Information Technology Dark Side » Funny Things

Merry Christmas Cubicle Dwellers!

David Christiansen — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:05:03 +0000

Jingle Hells
(to the tune of Jingle Bells)

Dashing through the snow
To cubicle hell we go
Whining all the way
My coffee’s getting cold

My boss is always late
To the meetings she sets up
I want to leave to do my job
But everybody waits

Oh…

Jingle bells, snotgun shells,
Coming from my nose
Winter’s here, and as I feared,
I’ve got a real bad cold.

Jingle bells, snotgun shells
Spraying on your clothes
Now you’ll get sick, unless I’m thick
Cuz I won’t work from home!

Yup. I’m glad that’s not me anymore. Neener neener neener. Someone who knows me is going to read this and point out that I don’t drink coffee. It’s just literary license.

Merry Christmas.

Keep a Piece of Your Soul by REBELLING with Socks that Don’t Match

David Christiansen — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:05:53 +0000

Corporate IT is soul-sucking. I was lucky to escape, a hollow shell of the software developer I once was, with a tiny shred of my soul left. It’s been over a month now since I shed those chains and frankly, I feel taller.

Protect your soul (or the soul of an IT geek you care about) by being safely rebellious. Wearing socks that won’t get you in trouble but will raise eyebrows – socks that don’t match. No, don’t wear one black sock and one blue sock. That will just make you look like a nerd. Assert your geekdom by wearing socks that match without matching.

This concept is hard to explain, so check out some of the socks below.

Socks that don’t match, but do, make great stocking stuffers for the geek in your life, and they just might save a soul. So check out LittleMissMatched.com (the pictures I’ve shown are all guys socks, but they have lots of socks and other cool stuff that doesn’t match for everybody).

Note: As much as this post sounds like ad copy, it’s not a paid advertisement. I just really like the socks.

Career Advice You Can Count On

David Christiansen — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:37:32 +0000

Most career advice sucks at least 50% of the time. Context matters when it comes to advice because most career problems aren’t simple enough for generalities to work very often. Buy a house. Have kids. Don’t lease cars. Good advice? Sometimes, not always. For career advice to be really useful, it has to context imperial. No matter what the context, it has to work. Unfortunately, advice that fits this requirement is usually pretty lame.

So here are two pieces of advice that I think are pretty useful in nearly all contexts within IT.

1) Don’t schedule a presentation to senior management on the same day you get braces glued to your teeth, unless you want the director of application development to whisper “I tawt I taw a puddy tat” whenever you leave the room. I wish that hadn’t just happened to me YESTERDAY.

2) Don’t use waterfall for software development projects. Unless you want to spend huge amounts of money, deliver nothing, and go down with the ship insisting you would have been successful if only the business hadn’t kept changing requirements. Flippin’ baby.

Atomic Object: A Good Example of What Corporate IT Isn’t Like

David Christiansen — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:42:52 +0000

Tuesday night I spoke at XP Western Michigan, an XP user group in Grand Rapids Michigan. Here’s a link to the presentation – “Pulling Your Head Out of Your… Budget: Mental Re-tooling for Agile Project Management.” It was a great time – thanks to XPWM for having me out and to Matt Heusser for introducing me.

While I was there I was lucky enough to meet Carl Erickson, one of the owners of Atomic Object, and check out their office in Grand Rapids. It’s hard to think of what I saw there as an office – it had more in common with a grad school lab than an IT department. I thought it was awesome. One of the first employees to greet me was Carl’s dog, a friendly blue-eyed boy with a rather frightening resemblance to a wolf. Not only was he very well-behaved and quite used to strangers visiting their lab, he’s a perfect example of what you’re not going to run into in your typical corporate IT office building.

There are no cubical walls at Atomic Object, nor are there any offices for “The Boss”. In fact, the office was just a big, enthusiastically messy and non-sterile open space, with desks scattered around the room almost randomly. A hodge-podge of computers covered the flat spaces, most of them macs, nearly all of them with multiple monitors. One of the developers was even pounding away at a Macbook Air, the first I’ve seen in the wild.

The focal point of the office is the little kitchen, which was well-stocked with all the unhealthy snacks a code-warrior needs to be productive. Note the movie-theater style popcorn maker on top of the dishwasher. Carl told me the kitchen area is where many of their design sessions occur – it’s the creative mecca of their organization.

Hung on a pole in the center of the room is a huge stop light, the kind I dreamed about stealing as a teenager. Hooked up to their continuous integration environment by X10, the stop light lets them know when the build is broken (the CI environment, incidentally, is driven by an older iMac that sits on a bookshelf that looks like it was made from leftover parts of a crate).

