Clouded the future is!

It’s been awhile since I’ve wrote in here but things started to get bad here at Men@Work. Last post was written while Bernie and Diuk were in Italy. They got back last week and they got back pretty upset of how they were treated there. They didn’t get their daily allowance and Bernie spent his days in non stop meetings with Brain where they reviewed Brain’s ideas over and over.

At the end of their experience exchange trip, when Bernie thought he can rest, Brain asked him to do some work Sunday just after poor Bernie arrived home. After 6 days of “brain storming” with Brain and a fucked up Sunday, Bernie made the mistake of asking Brain for 2 days off. In that moment things got messy. Brain doest like non submissive slaves, I mean employees, and next morning at the conference call he started to bitch slap our Bernie. Bernie swallowed it all and after the conference he looked at me and said he is going to quit this shitty company. Diuk confirmed Bernie’s opinion about the company and Carlos began sending his resume out.

When I saw that the people get man I sent an email to Brain and tell him that his management sucks and needs to be changed. I also told him that we can’t continue our collaboration if he doesn’t “cure” his amnesia and if he keeps changing the requirements every week. And at the end I told him that if he treat people like shit will get shit in return. (note to the reader: the email was very formal and polite, here you see the essence of that email).

Brain called me next morning at 8:30 AM and we talked about the email 60 minutes on the phone. Surprisingly he agree to all the point from that email and he promised he will change :) and he had few objection about Bernie. Brain even promised to ditch Pinky and to keep him away from us.

Anyway Men@Work as you know it has a great chance to die. Carlos and Bernie are determined to leave the company. Diuk is too green here and he will stay. Brain will come here this week on Thursday to make peace but I have a feeling that things will go ugly.

10x 4 h0stile MILF mate!!!!1

I woke up this morning at 9:01 AM. I had another nightmare last night and when I woke up I was glad it was just a dream. I looked at the clock and I jump immediately to wake Amaro too, we are late again. I hate being late because if I’m late 30 minutes and Carlos arrives at work before me, next day he will be at least 2 hours and a half late. I'm guessing that he wants us to be even in an odd kind of way :P.

Twenty min later we are ready to go. The sky is intense blue and it’s cold. I take the car, Amaro in my right and we started the "take-off" procedure. Five minutes later we are on our way.

We arrive at the office and in front of the building it’s our MILF from the first floor walking her dog. She is an American citizen around age 35, brunette, good looking who was very friendly with men@work before Amaro joined us at the office. It all happened two months ago at Amaro's first day here. Men@Work was all crowded in the elevator and when the MILF passed in front of us Amaro start yelling (in English of course) "Oh mygot duuude!!" when he saw her. She gave us a wtf look and since then she stopped talking with us. Thanx m4te for making our MILF hostile!!1 Me, Carlos and Bernie were smiling like three mororns in an elevator trying to minize the damage but unfortunatelly it had no effect.

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

The answer is: Two and a multimeter.

Today morning Amaro asked me to help him with a problem at his car. One of the car's rear lights wasn't working. When I punched the break lights the light went on, few seconds later it went off and so on.

Ok we started the debugging process. We took the technical spec book of the car and start the documentation. The specs for Amaro's Fiat were in Italian. We took the rear light off, we took every component and clean the every light bulb contacts, we measured the voltage for every light. Everything was ok. After one hour of work it struck me. The light bulb was burned. We went and bought a light bulb and it worked like a charm :)

That's all folks for today and check my cousin blog to see what he has to say.

Yet another refactoring

Dear readers, in the previous post I twisted the pseudonym of our flash guy. Instead of "Diuc" please read "DIUK". I apologize for any inconvenience, thank you for understanding.

Bernie and Diuc does Milan

Hello everybody, one month and few days ago Men@Work was hiring a flash guy. We found somebody who fitted our requirements and since 1 August, Diuc, the new flash guy, joined our team. (see "Pinky was about to start a war" posted on Diuc first day at Men@Work)

After one month and few days of quality time here at the office, it came the day when it was Diuc time to make his initiation trip to Italy to meet our partners there. Because Bernie didn't had his initiation trip yet and he is here for about six months, Brain asked Bernie to go also. Bernie tried to pull on his ass [sa se traga pe cur] but his lamentation on the phone didn't impress Brain too much and with my "help" he is also scheduled for the trip on Monday. With this said, its pretty obvious what is Bernie doing on Monday :)

With them gone for one week I can see two possible scenarios for me and Carlos here at the Men@Work office. Lets start with the good one: 1) Bernie and Diuc manage to create a big enough "diversion" there and Carlos and I wont be bothered with calls, emails and stupid instant messages and we will spend quality time procrastinating. And 2) Bernie and Diuc fail to live up to our expectation (to create the big diversion of course...) and we will function here as a support team and get lots of calls, emails then calls again and all that crap for a whole week. We shall live and we shall see [om trai si om vedea].

Turkey!

My vacation is over and now I’m relaxed and with my batteries recharged I’m back at the office and ready to continue and improve my everyday procrastination. I spend my 10 days vacation in Kusadasi, Turkey together with my fiancé and another 4 friends of mine Carlos and his girlfriend Didi, Vik and his girlfriend Tzutzi. It was great except for the trip with the bus which was supposed to be a 22 hours trip. Unfortunately because the Turkish drivers were smuggling alcohol, tobacco and coffee from duty free shops in the countries the bus passed, they had troubles at the customs and that added a few hours extra at the bus trips.

