I’m ‘blogging’ old school in a moleskin journal, however I’ve nabbed Dad’s laptop to assure the world that I am, indeed, alive. It’s muggy and beautiful. We leave tomorrow for Henro.

The stupid of my developers is only matched by the stupid of my India Consulting Firm.

At work, we tell people “If you want to be added to a project’s list of users, open a ticket with the project’s name listed under ‘PROJ’ and the list of users under ‘USERS’. Please only open one ticket for each project, though you can list up to 50 users per ticket.” Makes sense, right? Well eventually one fucker said “Add Joe Blow to Projects Fido, Rolf and Spot” in one ticket. So I replied “One Project per ticket, please.” And life moves on.

Today we get 15 tickets from that guy. Each one is for ONE person in ONE project. Really, all they want is to add the same 5 people to 3 projects. They only need 3 tickets! I’m about to correct this when my Indian consultant (an offshore/onshore consultant - that means he lives in the US and works in the US but is paid by his company in India) tells me ‘Please don’t! I need to prove I do work here, and my company counts how many tickets I do! This will let me not have to ask you for something to do today!’

I approve of this and we both giggle a lot.

Then I tell this saga to my online friends, one of whom coins the comment that is this post’s title. As he and I are chatting, I sum the situation at my office as follows:

I have an outsourced tech, who was hired to save the company money, being told that he can only keep his job by the number of tickets he CLOSES. At the same time, the other outsourced tech in other departments are being told to keep their jobs by opening more tickets. SO the developer’s outsource techs create more work for our support outsource techs to complete, fulfilling an endless cycle of busywork that I otherwise would have had to deal with, but now can ignore. While it is increasing the work twice over, it actually managed to DECREASE my work by a quarter. While it’s not saving the company any money, it’s helping me out.

So today I see this:

It occurs to me that even though I never want to wear a dress, I can’t dance, and I think cheerleaders are lame, I still watched this and thought: My dad would have been that guy. So I email him and tell him that.

My father’s reply:

…. but I would have worn a dress, too.

xxxx

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love him.

My darlin’ dearest bought me a new guitar today. Belated birthday, but not her fault, as the store had no Martins and had to order me one from another store and then they messed up and sold it and … Anyway. I now have a Martin Backpacker.

I really thought ‘I don’t travel enough for this…’ and almost asked for something else, but then I got it and I love it. I admit, I want the Martin D-16 (or similar - I love the D series) but this thing weighs nothing. And it does have a slight ‘banjo’ quality to it, but it’s also got a great tone that’s as good as a full sized Yamaha. No real bass to it, but what do you expect?

I plan to bring it to Japan, but first I must practice a lot in the three weeks leading up, so my hand doesn’t die!

Spoiler free review of BSG’s Mid-Season Finale

Seriously. That’s exactly how I feel and that’s the face I made. And worse? We have to wait till 2009 to see the end! I’m not joking! They filmed it, edited it, prepped it, and now they make us wait.

It’s almost as bad as Avatar!

My Mole Journal, Ep 1

This will make no sense unless you watch the show.
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Foamy’s on Hiatus. After three weeks of us making noise back at the damn thing every time it started it, Foamy seems to have migrated to our neighbors. Which serves them right for not listening to me.

However I will share how Foamy made me feel.

Read this Comic

Spoilers exist (Cousin Dan, this means you!). Short version. GO SEE HIM!

My one regret is that I should have gone to see him in Cleveland and taken Taffy. She would have pissed herself laughing.

Oh and don’t leave until the house lights come up. There’s always more.

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I’ve been perfecting the art of a spamfilter on the ipstenu and jorjafox servers for about 10 years now. To that end, I’ve come up with a list of emails that I don’t want, and thus, are turfed before I ever read them:

If your subject line contains any of the following, I will never see it:

• (Id:
• Auslaend
• Key
• Time Share
• {Filename?}
• {Virus?}

Key was a weird one and is only on JFO, as it was getting GIGS of spam a week with that subject line.

I also block all emails with GIFs, anything from the .ru domain (I don’t hate the Russians, I got 50+ spam in a week and SpamAssassin wasn’t catching it), and anything from the asswipe who called me to demand to know why JFO wasn’t updating with why Jorja Fox had left CSI… Seriously. If he calls again, I’m sic’ing the police on him for harassment.

Anyone else have standard FOAD email subjects?