If you’re less lucky, you can also go to the author’s homepage, download and build it yourself. The package will feature the game itself, a dedicated server and a level-editor. Plenty of room for a great many gaming sessions!

overkill2

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Picture 1 of 3

Notes:
1. There were more players, but I didn’t managage to get my glorifying screenshot soon enough.
2. Beware of server lag. I played it in a screen session on a Linux VPS. I got a load average of up to 19.48, 7.16, 3.00

But there’s another level of hate. I hate pseudo business proof settings in Windows even more. One of those would be the “Auto Lock”.

Anyway, if you think that your (clients) VPN – or bureau for that case – can keep up its security without the dreaded auto lock – here’s what you do:

1. Hate the auto lock

2. Right click your desktop

3. Chose screensaver

4. Uncheck “On resume, display logon screen”

5. Be

At least a little less unhappy. You’re still with Windows. You’re still doomed. But the apocalypse is a little farther away for now. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/feed/ 2 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/06/26/true-story-software-engineering-fail-follow-up/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/06/26/true-story-software-engineering-fail-follow-up/#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 11:28:35 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/06/26/true-story-software-engineering-fail-follow-up/ Funny thing – or should I say: True story!

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Probably you are now wondering like I did. Let me re-tell you the story. It went like this:

“Yesterday I bought the the Mybook NAS (*cough* Mybook? Why didn’t I get the memo from Apple, I thought I read the news..). It’s such a great product! It worked out of the box, no strings attached – and even using Windows (note: which is of course the only OS he uses)! I even use the built-in backup mechanism – there was only a little trouble, because I wanted to use it on my second computer as well, but it didn’t ship with a second licence. But Apple is quite nice, after my complaint they sent me another key right away (*cough* Licence keys for Timemachine instances?..). However, my new Apple Mybook NAS works so great, I now consider becoming part of the family and buy myself a Mac. Of course I will install Windows XP, because I consider that to be the better OS.”

This is how the story went. If you wonder what the new Apple Mybook NAS looks like, I took the liberty of asking him for a picture. Enjoy(;

If you liked the article, follow me on twitter here

First of all, it’s time to propagate that I’m writing using a new domain. The name gefechtsdienst.de was a remnant of old times and doesn’t really convey the feeling I want to share with the world. As of now I will be using dispatched.ch to publish applications and software snippets. To me the phrase dispatched channels the meaning of done and reliable; what has been dispatched doesn’t need a fix-up, it has been taken care of. Respectively my blog will be published on blog.dispatched.ch where I will keep writing and ranting(;

As a foretaste on what can be found on dispatched.ch in the upcoming future, I give you a screenshot of my current project to improve productivity on a Windows machine. I’m under the impression that nobody has ever written a decent translation toolfor it; not to mention the lack of anything for searching synonyms.

The web is no option for me; I can’t afford to maximize the strain to my hands each and every time I have to look something up. So I chose to write something from scratch. I will keep you posted on that one.

This brings me to matters of profession. Last week I had my first annual review which went really well, I might say. My work seems to be appreciated; resulting in a raise (2 weeks more vacation – which is good, because I need spare time a lot more than more money, nowadays) and the proposal as to whether I would like to work out even more own projects in the future. This includes going to (potential) customers, figuring out requirements, consult where applicable and finally implement those requirements in a new project. Likewise I’m getting the feeling that I really could go for quite some time in my current job. Even though I have always said that I won’t ever have to work with MS-Office or write accounting-software, it’s kinda nice to see your work really having a big impact on the efficiency of big companies and banks. In the current economical situation, I believe it is of utmost importance that cash-flow is guaranteed and that in an optimized speed. I might not work in a very fancy field with a young elite on a thriving web-project, but my work matters – not to the average user, but to the economy, which ultimately is needed for a happy life of each and every average user, isn’t it?

I’m even getting a little more business-proof along the way. This is what I have looked just a month ago and last week. Each picture was taken after a work marathon of over 12 hours in the bureau, so be kind in your assessment.

Well, I need new trousers and a nice belt. I’m thinking of brown Kapok.

