Sunday, February 02, 2003

Drudgery "...I used to punch a clock. I didn’t make anything, I didn’t produce anything, I didn’t write anything, I just punched a clock and when I was done I was done and I went home or out or somewhere else, anywhere else, because it was after work and that’s what you did after work. Now there is no after work, there is no before work, there is no work day, no office, no clock. There is only one long continuous 24- hour day that is always work, always office, and I never punch in and I never punch out..." [Mark Pilgrim] I was having this discussion with someone the other day, he didn't seem to understand the concept of putting in anything more than 40 hours a week. It was as if working "a few" extra hours a week was somehow going to be a serious detrement to your health. 40 hour weeks seem so strange... so distant... so banal... 10:15:15 PM    comment []

My New Wallpaper I was looking at my referrer links and I came across the coolest wallpaper. Check out the background here: http://umbbs.liful.com/favorites/favorites.xml Right click, "Set As Background" :-) 9:34:55 PM    comment []

VB.NET I've been answering postings over on MSDN for a while now (thought I would contribute some spare time to something useful). Man, there are a lot of clueless people out there. Some times you wonder how they ever got ahold of a copy of VS.NET. You just have to hope these people are just 12 year olds that downloaded it off Kazaa and aren't billing anyone for thier "services." You would be suprised how many people have no idea what layered architecture is or how many VB guys cannot convert a code example from C# to VB.NET. It really makes you think about how low the quality of a lot of custom software out there must be. The sad part about it is that the sorry shmuck who is paying for the software won't even know the difference until it is too late (heck, it might even be cheaper for this $5 an hour amature). One day, you come into the office and your entire network is bogged down by this application that is trying to pull the entire Access database across the wire every 10 seconds. It was fine when there were only 5 records in the thing, but now that you actually use it, it just doesn't work. So, you hire a consulting company to come on in and they break it to you: "We cannot work with your existing code, we are going to have to rewrite the entire application from scratch." Of course, the client is now faced with a decision: a) Admit they wasted $100,000 on this 80 year old VB guy whose code bears a striking resemblence to an ASM dump, suck it up, and rewrite everything. b) Ignore the consulting company and upgrade the hardware until the latency is unbearable again (at which point they call another consulting company, who hopefully doesn't screw them over just as badly with a new set of lame code...but hey, they are cheaper, and code is code, right). Suprisingly to us programmers, many clients get stuck on option b and cost themselves a lot more pain in the long run, not to mention decreased efficiency and endless little "matinence" fees to the moron who built the thing in the first place. Ok, enough ranting and raving. Can you tell I've had to deal with this type of thing before? I just can't comprehend it. Someone needs to come up with some type of industry standard code compliance kit or something to protect these unknowing clients from the lazy shmucks out there who decided to be "independant contractors" after their big .com went under because, for some strange reason, they never could manage to get their project off the ground. 9:06:25 PM    comment []