Caffeinated Coder

Don’t worry, I’m not going to join the growing ranks of developers with false claims of responsibility for the the Alt.NET pursefight blog (i.e. Bil Simser, Donald Belcham, Derik Whittaker, Sergio Pereira, Tom Openorth, David Woods, and Kyle Baley) .

My confession is way more shocking.

The more astute among you have noticed that D’Arcy Lussier has shown signs of instability and even mental illness lately. Who can forget the now infamous post that featured many Paint.NET atrocities that are now banned in most civilized nations?

The reason for this disturbing behavior is simple.

His entire blog has been an elaborate hoax that I invented while freebasing experimental, synthetically engineered, black-market coffee beans during a mind-numbing HR meeting one day.

Yes, I have been ghost writing the 50 plus posts a day for years under the guise of a batcrap crazy Canadian to keep up this charade. I even went as far as to hire a homeless guy who I found mumbling to himself on a street corner to impersonate this fictitious D’Arcy character of mine at various User Group meetings and conferences to lend credence to my misguided prank.

But no more…

Due to the recent addition to my family, I’ve decided to expose my blogging sins and turn full control of the blog over to the homeless guy, Burt. For those of you who actually do like D’Arcy’s blog, I’m sure that Burt will be able to maintain the quality of the content that you have grown accustomed to in between his frequent drinking binges.

Forgive me dear readers and may God have mercy on my soul for the havoc I have wreaked on the blogosphere with this cruel practical joke.

A friend of mine whose wife is an elementary school teacher just sent this to me.

You just can’t teach that kind of literal thinking in Computer Science programs. Yet another piece of evidence to support the claim that programmers are born, not made.

In my last post I hypothesized what could have caused Scott Bellware to disappear from the blogoshpere so quietly and abruptly.

I admit that I was leaning towards one of the options that involved alien abduction, but then after doing a little detective work I uncovered this little bit of photographic evidence.


Apparently Scott was just playing hard-to-get with Microsoft as a bargaining tactic. Well played, sir!

Imagine my surprise the other day when I discovered one of my Scott Bellware links was broken. Panic quickly set in when I went to CodeBetter and noticed that his blog was no longer listed on the site.

I did notice that my Bellware feed hadn’t been updated in a while, but I figured he was just taking a break after the comment section of one of his recent posts devolved into the equivalent of a Jerry Spring episode. I had no idea that he was going to pack up his bags and leave codeBetter for good.

What is even more puzzling is that he left without so much as even a Sam Gentilesque farewell rant.

This leads me to believe that one of the following things has happened to Bellware:

1. Scott is busy founding the “bald is beautiful” cult which he will then lead on a suicide mission to shave Justice’s wild, lustrous mane of hair.
2. He is busy being the mysterious anonymous blogger for the Alt.NET pursefight blog**
3. He has taken a job at Microsoft.
4. He has been abducted by aliens.
5. He has been abducted by aliens working for Microsoft.

If aliens are somehow involved in this equation, the only thing I ask is that the next time there is a break in all the anal probing action, could they please be so kind as to republish all of his old codebetter postings somewhere else?

Scott may have not been the most tactful blogger in the world, but he also had some pretty thought-provoking ideas at times that would be missed in the blogosphere.

**Justice - no fair hiding the identity of the real Alt.NET pursefight blogger if really know who it is.

My official “homage to Justice Gray” guest blog post has just been published. Besides providing me with some of the most fun I’ve had in blogging yet, this post also inspired me to finally learn some basic photo editing skills (beyond just cropping and resizing) so that I could provide some appropriate visual aids to go with the post.

Many thanks to my lovely wife for sharing some of her image manipulation prowess with me and to the creator of paint.net for providing such an awesome free tool. I apologize in advance to all future victims of my new multi-media skills. Your safest bet is to quickly do a google image search and promptly remove any photos of yourself that you find floating around on the internet. Consider yourself forewarned.

I also wanted to thank Justice for encouraging me to write the guest post and for producing such entertaining content on his blog. To get inspiration for this post, I went back and read many of his older posts that I had never seen before because I only started subscribing to it this year. I found a plethora of truly excellent content that I linked to in my guest post.

By the way, if you’ve never tried historical blog spelunking before (reading all or many of the posts from a single blogger in one sitting), I highly recommend it. It gives you a unique appreciation of the writer and person that you just don’t get when you are bouncing back and forth between a hundred different writers every day.

