Eric is a bipedal organic life form born towards the end of the 2nd millenium. Still alive despite the desires of
most of his colleagues.
Has an aptitude for techie type things, general geekines, tampering, interfering with any computer based entity.
His greatest skill is breaking anything he touches, especially well desgined things that are useful.
Fluent linguist in Binary, Hexadecimal, ASCII notation, Assembler, Cobol, SQL, C, Oracle, Sybase, PowerBuilder,
Unix and Perl.
When younger he vainly tried to become a developer of working, useful software but never actually succeeded.
He has recently discovered his true vocation in life and now works as a proffessional Bringer of DIgital Chaos
and has successfully worked in this role on many projects.
Major achievments include:
Worked for a major insurance company to organise the setting of the correct time on digital clocks on the domestic
applicances in the corparate kitchens (like micrwaves, cookers etc..) every time the clocks had to change due to
daylight saving.
After the 10 month analysis phase, decided that what was needed was a centralised time server connected to
a tiny micro kernel client on each domestic applcance. Decided to reject the obviously useful solutions like pay the
janitor to manually set the time or install thin micro-java clients linked by thin ethernet to an already existing Unix
server.
Decided the perfect solution was to install Windows NT on all of these devices with Microsoft Office
Domestic 2000 and a dedicated NT tiime server. There were a few teething problems with the initial setup so
upgraded each client with 500MB RAM and a 20 GB hard disk. Some microwave ovens lost a bit of their cooking
capacity to make room for the hard drive bays but this was considered less important than having a centrailised
enterprise time setting mechanism. We also had a few problems with the toasters where it seemed the memory
and hard disk needed replacing every time you toasted white bread. This was ingeniously fixed by arranging
delivery contracts with the local bakers to drop by PCWorld on their way to the office and pick up a fresh crate of
memory and hard disks to be delivered to us with the bread.
This setup worked perfectly until we tried to connect the 2nd client to the NT time server. This was easily fixed
by upgrading the server to a server farm of 230 Dec(Compaq) Alphas. We ended up with an interesting discovery
that for every domestic applicance/client we needed to connect, another NT server was needed. This discovery
has greatly improved our capacity planning.
This has provided the critical mass of bad engineering and management needed to form a Self Generating Chaos
Region. The board of directors were very impressed when the SGCR first appeared, some even gazed for hours
with moist eyes and a wistful look at the time sheets and invoices that spewed out of the SGCR's project code.
This implementation is now used as a reference site by Micro$oft as a good example of world class SGCR engineering.
We hope to get an award from Microsoft Today magazine soon.
I now proudly head up a team of 170 technicians and we hope to go live with our first time-automated kitchen this month
after 2 years of design and development. Between you and me, please don't let this get any further, I am being
headhunted to work for a "large consultancy" ( with out mentining any names they are NOT called Anderson and they
put a heavy ACCENT on the futURE (geddit?)) to manage their newly formed Domestic Realtime Electronics Automation
Division. I think the marketing chaps are working on a catchy name based on the abbreviations.
DEFINITION
Self Generating Chaos Region
Is a collection of one or more mechanical/electronic/human systems that when considered as a whole has the
following properties:
- of no use to anyone
- consumes large amounts of resources
- creates components that will form the critical mass for new SGCEs
Examples of successful SGCR's:
Micro$oft
M$ Windows
SSADM
Any time sheet system of your choice
European Union farming subsidies system (called CAP)
Well, any public beaurocracy really
And for that matter most private companies with more than 1000 workers