You? Who the hell are you?

Well, it's been more than a year now... wow, that must be some kind of new world record in lazyness and negligence.
Oh, yeah, I'll get an award for that? Oh my god, that's all so surprising, I...I don't know what to say. Uuuummm.... I want to thank everyone who supported me on my way to this success, specially my incredible ability to postpone important matters to the point of no return, all the people who successfully distracted me from anything and of course a big thanks goes to real life. I wouldn't have made it this far without you guys! Thanks!
*tear*

Well, being absent for so long needs a reason of course, but you'll see that not many of these reasons hardly make any sense, granted if they are of any relevance to the matter in question at all. Not that you'd care in the first place, of course.

Firstly, I was trying to figure out how to fly. Not a big deal you think? Well, it sure is, because I said to myself, 'Tim, you're not going to use an airplane or a chopper or even a parachute (also known as "sissy-towel") for this. You're not a coward. Real men don't need any auxiliaries to do some badass flying.' With this approach to flying in mind, the first place you'll find advice on how to do it, is check up in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Unfortunately, Douglas Adams had obviously no idea how hard it really is to get everything to work how he figured it. I decided to ask him what the f*** he had been smoking when he was writing that.
And since Mr. Douglas seems to have perished, I had to spend some time being dead in order to interview him. (Luckily he also had some advice on how this works, but I won't tell you, I can only tell you that you need 23 Guatemalan spin-win snails, a rifle with 3 barrels and a homosexual, castrated voodoo priest)
As things were getting much more complicated and some serious multidimensional lawsuits had to be held, I decided to get back to life again. To my surprise more than a year had gone by (you really lose your sense for time when you're dead, the only reference you have are the number of maggots having a party in your rectum)

Well, that's pretty much it. As soon as I woke up I came here to post..... ahh, ok, I went to the toilet first.

I hope I don't get haunted by some people I pissed off while being dead. Dead people can be pretty resentfully, because they don't have a lot of things to do other than getting eaten by worms, which is not very entertaining in the long run.

If they leave me alone, I'll post again soon.
Cheers
Tim

PS: I'm wondering if I now qualify as a zombie... I'll go check this up at the local office of the zombie association. I sure hope they had enough brain for lunch.

Where me been has? (What?)

It's been long time since the last post. (Well, ok, not that long, but still longer than usual)
There was a darn good reason why I didn't post anything in this time, but I forgot about it because I ran into a strut, which was surprisingly close to the ground.
Of course it was not the strut's fault, it was just doing its job as it had been doing it for 178 years. After such a long time you tend to become rather are good at your job. The strut did indeed an awfully good job, since the house it is a part of has stood there for 176 years (originally, the house was built a little more uphill, but it obviousely didn't like the view there and caught the next best landslide 2 years after).

I felt fluffy and knotty after the crash.
I can't really describe what feeling fluffy feels like, but it somehow fits perfectly. The knotty feeling wasn't caused by knotted and twisted parts of my body, it was more my state of mind that was knotty.
It took me a awful lot of time to end one specific thought, because other thoughts thought they needed some quality time with my consciousness and jumped out and started yelling and shouting at it. In order to get some order my consciousness redirected the most hideously looking thoughts to my subconsciousness. At least that's what it tried to do, because my subconsciousness was out for lunch, together with my libido.


So long
Tim

PS: Another reason I hadn't written anything may be the exam session coming closer terribly fast. If it's coming any faster than now it will travel back in time...

Proper Project Planning

There are many guides to handle a project properly and efficiently. Most of the contain fancy graphics and tables which, when it comes down to real life usage, most precisely fail to be of any use.
It's not only the graphical depiction of the processes you're supposed to apply that are wrong, but also the whole processes seem to be terribly inaccurate if you look back on a finished project.

That's also something that's suggested by those guides so you can learn from your mistakes. However, I recommend not to do so, because most of the time you'll end up so depressed about all the things you did wrong or didn't do at all that you need a really stiff drink afterwards.
I'd propose you just skip the looking back part and go out for a drink immediately after having handed out the project report.
Most people already do that, but they disguise it by calling it an "end of project celebration", which is basically the euphemistic equivalent to a nice and hefty booze-up.

