Faith Hill Bikini, image courtesy of FOXNews

Has anyone noticed how ugly this Faith Hill bikini shot looks? What’s there to look at in that bikini? The magazine called “SHAPE” should’ve known better what is shape and how to show it.

Just to rant some more – what had happen to the common taste? Everywhere I look I see shameless promotion of “boys in dresses” – child or boyish looking girls, that probably starved to near death by some designer who also prefers boys.

Why my girlfriend has real big problems finding a decent bra for her 36 DDD size, just as well as anyone with boobs size larger than size C? Given how much everyone screams about America being fat, overweight and enlarged, someone must have thought about that nationwide market of women with breasts larger than size C. Someone other than tasteless Lane Bryant brand must have came up with lingerie and other stuff for women who look like women. Or so I thought.

Somehow, all this escapes me. Stay tuned – I am so annoyed by images of all these boys in a dress it makes me want to do some propaganda of real world curvy women. I’ll see what I can do.

Put a software developer in the cubicle. Block almost all of his internet access, including developers’ forums, blogs, personal e-mail (where he may be subscribed to newsletters and newsgroups). Have him work on web application. Keep randomly block more web sites as the work progresses. Watch what happens.

Here, I’ll admit – I am neither the best nor the brightest star in the team. I constantly need to learn something new and re-address what others already know to be able to keep up with the team. Of course, I have some knowledge up my sleeve too, but in general – I know I have much to learn, I don’t mind learning and I enjoy it. I also know that 90% of my team have similar kind of catching up to do on a daily basis. Which we all cannot do, because finding an unblocked useful resource takes increasingly longer times – and we still need to get the job done.

So, what kind of bright management decision was to block access to all these resources? So that we would not spend time on personal pleasures? Or because management don’t trust us enough to let freely search the internet for the information we might need in our course of work? Or maybe because someone up the food chain all the answers to all the questions in the universe are in MSDN that is installed locally?

Couple of years ago I read an article about bank workers (and these were not the tellers – the regular office workers) who were only allowed 3 to 7 minutes of bathroom time per day, 2 minutes of walking to and from their workstations and two 15 minute lunch breaks. It was stated that efficiency increased to about 130% from the previous level. What the management usually fails to notice is that if you put a really muscled guy with a whip and a bat to force people to work, it may increase the efficiency to 200% and even 300%. But for a very short time.

The problem is that large companies only want to hire either code monkeys (so that thay can outsource their jobs later to India or Romania because of budgeting issues) or gurus who are capable of replacing entire departments. Such gurus want (and deserve, trust me) huge salaries that are, however, still offsetting salaries of few average programmers. The problem, though, is that such gurus are rare and hiring them means doing things in a certain specific way.

Let’s say you hire a guru for a project, the project gets completed, your guru moves on to another project at another company. Three months later you need an update to your existing software. You can’t hire same guru – he’s somewhere else and not interested. So you hire an average Joe (after all – the job isn’t that complicated, right?) who spends three times more time trying to figure out what’s going on. By the time he’s done there’s a new update pending, so you keep paying him three times more for figuring things that were done in a certain unique way.

Personally, I am neither a code monkey nor a guru, so I am sort of in between the bandwagons here. Can’t say if it’s a bad thing or a good thing. By the way, my own dream job of the moment is some large development project on which I will be working alone with a good and understanding project manager and business clients who don’t tell me how to write the code. Oh, and I prefer free bottled water in pantry, thank you.

What struck me as I was filling out form by form is how all those social web sites treat your information. Some of them post in large print that your information will NOT be shared. Another one (namely Blinklist) pushed some ads, some “Get Free Something” bait and switch offers and after declining – some more in-between advertising pages. Another one (Simpy) sent me three confirmation e-mails. The whole point of all three was: 1) to promote Simpy Firefox Add-on (first e-mail), 2) to welcome new user (that’s the one I expected) and 3) to promote Simpy blog widget. Why would I have to get all this junk in my mail box – beats me.

If anyone from those web sites can hear me, here’s my statement: if you want me back on those sites – get rid of these techniques. Now.