Tag: thoughts

Babies vs. policemen

While walking around the airport today, I noticed an interesting similarity between policemen and babies. Policemen have whistle. Whistles are usually hanging on a small piece of rope around the neck. Policemen blows the whistle and than spits it out. Babies have soothers. Soothers are usually attached to a small piece of rope that can be easily clipped to baby’s clothes. When babies get bored with soothers they spit them out. Soothers than hang very much like policemen’ whistles.

That made me smile at policemen…

On salaries

The question of salaries is, I think, one of the most important in the business world. How much should an employee get paid? How much is too much? How much is too low?

The other day I was thinking about ways of finding the ideal salary amount. This is close to impossible, of course. But I managed to find a nice measurement for the managers to compare. If employee, by accident, will one day destroy the boss’s car, which supposedly is not insured against accidents like this, than employee’s salary should be high enough to provide a realistic payback period.

Thus, the more expensive boss’s car gets, the more employees should be rewarded for their work. Nice and fair, isn’t it? :)

IBM presentation

I just came back from a two hour presentation by IBM that they gave in our office. They were mostly talking about their OpenPower servers, TotalStorage storage and backup solutions, and, of course, about their BladeCenter.

Overall, the presentation was slightly boring and a bit too long. I learned little except for the names of product lines. I was also repeatedly told that IBM is getting cheaper more affordable and more open.

I was also surprised as to how often the word “Linux” came up. I mean it was used almost as often as “IBM”. Every ,and I mean every, slide of the presentation had the word “Linux” written at least once. They even had a picture of tux on a couple of pages. And they mentioned a few times that IBM currently works with Red Hat and SUSE.

The funny thing is that almost every time one of the presenters used the word “Linux”, someone from our guys was turning around and looking at me. I was the biggest Linux and Open Source Software advocate present there. Some people can still remember similar presentations from a few years ago when I would ask about Linux support and presenters would just nod their heads negatively. There has been surely an improvement. Those who don’t support Linux, don’t even come to our office anymore.

The resume of the presentation is still the same as it always was though – a nice fairy tale that you have to sell your organs to live in. You don’t need organs in the fairy tale anyway. The sales people were trying to convince that the situation with expensiveness changed dramatically, but watching how comfortably they were operating with tens of thousands of dollars, I tend to think otherwise.

On long posts

Looking at my recent posts you might be thinking something like “What’s wrong with these guy? These are like paragraphs and paragraphs of text. I can’t even be bothered to read all that crap!”. Well, if you do, I’ll tell you that I am surprised myself.

I tried to analyse this change of my writing habbits and pretty quickly I realised that it was the migration of my blogging software to WordPress that triggered that change.

As you might remember, one of my main dissatisfactions with Nucleus CMS was the editor. WordPress provides an excellent editor, which is fast, comfortable, and easily extendable (quicktags are easy to add and edit).

With editor hussle out of the way, nothing stops me from writing more, and thus I am free at expressing whatever I feel like and freeing my head from thoughts that would stay there for ages. The more I dump, the more space (or rather thinking power) I get. And the more thinking power I get, the more thoughts I get again. As you can see this is the vicious circle, that I can’t break. And even if I could, I woldn’t do so just yet.

So, for all of you out there who like short posts – my temporary appologies. I will try to put some short items here too, but they will be mostly in the Links category. That’s my educated guess. :)

P.S.: 5 paragraphs to say a simple thing… that’s graphomania or some other disorder.