With any luck I will totally dominate on his contest and perhaps even earn one of his coveted “Potential Friend of Justice Gray” certificates that he offered Martin Fowler.

Don’t be jealous, but I finally got an official T-shirt from my favorite political affiliation.

I also got a bunch of chocolate covered espresso beans in my stocking interspersed with all the coal, so you can expect those late night blogging sessions to continue for a while.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised that Santa still gives out coal. Sure, it makes economic sense due to the falling coal prices in 2007, but hasn’t he heard that coal has been labeled “Environmental Enemy Number 1″. If had read the homework that I assigned him last year, then he would know that coal plants produce more radioactive wastes than nuclear power plants and contribute in a significant way to poor air quality, acid rain, and global warming.

Very uncool Santa.

My theory is that the jolly old elf is getting tired of it being so cold in the North Pole, so he is doing his part to bring warmer weather to his homeland and perhaps even increase his real-estate wealth in the process by creating new beach front property near his workshop.

Get with the environmental program, Santa! Next year I expect to see some clean, renewable energy source in my stocking and not any more of this black environmental poison that you keep leaving me.

I just caught up on my Fake Steve Jobs reading and I am now convinced that Microsoft’s approach to the blogger problem completely lacks imagination and style.

When faced with the likes of Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Rob Conery, Microsoft takes the sissy approach of hiring them and keeping them so busy on cool projects that they use up most of their blogging wiggles and focus their remaining writing energy on sharing about the projects they are feverishly working on.

By contrast, it appears that Apple prefers to neutralize bloggers through the more direct and manly approach of bribery and intimidation.

According to Fake Steve Job’s latest post, Apple just pulled the legal equivalent of sending him a fish by listing all his assets (including his kid’s college trust funds) in a legal correspondence while urging him to consider the potential serious consequences that his blogging activities could have on himself and his family. When that didn’t work, they apparently offered him a half of a million dollars to just shut up and stop writing about them.

If that is true, then all I can say is this. Well played Mr. Jobs.

The idea of paying someone to shut up is pure genius and I officially predict that this trend will spread like wildfire in the coming year and be applied to all sorts of personal and business scenarios. I know I would have gladly paid several people to just stop talking this last year. In fact, I can think of a few instances where I would have taken a second mortgage on my house in order to silence my former HR director during a few rather lengthy company meetings.

That brings me to my new business plan. I’ve officially given up on ad revenue for my blog and stopped waiting for the marquee job offer from Microsoft. Instead, I’ve decided to start courting Apple hush money by trying to effectively harness the power of my obnoxious blogging tendencies.

The next part is addressed to RSJ (Real Steve Jobs) and his mafia-wanna-be legal entourage:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

I’ve been following your recent public relations strategies and I would like to officially apply for some hush money.

To prove that I am serious in my request, I will give you a taste of some of my crazy blogger antics and conclusively demonstrate the grave threat that I pose to your company. Here is a sample of what you have to look forward to unless a very large suitcase full of hush money finds itself on my doorstep soon.

My super-secret apple sources inform me RSJ is really an alpha douche bag of epic proportions. I’m not talking about one of those fancy French, sweet-smelling contraptions that pleasantly tickle your insides with an easy and refreshing flow. I mean that he is like the cheap, defective, puss-filled and bacteria-laden, communal douche bags that get hooked up to fire hydrants and violate your insides with 500 lbs of brutal, prison-sex force. You be the judge. Can you tell the difference?

I ask you Mr. Jobs…is a measly half million bucks really too much to ask for in return for sparing you the aggravation that a constant barrage of these kinds of insightful criticisms would cause? Think about it.

Yours Truly,

Caffeinated Coder

On the off-chance that my new business model backfires, I would like Apple’s legal goons to note the following as they compile a list of my assets for their threatening letter. Unlike FSJ, I haven’t gotten around to setting up a college fund for the kids yet and the only boats I have are currently floating in my bathtub. Also, my most valuable asset consists of a rather extensive porn collection.Unfortunately, the individual items within said collection are well worn so you will no longer be able to go by the mint condition price when determining their value.

I certainly hope that FSJ isn’t pulling our legs with this story. Life isn’t nearly as much fun when sane people are in charge.

