In keeping with the current theme of British Cardboard, I found this the other day…

4,000 miles on a juice carton boat

While technically not cardboard, it is close enough for me…

The father son team of Alan and Rhys Jones are going to attempt to travel the Missouri and Mississippi rivers a total distance of 4,000 miles on a boat allegedly made of juice boxes…

I think I need to throw the Bullshit flag on this one, because looking at the picture there appears to be a lot of plywood there… So you think they’ll use a “ShitBox” on the trip…

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.

1997 was not a good year for me. That’s the year my mother died. It’s also the year Mother Theresa and Princess Diana died. But who of these three gets remembered every year? Yep. Diana. I remember 1997 very well. I clearly recall the one or two days of news coverage over Mother Theresa, contrasted against the one or two months of Diana. Like who gives a f-ing shit about Diana. I’m sorry, but she didn’t do squat to alleviate world suffering nearly as much as Mother Theresa did. But if you ask a room full of first graders who Mother Theresa was, you’ll get a bunch of confused faces. Ask them who Princess Diana was and they’ll all raise their hands to answer eagerly. That is an example of just how f-d up we are as a culture.

So, now we’re once again reading about a remembrance service for Princess Diana. It reminds me of two bad things: my mother’s passing and how we all so easily forget someone like Mother Theresa.

No, I’m not being jovial or anything like that. I mean it. At least here in America, it is certifiably extinct. There is no such thing as “common sense” in this country. I suspect it may have existed a few decades ago, if I am to believe the old news reels, books and movie clips. Who knows, maybe it was all a huge act.

I recall an older guy I worked with, a very funny guy, responding to someone saying “…the good ole days” in a conversation. He replied: “There never were any ‘Good Ole Days’. That’s just a fabrication old people use to make younger people feel bad.” Like THEY had all the fun. THEY had the great parties and action-packed memories. We just watch it on TV and hear about it.

But check this out: I can’t recall ever seeing people do stupid things at the same quantity and consistency as they do now. I’m serious. Things like watching a woman open her drivers-side door, pull out her baby in the carrier and set it in the street behind her, out in traffic, without even turning around to see if cars were coming. Not once. Not twice. I see this happen several times every week!

People opening their car doors into traffic. People walking across busy traffic without looking for cars. FUCKING STUPID! It’s getting more and more common too. Either something is in the water, or there’s a lot of genetic damage going on which is finally catching up. Idiocracy is definitely looking more real all the time. Teenagers are getting stupider all the time. Not mine, of course, but hey, you know. The things they say and expect from parents and adults in general. Like we owe them a car, clothes, money. Forget having to work for it, or earn it somehow. It’s like a God-given right. The crap I see on MTV that only fortifies this expectation of luxury. It feels like a tidal wave of fucking stupidity. Can we stop this damn wave somehow? I suppose if the Bush administration enacts the draft, that might thin the gene pool a little, but until that happens, we need a plan.

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.