Here's how projects are really handled, regardless of any advice.

Person A comes up with solution F, Person B has the idea for solution G, C knows how the solution H works and Persons D and E are arguing about the report layout.
While A tries to convince everyone that F is the best, B and C try to win D and E for their course. The next day A says that solutions G and H are equally good, B now says that F is perfectly fine, D can't decide which of F, G and H she hates the most and E has lost track of everything. C has called out sick that day.
The following day E has finally caught up to the rest and has many issues about each solution, A is discussing with C the happenings of the previous day, B is violently trying to get F to be the final solution, C keeps unsuccessfully insisting on a democratic selection and D is nagging about the lousy teamwork and how the project is failing.
After the more or less worst solution has been found, everyone agrees on going on with it so they can finally have their cup of coffee (except D, she hates coffee, she's just lazy). After everything is thorougly calculated and estimated and the deadline is drawing closer, E finds out that the solution is not working after all and that A,B and D are lousy jerks nobody can possibly work with.
The following quarrels and lengthy nightshifts result in a completely reworked report, which is all but correct or even useful.


Despite all these problems, the projects are usually a striking success and nobody really knows why (and nobody actually wants to know).


So long
Tim

A strange place to eat

Did you ever notice that people act totally different in restaurants?
Normally, everyone is rather keen on keeping their money. But when it comes down to pay things in a restaurant, they always start arguing who can spend their hard(ly) earned money.

Or that one time back then.
A family, mother, father and son, waiting for their food to be served. The little boy is naturally very unpleased about the subject of waiting. Due to the lack of any other entertainment he concludes that he should cause some mischief instead. This includes tossing forks at other guests, tripping up waiters or simply crying out loud for a change.

All this is of course not very well perceived by the parents and the other guest, particularly the guests with the forks sticking somewhere unconfortable in their body. The waiters don't really mind that much, because they get paid for all this stuff.

Usually the parents would just keep saying things like: "Shhh, sweetie, please be quiet" or "If you don't hush now you won't get any dessert afterwards". These sort of requests or threats are very obviousely entirely useless and the parents very often know that.
If they wouldn't be sitting in a restaurant they would just say: "Shut the **** up you sh****** brat. If you don't shut your ***** at once I'll ****** you with a ******* and ********* until you don't know where's up and down!!!!! Geez, damnit!!"

These are very inapproprte words to be set free in a peaceful average restaurant. Not because the restaurant itself would mind being the host for some serious swearing (the only buildings that do so are churches, they are really not that easy going if you ever get to talk to one), but the people within it would.
So the parents are restricted to the useless talk, and the little brat keeps producing noise and pain.

All this inevitably led to the invention of McDonalds where you can shove your kids in some small plastic playground if you get tired of them.

So long
Tim


PS: No, I don't have kids

Surviving death

I went through a painful week.
I had to deal with this really annoying customer. He was trying to get a refund for his broken leg, because it failed to serve as a crowbar. I tried to explain to him that we don't have any spare legs in stock, since our branch hospital isn't that big, so he should address to our Head Hospital. He didn't like that and started yelling at me more or less, but rather more than less, incoherently.
I hung up because I was needed in the operation garage to explain to another customer that it is not possible to replace his heart with a green 12 cylinder diesel engine.
We ran out of the green ones yesterday. He then also started yelling at me more or less, but rather more than less, incoherently.

Many people always get off their initial topic when getting angry about something. Some scientist say this is due to the limited mental abilities (and the lack of any knowlegde about platinum based nanocells for semi-purposeless use in quantum medicine) of normal humans, but most of those scientists are elitist smart-asses.

Despite their hateful attitude, they still have a point there. If you have ever watched someone being really furious (best enjoyed at a safe distance of at least a bit more than armlength, so you won't get involved in severe fist-to-face complications), you surely noticed the tremendous amout of energy the person is wasting on pointless tasks like smashing furniture or learning French.