*UPDATE* - It appears that FSJ was really funnin’ with us after all.

Well played FSJ. As far as RSJ is concerned, my offer still stands for the hush money. It won’t be long before people are standing in line to pay me to shut up. You’ll get a better deal if you start negotiating now.

I just noticed a reference to yours truly in one of D’Arcy Lussier’s recent posts in which he talks much smack about his plans to overtake Chris Williams (a.k.a Blogus Maximus) for the title of wordiest bastard on GeeksWithBlogs.

It was bad enough that his weirdo Knuck references forced me to google both Toque and Tim Horton or that his absurd suggestion that I would soon want to immigrate to Canada to be closer to the new “Blogger King” caused me to spew coffee over my monitors. But he simply crossed the line when he vowed to ban me for life from GeeksWithBlogs if I don’t pay him proper respects by awarding him another coveted CaffeinatedCodey award.

This offends me almost as much as Canadian fart jokes.

First of all, I can’t be intimidated into submission by anyone other than my wife who currently has enough pregnancy hormones surging through her body to drop a large elephant.No honey, I’m not in any way calling you fat.Pre-emptiveDisclaimer>

Secondly, what makes him so special that he can demand a prize that many have killed for without first offering up a princely bribe like all the previous winners. Justice Gray (a.k.a Justin the Metrosexual), for example, offered me a lifetime supply of “Nair For Men” along with his super secret exfoliation recipe. Rory Blyth offered first to make me a God and then to help disguise me as a forest so that I could escape the clutches of the Evil New Orko Seclorum. Most of the other winners offered me vast sums of their blogger wealth, which thanks to the new tech bubble now dwarfs the paltry chump change held by the oil tycoons.

So D’Arcy, I leave you with the following classic parable to ponder while you search the frozen tundra that you call home for a bribe worthy enough to secure you another Caffeinated Codey.

An American, a German and a Canadian blogger were sitting in a sauna when suddenly there was a beeping sound. The American pressed his forearm and the beep stopped. The others looked at him questioningly. “That was my Blackberry device he said. “I have a microchip under the skin of my arm.

A few minutes later a phone rang. The Japanese fellow lifted his palm to his ear. When he finished he explained “That was my iPhone, I have a microchip in my hand.

The Canadian felt decidedly low-tech, but not to be outdone, he decided he had to do something just as impressive. He stepped out of the sauna and went to the toilet. He returned with a piece of toilet paper hanging from his butt. The others raised their eyebrows and stared at him. The Canadian finally said “Well, will you look at that! I’m getting a fax.

I started my developer career on the tail end of the last tech bubble, so I can’t help getting all misty eyed thinking about the Tech Bubble Part Deux.

What better way to celebrate this historic event than to pay homage to some soon-to-be classic YouTube satire by the Richter Scales. It’s set to the tune of of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I especially like the minute by minute rags-to-riches twitter stream along with the “Just Go Blog About It” refrain at the end. The irony of using an 80’s Billy Joel song to lambaste Web 2.0 is pure evil genius.

So now I finally understand what is driving the big IT salary increases in recent months that has been touted in this CIO magazine article.

Note to self: Pack a few extra bucks under the mattress for when the bubble goes kerplewy again in a couple of years.

Recent source control woes have inspired me to write this little poem about my least favorite source control system.

VSS, I hate you so
And I can not wait to see you go.

You have the word safe in your name
Yet since you came
my IDE has crashed
And my files have been trashed.

If your integration were not so lame,
Then maybe I could do a simple rename;
All I wanted was a little bit of history
But a few files I did purge and now it’s all a mystery.

Branching and merging is something we no longer dare
So we copy and paste with much care;
A changeset would help reduce the friction
and make release reports seem less like fiction.

If only you would realize
that it should not take days to Analyze;
And it is wrong that I should have to be leery
when all I want to do is a simple query.

Because of your file based sharing
About disk space and security we gave up caring;
Haven’t you heard of atomic commits?
If so, perhaps my project wouldn’t be on the fritz.

If only I could create a simple diversion.
Then I could quickly upgrade to Subversion.
Perhaps if we had Perforce or Vault
Then our development wouldn’t grind to a halt.

VSS, I hate you so
And I can not wait to see you go.

For a non-rhyming look at some of the short-comings of VSS, I recommend this article by Alan de Smet.