Now it is time to post a picture of my workplace, at least. It was taken on my natural hour – when everyone else has left the building, already(; It features a left-over of my previous employer Sun Microsystems – my favourite keyboard, a Sun Type 7 in British English (really.. how can anyone think of coding using a Swiss layout*argh*). You can also see some decently stacked notes, my nice 24″ Dell screen and well.. a table, I guess(;

Then, I finally found a nice place to stay for good. Now I rent an apartment in Zurich City, featuring 2.5 rooms, 50m² and a nice balcony with a good view. In the first month I already invested the better part of 10k CHF(which has formerly been more than I had available for a year..), but it really is worth the struggle. I find myself no longer situated in a clumsy small, dark and unproductive room, located in a house full of wildly drinking and partying students, but in my very own realm – featuring green planes around it, a great view, a close nature conservancy, shopping opportunities  nearby and public transportation just around the corner. It’s a real dream come true. And due to the caring help of my dear grandparents I was able to really move in – I finally have a 2×1.6m bed, a couch(+ table) and a very nice workplace. Of course there’s every other piece of furniture, you would expect in an apartment, but those I consider real convenience. This is a picture on how my study looked like when I was still assembling it. Now, everything is finished and I probably will release some pictures when I’m content with all the accessories. But rest assured, it already looks a lot cleaner and nicer.

But now to the utmost important change in my life – Katrin and I are back together again \(^_^)/

A good year ago we split up after sharing an apartment for a year and being a couple for over five. Who would have guessed that we could ever join again; from Stuttgart she moved to Weimar and I moved to Zurich – not only in this respect into opposite directions. But we found a way and now that she has moved again we’re only 40km apart geographically and can share a new and rejoicing quality of partnership. I love her and have been with her for the better part of my adult life – and I am very much looking forward to sharing the rest of it with her, as well. However, first we have to figure out our next anniversary and how many years we will be celebrating(;

On a stroll, April 2009

Now why would I want to lead a life, relentlessly trying to improve it? Because in doing so, I find a great lot of joy, the time to work out, help my grandfather chop wood or go out and to the movies with Katrin without any further consideration – because I have created an environment in which I can find peace, love and happiness.

]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/05/03/relentless-resourcefulness/feed/ 2 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/03/12/on-competence/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/03/12/on-competence/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:28:39 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://gefechtsdienst.de/?p=532 Today was a day of competence – in its pure and inconceivable form. The first 8 hours of my 5.5 hours working day I have spent with a “Senior Consultant”. To shorten the story: after four months working overtime, I have finally reverse engineered enough information to be certain that the product we bought just isn’t going to do what it is supposed to. Instead I have to put up with approx. 10 fully committed days to compensate all flaws and inabilities – only to lessen the gap between what has been promised and what will be possible. Notice that “what has been promised” should have been done in about a weeks worth of work and that this week has lasted approximately four months now. Reasoning, I guess my position is save for yet another week*phew*

On the other hand I just had a soothing conversation on the phone with the astonishingly unfit almighty administration of the university I used to go to. As always they didn’t fail to surprise me once again in matters of stupidity, regression, unfriendliness and a relentless misperception/misapprehension of their own job.
Probably I shouldn’t go into detail too much, but let’s assume a situation where you wanted to send an application for something that is perfectly reasonable, what would you do? Also consider the fact that you already consulted the dean of your faculty and that he confirmed your thesis about the application being not only reasonable, but perfectly valid. What I did was to go the the universitiys’ website, get the form, filled it out and send it to the fax number I found on the application which should have been the last pro-active part of mine in this matter. Six weeks later, I’m still not done. What went wrong? It’s easy to figure.

You probably knew it all the way when I mentioned the fax machine. I have used moderately modern and therefore too complex inadequate technology during the first contact; I even went so far as to use an e-mail address I found under “contact -> administration for students -> computer science department” to send an inquiry on whether my former request has been received. Today, when I called and asked for a confirmation of receiving my application, this most certainly hilariously ugly woman spontaneously burst into shouting. I immediately felt as if I had shot her baby. Turns out I was head-wrong. In the next 15 minutes I came to realize that she doesn’t hate me for personal reasons, but she still behaved as if I were claiming she never has paid taxes and I came to get them from her all at once. Certainly understandable – I wanted to know whether my application has been received and probably is being processed already; that could certainly be considered a matter of existence for her.

