This exchange — a post followed by a comment — showed up on my Facebook home page today. The poster and the commenter are both women, btw . . . let’s play a game! Who am I?? I’m the first to talk shit behind peoples back, but when I’m talked about i’m the first to get all pissy! Who am I? Every female known to man. I spit cola all over my desk when I read that . . . Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Women
Free Advice for Women Considering an IT Career
I’d just finished reading another tiresome “why oh why aren’t there more women in IT?” article when I found a former colleague on LinkedIn . . . he lists his job title as “Analyst, Software Quality Assurnace.” Would you hire him as a QA guy? I wouldn’t, and that’s even before I saw how he misspelled “Assurance.” The IT “profession” is chock full of idiots like this. Why anyone thinks women are missing out on something if they don’t work in IT is a total mystery. If I had a daughter, I would tell her to be a meeting planner or a flight attendant . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Women and Solitaire
We’re driving home from the hockey rink in Corona . . . my son’s playing solitaire on his iPod. As we’re pulling off the freeway in Irvine, he says, “I just won my first game the entire trip.” I say, “When I play it on the computer, I lose most of the time, but once in a while I’ll get like a three-game winning streak.” “Yeah, me too.” “It’s like women in that respect. The overall goal is to make you feel bad about yourself, but they throw in just enough positive reinforcement to keep you from giving up completely.” Read more →
Katie Couric Eating a Tuna Sandwich
Katie Couric talks about Twitter: I don’t think anybody gives a rat’s ass whether I am about to eat a tuna sandwich. I don’t even care. Some of it is so inane and narcissistic and bizarre I don’t quite get it. I don’t know why anyone would want to read it, much less why I would want to write it. Unless “tuna sandwich” is a code phrase for “vagina.” In that case, I’d be very interested to read about Katie Couric eating a tuna sandwich . . . Read more →
Another Reason Why All the Great Scientists (Except Marie Curie) Are Men
Two women are talking in the lunch room. One is wearing a black pullover sweater. The other woman says, “I like your sweater.” “Thanks. It’s long, so it covers my ass.” “That’s what I like about it. Not that it covers your ass, but that it would cover my ass.” I’m speechless . . . The sweater isn’t covering her ass, her pants are covering her ass, and the sweater is covering the pants! It’s a total misread of the geometry of the situation! Read more →
Microblog: 2009-04-16
I love California but if Texas secedes from the union, I might move there: http://twurl.nl/8wgzbz # At a stop light, driver in front of me starts making out w/girl in the passenger seat. Did I mention the driver is also a girl? # Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: A Birthday Gift
My fellow Americans — Did you know that I was born on this date in 1743? Probably you didn’t because nobody makes a big deal about it like Washington’s birthday or Lincoln’s. That used to really bother me but I’m okay with it now. Anyway — it’s MY birthday but YOU get the gift. Point your browser at the Guess Her Muff website. GADZOOKS! You will not be disappointed! Sadly, ladies styling their pubes had not entered into the marketplace of ideas in the 18th century. I can’t help thinking what Sally Hemings would have looked like with a Brazilian. Read more →
Be Disloyal
”Be disloyal. It’s your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it’s the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living, boy, and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent — and never let either of the two sides know your real name. The same applies to women and God. They both respect a man they don’t own, and they’ll go on raising the price they are willing to offer.” — Graham Greene, “Under the Garden” Read more →
Two Bright Spots in the Recessionary Landscape
Fewer kids in day care More women in porno Read more →
Ducks Visit WIHA
The Devil Dogs played in the WIHA tournament in Irvine last weekend, losing in the Bantam AA finals to the Reebok Blades. Wild Wing, the Ducks mascot, was there. Two of the Power Players were there too. You can’t see the girl on the right because I’m a bad photographer, but there are better pictures of her here. My son is the taller boy with the crooked sneer he likes to be photographed with. I hope he outgrows that. Someone said to me, “I bet you wish that was you in the photo.” I must be getting old because I hadn’t thought of that. I did get to fist bump the Duck mascot though . . . Read more →
Tweets on 2009-03-23
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? # A woman just sent me a doc on web hits in which she uses the phrase “extraneous back-end activity.” What would Freud make of that? # Read more →
I Wonder
The dizziest woman in the office just used the word “congruence” in a sentence — correctly. Have I underestimated her? Read more →
Scent of a Woman?
I Had a Great Meeting
I had a great meeting today — eight women plus myself. That’s not why it was great though. These ladies want to launch an online Education Room with webinars, a speaker directory, announcements of upcoming events . . . they have none of the content ready . . . and they want to launch it on Jan. 1, 2009. So instead of talking about how they’re planning to get the content to me so I can build the thing, they’re saying things like, “When you hover over a webinar link, it will display a description of the content — like on Netflix . . .” Netflix. Right. So I say, “You’re not gonna get that.” Oh, they loved it! They laughed and laughed. They knew it was ridiculous, they just wanted someone to tell them it was ridiculous. Women love a masterful man who’s good at his work. Thus spoke… Read more →
Stacking Plates is Woman’s Work
After Thanksgiving dinner, the hostess asked everyone to please stack their dishes and bring them into the kitchen. I started to stand up — not to stack dishes because my wife had already picked up my dishes — but just to stretch my legs, when my dad, who was sitting next to me, put his hand on my arm and whispered, “Don’t get up. That’s woman’s work.” I said, “I’m just getting up to stretch.” “Don’t move,” he said. My dad, like a lot of men his age, has old school views on gender roles. Earlier in the evening, my mom was saying she’d read that women control 60 percent of the wealth in America. “That’s all right,” my dad said, “because we control the women.” Compare that to one of my nephews, who says things like “I’m nobody’s patsy,” then turns to his wife and says, “Isn’t that right,… Read more →
Nigeria Rules
You may be thinking “Nigeria Rules” now, dude, but wait till all 86 of your wives have PMS at the same time . . . Read more →
Breast Awareness Month
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month . . . Were you aware of that? Not to make light of breast cancer, but what a waste of a month. I mean, who is not aware of breast cancer? Being unaware of breast cancer is like being unaware of breasts. Hmmmm . . . How about this: Breast Awareness Month! More of a fun, celebratory thing instead of the whole downer vibe around cancer . . . Read more →
Access Denied, Dork
It’s interesting how many HTTP 4xx return codes could be used in response to a request for intimate access to a woman: 401 Unauthorized 402 Payment Required 403 Forbidden 405 Method Not Allowed 411 Length Required 413 Request Entity Too Large 417 Expectation Failed Read more →
The Downside of Effective Communication
What I re-learned in Crucial Conversations class is that you can have “better” conversations with people if you’re able to control your initial emotional reactions and apply some learnable communication skills. I say “re-learned” because I got the same takeaway years ago from reading How to Win Friends and Influence People and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. And while it’s been my experience that these techniques really do work, I haven’t used them as much I could have because they also seem to take a lot of the zest out of being alive. For example: Several years ago, we had an electrical problem at the house, where we weren’t getting power in any of the front rooms. My wife was home when the electrician came out — I was at work — and he fixed the problem in five minutes. When I got home, she was unhappy… Read more →
Watching Olympic Women’s Weightlifting with a 10th Grader
“These women look worse than the Australian basketball team,” the boy says. “Some of them would be cute,” I say, “if they lost about 150 pounds.” An eHarmony commercial comes on . . . We prescreen candidates for compatibility . . . “Good,” the boy says, “because I don’t want to date any women weightlifters.” Read more →