But we work in summer

More on the August paralysis. El País, today, full-page ad. An oncological hospital in Madrid advertises its services using the tagline:

We work at normal pace in summer

This is not a small note at the bottom of the page. Rather, this sentence is in large type, at the top of the page, acting as what we could call a marketing differentiator, i.e. a fact or property that makes this product (the hospital) unique from its competitors and hopefully attractive to the potential clients.

Isn’t this sad? This is not a video shop, for Pete’s sake. It’s an oncological hospital! And they use a full-page on the Sunday El País (imagine the cost!) to make the proud statement that they work at normal pace in summer.

This country just sucks.

Teamwork (again) on Peopleware (again)

Ha ha ha. I am laughing my ass off.

I just started reading chapter 27 of the second edition of Peopleware, where DeMarco and Lister poke (serious) fun at “those damn posters” that make your skin crawl by insulting your intelligence. Guess what example they use. Yes, exactly. The very same one that I ranted on ages ago. They even quote the whole thing as I did.

Funny? Sad? Pathetic?

Anyway. I’m off for the weekend to visit the lovely historically interesting San Simón island.

Digital glitz

My mom’s old computer click-of-death‘ed a few days ago. I ordered her a new Inspiron, which arrived yesterday, and today I drove up to A Coruña to set it up at her place. As usual, I was positively surprised at the quality of Dell’s packaging and overall engineering of the out-of-the-box experience. I set up the 17-inch widescreen flat panel display, the 3-GB RAM, 200-GB HD mini-tower machine, hooked everything up, and in 15 minutes all was running smoothly. Not a bad deal for just 575 €, I thought.

The disappointment came once Vista configured itself and let us in. Ohmygod, what is that ugly thing on the desktop? You know, I have been using Vista for some time now, and I like it. Yes. I like it. I like its behaviour and I like its looks. What? No, I am not embarrassed of saying this in public. I know, some people are. Anyway, I digress. There was that really ugly thing on the desktop, like a huge horizontal toolbar across the top, holding a few large blackish icons. Also, something similar to Vista’s SideBar could be seen, well, down the right edge of the screen, where the SideBar usually appears, only that this thing was not the SideBar but something horrible. It looked more or less like the SideBar, i.e. it was a container-like area where large applets where docked. But it was oh-so-ugly. Not ugly. It was the most unstylish, tacky and trashy Windows application I’ve seen since the days of Visual Basic 5.

To make things worse (or more interesting, depending on your views), I realised that some McAfee thingy was also running since a menacing “M” was winking at me from the notification area on the taskbar. I am a survivor of McAfee products. I used to be a proud user of them, until one day I admitted that my relationship to them was a vampiric one; they were sucking my blood, stealing my CPU cycles, bombarding me with adware for products I didn’t want, and making tasks that should be as low-profile and lightweight as possible a cumbersome and exasperating chore. So I filed for divorce and McAfee left my life forever. I am happily married to Windows Live OneCare now.

August paralysis

In Spain we suffer from August paralysis. Since almost everybody takes their annual leave as a block in August, public services, businesses and stores are at half capacity if not less. The result is paralysis. No services, poor attention, closed shops.

Most businesses and government agencies go as far as encouraging as many of their employees as possible to take all their annual leave in August, with total disregard for those customers who may want to be served during that month.

A few days ago we wanted to do some refurbishment at my new work place. The answer from our regular provider was “the person in charge is on leave and won’t be back for 20 days”. Yes, we could move to a different provider, but (a) it is a pain and (b) most would be in a similar situation. Last week I phoned a local government agency to inquire about the parking zone system; the guy whose echo resounded in the empty room across the phone wasn’t able to answer my questions because “the woman in charge of that is on vacation”, and she won’t be back for three weeks! Try getting a plumber in August. Ha!

Wouldn’t it be better, maybe, to scatter annual leave time over the year, and have people take turns so there’s always somebody at work who can deal with customers calling?

What do you think? Is it me, or is this just a stupid way of doing things?

Where are the sysadmins?

Recently I have been trying to find a sysadmin for our lab. Hopeless. Where do you find one?

Our government-dictated recruiting system is so stupid that we cannot hire the person we want. Rather, we specify the criteria that the person should meet and a panel in Madrid runs the whole selection process. A few months later, somebody turns up with a signed contract under his/her arm and you are supposed to smile and be happy with him/her for a couple of years.

To add insult to injury, the criteria that the Madrid guys would take from us are supposed to be outlined in a few paragraphs. Part of these criteria must address the university degree of the individual to be hired.

As you can imagine, the outcome of this nonsensical policy is quite random. Sometimes you get brilliant people, sometimes you get people that are severly mismatched to their position.

Oh well. I digress. So, what am I supposed to write in a few paragraphs so that the best possible sysadmins are selected? What kind of degree is logical to expect from a top sysadmin?

Wikipedia says that there’s no single path to becoming a sysadmin, and this quite matches my own experience. The good sysadmins I’ve met come from all sorts of funny backgrounds, from biology to history to commerce & economics.

Help!