In the meantime, she taught me a great many wise things. For example I would be half a year behind. Behind what she didn’t tell. Plus I couldn’t do any exams. Which exams exactly, I also don’t know. When I asked her, the shouting resolved in angry yelling – stressing her vocal cords to a level close before the point where I might have considered it unfriendly. She repeated the upcoming facts that I would be behind and that I couldn’t do exams, because there would be no sixth semester. Never again, I thought? Great! I heard that one stinks, anyways. Then I made my first mistake – I tried to outsmart her. That’s something people usually don’t like very much. I told her I could take courses from the seventh semester. Oh, baby. She didn’t like that too much. After a long and shiny tirade I thought to myself “So what? Couldn’t hurt to tell her a little about her job, could it?”. I told her that it is possible, that I have colleagues doing something similar, that the examination regulations allowed me to do courses whenever I see fit and that I planned everything in full agreement of the dean of computer science. What I should have known is that everyone’s colleague is only telling him lies, that taking courses was not as simple as I think it is(yeah, probably she didn’t bother graduating from knitting school, because taking courses has been just too much a grind..) and finally that the dean simply had no say in these things at all.

Her fury began to annoy me a little by now, but when I tried to tell her that I only wanted to know about the status of my application she told me to shut up and wait. What followed should be considered the greatest accomplishments of mankind – complete and utter disregard for humbleness. She asked her colleague(remember; those are the guys always lying to you – so better don’t ask them too important stuff) whether it is possible to officially be in one semester, but take courses of another. Surely she was determined to start whatever she tried to do to me all over again after hearing reassuring words. Well, she didn’t. The nice, and officially most intelligent person in the bureau, told her that I’m in the main course and that I could do whatever and whenever I wanted to. Hearing this, I expected anything from a sign of insight to an apology of some sort. What I didn’t take into account was that her life already was very confusing and not that pleasing. So she went on hating the phone, me and herself. However, I had enough of this senseless waste of time. I gave her my best wishes and hung up.

What I still don’t know after having to put up with this miserable performance of a bureaucrat is whether my application will ever be processed at all. Today I even received a mail from a professor. He told me that “he heard” I would be taking his classes – he already designated me into a group and told me that next Monday would be a mandatory kick-off meeting. Well, I guess, I won’t pay the semesters’ fee and then I will be banned anyway. That’s what I wanted from the beginning, I think.. And if one thing is for sure: I won’t be in Stuttgart next Monday; for whatever reasons. Apart from the mail from the professor, I am very glad that I had this experience on the phone. It proved once more that just about any random person living in Stuttgart is miserable, unfriendly, conservative, boring and dumb – a combination of attributes I simply don’t want to face in aggregated form. How I miss Stuttgart! not.

Coming home, I realized that my fellow housemates were meeting with the landlord. The last months we were living like insects in a more cold than warm and more stone-age-ish than electriced cave(well.. it has walls and a ceiling of stone, at least). We were told that the house would be torn apart after we leave; granting us the choice whether or not to clean, to fix stuff and to let all the garbage obsolete furniture just inside. Today everything changed. The formerly liberal and avuncular landlord turned into Satan himself; demanding unscrupulous things like painting the tainted walls. Of course they were as stained when everyone moved in as they are now, but I guess that’s no argument to make. There’s more, of course, but it’s probably best not to think of it right now. Having rent apartments for the last years, I know a little about rights and responsibilities in this area – and I just spent my evening funnelling those insights into my fellow housemates.

All in all, I’m pretty impressed. I didn’t even bother to mention that I have been at home tonight for just about six hours before moving back to work; even though I have been there for 14 hours straight yesterday. Well, I even had darn good reason for that. I found code that locked itself out in not less than four places – giving my middleware a little bit of trouble. I also won’t go into detail that I found out about databases that have configuration tables for transcription tables which lead to statistics tables – only to never be read, but to be redundant to other configuration tables for another transcription table leading to its own statistics table. Since none of the tables have any keys or indices and there are lots of statistics to be saved, one of the tables has outgrown the state where queries going in will bring back a result different from a timeout. The most obvious part here is that both tables are never being read in a meaningful way. There is only one daemon process(the same that’s been filling these tables all along), reading one column of only one of the tables, sorts it and writes the top result in a third table. There the data will finally be read from a program and translated by a third transcription table. Apparently it proved impossible to fill these 4 bytes of information in the third table skipping the overhead before. And good for me I had to reverse-engineer all that great business logic; it’s not as if my todo-list is giving me any trouble recently; there’s still some space on the monitor that I can read in between the piles of notes.

