Hard Deadlines, Soft Couch

In my career I spent a good deal of time working overnight, pulling 12, 24, and even 36 hour coding sprints. You can cram a couple of weeks of work into 36 hours. This is not unusual or heroic at all – most programmers I know routinely work crazy hours.

Because of this it is very important to have a couch for naps in the office. At my current job there are no cornerner offices. Every corner of our parallelogram-shaped building is either inside a conference room or set aside for a small meeting space. One of them is where “my” couch is. Whenever I’m working off-hours and stuck, I go there to take a nap. Just like Don Draper in “Mad Men”, I almost always wake up from the nap with an idea of how to solve the problem.

Recently there was a some kind of commercial shoot at the office, and I’ve been sent this photo. There he is, Doctor House, MD, on my couch!

Actually, I only recently started watching House, having being unable to turn off disbelief of so many doctors spending so much time on patients. I did not realize that it was a neat little pun on Sherlock Holmes, complete with drugs, loyal sidekick, and even very sexy Mrs. Hudson. Now I have 4 seasons to watch.

Brought to You by the Proliferation of Digital Cameras

Livejournal’s blogging software might not be that good as far as I am concerned, but they still have some of the best communities ever. Take, for instance, found_objects”>. It’s a community dedicated to pictures of interesting random crap, very much in the style of Found magazine. Of course, many livejournalers are not familiar with the concepts of “interesting”, “resizing pictures” and “editorial selection”, but overall besides the huge blurry pictures of absolutely uninteresting stuff (what, the community is called “found objects”, I found this) there’s much, much outstanding stuff. Here’s my selection for your lesurely browsing:

  • Primer II: Evacipation Now is wrapping up principal photography. Once again no expense was spared for props and special effects.
  • NSA’s version of McGruff the Crime Dog (NSA stands for “No Such Agency”). NSA is scary, and their mascot is scary too.
  • The three laws of robotics. In bench form.
  • DSL-Shmesl.
  • Cooooooooomeee on down to Ocean City, Maryland. But to get that suit you need to name the actual retail price without going over.
  • What is the great Russian poet doing here?
  • Um, I say this is a torture device.
  • Totoro was here.
  • That’s a great chair. For me to poop on!
  • Now, this is great art. Period.
  • The moving company with the most unfortunate url.
  • Lipton ad executives have been smoking stuff.
  • Now this is a chick magnet!
  • Happy times!
  • CDR art / Biohazard.
  • The vast right wing conspiracy in bookstores.
  • To the dump to the dump to the dump-pum-pum.
  • Now, that’s a noble profession.
  • The magical mystery bus.
  • The magical mystery buckle.
  • The magical mystery soda.