Saturday, March 17, 2007

Washing & drying & drying & drying...

Why is it that women's underwear dry much more quickly than men's? Every time I do laundry, I notice that the time it takes for my underwear to dry is measured in days, while my wife's is dry in a couple of hours. The time seems even longer, if you sit beside the clothes and check them every few minutes, as I'm doing right now.

Why is the standard men's underwear made out of thick cotton, while women's is some kind of thin, smooth fabric? Women seem to have it much more comfortable. I know, there is men's underwear made of similar fabric too, but it is usually of the loose boxer shorts kind. I'm not into those, it just seems... eh... like there's too much space, you know, and not enough... support. Probably some people like those, but I'm not used to that much of freedom.

I like the underwear that is not of the Y-fronty, or boxery kind, but kind of in between. Like boxer shorts but tighter. Don't know what it's called officially. I vaguely remember once having shorts of that kind that were made some kind of smooth, thin fabric, not quite unlike those my wife's underwear is made of. But they were not comfortable at all. When I bought them, I thought that they were going to be the most comfortable piece of underwear I've ever had. I was wrong. The material was some kind of experimental, super-itchy, space-age material, that wore real fast. And they liked to creep upwards too, so I had to constantly be yanking them out of the, ahem, crack. No, that's vulgar, can't use language like this in a public blog. Groove. Out of the groove. That's better.

Luckily that piece of underwear wore out after wearing it for about four painful days. That's what you get for buying your underwear from H&M. Quality is not their strong point. Looking cool in the store is.

Wearing women's underwear is not an option either. It's not comfortable because of the anatomic differences. There's just not enough space for a man. Sure, some kinky types might like that, but I'm too practical. Of course I've tried, who hasn't, but it was not for me, and the laughing of the wife wasn't encouraging either.

I could tell you about the time I was in a hurry, and had to dry my underwear in a microwave oven. It would seem kind of fitting, given the topic. I had just washed them, and was going out somewhere, so I had to get them dry as quick as possible. So I put them in a microwave oven, turned it on for a couple of minutes at a time, then took them out, shook them for a while and did it again. It was going okay, although taking a long time, until I got distracted and microwaved the underwear for too many minutes at a time. When I opened the oven my shorts were getting black and smouldering, so I had to throw them in the sink and pour water on them to prevent a fire.

Can't remember the underwear I wore that evening, but most likely it was dirty. I do remember this incident, however, because it happened at my parents' house, and my mother found it so hilarious that she kept the shorts, black holes and all. She might have had them framed by now. Also, she keeps on telling this story at every family reunion.

Now, to a witty closing remark.

Can't think of any.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Short post

You know, I had a good intention to write short posts. Even though the title of the blog suggests otherwise. Because that's how it just is, short and to the point, that's good and you're not going to become bored and f**k off.

So here's a very short topic: I'm not british, even though my masterful use of the language might suggest so; I'm actually Finglish. In fact, it might have become apparent in a recent post, Politics!.

*Cough*

Well, I suppose there should be some kind of a point to every post though. So why not tell you what I've been thinking to write about: the origins of my sense of humour. Oh crap, I'm beginning to see why this blog will be like most others, i.e. interesting only to people who already know me. But I'll try to make it universal.

And might I add, eat my shorts! Short, eh?

Deadline and incontinence, I mean incompetence

Met a deadline today. Great feeling. The subsystem I've been working on is finished just as planned (only some testing left to do), and can be migrated to system test on Monday. Don't even have to work on the weekend. Not to brag or anything, but just for comparison, I heard today that a coworker has just spent four times the estimated time on the stuff they're working on. And it's definitively less complex than the stuff I've worked on. Oh, that was definitively bragging. Well, what are you gonna do. I wish there was somebody to do my bragging for me, so I wouldn't have to do it myself.

I just realised today that the great part of my job is the non-repetiveness. Sure, it's the same old same old every day, in a way, but the tasks change. I think it's split to parts nicely. You get to work on a specific issue a couple of weeks, or months, at a time. Then it's done, and you get the next change request. Of course it involves lots of repeating minor stuff to do, but the problem to solve is one-off, different each time. That makes it interesting.

Project work is fun and exciting in that way. It's kind of unique, and you get excuses to celebrate often, if you're into that. The sad part is that it will end someday. Afterwards, there's only the dreary, never ending maintenance, which includes no milestones and parties. Just fixing some minor defects that someone else caused. Well, hopefully it's not like that. Because I'll be the one doing the maintenance, in this case. The consultants will be off on another project, with it's fancy parties. I suppose that's a main point why consulting is appealing to many people. You get to work on a project, and you don't have to commit yourself to it forever. If the project's large enough, you don't even have to be very good at anything. Any good, to be more exact. You can get by just appearing to be competent while producing some crap code.

I keep on being amazed about how some people are good at seeming to be competent while actually sucking. And the amounts of these people. I just don't have the nerve. If there's an area in programming that I'm not sure about, then I study it. But some people just produce the crappest code you've ever seen. Minimal amounts of it, if we're lucky, and lots of it, making the most of the worst programming practices, wrongly indented, if we're unlucky. I've seen consultants who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag, but yet they talk about their work convincingly enough to not be thrown out. Well, to be fair, consultants are not the only ones that couldn't code, or document, if their lives depended on it. But I have to wonder about the quality of A*coughecunt*ture consultants. There seems to be an endless supply of them, and to an outsider like me, it seems that half of them were just hired off the street, without even a phone interview.

Is this enough ranting about cow-orkers for today?

I suppose it is. No, wait. There's still some left.

How can these consulting companies (notice how I'm using plural, even though I only have experience of two) teach their programming consultants to produce vast quantities of probably not useful documentation, that's actually quite an annoying burden for other people to keep track of, but not actually requiring them to have rudimentary programming skills? Whew. But equally I'm surprised that we, the client company, aren't able to dictate how it should be. I mean, consider this real-world scenario: to replace a generally liked, competent lead developer the consulting company sends a supposedly competent, generally disliked nerd who doesn't actually develop anything, but likes to produce Excel tables of probable statistics of some subsystems that nobody is ever going to use for anything, ever. Why the f**k is it not in the contract, that if the guy is clearly of no use whatsoever, we can require a competent replacement? Gasp.

Wow. I'm not actually angry at the moment, just letting out steam, and enjoying it.