black olives, and chicken breast.
Dinner was meat {easy for me as I am a big carnivore and not much of a pasta fan} - Lobster tails, crab, steak, rack of lamb, swordfish, salmon, garlic roasted chicken, Atkins meatloaf, or Atkins fried chicken. On the side a dark green veggie - usually asparagus smothered in Hollondaise sauce.
Snacks were almonds, beef jerky, cheese, sausage, pork rinds, or Atkins bars.
I kept this up until a vacation in mid April and I was never hungry. And from January to mid April I shed 35 lbs. After the two week induction period I allowed myself as many Vodka & Diet Tonics as I wanted; Atkins doesn't forbid alcohol after the two week induction period. I'm definitely in the low carb camp
--Richard
P.S. I kept the weight off until earlier this year. As of today I've krept up 10lbs {due to 1) I stopped exercising when I got the flu a few months back, and 2) I've been drinking beer with coworkers after work}. Next week I'm going to go back on Atkins for a month or so and get back into my exercise routine, mmmmm lobster in butter... I'll keep the weight off because I have the power!
Ethanol is a good idea, but I do feel compelled to point out that Archer Daniels Midland is both an Agro-Dictator AND an Agro-Baron!!!!
--Richard
We've been far too restrained in this war on terrorism! Let's go conquer the Islamic world; then we can use the male slaves to haul us around in rickshaws and the female slaves, well I leave their good use to your imagination! ;)
--Richard
I apologize for the length but I have something to say about this topic:
.tif images and Oracle databases. Nope, they hadn't fleshed out the design before I arrived; we went from requirements gathering to design to customer sign off to finished GUI in 4 months. Yes I made it, but I almost landed in prison. The problem? A somewhat competent but HUGELY arrogant buttwipe of a PM. This guy's picture is next to the word "hubris" in the dictionary. His favorite thing was unannounced "dog & pony" shows where he would routinely berate people for not showing any progress. This PM also suffered from the trait of liking a$$sholes. His favorite boy was a devout Iranian muslim who drank heavily, fondled women, and lied lied lied. Muslim boy made one mistake though; he tried to get me in trouble with the arrogant PM. You see, muslim boy had written the coding standards document. I was standing in the room when muslim boy told the PM I was not writing code to his standard, to which I replied: "I am writing the code as close to your standard as I can, but my code interfaces with your code and your code is not written to your standard. If you would like to spend a moment I can go print out a sample of your code and we can review it in front of the PM." Muslim boy shut up after that day. But anyway, the PM was an a$$ and he always listened to Muslim boy's advice. As a footnote there was a position open a few weeks ago on dice.com at this company for an MFC Visual Studio v5.0 person who "could fix things". Hubris is a ver bad thing to have when you work in software...
.NET work in the future - and I will most likely want to come back and help out.
Well let's see, I've been doing this C++/Oracle/SQl Server thing every day for 11+ years now, sooo:
First Job: Manager was highly technical. Great gig for me because he let me play and play; I learned alot. After 4 years of bonuses and pats on the back, the job ended in a rapid 3 month assault on my work habits. For example my
"tardiness" was not an issue for 4 years - then suddenly it was a BIG issue {this from the boss who said "I don't care when you come and go I just need it done"}. Why and how did this happen? Because I refused to hand edit a report to change numbers so they were more like what the customer expected. The hand edit was needed after I discovered a nasty "off by one" bug that caused miscounts of dozens at the territor level, hundreds at the region level, and tens of thousands at the national level. My manager acknowledged the bug, told me to fix it, and then had me rerun the reports --> the reports were hugely different from the previous quarter's reports and so some "fixing" was needed to make the data more like what the customer wanted. The incidental fact that these "numbers" dictated salary and bonuses for a sales force of hundreds mattered not - the customer expected numbers that looked like the previous quarter and that's what they got. Nope, I don't think that the company that hired me out of college exists anymore...