I could go on, but then it might seem to you, my dear and noble reader, that I am a bitter old man having a hard time keeping my heart from exploding due to too much pressure. But the truth couldn’t be farther apart. In fact, I don’t think of myself as a truly smart man – I mean, I have my good parts that I have worked pretty hard for – and I am proud of them. But I’m no genius and as it seems never will be. On the other hand, being confronted with those massive amounts of stupidity in the world, I feel pretty neat about myself. I am deeply grateful for what I have not become.  Others missed out on that opportunity and are now stuck in a demeaning life of sluggishness. I look forward to the great journeys of tomorrow, they undoubtedly will be fun.

Only one day I was able to leave early. And so I planned it well. My first stop of the afternoon was to fetch my so called “Betreibungsauszug” attesting me to have no  debts; and guess what – it seems I have none they know of. Getting this one was rather easy since bureaucracy seems to work really smoothly; no overhead, no long waiting in lines, no unfriendly clerks, no over-complication leading to any trouble so far.

Then the real work began; I drove off to what I refused to believe it might exist in this beautiful city – a real ghetto with everything needed to feel uncomfortable: all those pseudo gangstas(please notice my fluent subcultural influences) in their pimped cars listening to crap, drunk migrant kids seeking for trouble, a lot of broken glass on the street to take my eyes of walls full of graffiti calling me names. Well, with all that filth I might have lived with – despite the fact that I would have had to arm myself in the future, but the apartment waiting for me was beyond all legally possible description. I will skip this part, because it probably would seem that I’m a vicious Nazi talking bad about friendly people just happening to originate from foreign cultures – only because I had the pleasure to find a flophouse full of terribly disgusting people – leaving me itches in the nasty places. Supposedly I should only contemplate to write a decent letter to the landlord, because I consider it frivolous impudence to put up with visiting hours while the only ways inside the apartment are those the rats have broken free for the sake of having flight tunnels when the nasty vermin wake up at night. Well, considering my spare time on the other hand; this might never happen.

On the other hand, the second apartment I saw was nothing but magnificent. Proclaiming the same matter of expense as “Exhibit A” for a future investigation on how cockroaches can engulf an entire human being if only the breeding habitat is set up properly, the apartment just fulfilled all my dreams – including being close to work, brightly and quiet. There were even bonuses like the Coop just around the corner having opening hours until 11PM even on Saturdays, the tram station being nearby or friendly, tidy and fluent previous tenants from the beautiful country of Liechtenstein. Oh man, I wish I could live there!

Of course I wanted to take action and introduce myself personally at the estate agency – probably to even leave a good impression there. But what shall I say, some client of us thought better of my plans and started to post some invoices not once, but multiple times… Thinking of the amounts being well in the high 6-figure ranges, I wonder what manual signatures are for (if our system fails due to the clients’ lack of supporting infrastructur that can handle the SQL traffic). No matter what, I had my fair share of quick-fixes work to do and stayed until some time around 11PM which probably only was 6 hours after the real estate guys went home and on with their personal lives. Considering that today(Monday) there might also have been a last minute opening for a private investigation on whether I could smuggle myself into my dreams, it might have been a good idea to stay less than 14 hours in the bureau one might think. Well, what can I say..

Don’t wonder if my address will slightly change and soon will be “Bridgestreet 24″ – somewhere more close to the bureau – then I could finally leave all this logistical overhead behind and walk myself to work each day.

–

Update: Today I received a call from the real estate agency. As it turns out they made an excessive background-check on me – calling earlier  landlords and my employer who each took the liberty of recommending me – probably only because they know what I sound like when I’m really grumpy, but still, I’m very glad they all stood up for me, because on Friday morning my life will take the next turn and become even greater than now: I will be signing the contract for the mentioned apartment of my dreams*yay* As it seems “week #1″ might be the last week for the next decade to come*phew*

Before arriving at my temporary home at 9:30pm yesterday again, I have consolidated about 18 papers full of random to-dos onto only three pages while finding solutions for several of the beforehand penned down problems.

