MEN AT WORK

Clouded the future is!

2005-10-02T22:40:00.000+03:00

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

2005-09-23T10:03:00.000+03:00

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?

2005-09-17T20:23:00.000+03:00

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

2005-09-15T16:54:00.000+03:00

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

2005-09-15T16:10:00.000+03:00

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!

2005-09-13T13:54:00.000+03:00

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

2005-08-27T11:42:00.000+03:00

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

2005-08-25T10:29:00.000+03:00

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!!!

Worst movies ever

2005-08-19T17:34:00.000+03:00

Today I've spent quality procrastination time on one of my favorites websites imdb.com (The Internet Movie Database). Browsing around I stumble across the Bottom 100 movie list (as opposite to the Top 100) is a list with the worst movies ever.

Surprisingly I knew a lot of those movies, thanks to romanian TV station PRO TV and other motherfuckers which polluted us with shitty movies. Here worth mentioning the pathetic series "Police Academy" which was on PRO TV multiple times in prime time. Not all the TV stations are bad. The national TV station TVR is ok and they have good movies and no commercials during a movie. Maybe one or two but that actually means no commercials when its compared with ProTV which they show more commercials than movie runtime. For example Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace which has 133 min, on cheap motherfukers ProTV lasted 4 hours and they cut parts of it to pump some more commercials.

Ok lets get back to our Bottom 100 movie list. Here are some remarkable titles:

1. The Final Sacrifice (1.6)

The movie was rated 1.6 from maximum of 10 and was on the 4th place on Bottom 100.
Plot Summary: Ruled by the evil Satoris, an ancient cult of Canadian wrestlers, the Ziox, are bent on world domination...

An ancient cult of Canadian wrestlers??? Jesus.. It sounds ubber lame and CHEAP! I bet it will be soon on ProTV, you will see.

2. Future War (1.7)

This crapola rated 1.7 is on 8th place and has the following plot summary: A runaway human slave from Earth's future escapes to the present day and fights cyborgs and dinosaurs.

Wow, sounds like another prime time Saturday night movie for romanian TV stations.

3. Jaws: The Revenge (2.6)

You all remember this movie with the mentally deranged shark that pursues a woman and her son and the red painted bubble water. This movies is one of those stupid movies with animals that terrorized people. After Jaws, there were movies with killer crocks, snakes, bats, spiders, killa bees :), crazy cats, chickens and owls :P

4. Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (2.6)

The title speaks for it self :). I haven't seen it but I believe the movie worth mentioned in this post. Maybe the work "Bitch" will attract more traffic here :).

If you want to have fun take a look at the IMDb Bottom 100 and who knows maybe your favorite movie is listed too "hee hee" >:)

Carlos depression

2005-08-10T10:21:00.000+03:00

As I've posted in a previous thread, Brain and Pinky went in vacation. Unfortunately for us vacation Brain is much more nasty than working Brain. Probably because he is too bored sitting on the beach all day, drinking fresh juice cocktails and spending his money on expensive shit, his calls per day increased from 0.05 calls per day (CPD) to 3 to 4 CPD. Every time the fucking phone from the office rings I get chills and few more extra gray hair. Th4nx Brain for chills and gray hair m4t3!!1

Last Friday he called to tell us that from Thursday 11 August more people are going in vacation and we need to finish another (fucking) document by Wednesday morning. The bad news put Carlos in a depression ever since. Fortunately I know how to deal in situations like this, otherwise I wont be Chief :P. It took me one sinckers bar, one rum chocolate, one bag of haribo and one bag of Lays chips plus a peach to get Carlos back from his "fuck them! depression". Bernie tried to fake a depression also but didn't work. Ok nuff said.

We finished the (fucking) document and now we are gonna watch a movie or do some more procrastination. Ah by the way, I've been looking at the bog statistics and I saw that some dude or dudette from New York ended on my blog directly at the article FuW busted by Boss part I and the referal was yahoo search engine. Ok so far no big deal but then I saw the searched keywords: "company porn boss men" heh. Some people out there are really REALLY sick motherfukers.

FUCK GMAIL!!!

