Continuing Frusterations at Work

In addition to having Monday off for Columbus Day, I took Tuesday off from work as a person day to head up to the valley for my Uncle Fred's funeral. Even now, it seems weird even typing those words. He had been fighting brain cancer for a number of years and his body finally gave in. The funeral was great and I think our family held up pretty well, despite the unfortunate circumstances. I don't know what else to say about this other than it reaffirms my fear of cancer. It seems like every time I lose a friend of family member to cancer, I get very angry at the world of science. Why is it with all of the technology and information that we have (in the year 2003!) that we can't seem to find a way to stop this terrible disease? It makes me very uneasy knowing that it can sneak up on you and take your entire life away, in a matter of months. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not too keen on the idea of death.

On to a more happy subject..or not. Work. Work has still been busy. I felt like I was playing catch-up all day today. And I continued to notice, as I have often recently, that things aren't quite right in our department. It's really difficult to put into words. At our last department meeting, we played a little game about maintaining good, clear communication within our department. The bad news is, I'm not sure if it served its purpose. In general, I don't feel like our department is functioning as a cohesive unit. There are certain groups that are still functioning great, in my opinion. Tommy and myself are kicking butt getting the new Macs rolled out, despite our frustrations with Quark. I guess the bad part is, there's really nothing I can do except sit back and hope that someone important notices the problems and figures out a way to turn things around.

In other news, I purchased a 120gb IDE drive to install in my TiVo on Monday at Best Buy. After the 10% off (thanks, Brian!) and the rebates, it'll end up only costing me around $63. Not bad at all. Another $60 was spent on the installation kit from Weaknees.com and now I'm ready to upgrade the TiVo. I should have somewhere around 160 hours of recording time after it's all done.

I also started a new promotion over on the ole' Taco shack where we'll be giving away something cool each month for the next few months. Luckily, I've got lots of great relationships with companies who would benefit from the exposure of giving away stuff. We're starting small and just giving away a CustomTacos t-shirt this month, but I've already gotten verbal commitment from three of my other vendors to help me give away neat stuff. The underlying goal is to sustain and grow my premium membership numbers, which helps to keep revenue coming in to the site. All users will be eligible for the first contest and subsequent drawings will probably be only for my premium members. We'll see how it works out.