Yep. You read correctly. I’m not stt-tt-tt-uttering. Ok, maybe a little.

So, what’s up with the fucking dumbass naming conventions lately? I thought the Linux world owned the rights to fucking stupid names like Feisty Fawn, Dapper Dickhead, Whorry Hedgehole, and apps like Joomla. (what the fuck is a Joomla anyway? nevermind. Don’t answer that).

Then came Microsoft and their penchant for the fucking stupid long names like “Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Extras Edition” and “System Center Configuration Manager” or even “Internet Explorer”. The competition has names like OSX, Tivoli, OpenView and Firefox. Simple. Brief. Not good enough for the overpaid marketing goons in Redmond.

But wait! If you call before midnight tonight!… you’ll discover that hardware isn’t immune to marketing idiocy at its best. How about Intel’s preferences for naming chips? Tigerton? WTF? Merced? Klimath? Who cares if they’re proper names for places. Why not “Moorehead” or “Brisbane” or “Hiroshima”? Those are places too? Tigerton? Geez.

I have a solution: go back to version numbering. Versions that include the date/period are nice. Simple. Helpful. When did Pentium 4 HT come out? I dunno. When did chip 2007.01.1234 come out? I’d guess sometime in early 2007. For God’s sake, even Apple has enough sense to use a version number with OSX. Hence 10.4. Don’t hold your breath for a version following behind “Windows Vista Home Premium Edition”.

I wonder why we sacrifice so many brave men and women in the middle east when we could simply dress up marketing pukes as soldiers and let them market their services in the Al Anbar or Waziristan provinces. I’m sure the locals would embrace them warmly (and explosively). The world is getting dumber and dumber every day.

I don’t know what’s worse in this situation (read article): the actions on the part of Oscar Wyatt, or the possibility that he was allowed to have access to sensitive information that he supposedly leaked to Iraq. There’s no explicit mention of what information was leaked (numbers, specifics), but it would be very disconcerting to know that whatever he leaked might have been accurate at the time. If that were true, someone inside our government or military needs to have their head removed for sharing that sort of information.

I was just thinking. Something I occasionally do, in between ranting about things that piss me the fuck off. Anyway, it was about how businesses grow from something small, to something “medium” (whatever the f that is), to something “large” to something “enterprise” (again: whatever that is). It seems there’s always a point where things begin to unravel or get stupid. A point of diminishing returns, if you will. Nothing like an epiphany here, but I think I may have stumbled upon a key indicator: re-organization.

Yes. When your company embarks on its first major re-org, it’s the mark of death. Slow, silent, insidiously horrific death. When the business is “small”, which to me is anything short of 500 employees, you can do just fine with a handful of departments and maybe two divisions, if that. You have “executive”, “administration” and “production” (or “operations”, etc), and that works just fine.

But when the MBA’s start clamoring around the water fountains to discuss how efficiencies could be achieved by splitting, moving, recombining, and shuffling groups around… you’re entering the death spiral of bureaucratic self-annihilation. You usually cannot stop that momentum once it starts rolling. So you can either surf it to the shore or get out and find greener pastures. That moment of realization. That tombstone milestone. Be afraid. Be very afraid.