2005-08-06T16:36:00.000+03:00

Fuck GMAIL in its stupid ASS!! ARRRRRGHHH!

After I wrote a fucking email for more than 30 minutes I accidentally hit BACK and GMAIL fucked up! This only happen if you are in reply mode. Goddamn gmail motherfukers!

Vony got thirsty :P

2005-08-04T10:58:00.000+03:00

Reliable sources confirmed that last night Vony a.k.a Von Borsh dried out 8 (eight) beers and 5 (five) tequila shots. I'm waiting comments from eye witnesses, pictures are appreciated.

Last weekend log

2005-08-04T10:57:00.000+03:00

Its been awhile since I’ve posted on the blog. The reason for my absence is that these days were cursed. Couple of times I tried to publish a post but I got interrupted and after that I was too pissed off to write. Even when I wrote this post I got interruped few times.

So, briefly, Men@Work went outdoor last weekend. Bernie “pulled on his ass” (s-o tras pe cur) in the last moment and served us the lame excuse that he had a fight with his girlfriend and he couldn’t come with us. With Bernie out there was me, Carlos and Amaro (former Dirty Gonzalez) and of course our women. We went to the “Green Laguna”, a small lake with some strange goo floating around. Carlos incinerated an entire population of ants with the grill fuel, Amaro killed 3 baby frogs with 10 kilos boulders and I’ve ate a few steaks and couple of littles (mici). In other words we had a lot of fun.

Next day, Sunday, me and my girl went to Tarnita lake where the water was so cold that you couldn’t swim unless you wanted your balls to freeze. Instead I took a sun bath and in the evening I got myself 2nd degrees sun burns.

Pinky and Brain went in a 3 weeks vacation!! Men@Work threw a party in their names! :) Still Brain is terrorizing us with calls from Bahamas or Hawaii or where the fuck he went.

Pinky was about to start a war

2005-07-25T10:57:00.000+03:00

Today Pinky with his fluent English was about to start a war between Romania and Italy. Thanks to my super duper mediator skills the situation was diffused. Here is the Monday morning transcript.

Pinky: hi Chief
Chief: Hello
Pinky: is the gay there?
Chief: Who??
Pinky: the new gay,the one who knows flash
Chief: You mean the new GUY? yes he is here
Chief: gay means homosexual you know...
Pinky: ah
Pinky: ok
Chief: we must connect his laptop in the VPN
Chief: i think we have to call BOFH for this
Pinky: yes we are waiting for BOFH
Chief: aiight! peace :V
Pinky: Peace dogg!

Deathmatch with Brain

2005-07-21T09:46:00.000+03:00

Yesterday after lunch I went to the bank to withdraw money from company expenses fund to have cash in order to pay the company bills that cant be payed through the bank. I took Carlos with me and together we went with his car. In 20 minutes max we were back to the office and we found Bernie talking on the phone with Brain. Immediately Bernie hands me the phone and I had a delightful conversation with our supreme commander that sounded like this:

Chief: Hello?
Brain: This is NOT POSSIBLEEE!
Chief: Hello!?
Brain: Chief, we cannot continue like this anymore! Its 3:45 and you were not in the office! You do what you want there and nobody can control you! Most of the time when i call you are not in the office, you are smoking, you R in da bafroom, you are out but i didnt said anything. This is NOT POSSIBLE!!
Chief: But Brain, i went to withdraw the money in order to paythe bills in cash!
Brain: You must do that in your free time, Saturday or after working hours like we do here.
Chief: The bank opening hours are the same as our working hours!
Brain: Go to the bank during your lunch time.
Chief: I cant go during my lunch because i have to eat! Its MY lunch!!
Brain: Chief, you cant use the working hours to solve your personal issues!!
Chief: WTF???? Who said anything about personal?? This is for THE COMPANY!!! THE OFFICE HERE!! THIS IS WORK, ADMINISTRATIVE WOOORRRRRKK!!!!!!1
Brain: Ohh..
Chief: Hmm..
Brain: Chief, i'm sorry i thought you said personal problmz..
Chief: Yep..
Brain: Ok then I will see if we can arrange something with the bank..
Chief: Yeah..
Brain: OK bye, thank you! See you tomorow! Bye
Chief: Ok, bye.

