Fek'Lar
(The Last Honest Geek)
The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar
You Know You're DOOMED When...
your manager falls off his bicycle and breaks his arm. He can't come to work, so you have to call every hour to read him his email.
You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.
This Crapolla is sponsored by...
In This Issue...
Trash Can Be Fun!
Remember, just 45 years until Y2K. Get ready now!
Recently, my Director stripped the title of "Engineer" from everyone who works for him. This stirred quite an uproar of Bitching, and its little brother, Whining.
The Director's logic is simple. No one who works for him does actual engineering work. And none even have an engineering qualification. (My membership in the Society of Really Dumb Television Engineers doesn't count.)
According to dictionary.com, and Engineer is...
Nope, no one I work with is doing any of that. Seems like in this case, the Director is right. (Don't you just feel dirty hearing me say that?"
The Bitching and Whining came down to a couple if items. Part of it was vanity, and part of it I couldn't believe when I heard it. One guy wanted to have Engineer as a title because he thought it might help him negotiate a better wage with a future employer. Like the current company gives a shit about how much you'll be making in the future. How dare you consider working for anyone else!
13 years ago, when I ran a Disk Duplication house (and had a manager title (doesn't THAT just make you feel dirty?)), I had a guy working in a warehouse whom I wrote the review for. He was upset because he didn't have a title. I relayed this to my boss the President of the company (who once declared me an honorary Jew, but that's a different story.)
"Fek, titles are cheap, tell him to pick one. Anything but President. That's mine," the Boss said.
I made this guy Warehouse Manager. He was the only guy who worked in the warehouse. I guess he managed.
Back at WTHAIS, we had a meeting to decide what other engineering titles should be done away with. Here's a short list.
One day while flying down Caribbean Drive in the new Fekmobile, I slipped into the parking lot of Weird Stuff Warehouse. For those not from The Valley, Weird Stuff is a surplus store. The back room is almost a museum of old technology. I like to walk down the modem isle noting which of the hundreds of models I have owned.
Then I hit the chassis isle, filled with computers whose only crime was their clock speed. It's amazing how people buy into the "more is better" mentality. The truth is, very few of us need or can really use a 2 gigahertz processor. And if Operating Systems weren't so bloated, we wouldn't need as much memory.
In March I'll be taking a class in PHP connectivity to MySQL servers. I have high hopes that three projects of mine will be sliced and diced with this architecture. Rather than pollute any of my work horse machines, I'm building a new Linux box for this class. You know, I really won't need a HAL 9000 to do this.
That in mind, I found an old (more than three years old) machine that someone was about to toss into the trash. I added a 6 gig hard drive that was laying in my "extra computer stuff and cables" box, and viola, I have a perfectly good computer. Add a two year old distribution of Linux, and I'm ready for the first day of class.
To me, this is what the reduction in the cost of computing is all about. It's not that retail price points are dropping per clock cycle. It's that what is perceived as junk these days can do quite a lot.
For years I used to run a mailing list on an old Mac Plus. In fact I had seven of them sitting in a closet. If the current production machine blew up, I would un-hook it from the hard drive, swap in a new machine, sync its clock, and go have another Diet Coke.
I ended up with seven of these guys when people realized how I was running a mailing list. They were about to toss their old Macs and decided to help the cause. Alas, I have moved to UNIX where list servers are powerful and cheap (if not free). All the Mac Pluses went off to the Goodwill where they were probably sold for about 25 bucks. One one-hundreth of their original cost.
The price of computing keeps dropping.
This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.
'Ring of Stars' Discovered Circling the Milky Way!
Department of Homeland Security Restricts Fingernail Clippers From Inter-Stellar Travel
Let's play, "Who said this?"
Heard in the halls of various software companies.
"Now that we're done lying to each other, let's get down to business."
"You're in Tech Support, we swear a lot hear. Get used to it."
"Adult means 'dirty'."
"I don't want the cast of Ben Hur attending this meeting!"
"I'm out of here!"
"What are you talking about?"
"I just sold my job on eBay!"
Excuse Me
I need to over-clock my fridge.
Fek'Lar
(The Last Honest Geek)
Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn! This whole mess is copyright © 2003 by LowComDom Performances, all rights reserved. Wanna send this to your friends? Go ahead and pass out the URL.
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EOJ
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