quote of the day

“I’m hiring out someone elses womb next time…”

From Claire, during a particularly shitty day of morning sickness…

sympathetic vomiting

Sure, you may think that my mind seems to be on the one topic lately, and you would be correct. This time I ask the question: “Who the f%$# came up with sympathetic vomiting?”. Really, what evolutionary freak thought it would be good to keep that process going in humans? Think about it… If you were a neanderthal in the fields hunting a mammal for food and you saw your hunting comrade vomit, would it really be the best time for you to do exactly the same thing? Absolutely not. You’d probably either end up starving, or even possibly have a mammals horn stuck in an unfortunate place.

I got home tonight, and Claire was throwing up because Charlie decided to eat too much plastic and threw up herself. Will everyone please keep their stomachs inside them over the next couple of hours. It would be a nice change to see no one vomit for a little bit.

old photos from my childhood

I was going through my old family photos recently and I found these two gems. Both are of my sister and brother; Lisa, Daniel and myself. I laugh at the goofy smiles we had back then. At that stage, nothing is wrong with the world, and the hardest part of life is spending a short day at school doing work. Hmmm… Wish I was back there, seems so easy now.

The worst part of old photos is that they never get the light of day, yet most are quite fun, silly or scary. So I thought that I would share these two with all of you.

look familiar?

 

Claire sent me a photo recently of the very cute Flocke, the new polar bear cub at Nuremberg Zoo in Germany, who will no doubt be as popular as the ever favourite polar beak Knut. Look familiar?

vomiting during pregnancy

I’m still to understand the actual benefit of vomiting during pregnancy. Sure, if something in the body stomach is bad, then it should be purged. But indescriminately throwing everything away is pure crazy. Let alone that someone has to clean it up.

Claire seems to throw up after fluids, which is typically what I throw up afterwards, except mine comes from green bottles.

picture of the day

I love this photo. Stumbled upon it while surfing the net. Don’t try and guess what I was on the internet looking for, because you’ll be wrong.

(via isobelwren)

sexy will ferrell and heidi klum photo shoot

Will Ferrell and Heidi Klum recently did a photoshoot that cracked me up. I think it was aimed at showing off the new movie Will stars in called Semi-Pro, but some of the photos were styled like 1970’s porn. I love how tacky they are.

(via Sports Illustrated)

picture of the day

George Bush. Retard of the free world. Enough said.

michael ware on real time with bill maher

 

Spent a night watching tv shows, including an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. One of his guests was an Australian CNN International Correspondant called Michael Ware. I started to take notice when he started the interview with ‘GDay’.

Anyway, it was an very interesting discussion. Here’s an excerpt from Michael Ware on how fucked up the war in Iraq is, and it’s impact to US people in terms of economic (the interview was live from Iraq, as he has been there since the beginning of the war).

“Well, i guess, unfortunately from a purely self interested view from, say, the united states you can pull out of here tomorrow. And lets forget about the moral horror that would ensue as everyone just starts hammering in to each other, you’ve also got to think about whatever disaster takes place here is sitting atop some of the world largest oil reserves. You reckon filling up at the bowser is expensive now, just imagine a regional proxy war here involving all the big oil players like Iran and Saudia Arabia and Iraq.

I mean, that’s just a nightmare from the hip pocket. Let alone those people who will die. Let alone the fact that Islamic Extremists and terrorists on both sides of the islamic fence will just be having a field day. There’ll be more terrorist camps than you can shake a stick at.And you dont think that’s not going to come home and bite america. I’m sorry, America broke this country and for better or for worse, it’s going to have to work out how to sticky tape it back together, atleast long enough for the world to breathe.”

It was a great interview, and it kept resonating the hopelessness of the situation. Yes, the USA screwed it up, and there is almost no way, no exit strategy, that will get them out without a lot more blood being spilled. Scary.

(Michael Ware: wikipedia),  (Michael Ware: CNN)

tank made from balloons

Saw this picture on the web a couple of weeks ago and thought it would be great to see the worlds armies use these tanks instead of the metal hunks that they use.

(via Core77)

happy 0th birthday faith

So, this one is even more belated than the first. But this one is sooo exciting that I just had to write about it. I have a new little niece called Faith Olivia, who was 6 pounds 11 ounces, and was born on MY birthday… That’s right, she’s a March 13th girl. That day is becoming one of the most busiest days in our calander. So much so that there is no space left to put in real appointments after all the birthdays are entered.

Mum sent through this fantastic photo of Daniel and Moo’s little Beth. I think she’s a little excited that she is going to have a little girl cousin to play with. I can’t believe just how small Faith is compared to Beth, who was around that size not that long ago.

Hopefully that will be one more person capable of reading this blog in a few years.

1 + 1 = 3

For those who don’t already know, Claire and I are having a baby. It’s aparently just over the size of a grape at the moment, and is totally kicking Claire’s ass. She is vomiting around the clock. In fact, the last couple of days Claire has been:

Tired.  Hungry.  Sick.  Tired.  Hungry.  Sick.  Tired.  Hungry.  Sick.  Tired.  Hungry.  Sick.

And that’s a snapshot of just one hour. Hopefully she starts feeling better over the next week or two.

We do still have to break the news to our current baby, who I believe will be put out by the new member of the family when he/she comes. Considering her love of licking the feet of young children, Charlie will probably be excited to have one at home to lick all the time. The horror is going to be training a puppy dog that barks at babies who cry. This will be quite a challenge.

happy birthday lisa

To my gorgeous little sister, who on the 21st turned 25, HAPPY BIRTHDAY. I love and adore my sis, so i’m happy that we are all growing old in a close family together. OK, so this post is a little late, and should have been done earlier this week, but if you’ve kept up, I have been a little busy.

the sub prime monster

I saw a good take on the Sub Prime Crisis in the USA with relation to it’s effect on the Australian populus. It was on the ABC, by John Clarke and Bryan Dawe.

