Much as the baby sparrow leaves the nest to perform whatever sparrow-approved activities are the rage these days, I leave IBM to pursue different (if not bluer) horizons.

Come next Friday I’ll be leaving the premises to engage in the exciting job of webmasterdom and Internet Technologies Integration at an undisclosed location much nearer home. If this does not sound like an exciting job to you, try doing low level programming for almost two years.

In retrospect, I must say that it has been a somewhat exhausting, albeit very interesting run. I must confess I am fairly glad to be leaving now, since church towers and sniper rifles were increasingly catching my eye for the past two z/OS releases. Usually not a good sign.

During my stay here, I’ve experienced what it is like to develop software the way it’s meant to be done. Many may bash IBM and other software behemoths for being unproductive and lacking the dynamism of smaller companies, but having been privy to both methodologies, I can assure you that there are reasons why stuff is made this way in the proverbial cubicle farms. That’s not to say that the process of attaining CMM 5 (a process I had the fortune to be a part of) was any fun at all. Basically it means documenting everything (if you take a dump, you keep a record of how many squares of toilet paper you use).

Through this almost two years I have worked with incredibly talented people, and to you, my coworkers, whether you are here, on the US or on other IBM sites: I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. It’s been a blast.

— sergio at 04:51 PM  

Another Sitepoint article by yours truly has hit the deck. This one, The unruly ruler, is actually quite old and was originally published only on Overcaffeinated, here. Georgina, the Sitepoint editor, contacted me and asked for permission to republish it, which I obviously found so thoroughly repellant that I yielded only after about half a second of forceful evil-eye staring and virtual arm twisting.

Plus, it provides an excellent opportunity to, once more, bring attention to that hideous photograph of my noggin’ that they have in my profile. A fact to which I can hardly object, really, since I was the one that provided it to them. Rest assured, in real life, I look kind of like a cross between Fabio and Tom Selleck.

This one is not as large in scope as Tables vs. CSS, but I hope that it will be useful for someone. The technique also falls somewhat short of being semantically correct, so if my prognosis is correct I should be getting a public flogging of MelGibsonian proportions at the Sitepoint forums (fora?, fori?) at about this time tomorrow. Don’t miss out! There might be entrails!

— sergio at 01:21 AM  

— sergio at 09:34 AM  

— sergio at 12:24 AM  

I do not suffer from obsessive behavior. I do not suffer from obsessive behavior. I do not suffer from obsessive behavior. I do not suffer from obsessive behavior. I do not suffer from obsessive behavior.

I didn’t copy/paste that.

Ok. Now that’s out of the way: I do have a few quirks and oddities that sometimes bug me. Here’s a (neatly marked up in standards-compliant code) far from comprehensive list:

• When I’m driving I repeatedly reach for the handbrake and remove it, even though I know it is not engaged (This doesn’t look so weird now that I drive a standard with the handbrake next to the shift stick, but when I had a Dart-K I kept reaching under the dashboard repeatedly for no apparent reason, to the utter confusion of friends and family).
• When riding on the passenger seat of a car, I wiggle my pinky toe whenever we pass a lamppost.
• When I’m with friends at a bar, I surrepticiously remove the lighters from the table and return them to their exact same position later, after having detached the longish security stickers they have on one side.
• Sometimes I avoid stepping on the lines on the floor (I used to do this long before it became cool — Damn you, Jack Nicholson!).
• I absolutely, positively must always straighten the teeth of the forks I get at restaurants so that they’re all plumb and evenly spaced (Don’t look at me like that! someone’s got to safeguard the karmic balance of the universe, ok?).
• People who keep the protective plastic covers on their cellphone screens drive me berserk. That goes double for the ones that allow the little ear of the plastic to get wrinkly and worn out, and still refuse to remove them. I’m getting chills just writing this down. This also applies (on a somewhat lower level) to those who keep the bright red/yellow/blue demo stickers on their camera/laptop/VCR, and those who put plastic covers over their furniture. Whenever I see this kind of thing I get a sudden rush of blood to the head, start foaming at the mouth and try to gouge people’s eyes out (Just kidding. I don’t actually foam at the mouth)

So, that’s it for me. What about you? What are your little quirks/oddities? Share.

And remember: they’re not bugs. They’re features.

— sergio at 12:56 PM