Life


This is a machine that I saw today at a local mall. Made totally out of cardboard and paper it was there on display to amaze the shoppers (it did draw attention of kids and men – women at malls are too concentrated on clothing to notice), was not doing anything useful.

A reminder how much can be achieved with simple means and lots of creative ingenuity.

I’m happy to announce that on August 2nd me and Joanna got married at the Our Saviour Church in Cracow, Poland. It was the happiest day of my life and we both look forward to our lives together.

Here are some pictures from the post-wedding photo session.

It is always with amazement that I find looking at my statistics, that the set of key words that brings most of random visitors to this humble blog is “Dilbert Scrum”. This is so ever since I’ve commented on an episode of Dilbert in which agile is mentioned. Based on it I’ve moved on to discuss Scrum – and probably no one else did exactly that, because if you type “Dilbert Scrum” into Google that post of mine is now number 1. I suspect this post will strengthen that effect.

Interestingly, I’m not sure Dilbert ever referred to Scrum directly but even so people think he must have – so they look for it. Also, this shows that people want to find an image, not a text. Texts are boring, you have to concentrate (which is hard) and think sometimes (which is even harder). Images are much much easier. Which is, probably, why Dilbert brings so many visitors to my page who come for only one thing: the link to the comic strip (BTW: It was wrong, I just fixed it).

I’ve just spent (I wouldn’t say wasted) half an hour browsing through a collection of old photographs made available by the Library of Congress on Flickr. Images of a world long gone, so old that even children depicted on those frames are most probably long dead. And a thought came back to me that I had years ago when first really reading up on the history of late 19th century: how easy it was, in a sense, to live one’s life then. The society’s values and roles were very clear then. No doubt as to what was wrong and what was right – everyone was believing in the general set of values based on the ten commandments and moral teachings of Christianity. Not everyone followed them – liars, murderers, thieves, deviants and the like were with us always – but no one questioned them. Most of insanity we see every day on the news now, including all possible perversions, was not thinkable or – at the vert least – was limited to single cases on the fringes of the society. No question then why general decency prevailed – no one posited immorality as a norm.

It very well might be that while we have much developed since then technologically as a culture we – Europeans – have rather declined. The turn of the 19th and 20th century was, I think, the golden age of our culture – even though the first seeds of the catastrophic 20th century were there already. Good that at least we have those images to remind us of times when right meant right and wrong meant wrong.

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