Friday, September 19, 2008

When CSIs stray too close to home

I remember an interview with Emma Thompson way back when she was in The Tall Guy with Jeff Goldblum.
"You play a nurse, did you spend time at a hospital to observe how nurses work?" she was asked.
"No." She replied, "I'm an actress, I acted being a nurse."
I loved that response, skewering in a few words a legion of method actors and the interviewer into the bargain.

Yet, how many of us have watched our profession portrayed in film or on TV by some walking cosmetic-surgery commercial and cried, "No one buffs nipple-gimlets like that!"  (or words to that effect).

Well, I was enjoying an episode of CSI:NY the other day - it told the story of the Cabbie Killer, an evil taxi driver who kidnapped and gassed his passengers.  The idea of a killer cabbie is ironic as most of them seem to be trying to kill themselves and everyone within side-swiping distance anyway.  Anyway, the Cabbie Killer had kidnapped some irritating blogger (bloody bloggers) and was forcing him to live-blog the killer's moments with his current corpse.  Our hero, Mac Taylor and his attractive but useless sidekick, Montana were reading the web-site with distate.  On recognising that the page was being updated in real-time, Montana turned to Mac and said...
"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual BASIC and see if I can track an IP address"
WHAT????

Ignoring the fact that no-one except the Goateed Bassman writes anything in VB, it doesn't make any sense.  She may as well
Write a Java app that connects to the domain using ASP.
or
Prototype a Ruby executable that will decode the URL.
or
Create an extreme program with DSDM that derives the TCP/IP.
Developers don't really sound like that!

Do we?

2 comments:

  1. VB was the code of kings.... remember just when you think something cannot become more unfashionable and that no one will ever do that thing again.... that is the time to get in early, jsut before the revival starts..... which preety much answers your question.... yes we do sound like that.... at least to non-developers we do.... :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Come on. I'm bored waiting for more. Blog or don't bloody blog. Which is it be?

    ReplyDelete