just act like you know what you are doing
Some wise person has found a way to keep me awake during boring meetings. Enter http://www.bullshitbingo.net! Click here for a clickable bingo card that you can use to keep track of the bullshit being discussed in your next boring meeting!
Filed under: Funny, workI just noticed this article in the latest print/online version of Wired Magazine: Wired 14.11: Attack of the Bots. Fascinating. This is my favorite part:
Whatever it was, it worked.
Muahahahaa!
Filed under: Security, workWouldn’t you know it, the title of the magazine is Outside. In this article from the June edition Mark Jenkins does a good job of applying some perspective to our crazy, crazy workaholic lifestyle.
As a nation, we Americans are among the hardest-working people on earth. A 2001 United Nations report found that we work 49.5 weeks a year—3.5 weeks more than the Japanese, a people who even have a word for working yourself to death: karoshi.
He goes on to illustrate something that I’m only just starting to really learn, that getting away is really as important to being productive as getting to work in the first place. I didn’t realize that there is no legal requirement for paid vacation in this country. I just had no idea. I know that I sometimes meet people from other countries on multi-month excursions and I can only dream about ever taking a six-week vacation. But even in a short span like a week or ten days, perhaps especially on such a short trip, Jenkins’ eight rules of vacating are excellent guidelines:
Update: There is a piece today on NPR’s Morning Edition that talks about vacations and says that just doing nothing, completely vegging on vacation is counterproductive. Listen here … what do you think?
Filed under: about me, adventures, workAreseven has a new twist on an old idea. The DC version of a “corporate tourist”: My new job.
This is an excellent riff and ripe for embellishments. I won’t bore or disgust you with the ones that come to my mind.
Filed under: Funny, work
In The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut provides this excruciatingly accurate description of the building in which I work:
Filed under: Real Life, work…a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats — men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year…
The folks over at prolexic are building aDDoS DataBase which looks like it will be pretty cool once it gets up and running.
Filed under: Security, workArgh. Is it really 3:37 in the morning? Am I really awake because of nerves?
Unfortunately, yes. And how am I responding? Well, you’re reading it.
Now let me explain that my guts are all twisted up because of work stuff. Big customer presentation first thing Monday morning and, to be honest with you, I’m not sure I am going to confidently be able to answer all the questions forcefully and affirmatively, they way thay would like. A lot of that because there is a lot of work that needs to be done that isn’t done … at least not quite. Last week saw a milestone pass that indicates that, well, at least some of this *should* be done by now.
Frustrating this is that instead of working on it, I am writing a blog entry. Yeah, I’ll keep you posted.
Filed under: workSo today I got a call that someone was having an attack and they needed my assistance. Not unusual, but they required the “special help” that only we and a very few other groups can provide. Of course they needed it “right now” so while mister i-might-have-to-drop-off-this-call-if-my-wife-goes-into-labor kept the clients at bay, I put in all of the config changes except two. One because the situation was somehow wierd and one because the systems themselves are picky in one respect. At any rate, I pretty much did it without training wheels … fortunately the clients were already pissed so they weren’t screaming like with hair-on-fire at me.
I guess this pretty much won’t make sense to anyone but me, but hey .. i did a good job today. (too bad it used up about three otherwise perfect Saturday afternoon hours).
Filed under: The Internet, work
