Real men don't eat quiche
 

I drink my scotch with a fork and suck my steak through a swizzle stick. I write my code on a papyrus scroll, from the back, using Gutenberg-era type. (Ink is so yesterday, but embossing is in, again.)

It gets compiled to machine code and put into the machine by an out-of-work bookkeeper with a green eyeshade. I found him clearing a Brazilian jungle with a butter knife and armed him with a mirror, a bank of toggle switches, a telephone cable, and a bagful of two-headed alligator clips. He works for peanuts and picked up on the swizzle stick gig really quickly.

Now, you tell one. :beard:

Let me see if I can top that!
I can spit farther, belch louder and smell worse than any man west of the Rockies. I eat 16 penny nails and roofing tacks come out. I drink fermented wolverine sweat for breakfast.
I write binary code on scrap iron with a piece of soapstone and scan it into my computer using OCR. I make my wife and kids use a pedal powered generator to allow me to surf the web for hours on end.
And last but not least I am politically uncorrect.:eek:

I love you guys ... :)

ROFLMFAO

Very good guys. Both in pole position. :)

Is there a reason why I really don't understand this?

You're not a real man. :D

I often see it implied (not just on this forum) that unless one does something in the absolutely most difficult way, one is not truly skilled. I call "bullshit."

I also find that one can sometimes gain a better perception of circumstances if one considers the extremes. The other extreme here is Mild Mannered Merlin, who merely waves his magic metal wand and produces a complex, glitch-free, and totally secure application. He then steps into his phone booth, rips off his geekly duds, and emerges in an Armani suit with lebenty-jillion ducats in pocket change.

In observing these extremes, one immediately realizes that there is a gradient. One may then form some sensible idea of where to place oneself, even if one not going to get anywhere near the booth, the billions, and the bevy of beauties.

Ahh! A so called happy medium then.

I wish I could find this middle ground somewhere. I guess because I am hard headed, I seem to be stuck doing everything the hard way, and not just coding. If something doesn't work I tend to have the find a bigger hammer mentality rather than figuring another, possibly easier way to do it.

PS: I do eat quiche occasionally, but just don't let it get out.

Well I maintain production line control software written in Visual Basic 6, intended to be a semi-working demo and used live for upwards of a decade, running on XP machines and talking to PLCs over ethernet and date code printers down a serial line. One thread and minimal use of events, maximal use of polling. The code was written by a crowd of developers, some of whom had never coded in VB before or even on the Win32 platform. None of the code is documented, having mainly congealed over time as its role 'evolved' (read: changed drastically and rapidly in response to various management whims), and most of the developers never met or discussed the design. However, when I make a single line change I am compelled to complete at least 12 pages of documentation using a buggy template hacked together in Microsoft Word, which is printed out, signed by numerous people, and tucked away where nobody ever reads it (it's meaningless without any documentation of the existing system anyway).

No two lines of code follow the same conventions and decisions are often based on the background colour of a control with some responses to events being triggered by the Change event of a label or some similar perversion (this is as bad as Intercal's COME FROM in my opinion). The six or seven distinct applications (all fulfilling an essentially similar role) are all built completely differently from each other, and even use different configuration file formats and different ways of parsing them.

And I didn't even have to make it up. I get paid less than DaWei's out of work book-keeper, too (haven't seen a peanut in many moons). Not sure if this makes me a real man or an unfortunate soul in the overall scheme of things but I do know I'm looking for a Perl development position, ideally with a sprinkling of Postgres; if anyone knows of one going in Scotland, let me know where to send my CV (where my current duties will be described a little differently but that's playing the game I guess).

In case you think I'm exaggerating, here's a representative code snippet (hopefully I don't get found and fired...):