And so it ended another ordinary day from Men@Work life.

Big TV

2005-07-20T13:12:00.000+03:00

Samsung presented at the International Meeting on Information Display 2005 conference a fucking huge LCD TV. The screen has 82 inch diagonal with 180 degree viewing angle. Here is the link to the article found by Carlos on Tom's Hardware site.

Look at it (check the bitches too):

Stupid recuiters

2005-07-20T10:05:00.000+03:00

There are some really stupid recruiters out there with ridiculous requirements in their job details. Yesterday I found one on yahoo hotjobs that was hiring a Senior .NET Architect. One of their requirements was: "5+ years experience with Microsoft Software Engineering Technologies - such as .net, asp.net, C#". Here is the link

Now lets do the math. 5+ year of experience in asp.net and C# means that the candidate should be working with these technologies since the year 2000 or 1999 (taking the + in consideration). But Microsoft released .Net framework and Visual Studio .NET in 2002. In other words the candidate should have experience with a technology long before the technology had existed. Microsoft start working on .NET couple of years before the release, in other words to have 5+ experience in .NET means that the candidate should be one of the guys that worked at the framework?

The cherry on top of these requirements is that the candidate should be a Visio pro. What the heck is a Visio pro? Is it a professional that use Visio or a guy that knows how to use Visio to draw pretty flowcharts and diagrams that look professional? "Are you a .net architect and a Visio pro?" does this actually means "Do you like arts and are you gay?"

Major Men@Work refactoring

2005-07-17T14:07:00.000+03:00

Due to the fact that the names Boss and Chewbacca were not very representative of the nature of the real characters I've decided yesterday (while I was in "After Eight" club having my forth beer) that we have to choose other names.

So, from now on Boss will be called "Brain" because he has so many ideas that takes all his time. And Chewbacca will be called "Pinky" because he is kinda out of space, and the one that encourage Brain going forth with ridiculous ideas.

Pinky: Say Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

Brain: The same thing we do every night Pinky. Wondering what Bernie is doing on Monday!

What's Bernie doing on Monday??

2005-07-15T12:39:00.000+03:00

Romania is flooded, the representatives and senators are rubbing the mint and till yesterday we still didn't know what Bernie is doing on Monday!!

The question was raised in the meeting yesterday evening when Boss was babbling about development methodology and he was curious what Bernie is doing on Monday. The unexplainable interest of Boss and Chewbacca of what is Bernie doing is pissing me off because every week they disturbing me with this question. Yesterday we solve this enigma and we concluded that Bernie will write specs on Monday (we already made a press release).

Writing specs has become the regular activity at work. We spend more time planning what we will work instead of actually working. My original estimate of one month for rewriting the application was busted because from that month 3 weeks we spend planning and 1 week working. When we were finally in the zone, Boss suggested to write some more documents and specs because what we wrote so far he didn't even read them.

We made like 3 schedules, we split each part of the project into tasks that can be completed in hours. I even gave them fixed dates for releases. All these were not enough because Monday we are going back to the fucking planning.

That's all for today my dear readers :) and I'm sorry that I haven't posted more often but as you can see I was too busy with the planning.

.NET XML Serializer misbehaver (G.S.)

2005-06-23T18:13:00.000+03:00

From time to time your asp.net web service might crash with an wired error that says a certain .dll file is missing or that it cannot create a certain .dll in the TEMP folder. Those DLL files have generated names and if you receive one of these symptoms and the DLL file looks like a virus name then know that you had bad luck. As Microsoft says this happen only "sometimes".

The reason is that the XmlSerializer creates C# files (.cs files) and compiles them into .dll files in the directory named by the TEMP environment variable; serialization occurs with those DLLs. So what you can do is to set permissions on the TEMP folder to the ASPNET user or to the user that is running the web service.

The blind Bernie

2005-06-15T10:19:00.000+03:00

Today our HTML & graphics guy, Bernie, got blind. Yes, blind. Temporarily blindness of course, in 4 hours his sight will be back to normal (I hope).

Bernie went a little paranoid yesterday when he experienced a blurred vision when he was watching movies at work. So he decided to go an have his eyes fully checked. Because of the special eye drops he got temporary blindness.

