People Who Work Christmas Eve

It's Five days 'till Christmas

It's five days 'till Christmas
The dates almost here
With presents and carols
celebration and cheer

I feel like I've missed it
As if already gone by
I'm not feeling festive
I can't tell you why

I saw a strange woman
In line at this place
With bright Christmas sweater
and a frown on her face

If a bedazzled sweater
with real bells and a wreath
can't make you feel merry
Then you're mush underneath

There's just so much to do
With shopping and working
An election year coming
Who knew Christmas was lurking

So it's five days away
The window is prime
I mean look what Scrooge did
In a much smaller time

It's just five days aways
When we all remember
The birth of our Saviour
At the end of December

With thanks unto God
We should be rejoicing
For his gift of a Son
We should be voicing

So say "Merry Christmas"
And then smile as you do
It's just five days away
Let Christs joy shine through you

-Peter P. Brown 2007

Encoded For Security

I code. I'm a coder. I have coded. Up until yesterday this would not be true. I spent 3 hours yesterday writing a 10 line Perl script to do a job that manually would have taken me about 30 minutes. It was a fun challenge, but I could not imagine doing it for a living.

I get paid to be a network engineer. This means that I spend 60% of my time with hardware, 40% of my time with software, and 0% of my time writing code. Code scares me. Coders scare me too.

They can spend 10 hours each day about 3 inches away from a computer monitor for close to 3 months. Their co-workers pass by their cube to hear only the constant clicking of keys, rifling of paper and the incoherent mutterings and tortured moans of defeat. In the end after twenty-seven management revisions and user upgrades they barely squeak their program out with two days before the deadline.

It's not until after coding is complete when debugging begins. Now the pale cave dwelling coder must try to fix all the problems in their code. Because to produce a product that is free of bugs is an impossibility. They know this. So no matter how hard the devoted code masher tries, they will fail. Not can fail or might fail, will fail. I mean really, is that any way to live?!

In addition to that they must devote a huge amount of free time on staying current with this bizarre language that they speak. That's right, it changes and pretty frequently. Could you imagine that holding true with any other language?

So you spent three years in college learning French. You speak it very well, and use it everyday. Well guess what, the French have just released French 2.0. That's right, the sentence structure is completely changed around and even a number of words have been revised. They keep saying it's new, improved and works better than French 1.9, but you have yet to see any real benefit. It's not like you have any option though, everyone else is now using French 2.0 so you'll have to learn the new version.

What you called the restroom in French 1.9 is now the word for apple. In fact there is no word for restroom any more, you now have to say "The room where the bath is". If you don't like it, don't worry they'll probably change it again with the next release due out in 6 months!

This is what a coder goes through every few years. No thanks. The principles of networking were established close to 40 years ago, and while speed and the medium changes every few years, the concept of networking is the same as it was in the 70's. So when I say I code, I don't mean to say I'm looking for a career change.

No sir, I'd rather do it at my leisure than have it a requirement for living.

20 Signs You're Out Of Your Mind

Suggestion by Fernando

You have long conversions with yourself

Sometimes those conversations become arguments

You frequently lose those arguments

Because of this, bums on the street give you change

You spend the majority of your day at a computer manipulating things that don't really exist

You might get fired if those non-existent things were lost

You like the taste of black licorice

You can spell 'licorice' correctly on the first attempt but can't spell 'their' without spell check

You have more than two children

You want to have another

You argue with people about which are smarter, dogs or cats.

You're convinced your dog is smart because she'll chase her tail on command

Right before Y2K you stocked up on canned tomatoes from the store

Because if your alarm clock doesn't know what year it is, you might not be able to buy canned tomatoes

You yell at people on the television

You get mad when they don't do what you tell them to

You actually tell people how you're really feeling when they ask you

This conversation usually last at least 10 minutes

You love to buy items based on the claims of infomercials

You paid for a copy of Microsoft Vista

Stumped

"How about what life would be like if we still had to drive horses." -Jason from Puddleglum's Wigwam

Honestly Jason, I want you to know that I've been giving this a lot of thought. I believe that it would be bad. I mean real bad and stuff. Like people wouldn't like it and things like that.

Okay, I admit it you stumped me. I mean I haven't been able to come up with anything even halfway amusing at all, and I've been thinking about it for over a week. I liked the idea and envisioned some crazy story of horses in the backseat of cars with all their nasty habits. Like they were the oppressive overlord and we were the slaves... And then I just said, "Peter, that's not even halfway funny." So I cried myself to sleep and gave up on the dream of my horsey tale (<-- this is both a lie and a bad pun)

It's not you, it's me. I just wanted you to know I tried. Honest! I liked the idea, but just couldn't figure it out.

I also tried to get you a Papa John's pizza, but they don't take Paypal, so I'm sorry about that too. I let you down man, are you sure you don't like Dominoes? Oh wait, never mind they don't take Paypal either.