Obsolete by consolidation

Considering I start to look this fucked up when working too many hours, I really have to cut back. But still – this picture is featuring my two new best friends: Jean-Luc(the label is Picard, so there really was no choice of not naming my new companion after the captain of NCC-1701-D) and my headphones(Koss Porta Pro) which both deserve a special feature on gefechtsdienst for the sake of making my life joyous(;

Weary man in near empty tram enjoying his trip home

Annotation:

1. Today I got hold of some information which might concern you, my dear and most precious reader, too. Google found a gap(or if you want to call it void) in the space-time-continuum. You can observe it using Google Street View: NE Summit Dr, Blue Springs, Jackson, Missouri 64014
   

   Gap in the space-time-continuum

2. The day before yesterday Steffipunkt announced in Twitter and on her blog that already being a Vegetarian, she would improve on her Karma in trying to live a vegan lifestyle as of tomorrow(which accidentally already has become yesterday in the meantime..). I was full of joy to have randomly found such a nice post in between all this blabber on the web and then rejoiced when she wrote a new post today in which she summarized her first experiences. Even if it might seem a struggle at first, I wish her all the luck and look forward to be kept posted(;

On the other hand I am struggling with how processes sometimes dictate me to function. We are all surrounded by grossly static and therefore always imperfect well designed systems that need us to include ourselves in a more or less clearly defined way. It doesn’t matter if it’s the educational system that needs us to do just one paper after another, to finally have accumulated enough redundant and in itself senseless paperwork to be able to perform just a sequel of the aforementioned menial task or if it is our employer who urges us to use Microsoft Windows, because that’s the operating system imperatively declared as “business-proof” – when it comes to conforming to these given rule sets, I am at constant struggle with myself on why I am investing time in actions disclosed as being utterly inferior to alternatively available methods. There used to be a strikingly insistent explanation for everything – studying is important, because it proves to everyone else that you’re capable of doing your desired job while working with Microsoft Windows is important, because the guy ultimately paying your bills told you to. So far, this argument sounds simple enough, but I am afraid it can be dismantled just as easily.

For instance, there weren’t many exams that I didn’t succeed in without not having to put up any measurable effort beyond letting my tired eyes hover over some boring notes for two hours or so(annotation: I actually succeeded in using double double-negation in only the first half of this premise which already means more to me than all the papers I had to pile up during the last years) which ought to disprove (at least to myself) the declaration of improving me in matters of computer science any reasonable extent in relation to the vast amount of time spent simply holding the title “student” that used to imply a lot of restrictions like not being able to earn any appreciable amount of money. One might argue that I could study a lot quicker and therefore finish earlier if I frivolously declare my studies to be too easy for me which might be true, but I simply cannot overcome those fundamental motivational issues I have with studying itself – ever since I have learned that it doesn’t prove anything for myself, each hour invested into it just plainly feels like lost time I can never take back. This is why I chose the way of least friction – to be a student, but only to an endurable extent.

On the other side, I can’t stand working in topologies consisting of Microsoft powered machines – in fact I can’t even think of any way on working less efficient. There’s either a missing a license for VPN or there’s no license left for accessing the terminal server or the server won’t respond, because the operating system just went for a memory leak; there is always an obscure explanation why the programmer has to earn his money rather waiting than actually doing something useful. Then there’s always the thought that close to any requirement could be fulfilled amazingly easier in a Unix based environment; to only quote one example of today: A co-worker/project-manager had a serious and business threatening problem. There’s a bank which deploys some kind of ASCII-list on the web and this list is somehow important to one of our customers. Therefore there was a role created for some encouragingly qualified person minion(who is probably living in a very dark cellar) to download this file each week, time and time again, and to store it in a certain folder. The obvious problem is that intelligence obliges us to not to repeat simple and redundant tasks over and over again, but to seek out for new opportunities(or at least letting our mind wander) – and so did the person having the role of being a downloading machine. Of course the project manager is qualified and therefore would have liked someone to write a daemon process which would have loved to do the job on a regular basis(even if only lacking a infinitesimal amount of consciousness in comparison to the human downloading machine), but since application programmers are a rare resource these days, there was no-one available to write it. Evidently this task could have been performed in just about any other operating system with pre-installed tools; with any kind of Unix it would have been a matter of seconds to create a cron-job doing a wget. Of course Microsoft Windows can never be underestimated and since I’m trying to look a likable fellow human being, I hacked together some lines of Python code which then had to be re-assembled with a wrapper program to look like a stand-alone executable, because scripts are not allowed on some so called servers, because they impose a security threat – or more often are considered as being not performing enough(yeah, like Python would ever decline on a dare on who downloads the ASCII-file faster considering the opponent to be some random guy whose sole peripherals are a mouse and IE6). Even so – using Python for this trivial task took me more minutes than it would have taken me to implement a cron-job calling wget – saying that, other programmers even might have implemented a real Windows service using C++ or something equally gross. I mean – the customer did pay a guy to do the downloading so far.

