Rui CarmoA few months ago, I caught the You Have Two Cows meme and had one of my self-motivation moments, in which I literally bootstrapped myself (and my colleagues) back to good humor by tapping away at my Blackberry during a long and troublesome commute, after one of those weeks you long to forget.
That particular e-mail did the rounds and started showing up everywhere (a typical Internet chain letter fad, swapped among the national telco folk), but the fun soon died down. And yesterday, weeks afterwards, I found the original in my archives.
Well, it turns out that I'm in need of another bout of bootstrapping, so here is a translated, updated and sanitized version covering a bunch of random topics - from Apple hardware to, of course, telco stuff, hand-picked from the usual hype you pick up on the everyday news in our business.
It is, of course, fully compliant with the confidentiality clauses I set myself in my Disclaimer, and is to be regarded as another manifestation of the peculiar shift in reality that spawned the Blue Packet a couple of years ago.
So, without further ado, have yourself a bunch of cows:
MacBook Pro:
You have a Core Duo Cow Pro, and it keeps whining and overheating.
MacBook:
You have two cows: a white one and a black one. Both come with glossy horns that reflect every single little pinpoint of light.
Mac mini:
You have a very neat little cow, but you can't milk it without a keyboard and mouse.
Boot Camp:
You have a multiple personality cow, but only one of those personalities is cool.
Aperture:
Until you upgraded your cow, it was kind of fuzzy and not quite white.
Mail.app:
Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, does IMAP like a cow (with apologies to Douglas Adams).
Get a Mac:
You have a nerdy cow and a cool cow. Guess which one doesn't trip on every blade of grass.
Marketing:
We want those cows. What do you mean they're whales? Just fix them so they can graze in the ranch.
Corporate Pre-Sales:
You have two cows and have to sell them five different solutions.
Corporate Support:
Someone sold your customer two pigs with horns stapled to their foreheads and you have to milk them.
Network Vendor:
You keep trying to upgrade your customer's herd by promising chocolate milk in the next release.
Network Operations:
You refuse to take any cows into your barn until you receive a full specification of the milking process, in which you would have liked to have been involved earlier.
Network Implementation:
You have two cows to deploy and suddenly find yourself writing a full specification and set of use cases for the milking bucket and a dependency analysis correlating those with the milking stool.
Web 2.0:
You have two cows (named Ruby and Rails), and can drag and drop spots from one to the other using Ajax.
IP Backbone:
You have two cows everywhere for redundancy and high-availability.
Sarbanes-Oxley:
You can't even think of having a single cow without having its impact on the company's bottom line assessed by a team of expert chicken breeders.
Handset Testing:
You receive two sample cows for testing. One squirts yoghurt and the other barks.
Mobile Content:
You try to squeeze two cows onto a WAP page, but people can barely make out the spots.
IETF:
You have two cows: One writes an RFC and the other lobbies against it.
3GPP:
You have sixteen Siamese cows, each of which is responsible for a small part of the digestive process. Herding them anywhere is a nightmare.
3GPP Release 4:
You have two cows: One chews the cud and another moos.
Net Neutrality (Not):
You want to milk every cow crossing through your land.
Wi-Fi:
You have a gazillion rabbits, breeding like mad. People mistakenly expect them to moo.
Municipal Wi-Fi:
You want to invest in a herd of rabbits because you like the idea of throwing the milk away.
Push-To-Talk:
Your cow only moos after you hit the button.
Google:
You can find every spot on every cow on the planet and target it with a banner ad. Even if you don't, someone will write a Web 2.0 Google Maps mashup for it.
Skype:
You have two million cows mooing at once.
VoIP:
You keep two cows named Fixed and Mobile at your ranch, but a bunch of rabbits keep tunneling under the fence and nibbling at the grass.
IMS:
You have two porcupines (named Voice and Data) and they have been trying to mate (very carefully) for years now.
Fixed-Mobile Convergence:
You wish you had only one cow.