Click here to view it while it’s available.

eleven days of hell

My job has been an interesting experience over the last two weeks. The development team that I manage was asked to produce a complete product for demonstration to a client in a shortened timeline. So, we compressed four months of work into eleven consecutive days, and came out with a rather spectacular product. This week we will put the finishing touches on the product and I will fly to Sydney to show it off.

To do this my dev team and I gave up our lives and lived in the office. Some days I walked out of there at 4am, and was back in just after 8am. As you can imagine this was exhausting, and during the process all of our lives were frozen in time. I missed several important events, even spending my own birthday in front of the computer at the office. That pie with sauce was a great 30th birthday tea.

I have had two days to think over the whole process, and I think I have come to some important conclusions which I feel should be remembered for the next time someone puts a development team through this sort of agonising hell.

1) Everyone has a breaking point.
Considering that we worked around the clock, it was going to happen sooner or later. Initially, working double the hours gives a great boost of productivity. But over time we all became less and less effective in their jobs. At some point it was noticeable that we were getting less done in a day than we could probably have done in a normal 9 to 5 shift.

2) Balance your customers expectations.
One of the issues that pissed me off the most was that this whole process occurred because there was a change to documents that we submitted in a purchasing process that was obviously going to cause us heat. This could have been solved if the documents didn’t lie so much with what would be available, or allowing the development team to grow with more developers to accelerate the development process. When the development team thinks the boss is the root cause of the stress they are going through, the boss will be the target of resentment. You won’t keep employees acting this way.

3) People working crunch need to be isolated.
The most rediculous process that occurs during crunch is that during the day, developers are thrown in with the other employees. Typical companies suffer from every employee thinking that his or her work is more important than the rest. During crunch time, this isn’t different, except that most of the employees who aren’t in crunch think they are still important. We lost heaps of hours dealing with retards in the office who were trying to get us to do completely irrelevant work. Thankfully between 5pm and 4am we managed to get so much work done that it made up for it. This, in my opinion, was directly a problem of the highest levels of management. In no uncertain terms all employees should be told to leave the development team alone during this time. If this cannot be achieved, the development team should be given an isolated place to work (possible offsite) that will allow them to work at their best. 

4) More than the cost of wages.
Some of us in the group managed to get a bit of extra pay for the work. Some of us didn’t. But what is rarely recognised by the powers above is that the cost of doing these hours is really far more than the actual cost of the wages. Pushing a group of developers in this way causes issues in their personal life. Family and friends get neglected and its hard for them not to question the loyalty that is being shown to the company.

5) Crunchers get burnt if ignored.
The absolute worst thing a boss can do to a development team in crunch mode is to ignore them while they work. I’ve worked crunch for several bosses, and the good ones come in at the middle of the night just to see how the team is going. It’s amazing how much of a boost this gives to a development team, as it makes them realise the bosses care. Unfortunately in the company I work for, I had to spit the dummy before anyone noticed us. This is very bad for the team, and I think it will have longer term reprocussions.

6) Employees should not be expected to care as much as an owner.
My biggest greif with the company I work for is that the top tier of management do not realise that everyone else doesn’t care about the company as much as they do. No employee should ever have to care as much or work as hard as an owner. Employees work because we earn a wage. We will work more if we are looked after more. To suggest that we should work as hard as someone who owns part of the company is totally nieve, and unfortunately has been mentioned in my time in the office. The expectation of the employee to give everything, even when the bosses manage to dip the company is a bucket of hot oil is just a terrible way to work.

OK, so that has been my thought process, and is more of a rant than anything else. I’ve learnt a lot from the process, but at the same time I have realised that this is a reoccurring problem with the company I work with, and it might be time to find another income stream. If anyone has any good ideas then feel free to let me know what’s available.

picture of the day: geeks anti-war protest

I noticed this humerous picture on a blog, of a sudo HTML tag effectively declaring “end war”. OK it’s a nerd joke, which is why I probably found it funny. (via SwissMiss)

hide… the lego people are coming to get us

I for one welcome our new leaders…

This is somewhat old news, but last year an interesting story appeared on several news sites about a huge Lego man washing up on a beach. I was only just reminded of it when seeing the photo appear on a tech related website.

You may think that it is a great thing to see a giant Lego person on the beach, but think about it seriously. This could be just the start of the invasion. And what if our world was run by Lego people… No genitals… No facial features. What would the world come to.  (via ABC News)

the last supper: battlestar galactica

I recently stumbled upon this cool teaser for the last season of Battlestar Galactica. The religions references are obvious, and it isn’t suprising considering the consistently extensive references to every known religion within the show.

Yes… I watch Battlestar Galactica… And Yes… I am a nerd. Thanks for asking.

there’s time to sleep when you’re dead

OK, I’ve been slack recently. Between an exhausting work schedule and a rather severe cold I haven’t had the energy to do much, let alone write some interesting or profound discussion about why something sucks, or why something isn’t designed particularly well.

Oh, and there’s this Puppy school that we are going to once a week. Supposedly we are meant to get Charlie to live with a controlled level of craziness rather than being totally mental. Hah! It’s going to take a lot more lessons to get us to that point.

P.S. Charlie says hi… Lisa is overdue in popping out a bubby… could end up coming on my birthday, Grandpa has gone to Respite for a small holiday to give mum a break, and Claire hasn’t been well either. For now, I’m back.