This is where I finally reach my conclusion; if there are customers willing to pay for slowly built, hardly maintainable, badly scaling software whilst there are so much more efficient ways of doing the same job without the customer ever knowing about the reduced development costs, wouldn’t the intelligent course of action be to do just that instead of growing older from waiting, because the man in charge told you to?

Annotation: At least I have seen something incredibly efficient today. As I have been driving with the tram to work as every day, it was this morning that I witnessed the first control for tickets – leaving an impression on me. About 20 seconds before arriving at a seemingly random station there was an announcement to ready our tickets. While holding at the next station 10 men in uniforms entered the tram bringing up memories of a SWAT team storming a building that is to be re-pacified. Only another 20 seconds later they were already done and left the tram as quickly as they entered.
Two things I find peculiarly interesting:
1. Efficiency and speed were close to a theoretical optimum.
2. Absolutely no one tried to dodge the fare. I repeat: No one in the whole tram.

I have never seen the like before in my life. This finally has proven a statistic to me that I have recently dug from the depths of modern information distribution systems where a German consulting group sought to identify which city of the world held the most quality of life[1].
The pleasure was mine while reading that the 39 criteria that were used in the fields of politics, culture, life standard, income, health, etc, lead the consultants to crown Zurich(CH) as just this city. I would like to further mention that the #2 city of the world is Geneva(CH). Additionally counting #9 (Bern), this clearly shows the dominating factor of Switzerland.
Even though I really am in love with Zurich(or probably because of my definite affection), it’s a little strange to know that there is no better place to live in the whole world. Well, I better not screw up around here(;

[1] http://www.mercer.com/referencecontent.htm?idContent=1128060

Well, now that my career has changed and I’m not working for Sun anymore(where I already had to change my opinion a little since I had to publicise OpenOffice), but am into programming business applications – dealing with Office(MS Office in particular*choke*) has become day-to-day action.

Working only 70%, I am the only employee who is allowed to write down hours. My choice was to use a fancy Web2.0 tool which most certainly would make my life more productive while at the same time easier, but ultimately I chose to use Excel for practice. And even though I could fall back upon my large repertoire of Excel functions(i.e. SUM and ROUND), I also had to get help finding a way on how to count lines that are already used.

Luckily my improvisation skills were great enough to do the perfect job: I can write down my hours and my breaks and it automagically calculates how many days I have left in overtime. I even agreed with my inner conscience that Microsoft Office was lame – so I chose to not only use a proprietary application, but also a personality(and therefore life-)threatening tool called Google-Docs for the sake of ubiquitous information. No One can hold me responsible for not being able to remember my current overtime whilst I have the need to know it each and every second of my life. Well, I could have used OpenOffice and my FTP server, but who really wants to be a good and intelligent person in this messy world, anyway? It would have taken me like what.. minutes.. to do the same job with free tools – never mind, I’m a busy man now.

And now comes the funny part. I realized I had to improve on my work-reward-expectations that I had grown into begin a lowly student(I’m talking of things like having to work all day without ever[ever] getting a reward whatsoever) – in my first 15 days, I already worked enough to earn me over 7 free days in overtime.

I began raising my own money with 15 – whilst being completely abandoned from my parents before I even was born since the age of 18. And even though I didn’t get any nameable help from any social institution and had few to back me up, I always had my own apartment, but lived far below what Germany considers minimal standard of living. In the struggle, I didn’t miss too many opportunities to screw things up – my CV looks kinda awkward, which lead to a few unpleasant incidents, while my social life has been so screwed, I can’t even tell without writing a series of novels about it.

