After more than two years of working with Siemens, I have decided that there is nothing holding me there any more.

What was once an interesting job filled with opportunities to learn new things has quickly become a quagmire of all-nighters, piss poor code and people who just didn’t care. So I stopped caring, my performance suffered and I figured that it’s better to call it quits while I was ahead.

I’ve been taking some time off for the last couple of weeks. I’ve finalized my paperwork with Siemens and have already made arrangements for my next job. I’ll be working in the banking industry. While I can’t really share more info than that right now, I can say that I have seen these people use some fun Java technologies.

Namely, I’ve seen Maven, Spring, Hibernate, Jetty, Jasper Reports and various others used in a live system. Can’t really say I know what the system does, but the sheer amount of technology involved sounds promising

Technorati Tags: quitting, quit job, leaving, siemens, croatia, job, office, work conditions

This is what pulling an all-nighter looks like, kids.

It’s you, versus the problem, versus an almost unlimited supply of coffee.

This coffee machine gave up. It’s display reads “Hot drinks unavailable.”

I’m still working.

It seems to me that a gem from the past is becoming ubiquitous again. The technology I’m talking about is geolocation by the client’s IP address. Read on »

Chindogu is a Japanese art form of creating inventions that seem to help solve a problem, but when analyzed they bring about just as many problems with them, albeit different ones.

For some nice examples of chindogu, you could take a look at the nonist blog’s 12 examples of chindogu.

Notice the similarity between this photo and the photo of the man with the inverse umbrella.

Technorati Tags: vienna, wien, chindogu, japan, culture, sociology, inventions

There’s a biologist out there, known by the name Eric R. Pianka. He specializes in lizards and snakes.

However, this doesn’t tell is how popular he has become because of some of his recent talks. In them he proposes the idea that about 90% of the population should be killed in order to save the planet. It seems that this has been very badly accepted by the non scientific crowd, as well as some scientists.

I have to agree upon one thing with Mr. Pianka. Death is a fact of life, and the truth is that we are getting a bit crowded here. I’m not saying that those problems couldn’t be resolved with better resource management, but the current situation doesn’t look like it’s progressing. Maybe we do need a bit of bird flu to fix our gene pools?

As a computer consultant, it’d be hard for me if I would be one of the people to survive the death of 90% of the population. On the other hand, I think I’d enjoy it in a perverse way. I have lots of practical skills that I could put to work in such a case - woodworking, plumbing and water systems with primitive materials, masonry…

The ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times,” sounds appealing. However, I may be a victim of childhood stuffed with bad reading material: Earth Abides; Alas, Babylon; The New Madrid Run; The Stand; Dies The Fire; etc… all really good end-of-the-world books.
Whatever. Go read his website which tells a lot of interesting stuff about him and decide for yourself. The recent events related to him can be looked up by following blogs on Technorati search “Pianka.”

Technorati Tags: pianka, biology, extinction, death, cool, h5n1, bird flu