He couldn't have picked a better moment to go blind than this morning when we are expecting a call from Boss to finalize the last graphic details of our project. Now I'm praying that he will be back at the office before Boss calls because I don't think Boss will believe the truth. Boss wont be able to handle the truth, not THIS truth anyway, that his graphics guy is missing again from the office with the excuse that he is blind for four hours.

My g0t, shocking news..

2005-06-10T10:09:00.000+03:00

I just found out that the company that we are working is in the top companies on the region where its registered. Its on 2nd place with a gross profit of hundreds of thousands euros.

Asynchronous JavaScript with XmlHttpRequest (G.S.)

2005-06-09T23:54:00.000+03:00

Here is another post from category “Good Shit” (G.S.). G.S. means that you should remember this post for later when you probably need it, or you just want to impress your mates, your employer, your colleagues or your woman (???) with your super duper pizdous genius. All the posts of this kind will have the (G.S.) suffix in the title. When you see the suffix remember that there is no catch in the post, there is no joke or a funny scheme. Its serious shit dudes. Special notes to my buddy Von Borsh who was confused by an early post here about synchronizing stuff in C# :)).

Anyway, Carlos came with a piece of C#/.NET wisdom. There’s this article that tells you how to improve your web application with XmlHttpRequest and is all done from server side.

Additional links:

Spank it!!

2005-06-09T13:18:00.000+03:00

A very simple and efficient method to releave stress is to spank a woman's booty. The rounder it is the faster the stress goes away :). There is a solution for all yo geeks out there. Here's the link. (extract and run the .exe :P anywhere but the steam folder :)))

Ah.. by the way, my record is 749 MPH.

Spank It!

Bernie's geeky toy

2005-06-07T17:24:00.000+03:00

Check this thing out! With only $29.(9) you can buy this autosentry from thinkgeek.com. The gizmo is shooting foam disks up to 5 meters or so. It has a remote control and a motion sensor. The motion alarm is triggered by anything moving and the mean looking toy shoots 16 foam disks at the intruder. I guess I could use this thing to protect my food from being eaten by my cat while i'm not in the kitchen.

Room defender
(bateries are not included)

FuW busted by Boss, Part II

2005-06-07T16:36:00.000+03:00

Previously on "FuW busted by Boss" ....

Boss came a day earlier and started a brainstorming that would dry our brains out. I was at the end of my power, Carlos barely could talk, and even Boss was out of space while Bernie was found a breakthrough algorithm that would some all our problems.

In those moments it seemed so hard for me to fake the fact that I’m interested in the discussion. Suddenly everything went mute, I saw Bernie talking, Carlos moving his lips too, Boss scratching his head like a monkey and when was about that my vision to go black I heard the magic words "Lets go home and we will talk about this tomorrow". Ohhh.. FINALLY! I felt so happy like a schoolboy when the bell rings. I got up from the chair, packed my stuff and we all went home happily.

I picked my girlfriend from home and together with Carlos and his girl we went for a drink. Saturday morning at 10am we were back in the Office ready for another challenging discussion. This one was lighter than the ones before. We wasted perfectly good time, wrote a crappy doc, we got paid and then at lunch we went to eat a free meal paid by the company.

We all went to a nice restaurant where Men@Work usually procrastinates. There I and Bernie got "served" big time. The fucking waiter was drunk as pig, probably the chef too because in the food me and Bernie ordered there were two loafs of fat where was suppose to be meat. We politely refused the plate with those shitty fat things and we asked something else. We got served again, this time we got raw chicken breast with no taste and felt like chewing gum. I didn’t dare to refuse this one too because I didn’t want any "secret" ingredient in my third plate so we ate the damn thing. Bernie also ordered a cappuccino that was suppose to be brought before the food but the waiter didn’t bring it till the end and every time we came to the table he told Bernie that he didn’t forgot about the cappuccino. "Well.. Bring the cappuccino already and then you can forget about it you fuck!". That was the last time when Men@Work will procrastinate in that shithole!

