And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it’s unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

in The Development Abstraction Layer

Last year, I paid the following to the Bottom-less Big Bucket™:

• 1,556 € to the pension system [for which I will never be elligible]
• 344 € to the Family Fund [for which I will never be elligible]
• 221 € for the Social Security Fund [for which I am thankfully elligible, but haven’t used yet]

among other things

Now, I received recently a 4-page maze of a form that I am supposed to fill out in order to help them calculate my income, on which my contributions to the Bottom-less Big Bucket™ will be calculated. Here’s how my income is defined:

The amount of my fees [being a service company] - 52% [so far so good]
plus
The amount of my contributions in 2005: social security, pension fund, family fund.

Yep. You. Read. That. One. Right. These 2,000+ € listed above count as INCOME. Yup. That money that bled out of my wallet. Yup. Income. I’d call it useless expenses myself, but what do I know about social contributions? Nothing. And I sure don’t want to. So I’d better close down that little company of mine and ask to be at the receiving end of those so-called social contributions. Ah but there’s the catch: entrepreneurs are not elligible for the dole either.

Well, better leave again then…

Via Tanukette Tanuki, this list of movies you shoulda seen. Oh well…

Seen/Read [since some of those are based on books]:
The Godfather [both], Pulp Fiction, To kill a mockingbird [read], The Shawshank Redemption [seen], When Harry Met Sally, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, The Maltese Falcon [I think], The Bridge On The River Kwai [read, maybe seen], The Sixth Sense, Apocalypse Now, L.A. Confidential [read 5 times, at least, seen once], Jerry Maguire, E.T. [I think], Star Wars, Rocky, La Grande Illusion, The Hustler [many times, I have the DVD, and The Color of Money, of course…], Memento.

All the rest, terra incognita… Where are Die Hard 1, 2 & 3? Last Man Standing? Snatch? Blade Runner? C’mon…

;-)

I don’t know about ya, but I see some broken glass coming this dude’s way: