web-goddess

The Snook and I watched the Big Game live on television this morning. How nice was it to watch the Superbowl at 10:30 a.m.? It almost made up for the fact that we don’t get to see any of the commercials. Which reminds me: ever wondered what the cameramen do while the adverts are running? They zoom in on cheerleaders’ boobs and asses. I swear to God. We international types get to see everything.

Oh yeah, and it was a pretty damn good game. I was rooting for the Pats the whole way, which makes it the first time in ages that the “Kristy Curse” didn’t strike. (Unlike the cricket yesterday, which was a major disappointment.) And wasn’t Brady the cutest? “That’s my car?? … This will be a team car!”

Phil saw his shadow and y’all have six more weeks of winter coming. Does that mean we get six more weeks of summer??

Grrr. Sometimes I hate being a day ahead of you guys. It’s Monday morning, and I fire up web-goddess to see what comments have been left. But wait! I’ve forgotten that it’s only Sunday there. Crap.

Michael Moore’s summation of Bush’s wrongdoing in the Enron disaster is masterful. For a few weeks I’ve been feeling like I’m not getting the whole story from the media, and now here it is. Granted, Moore can be a bit over-the-top sometimes, but here he seems to be backing up his wild accusations with evidence.

Funny Australian Observation O’ The Day: Aussie newscasters pronounce the word “debut” as “day-boo”. That cracks me up.

Oh, since the Super Bowl is coming up, here’s a sports-related bit of trivia. In Australia, the word “root” has a very, very different meaning. In fact, it’s a very vulgar and rude word for “having sex”. Which is why the Aussies spent the entire last Olympics giggling at Americans “rooting” for their teams. (I won’t even tell you what “fanny” means here, but suffice it to say that the mere mention of a “fannypack” sends Snookums into fits of laughter.)

Holy crap! I found my first Googlewhack… and it’s my own site! Check it out. I am the only site on the Internet for the search “singlets hummus”. I didn’t even come up with that; I just saw it on my list of last searches. How insane is that? My score:

singlets: 20,100
hummus: 41,800
singlets hummus: 840,180,000

The Snook and I just got done watching his favorite movie, Tombstone, on television. Wanting to know the truth about the events in the film, I turned to the Internet. Wow, they really white-washed some stuff! Apparently most of the Earp boys’ wives were reputed to be prostitutes, and it’s not even certain that Wyatt was married to his before he left her for the actress. Are you a big fan of the movie? You should take this guy’s Tombstone Purity Test. The Snook only managed to score a paltry 80. (It’s pretty difficult unless you’ve actually been there.) I myself got, like, two.

John found a fantastic essay that questions the importance of teamworking skills. Personally – and this might be the wrong thing to say considering I’m currently looking for work – I hate working in teams. It all goes back to being the smart kid in elementary school. I’d get stuck with all the anti-social losers that the teacher felt would benefit from my leadership. Instead I ended up doing all the work myself just so we wouldn’t fail. Eventually I discovered that I just work better alone. Even when I played sports, I played singles tennis, where my success or failure was entirely up to me. It’s just easier to get things done when you’re the only person responsible for it.

That said, I have of course had to work on teams in my career and the experiences were not all bad. The best cases were when everyone had a clearly defined role. I’d rather be the only HTMLer and have to do twice as much work than have to pair up with somebody else and go through the business of deciding who does what, what format to do it in, correcting their mistakes, etc. To me, specialization is the key to a good team. The only problem is that most I.T. companies fall into the mistakes mentioned in this article. They use “teamwork skills” as a convenient way to pressure people into working 60-hour weeks. If a project (or team) was getting behind, the solution was always to throw more people at it, rather than look at the ways the structure was already messed up. Most “successful” team projects only happened because two or three individuals pulled an all-nighter fixing what everyone else had screwed up.

Snookums and I have been debating this type of thing for awhile now. We lived with a Project Manager who felt that it was the duty of the better team members to handhold the others through the project. Our argument was always that companies may want this, but they never budget for the extra time. When a project is high priority on a tight deadline, mentoring goes out the window. And when it comes right down to it, I trust myself in those situations better than I trust anybody else.

Which Buffy villain are you? I’m Anyanka (Anya), which I think fits pretty well.

Your job was purely to grant revenge on men by their angry female lovers. Unfortunately you’re mortal now, and also in love. You’re getting the hang of being human, but you’ve still got some rather strange habits that give away your old, evil nature.

Translation: You were an angry, bitter, man-hatin’ girl before, but now you’ve got a schmoopy and you’re happier than ever and you try not to mess it up. (Link courtesy of anon.)

Ooh, boy, that was fun! I just spent ten minutes nominating people for the Anti-Bloggies. Oh, not you, of course! Just my enemies. Heh heh. Which reminds me, those of you involved in the Great Blogger Code war of January might want to, you know, nominate somebody for “Biggest jerk”. It does a body good.