Of course, all this energy has to come from somewhere; in most cases it's sanity that has to bear the reduced power supply. The worst thing you could do at this stage is pointing at the raging person and laugh.
There are, however, three things you can do in order to survive the rampage.
Sit-and-Care, Sit-and-Bear and Sit-and-Stare.
The last one is the easiest, because it's almost effortless to sit still and create an air of mostly unoffending indifference. Just sit and stare at a random point anywhere nowhere near the person and their surroundings.

Sit-and-Bear is for all the masochist out there, who love to get a nice beat up from time to time (This method may become Lie-unconsciousely-on-the-floor-and-Bear at some stage, but you'll have managed the worst part by then, so don't worry about that)

Sit-and-Care is hard to do, but can have astoundingly positive results. The general idea behind it is to pretend you'd care about the persons feelings and thus try to confirm them in their temporarily distorted opinions. Eventually, you will have to stand up and smash some precious porcelain to assert your point in a physically convincing way. If you do well, you'll have finally found someone who helps you to move into that nice new flat.

Cheers
Tim

Lies, untruths and other unimportances

I've just overheard...errrm I mean overread this conversation between person A, B, C and D on a forum. It started all after Person B posted a picture of his desktop on which you could see Firefox running in 3 different windows.

A: What kind of Firefox user are you? Tabs, man, TABS.

B: What you don't realize is that each of those windows contains about 57 tabs each.

C: Fifty seven tabs you say?
Triangle Fellow... I am going to accuse you of spewing untruths.

B: Hey, there's a lot of pretty girls posting pics of themselves on the internet these days.

C: Lies.
Most of them are men.

B: No.

D: Correction. Lots of them used to be men

Of course, such conversations happen every day in the Net, but you just can't possibly get them all. Unless you are some kind of super being that sees and hears everything, like that guy...what was his name again? Something with a G and an O i think...damn my memory for names.

Oh, yes, now I remember, Gordon. Really cool guy, you know, but not the brightest. He once said that although he knew almost everything about anything there was something to know about, he had never figured out why exactly the chicken crossed the street. I told him it crossed it in order to get to the other side, whereupon he seemed to think about it for a bit and then told me what a unconceivably dimwitted answer that was and ran off crying and laughing at the same time.

I've never met him ever since, but I heard he had snapped completely because of me and after spending 4 years in the Happy People Adjustment Asylum he decided to shorten his name and to found his own relgion. (The nurses told me, that, the day before he left, he came to them and asked if it was ok for them if he escaped now)

I'd really love to know what has happened in all this time...

So long
Tim

Death is imminent

I was supposed to get up at 6 this morning and leave at 7, but I didn't, because I had some very serious and important things to do in bed, most of them involved a lot of lying around and snoring. Luckily, attendance was totally voluntary, so I didn't cause any problems for someone else (which would also have somehow been fun to do). Of course I was fully aware of that when my alarm clock rang, I always instantly know what I need to know after waking up. I'm not of that sort of people who suffer from overnight-oblivion. As most illnesses, an annoying and absolutely useless one. If you want to know wheter you are infected or not go through the following check list (it's the only way to find out, believe me):

1. Before you go to bed, put your cat, your parrot, your guinea pig and your mouse in your wardrobe.
2. Try memorizing which animal you put on which spot and go to bed.
3. Sleep
4. Wake up.....I said: WAKE UP!......there we go
5. At this point, if you get off to the kitchen to get some tea for breakfast, you seem to be a very severe case of overnight-oblivion, because you didn't just forget your pets in the wardrobe, no, you also forgot that you hate tea. You are doomed and there's not point in making a fuss about it now, you'll eventually die sometime anyway.
If you happen to remember what you did last night, try to write down where exactly the pets are supposed to be.
6. Open the wardrobe.
Analysis
First case: Cat: occupying one random spot Parrot, mouse and guinea pig: more or less absent
Tough luck, buddy. You very probably didn't remember their positions correctly, did you? You have slight overnight-oblivion.
Second case: The animals are exactly where you put them. Congratulations, you successfully starved your pets to death without even noticing. Jubilate, this means you don't suffer from overnight-oblivion but from devasting stupidity.

Good luck

Tim