Now, there I am, finally earning 4k CHF a month net. Still a student, still trying to do his best, still having to deal with my screwed history. I thought yesterday could finally be a turning point, but the punch in the stomach I received just a couple of minutes ago proved otherwise. I won’t write about it, because it hurts too much – if I could instantly forget it, I wouldn’t hesitate. Putting it into text would certainly prove to be a stupid idea.

I have to change my way of living, of dealing with my needs and those of others. I have to stick to top priorities and stop taking big chances; history showed me they don’t pay off – and it really doesn’t matter how much I want them to do just that. There is only one life I can live at the moment; it is precious and fragile – I want it to be good, it will be good I say.

Finally I have the ressources to impose change and if I don’t do it now, I will some time die an old and inwardly discontent man like so many before me.

What is this post about? Switzerland of course! The country of love, peace and infinite possibilities! I am glad that I can be here, I am thankful and I want to make this time worthwhile. Thanks for reading, visitor. I appreciate it.

]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/01/24/new-record-paycheckswitzerland-is-the-greatest-country-in-the-world-3/feed/ 2 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/01/16/how-long-can-you-go/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/01/16/how-long-can-you-go/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:04:32 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://gefechtsdienst.de/?p=212 This is my 13th consecutive hour working on three projects at once – each of which has to be deployed tomorrow while my perception of the applications/daemons/tools is somewhere between post-alpha and beta. Therefore I will face an interesting day tomorrow – even more so, because it will be the first day in weeks that I simply won’t work overtime, because I will take a leave and visit a dear friend in Weimar.
I figure next week will even be of more interest – when I won’t have slept for aeons while several customers either are working live and productive or starting their testing and educational phase.
I’d love to go into detail, but instead I should hurry back to work.

I can’t even express how much I’m looking forward on the days to come – for so many reasons at once.

Life is good.

One influence that covered my newly found monetary income was the fact that my best friend Falko began working at our software company just today – which is going to be a  very welcome diversification in day to day life; also because we haven’t seen each other for quite some time now. It helps that he will sit on the same table with me(;

Now I’m going to start with the real good stuff. Coming to work for the first day of the year, I came to realize in several meetings that even tough I haven’t been given the tasks until today, I am already friggin’ late in absolutely every project that I have to put up for in the future. Our marketing has promised deliveries that should have stayed in some peoples dreams just a bit longer..

The next thing I know is that even tough I am working 70% now, I found myself before 14 windows – connected to four computers at once, trying to fix that terrible mess. Where’s the catch? I already have been working constantly for nine hours even tough I shouldn’t even work six any given day..

Another catch is that now I finally reached my bedroom and it’s already 2:15AM which is kinda lame since today I wanted to sleep more than the four hours that I had the night before. And why is that? Because I hung with my new room mates; that’s why. Something about two hours passed on our first meeting on who should do what and when concerning bath, kitchen, the garbage and these things – I quit the discussion by taking into account that I’m going to hire cleaning personnel. As one might imagine we socialized afterwards and I have had the pleasure to take a first evaluation of the two dissertations my two new computer science buddies are working on; and it has been a blast. Some time has passed since I had such a deep discussion about the potential of neuronal networks, implementation of kohonen propagation, optical character recognition and pattern foretelling. The good thing about it is that soon I will have the pleasure to propagate their work in a color of deep red*mew*

All in all, this day has been great – even though I will only get something around three hours sleep now, my throat aches since a week like it is going to explode any minute while having no voice at all and I absolutely had no time to work on some very important even more time critical tasks, this has been just a normal crazy day of my life.

1. 6th on the Human Development Index(HDI)
2. 6th on Gross Domestic Product per Head(GDP/per capita)
3. 3rd on the BigMac Index(1st in 2006 and 2007)

That said, I want to point out that there is a sheer incredible number of reasons why Switzerland is becoming my home of choice on a personal and non-statistical and non-monetary level; but those only work out their magic when experienced in persona – if I tell you that people are just so much nicer, obliging and overjoyed, you might just say that this is a subjective matter(;

Knowledge to have in advance: Right now, I’m doing an internship and am therefore earning only a somewhat small 4-figure amount in CHF.

me: “Btw, I paid 7% taxes on my last wage.” (Internally I was shaking with excitement, because of the great bargain)

co-worker: “_That_ much?” (Physically shaking his head in unbelieving despair about how incredibly unfair this big toll was to me)

Isn’t this the greatest country of them all?(;