I guess some people would find this kind of randomly distributed, inherently disorganized seeming workspace as a turn-off, but it felt full of creative energy to me. It screamed fun, creativity, and constant learning the minute I walked in. It seemed to be the antithesis of all things corporate IT – it was pragmatic, minimalistic, and devoid of pretense. It wasn’t hard to figure out that Atomic Object is a company whose primary concern is writing valuable software that works.

Top Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Corporate IT

David Christiansen — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:25:36 +0000

10. Deodorant is not optional.
9. Change jobs early in your career to get ahead.
8. Change jobs late in your career to get ahead.
7. Work as an independent consultant anytime you can.
6. Blogging is a two-edged sort. It can take away as many opportunities as it helps you find.
5. Get hemorrhoids. It’s a perfect excuse to leave a dull meeting.
4. Just because you’re 100% better than the guy next to you doesn’t mean you’re 100% more important.
3. Try reading the books in your cube every once in a while. You might actually learn something.
2. Getting a $100 memory upgrade for your laptop is treated with the same scrutiny as acquiring a $100M software package.
1. Did I mention that deodorant is not optional?

Switching to a Mac – Conversion Complete?

David Christiansen — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:26:29 +0000

Over a year ago I traded in my old PC for an iMac. Since then, the whole family had converted over – my kids have an iMac, my wife has a MacBook Pro. There’s not a single PC in my house anymore. I don’t have an iPod yet, or Apple TV, but… I am really glad I switched. My conclusion is that, even though there have been some frustrations along the way, Mac OS X and the hardware platforms it ships with are better than PCs – in a big way. I doubt I will ever buy a PC again.

So, in tribute to the end of the switching road, I’ve decided to share something creative I did on my wife’s MacBook, a video we call Pencil Madness. I hope you like it. It’s ridiculously simple, and a whole heckuvalotta fun, and it’s something I never would have bothered trying on a PC. The prospect of putting together a movie like this on a PC has always seemed like too much of a hassle.

- Dave

Stinking it Up for Productivity

David Christiansen — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:55:11 +0000

Drive by cubicle invasions interrupting your code efforts?
Long talking visitors sucking the life out of you?

You don’t have to come into the office before dawn to get a few hours of uninterrupted work time. No sir, cubicle drop-ins are a thing of the past with this foul smelling productivity boosting tip from my cubicle neighbor Shad Schultz.

Fart in your cube. The louder and stinkier the better. When the air around your cubicle approaches the “crap-point” (think dew-point, but for flatulence), nobody will bother you. And the fear that you’ll drag some of your bog stench around with you will stop them from inviting you to meetings too.

This strategy has a side benefit – you can eat all your favorite foods at lunch again! No more worrying about the bloated sick feeling you get from holding all those pent-up gases in until your next trip to the john. So go for it. Head off to Pancho’s, Skyline Chili, or White Castle, or wherever it is you’ve been avoiding because you don’t want to get caught farting in a staff meeting.

Fart. Write code. Repeat.

Welcome to the Sacred Order of the External Mind

David Christiansen — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:50:49 +0000

I wish I wrote this article.

Join the order, and turn your brain over to the information age. Very nice.

John Garrett, Outside The Box

David Christiansen — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:50:18 +0000

I met John Garrett at a charity event for The Hair Fairy Project, where he opened for another, “more famous” comedienne. He was funnier than the headliner, to tell you the truth. I laughed my butt off.

John started out as an accountant. You don’t normally think of accountants as funny, and maybe that’s why he didn’t fit in. I have to admit I’ve borrowed at least one bit of his material – whenever I post something I worry is a little too controversial I tell Shannon (my wife) “this might be the post that makes me a full time writer.”

I picked one of the clips I like the most from John’s CD for you to preview, Human Resources. Click on the link to listen to it. He rags on human resources, consultants, and life in corporate America in general. If you like it, I highly recommend you purchase the CD. It is available through John’s web site. You can download the CD if you like, but I suggest you buy the CD. I have never seen a CD that is as visually cool as John’s CD. You will really dig its looks and its content. It might seem a little strange to suggest a CD because of its looks, but once you see this throwback black vinyl CD you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Happy Friday to The Dark Side

David Christiansen — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:53:40 +0000

One of the nice things about corporate IT is that you get to wear jeans on Friday, at least in most places. Sure, you can wear shorts, flip flops, and bring your dog to work at Google (or Microsoft, or lots of other SOFTWARE companies), but this is THE DARK SIDE. Take what you can get and try to be happy about it.

I’ve been jonesing for one of these rocket launchers ever since I saw it in an article in CIO about USB devices your boss won’t appreciate. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find one you can control with a mac. There is third-party software available for this one, which makes it a (home) office necessity as far as I’m concerned. Definitely a business expense I can justify.