After that we went back to the office for some more but it was a light discussion without brain damages or any lesion of any sort. So that's how a good old FuW gets fucked up when it's busted by Boss. Because of all the things that happened this weekend I feel obligated to install FuW earlier this week. Therefore FuW is in effect starting from today! Yeah baby! ;)

Anonymous comments are history

2005-06-05T20:46:00.000+03:00

If you think you have something to say and you want your comment to be read from this blog then make an account and post. No more anonymous comments are allowed starting from today. I've resulted to this because the feature is often abuse.

FuW busted by Boss, Part I

2005-06-05T01:53:00.000+03:00

My g0t, I have having FuW interrupted but what I hate most is that FuW to be interrupted by Boss.
It all started when one week ago we received word that Boss is coming to visit Men@Work on Friday. When he says a day that means he will be here one day before. Applying this simple formula one can easily find the real date:

realDate = officialDate.AddDays(-1)

Even more couple of reliable sources from inside the company confirmed the realDate.

So, as was predicted Thursday afternoon, Boss ringed the bell of the blast door (we really have a blast door) of our "facility". We tried to be surprised as much as we could of his "unexpected" visit. Boss looked very impressed of how clean the "facility" was and after bitching around the office we gather around the conference table and we started a brainstorming session. At first I had no idea what is about to come but soon I realize that this will be the mother of brainstorms and will definitely end with some brain damage.

Hours passed and we covered only 5% of the whole crapware when we all agree that we should end this for today and continue Friday. Friday started as a regular Friday day, blogs, utopia, mail, porn etc... Then at 10am Boss enters in the office and we started the torture again. After 8 hours of thinking how to convert his ideas into a doable application and keeping a track of changes of the current architecture in my mind my brain stopped functioning. I was a mute zombie on a chair approving with my head everything he said when ever he looked towards me. I've surrender. In those moments I put all my faith in Carlos and Bernie that seemed that they are not completely brain dead. After another hour it was difficult to me to even move my head and keep my eyes pointed to the papers on the table.

When I thought that few more minutes and I’m entering into a coma, Bernie, with an unnatural lucidity said that he figured out the algorithm of mixing ads and music correctly. He started to explain the algorithm to us. Boss was at the end of his brain power too. But even when he was about to collapse his ambition gave him a boost to try to understand the algorithm. In that moment I abandoned all hope. The stared at the ceiling and I went to a quiet place in my head waiting for Boss to collapse.

… to be continued….. I’m drunk.

Synchronizing stuff in C# (G.S.)

2005-06-02T10:29:00.000+03:00

1. We have the good old lock() statement.

The lock keyword marks a statement block as a critical section by obtaining the mutual-exclusion lock for a given object, executing a statement, and then releasing the lock. This statement takes the following form:

lock(expression) statement_block

where:

expression:

Specifies the object that you want to lock on. expression must be a reference type.
Typically, expression will either be this, if you want to protect an instance variable, or typeof(class), if you want to protect a static variable (or if the critical section occurs in a static method in the given class).

statement_block

The statements of the critical section.

2. Using [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.Synchronized)]

MethodImplAttribule class specify how the method is implemented. You have a number of options (MethodImplOptions) and one is Synchronized. This tells you that the method can be executed by only one thread at a time.

Rats can't puke

2005-06-02T10:19:00.000+03:00

Carlos fond this article explaining why rats cannot vomit. This is very interesting because I always thought that rats can vomit and they have this self defense in case of poisoning. Well, I guess the "rats puking poison" myth is busted.

The naked truth

2005-05-23T21:38:00.000+03:00

Dirty Gonzalez sent me an URL to an article from CaseySoftware.com blog. There the CEO enumerates few reasons why a late project fails. Yes, it fails! Here’s the link. Crapware has them all!!

Crapware

2005-05-23T20:18:00.000+03:00

The future of our software application is getting darker and darker. Each month more and more features are pilling up over the crappy architecture that barely supports the new ideas that our boss "generate".

Six months ago we "own" the application. It was like our baby. We treat it with love and attention to detail, hardcore tested :P and bug FREE! Ok, maybe it had one or two bugs :P but it was ours goddammit!

