What can be better than a rant on IT matters? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, VS2005 sucks! Compiling anything takes twice the time it took before, loading it takes 3 times as long as VS2003, resources used are also doubled.
This is not something unexpected from Microsoft, just check out the evolution of the Windows operating system, doubling in size like following a sick Moore law, but this is a developer tool, it is supposed to enhance productivity. I don't even know what I would do without ReSharper.
They also had this idea, which I think it's not bad, of trying to make VS an universal platform for any developer tool. This makes sense if you consider it all started from Visual InterDev. However, if this is not done with the limited resources of developers in mind, it will only annoy people. Who cares Visual Studio 2005 can integrate the team manager stuff, the code, the html, the css, the sql, if I only want to make a small console application and I have to wait 5 minutes for my handy tool to start? It sounds a lot like Weird Al Yankovic's It's All About the Pentiums.

Yeah, baby, the World Sucks series is back with a new season. This episode is about smokers and, yes, they suck. And this goes beyond their obsessive need to put something long and slim in their mouth and suck on it.
Smokers suck for only one true reason: they don't care. Everyday I am exposed to tobacco smoke and none of the people that are actually smoking seem to care that other people have to breathe that foul smelling odor. When I go to work on my way to the subway, when I get back home, on the subway stairways (yes, don't wait another 20 seconds you fucking junkies, light the cigarette right in front of me on the conveyor stairs!), in my own home when I open the window and some neighbour decided to smoke the very next window.
I admit, smoking inside your own house should be ok and if the wind brings the smoke into my home, well, it happends. But it's just the last drop in the bucket, is there no safe place? I now understand the glue sniffing beggars that retreated in the subway to live an underground life; it's the only safe haven.
So there you have it: smokers suck, and it is so obvious to me that I don't even feel angry anymore. The only thing I can associate smoking with is farting. Someone farts, the others have to smell it. But who in the world sympathizes with a person that enjoys the smell of their own farts?

Rant alert! This time I am not sure what or who sucks, so I'll just ask the questions and let you figure out the answers.

Today, in Bucharest, a gay parade was kept to celebrate the removal of article 200 from the Constitution, an article that made homosexuality illegal. Of course, right wing, religious, or just plain conservative people held their own demonstration and todays gay parade was attacked and ended in violence.

That made me think of this gay thing. It never occured to me that it was an issue. Lately, though, I am seeing it everywhere, from movies like Brokeback Mountain and New York style films to scientific reports that say 1 in 10 people is gay. That means that somewhere in my highschool class there were three gay people, for example, and I know of none.

I have no gay thoughts and I might just as well admit a little homophobia. But would I mind seeing people expressing their homosexuality in public, for example? I am sure some instinctual disgust would appear, but I am human, I should be able to get above my instincts. Besides, homophobic feelings, as strong as they may be, they can't be stronger than a persons sexual orientation, can they? Why should these people be forced to fight their own emotions?

On the other hand, another part of me protests violently. I don't want to see men French kissing on the street, touching their bottoms with their hands. I want things to be as they were, I like them like this. Yet, things were not very different for kissing boys and girls a few years ago. Romania being a conservative orthodox society, with a lot of people outrooted by communists from their homes in the country to come to the big industrial cities, young boys and girls showing physical affection for each other were frowned upon. I can remember how mad that made me feel.

Where do we draw the line? It is a weird line, I can tell you that. A lot of things can be seen in public in Romania. Dirty smelly beggars for example, roaming the transport system (for free I might add, while we pay the fare); loud music in the night from people listening to it on their powerful car stereos; extremely annoying comercials, people with flyers or cars that play very loudly some radio music to make you pay attention to the slogans on their sides. So why not gay people? I would certainly like to be in a bus full of kissing men than in a bus of smelly sick beggars.

A few minutes ago an idea came to my mind. Maybe people aren't against homosexuals, maybe it all started from a misunderstood word. You know when you're all lonely and depressed and you see people being happy and together and you feel a strong feeling of anger and annoyance? I think that in all countries people are mostly unhappy. Therefore, as democracy has it, in the early history they forbid gayness. People were not allowed to be gay in public, it made depressed people even more depressed. Then homosexuals chose the word to represent them and it all got mixed up.

So, my conclusion is that to be gay means nothing to me. I can live with the level of annoyance gay people might produce in me and I think they should do whatever they want and be able to express themselves. But then again, I think the same thing about right wing activists, fascists, communists and arab terrorists. Free speech should be truly free, and I would extend this to free expression.

I got it! Laws against freedom of expression suck! They might be gay, also :)

I spoke about it in a previous post and I realised that this is an important issue, not just a side note. I never learned about it in school, nor did a lot of my friends. I've researched it and I found out that it's not in the American history books either. It's not even Spanish, it came from the US, and as Spain was not in the war at the time, they didn't have war time censorship and talked freely about it. That's why it came to be known as Spanish. Funny enough, in Spain it was called the French Flu.