Anyway after a day on the road we arrived at Polat Beach hotel in Kusadasi. The hotel is a 3 star hotel (they pretend it’s a 4 star) with a private beach and with a nice view to the sea and to the Greek island Samos and its located 4 km away from the center of Kusadasi in a region called Long Beach.. Immediately after we checked in and after the vital shower I and my fiancé went to the beach where I took a nap in the shade of a beach umbrella. In this time Carlos crushed in the bed and we haven’t seen him till dinner. Vik and Tzutzi also took a nap but they woke up around 4 pm and we went together for a coffee. The next two days we spend them lying on the sun, sleeping, eating and drinking. In afternoons or in the evenings we went in the center of the town and spend our time in the bazaar buying cheap stuff at half the price after a good bargaining. The city is very crowded and on the narrow streets of the bazaar coffee shops are next to restaurants, clothes shops, leather shops, jewelry shops, bistros, and souvenir shops etc. Surprisingly, being there between so many people and so many shops and restaurants in such narrow streets was very relaxing. There I eat best kebab ever and the best milk and rice pudding.

In the third day we went to Adaland, which is one of the two aqua parks in Kusadasi and we had a lot of fun in the pools and on the slides. Unfortunately for me, because I’m a bit heavy, I rapidly gained speed on those things and at 50% of the “landings” my balls where slapped by the water :D. Next after Adaland we took a boat trip which was the mistake of the season. It was so damn windy that if I face the wind directly I couldn’t breathe. Strangely, the other’s enjoyed the boat trip.
The other day I and my fiancé went in a trip to the ancient city of Ephesus, visited also the temple of Artemis and after lunch we visited the House of the Virgin Mary. This was the best trip ever because most of the tourists went home after seeing Ephesus and in the end only 5 people remained and the guide. This was Tuesday. Wednesday 7 September, I went with the dudes Carlos and Vik to a jeep safari which tuned out to be an ugly dust bath. We took the jeeps on a dusty mountain path in the national park. After the first jeep the dust was so thick that you couldn’t see the damn road and after 5 minutes you could spit mud. I think the jeep safari was probably the worst spent 20 euros on the same place with the boat trip which was cheaper.


Before we went back home I went to visit the white calcium-oxide waterfalls of Pamukkale and the ancient city of Hierapolis located near the waterfalls. It was nice but it took one day long. After that Friday we send it at the hotel resting, preparing for the goddamn 30 hours long trip home. Ok folks, its my lunch time, see you later and in the next episode will tell you how Carlos became a lame ass and spend a whole day locked in his hotel room watching porn all day :P.

Vacation Day One

Today is my first day from my vacation. I woke up around 10:30 AM, had a piece of bread with butter for breakfast and I'm planning to drink my morning coffee outside the Euphoria club together with my girlfriend and my homies Amaro and Luke.

Yesterday, when the knife reached the bone (ne-o ajuns cutitul la os), me and Carlos finished the tasks that were scheduled for 3 days in about 4 hours. Pair programming combined with some extreme copy-paste techniques works like a charm. This reminded me about the university years when with one night before a semester exam we start to read for the first time the courses materials.

My windows 2003 is freshly installed on my computer. Last night I've installed VS.Net 2003 + MSDN and now I'm ready to go in my vacation :D. I'm out for my coffee.

Two more days before vacation

1 day, 11 hours, 32 minutes and 15 seconds is the remaining time till I will be in vacation! I haven’t been in a vacation for more than 1 year. I can’t wait to get out of the office and spend two wonderful weeks on the beaches in Turkey.

One year without vacation is taking its toll. Even if I go to bed at a decent hour in the night and I manage to sleep 8-9 hours per night in the morning I feel like I’m hit by a truck. I can’t get up from the bed, my head is spinning and I can’t open my eyes. The alarm clock sounds at 8 AM and I torture myself with at least six 5 minutes snoozes till 8:30. At 8:30 - 8:40 I manage to crawl till the bathroom. At 9 AM I’m usually dressed and ready to go to work. Of course I should have been at work at that hour. Around 9 AM I enter Amaro's room to wake him up. I usually find him sleeping in weird position like he was "hit by a grenade" (© Vony). While Amaro is getting ready I wait in my room, laying on the bed like a whale beached on the shore, looking at Animal Planet (Unfortunately we don’t have the "Tree Channel").

Around 9:30 - 9:40 I and Amaro arrive at the office. Carlos is usually there at that time, well in two out of three of the cases Carlos is there. He seems more wrecked than me. For me the fact that I'm so close to the vacation is giving me demonic strength to work something but for Carlos this is giving him a demonic strength for procrastination.

I want to remind to the readers that from last week only I and Carlos were at the office and everybody else is in vacation. By everybody I mean Brain, Pinky, Bernie and the cool guy from Italy for which I haven’t found a code name yet but I shall call him Bushy for now :). At the middle of the last week Brain called us from Cote d'Azur curious if we are on the schedule that Bushy send Monday last week. Unfortunately Bushy didn’t send the schedule to us (those that should do the actual work) but he send the schedule to Brain only. I asked Brain to forward the schedule to me too to see it myself so I can tell him if we are on the schedule or not. Obviously we were not on schedule so we reschedule the schedule for 1 week later. Now, one week later, we are behind the schedule of course because we didn’t start any task that was on the schedule yet.

Carlos proposed to work on another part of the project. It smelled as procrastination and of course I agreed. We were supposed to finish the scheduled tasks before we will go in vacation. I don’t think this is going to happen. I can’t imagine the surprise on Bernie's face when he will see that we changed the security engine in the project and didn’t work anything that we were actually supposed to do. But hey, we still have 1 day 11 hours 5 minutes and 10 seconds before we are going in vacation. I'll try to motivate Carlos who knows maybe we will have something done by the end of this week and I'll get rid of the guilt feeling that I’m experiencing right now. Fortunately the guilt feeling is suppressed by the trill and the excitement that in less than 2 days I’ll be in VACATION!!!