The software application future was uncertain in the moment when an outside a project manager was appointed. Let’s call this project manager Chewbacca. Since he took over, the software slowly turned into crapware. This happened because Chewbacca didn’t have enough information of the project and also he didn’t even bother to study its architecture. Because of this, all his ideas were based on wrong assumptions. Chewbacca is also the guy who approves all the ideas that come from the boss who is far away from having a clear view of what this software application implies, nor is he able to evaluate the cost of making a big change in the architecture just so we can implement a stupid feature or a crappy GUI change.

To have an idea of how the development process is I’ll make a small analogy. Starts with: “Let’s lift a building with five levels”. Then it came “No, no make it with six levels”. When the sixth floor it’s almost finish “Nah, I changed my mind, five levels are enough, make sixth level disappear”. The building is finally finish when it comes “Paint it red”, we start the paint job, next day “No, no red is ugly, make it blue”. When everything is done, almost finished the cherry on top comes “Now move the building two meters on the right”

Fortunately the money is flowing and that’s what counts :)

Immune to workaholism

2005-05-22T20:38:00.000+03:00

First of all I want to apologies to the few fans of "Men At Work" but last week I didnt have time to post because I was too busy working, yes working.

It all started when Tuesday morning I realize that my deadline for my current project was due yesterday. In that moment I knew that I have to do the thing I hate the most, to procrastinate my procrastination. It took me awhile till I got in the zone. In those moments I felt an urge to do all kinds of unimportant stuff like mop the floor, rearranging the mess on my desk, taking cigarette breaks every five minutes, rearranging the icons on my desktop, to name just few. One hour later I was in the zone and I was working with passion :D.

When I got home from work my girlfriends sister called and told me she needed help with a school project that had to be presented at the end of the week. Ive wrote a simple front end e-commerce web site in three evenings. The weird thing is that I kind of enjoyed these working sessions both at the office and home. Friday, my anti-working safety system kicked in around 11 AM and I invoked FuW and I got back to my regular program and I saw Star Trek Enterprise, episodes 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 from season 3.

In conclusion, it seems I have a natural resistance to workaholism. After working hard and really enjoy my immune system saved me for wasting too much brain power and put me back on track. Yeah baby!

"Fuck you Weekend"

2005-05-15T15:51:00.000+03:00

Two days ago I've started this blog, wrote one single post and few hours later I've got this comment with "You guys suck." Usually it takes couple of weeks (more than 2) of effective work procrastination until the client realize it and send us this kind of "constructive" feedback :)

Well, I must admit that this anonymous bastard is probably right, we probably suck but not while FuW is in effect asshole! For those who don't know what FuW is I'll explain. FuW a.k.a "Fuck you Weekend" means that when the weekend starts Men at Work are less willing to take crap from clients, employers, anonymous bastards and in general anybody. We learn this useful habit from an old old friend of mine (who probably doesn't remember me now...) VP-bofh.

FuW is in effect in weekends and official holidays and when ever is requested by one the men at work. Weekend starts after 6:00 PM Friday and ends at 12:00 PM Monday. Since "You guys suck." post was at 9:13 PM Friday, that is... while FuW was in effect all I can say is FUCK YOU asshole! It's weekend!

Friday the 13th

2005-05-13T10:30:00.000+03:00

Hi, I'm a software developer working at a small software company. Me and my coworkers Bernie and Carlos are working at a large software application with no future.

Last night after a exhausting party in a local club I went home and while I was laying in bed floating on vapors of alcohol I got this idea of creating a blog about the company I work and the men at work (of course me, Bernie, Carlos and some featuring guests :) ). Excited of the idea I fell asleep and I woke up at 9:03AM next morning. I reached for my cell phone and when I saw the time and realized that I was supposed to be at the office 3 minutes ago I've decided to snooze for 10 more minutes.

At 9:51AM I was in the office and saw that Dee and Bernie were already there doing their usual morning activity, reading news & blogs of course. I told them about my idea of keeping a blog with real events that happen in our small software company. I didn't get the reaction and the enthusiasm that I had last night. The fear of exposing the procrastination here made them disagree with me but when I told them we'll pick up false names and such I've instantly received the support I needed to start my little enterprise :)

Ok folks, that's all for today.