But what was it? How did it happen? Apparently it was a type of avian influenza, just like the one we panic so much now, it emerged in an American military fort, then it spread as the soldiers were moved from place to place. When they came to fight in Europe, it spread there as well. The effects are very swift destruction of lung tissue which causes the patient to drown in his own fluids and the flu affected more the young and the fit, not the old people.

Opinions are divided, some say as much as 100 million people have died, while others give a more conservative value of 40-50 million. Compare that with the 16 million people killed in the entire World War I which just ended, and you realise the magnitude of the issue.

So, again, why have so little people heard about it? It is a horrible disaster, yet it is treated as a historical side note. I haven't heard of one movie that used it as a script idea. What is going on? Was the "war time censorship" so efficient? But then why did it not emerge as a huge thing afterwards?

As a history drive it was extremely powerful, for example US president Wilson who negociated the end of the war had it. Maybe if he had been stronger mentally, he wouldn't had let Clemenceau, the French counterpart, have his way in imposing harsher conditions on Germany. That, in turn, could have reduced the German motivation for starting World War II.

Even more interesting is how the disease disappeared. They didn't really have a cure for it, it just vanished, after killing so many. The mortality rate was rather small, too. The new avian influenza has a 66% kill ratio in humans so far.

Third episode from the internationally acclaimed series World that Sucks.
Normally, the good hearted person that I am (yeah, right) would flinch at the idea that 6 million people were moved to special extermination camps and, well, exterminated. But when we talk the Jewish Holocaust, I just can't feel anything. They whined and continue to whine so much about this, that it lost all appeal. That they do almost the same thing with Palestinians is just the tip of the iceberg.
What offends me even more are the number of Hollywood movies and other types of popular shows that are shedding crocodile tears over this. OK, it happened. More atrocious things also happened. A lot more Russians died in the same war, does anybody cry for them? No, they were communists, fuck them! 50 million people died in the Spanish Flu pandemic. Do we hear of it anywhere else than on Discovery Channel? No.
I bet the whole Holocaust Hoax idea came from some guy that couldn't take it anymore. So much bullshit was thrown that it was impossible for any of that to be true.
So my conclusion is that the Holocaust sucks. Any mention of it, as a corollary of the Goodwin law, should end any conversation and disqualify the guy that used it (phew, good thing that this is a blog). And what is even scarier is that after a few years we'll start seeing movies about the Muslim Holocaust in Guantanamo. And if they follow the same pattern, we'll never stop seeing them. Man, that would really suck!

Ok, non IT post (rambling) about religion. Episode two from The World Sucks internationally renowned series.
Religion sucks! I mean, not only that they advertise a two thousand year old fairy tale, but they do it agressively, violently and with no taste whatsoever. And I am not even talking about stupid people blowing themselves up because some other guy told them a deity said so. I am talking about Christians. Yes, the religion of the one God who must use hidden adverts to get more followers to donate to churches all over the place, as I like to call it.

I was searching for online adventures, as my favourite game site has been down for a few days and I found this fairy tale made in flash, with things to uncover, hidden alphabets, complex storyline. I like this kind of games, so I started playing it. In no time I realized that the hidden messages were not useful in the game, but rather poetic allegories to something. Then, when I needed to fight the evil dragon, the only solution was to abandon all my weapons and face him, while a SHEPPERD was fighting the dragon and DYING FOR ME. Later I find that the shepperd has been a KING that death CANNOT HOLD. Guessed it yet? Yeees. Congratulations for winning this absurdity of a game, let the dragon consume you and join our idiotic church! The next game in the google search had a similar purpose.

Of course, this is just an example of why religion sucks, and one might argue that the moral values advertised by most religions are more important than a few zeleous spammers and their annoying actions. You might even have a point, and as there is no way to prove a god exists or not, there is no way to disprove its existence as well. Therefore I submit my point of view: the dragon is real, he takes care of us by bitting the head of dumbass religion freaks, hates spammers and burns any god to a crisp with his firey breath. What? You don't believe me? Do you have any proof that HE doesn't exist? I mean, there are a lot of freaks out there who lost their head over religion and I haven't seen any of your gods doing anything of value lately. And of course the dragon hates spammers, everyone does!

Religion sucks! It's my firm religious belief. And I have 65100 Google followers.

I've started this blog on July 07 2005, in the first days of my working within an Italian programming firm, as a dotNET programmer. It seems a very nice place to work in, with nice people, but I am cautious. So many times I've burned myself by assuming too much or hoping instead of planning. I intend to avoid that pattern from now on.