Second Job: Two highly technical Manager(s) - they fought over me endlessly; it was fun. Why was it fun? It was fun because 1) Those guys both ran interferance - my job was to write tight code, their job was to make sure I had adequate time to do it, 2) They were TECHNICAL. Result: a very stable product that everybody liked {no really it does happen}. In general it was a Fabulous workplace with a really hot receptionist. Then the phone rang for more money...
Third Job: Maybe you've heard of them --> www.wsj.com. Yepp I helped the Wall Street Journal build their web site. Semi-technical manager whose favorite quote was "the day you see me writing code is the day we're all screwed". Okay workplace, with 2 hot babes in daily view. But there was one problem: my manager - who I did and still do like - had the horrible trait of liking incompetent a$$holes. I had a good run at Dow Jones but I have heard that my ex-manager's career has taken a nose dive --> it's hard to soar with eagles when your goto people are turkeys. The most important thing I learned at Dow Jones was that consultants make twice as much money for doing the same work as I do. Soooo, on a whim, I packed up my beamer and my babe and we moved out to CA where I would become a consultant...
Contract #1: 4 months to write a multi threaded MFC GUI that worked with
Contract #2: Signed a 6 month contract and rode the gravy train for 1.5 years before I couldn't take the stupidity anymore. Highlights of the gig were the time that the developers decided that the best database choice would be Object Store, but Marketing over rode developers and so we found ourselves writing an object-relational wrapper on top of SQL Server. The NON TECHNICAL PM didn't know the difference and we were unable to convince him that he should push back on this decision. Then there was the great "transaction controversy" where me with 8 years of databasing experience was over ruled by someone with {I'm not kidding} 3 weeks of database experience. The decision was made that MS transaction server, and transactions in general, would be too expensive and so they would not be used when transferring data across a wireless connection from a hand held to a SQL Server box. I was unable to convince the completely NON technical PM of the seriouseness of this situation. I finally couldn't take it anymore so I left. It has been 1.5+ years since I left and this product is currently installed at 1 user site and they are having "database problems"...
Contract #3: Best PM I ever worked for. The problem was that a staff of 220+ ADA programmers was making their first attempt at an OOP C++ application. The bigger problem was that project management {way high above PM level} forced an arrogant trash talkin OOP mentor onto the PM {trash talker: one who sounds great to high management but who is otherwise incompetent}. The mentor was supposed to know something about OOP and architecture. The mentor took a combat system which could have been as simple as "ship, sensor, track, doctrine, weapon" and he turned it into an unmitigated disaster of more than 8,000 classes that featured such classes as "TransitionFromStandbyToSafeNotComplete" and "ChecksumCalculator" - the latter being a class with one method --> calculateChecksum. But in every high level meeting that I attended there was my PM, who was quietly sitting in the back of the room rolling his eyes at the sh$t that was excruding from the OOP mentor's mouth. During one particularly bad sh$t storm with many high {I mean real high way above PM} level people in the room the mentor was arguing for the inclusion of another half dozen classes {with one method each} into the project. Well, I had a helluva gin hangover that morning and I wasn't in the mood for a sh$t bath and so I blurted out "yeah, yeah, yeah, and 8,000 classes later you have a system". The mentor didn't know what to do or say so he walked out of the meeting. My PM was beaming from ear to ear. Within 1 month the mentor was gone. Did I mention that my PM was both TECHNICAL and POLITICAL? Best PM I ever worked with and I will be working with him again, hopefully soon, in the future.
Contract #4: Short term biotech embedded. As I type this I am waiting for a meeting to end so that I can be tasked. I was going to play golf this summer while waiting for the economy to come back and rates to improve. But the phone rang. So I talked to these people. I'm here for 1.5 months. The work is good so far and my PM has had a large hand in writing the code - he's TECHNICAL. This contract will most likely lead to
Anyway, sorry about the length but IMHO being technical DOES matter. But the best PM I ever had was both technical and political...
--Richard
Thanx for your post - you saved me the trouble of typing in the same stuff!
--Richard
Does anybody think this idea might work?
How about we put in an RFC for e-mail passwords. I give out the e-mail password to anyone who I would like to get e-mail from; any e-mail that arrives without my e-mail password is discarded at the server.
--Richard