If programming languages were religions

http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html

Political Science for Dummies

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk
the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are
surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the
analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow
and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give
excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan , which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find
alternatives to milk production but u se the money to buy weapons.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally
vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you
think is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

22,994,227-ish seconds since last post

The seconds have just flown by. It seems just yesterday that the time was under a 10 million seconds, but I digress...

The true motivation behind this is to see if it still works and also to inform you, my reading public that I have decided to briefly come out of retirement. You can all stop holding your breath, you're turning a neat shade of blue.

Here are some pictures of my recent trip to Chicago: pictures

I've recently changed jobs. I was laid off from American Equity Mortgage in early July and started working at Brown Shoe Company as a consultant in early August. It turns out it was a good thing for my career to leave my old job, but as anyone who I have talked about it with about it can tell you, I'm still a bit perturbed about how I was asked to leave. On the plus side, I no longer have to take support calls and I get to work with some really smart developers. --And I am officially a developer! I get to go to development team meetings and everything!

The main site is www.brownshoe.com but I have been working on www.famousfootwear.com pretty much exclusively. If you order shoes from Famous Footwear and track your FedEx shipment online, you can thank me for that feature :)

Well, since this is more words than I have posted in millions and millions of seconds, I don't want to over-exert myself.

Till next time.

Quote of the day

Me: "I've been up for 20 minutes -- and I'm blow-drying a wet cat"

Saint Louis - The most dangerous city in the US

http://www.morganquitno.com/safecity13.htm

Another one

I am now officially another year older than I was last year at this time. Yes, I realize the previous sentence works for every person on the planet who is at least one year old, at any time - but let me put it this way -

!EDITED 2006-10-30 08:46:04 for whiney content!

I was congratulated by my girlfriend saying "Happy birthday! Your life is a quarter over!" Now, there are a few ways that you could interpret this gem. I could have thought, "hey wow, i could live to be 100 years old. I've got a LOT of living left to do". However, when the age old glass half-full half-empty question comes along, I usually see it half broken on the floor. What would you do?

I am starting to feel old. When I say this around people older than myself, I get the "oh shut up, you haven't seen anything yet", and that makes it all better. I officially jumped on the aging train recently by buying and actually needing a nose hair trimmer. I win. But its ok, it can double as an ear hair trimmer :).

I've been told by several people that I now have a noticeable amount of grey hair. Elizabeth says they're hers and she's quite proud. Of this I have no doubt :)
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Just so this isn't all me whining:



Happy Halloween!

Chicago is big

Yup. The title is still true.

I was in Chicago last week for a training class. I was learning about Business Object's product Data Integrator. I realize I'm writing this to a reading audience of 0, but Data Integrator is a program that allows me to move and transform data from one database to another. We've created a Data Warehouse at work and I'm now in charge of it. Thus the training ... nevermind.

My trip was actually mostly a disaster, but I got some good stories out of it. Ask me about it sometime.

For example:
I arrived in O'Hare around 9:45am and couldn't check in until 3:00pm so i decided to go into the city. I still had my luggage, but i was able to fit it into a backpack so it wasn't that bad. After walking around the city for a few hours, I decided to try to get back to my hotel. (At this point, anyone who's ever gone anywhere with me at any time should say, "oh man, he can't go anywhere without getting lost" - and you'd be right.)

Here's what I knew at the time. The piece of paper I had, said that my hotel was in Rosemont. I looked at the subway map and to my surprise, there was a Rosemont stop. Score! No expensive taxi ride for me, i'll just get off at Rosemont and walk to my hotel. Nothing to it.

I got off at Rosemont and started walking. At this point, my backpack was getting pretty heavy having carried it all day - but I'm tough (I told myself), I can do it. I knew that my hotel was 3190 RiverRoad and I was in the 6000s. I figured that this would go pretty quickly. I was wrong.

About 2 miles down the road, three policemen approached me with what looked like riot gear. I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be doing, or what to stop doing. It turns out that they were helping me cross the 4 lane street. I didn't want to cross the street, but when three policemen tell you to do something, I do it. I had no idea why they did this for me, but I figured I could recross later after they couldn't see me. I soon figured out why they were there.

Soon after, the sidewalk on that side of the street ended. I thought: "Lucky me." However, I had not gone far before the sidewalk ended on my side too. I was now walking in the grass beside a large rural road, and feeling a bit discouraged. This was turning into more of an ordeal that I had hoped and now it was getting dark.

I was getting hungry and started looking for someplace to eat. Unfortunately I had wandered into an industrial area, so there wasn't much to find. The one restaurant that I did find was closed for renovation and next to it was a residence with a sign saying "Thursdays: Female domination! Sign up now!". Feeling glad that it was Monday, i pressed on. At this point I had walked around 5 miles and was in what looked like the middle of nowhere. Noticing the casing to a switchblade on the ground, I walked faster.

Finally after what seemed like 2 hours, mostly because it was - carrying a now very heavy backpack, I reached my destination. A dirty truck stop not in Rosemont ... Figures...



It wasn't all bad though. I met a lot of great people:


It was an 'adventure' to say the least. If nothing else, the next time I go on a business trip, I'll be able to say, "this is so much better than last time!".

The moral of the story boys and girls is "Don't let your boss book your hotel"