January 29, 2003
State of the Onion
And now, without further ado (whatever the hell THAT means), I present: The State of the Onion Address:
Ok, that was dumb. But maybe..just maybe..it made you laugh.
Speaking of laughing, when I was searching for my image of an onion tonight (thanks to Watson) and found myself browsing through some image library thingie over on Lycos.com. As the page loaded, I started feeling my right eye twitching. Then, my right shoulder started spasming. Then my right pinky finger started twitching. Then, the next-to-the-pinky finger (my sources are now telling me that most people call that the "ring finger". I don't have a ring on that finger, so it will remain the "next-to-the-pinky finger") started twitching. Was I having a heart attack? Was I having a seizure? You decide (this is what I saw on the page):
Great advertising. Makes me want to... Well, you fill in the blank. Hope nobody had a seizure just now.
CD ripping continues tonight up here in my cozy computer cabin. I forget if I already mentioned this, but I'm ripping my entire music CD collection. I figure it can't hurt to have it all digitized..ya know..in case I ever figure out a reason why I need an iPod.
January 28, 2003
Back to Burning the Candle
In case you haven't already read, this past weekend's excursion to NoVA was a blast.
And now, back to my regularly scheduled life of burning the proverbial candle at both ends. What a strange saying.
Work has been really slow lately. I'm thinking that all of the computer bugs can't cause any mischief because they're all frozen solid. I have a feeling that once Richmond thaws out after this deep freeze we're in, they'll all come back to life.
..and now I don't know what else to say. Go Bucs? Go web? Wake up, Jeff.
January 23, 2003
Someone tell me why!
Ok, I've never understood why some companies think that sending out hundreds and thousands of unsolicited email messages about their products will bring them more sales. Perhaps it DOES bring them more sales. But, it also makes a lot of people mad in the process.
What I don't understand more than that is when you receive a spam email that's not selling anything. Here, let me illustrate. I received this email just a few minutes ago:
Howdy from Missouri
Just checking with you guys.
I had a bad dream about you and Jackie the other night,
Just wanted to make sure all is well in Illinois.
Anita Taylor
Payroll Dept. A0 ext. 1154ggffggffgg
What was the purpose of this message? It's obviously not trying to sell me anything and there's no link to go to someone's website that might be trying to sell me something. So what gives? Oh, wait. There's a phone number on there to call. Extension 1154. I'll just call and find out what all this mess is about.
January 21, 2003
Long Weekend Over
My 3-day (almost 4-day) long weekend has finally come to an end and now here I sit back in good ole' cubicle TMA01058.
With an entire extra day (that's 24 hours total time - approximately 16 hours of "awake" time) of free time time, you'd think I would have gotten a lot accomplished this weekend. You'd be wrong. Instead, I sat around, watched The Price is Right (yes, Rod Rodey IS still on the show!), played some Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and sat around some more. After which I sat around some more. I did get a few things done, but not nearly enough.
And now things are already getting busy here at work, so I must get going.
Don't forget to watch convicted computer hacker Kevin Mitnick tonight on TechTV's The Screen Savers> when he gets online for the first time after being in jail for the last 5 years! I can't wait.
January 17, 2003
The anti-climactic snow storm
OH MY GOD! WE'RE GONNA GET PUMMELED BY SNOW! 3-5 INCHES! 4-8 INCHES! 6-12 INCHES!
What a crock.
It started snowing around 8pm and was done by around midnight. We MIGHT have gotten 4 inches of snow. Although, as I was driving to work this morning, I could see the dead, brown grass peeking above the fallen snow, so we couldn't have had that much snow.
But, what's so funny is that just about all of the local schools closed for the day. The roads are CLEAR! Amazing.
So, here I am: arriving to work on a 2-hour delay. Driving to work was entertaining. I saw numerous cars sitting in the ditch, pointed the wrong way. Traffic on 95 north was sitting still all the way through downtown..and there wasn't a reason for it. I saw where the traffic started to slow down and there wasn't any accident, just two tractor-trailors moving very slowly side-by-side.
It's like when people see snow around here, some kind of chemical reaction takes place in their brains. "Quick! Close the schools! Engage stupid driving mode! Fire aft torpedos!" Ok, maybe not the torpedo thing.
January 14, 2003
Expected Scariness
Something not-so-unexpected happened today at work. I know, why didn't I just say "Something expected happened today"? Because. Because I like to make an otherwise boring sentence like that more complicated than it needs to be. I wonder if it makes me sound more intelligent than I really am. Probably not.
Anyway, back to my story: Soon after lunch, we received a global voice mail instructing us to meet in the atrium in few minutes. Slowly but surely, every emplyee reluctantly made their way out to the atrium. You could sense a bit of anxiety amongst the group; definitely not the kind of vibe you would get if we were all meeting for a happy event.
Even though I and some of my coworkers suspected that this was coming, the news we received was still a bit shocking.
Mr. Adams made his way out to the second floor balcony and began into his speach about having to deliver some sad news. "About 15 minutes ago, we resigned the Champion Mortgage account." He went on to tell us that the agency would be "experiencing a staff reduction" today and that those who had been selected to be released would be notified within the next 30 minutes.
Everyone left the atrium in total silence. The only other time I've ever heard the atrium that quiet was after our previous "staff reductions" about a year and a half ago.
Talk about a strange, tense afternoon. Luckily, I still have my job, but it appears as though one of our network engineers has been cut. It's really sad, too, because our department has been so perfect lately. Everyone does their share of the work and everyone gets along great.
I guess a business has to do what a business has to do. Life goes on.
And now, it's time for me to get on with mine. As you may notice, it's not even midnight and I'm headed to bed. I've been feeling really stuffy and terrible lately. Last night's NyQuil dosage seemed to help a bit, but I gotta hit it again tonight. Plus, I like going to bed drugged and with green teeth.
January 10, 2003
Hey Beavis...Thanks.
See that guy over there? That's Beavis. He'll be your tour guide this afternoon. I figured since my content had been lacking a little something lately that I should hire some help. So here he is.
I wanted to take a second and thank all of my friends and family for purchasing their various Christmas gifts through my Amazon.com link over there to the left. Between us all, we made almost $800 worth of purchases, bringing me almost $38 in revenue for my expensive hobby. Thanks, guys! Keep those clicks coming!
The Mac community has been blessed with a very special gift this week. One of the announcements in the Stevenote Tuesday was Apple's new web browser called "Safari". And it ROCKS. It's incredibly fast at rendering pages..and smart, too. I'm actually typing this in Greymatter using Safari right now..and it just helped me spell "incredibly" correctly. One of the best things about Safari is that it's based on Open Source..meaning that they take public code, make it better, and then give it back to the community in a better state than they found it. For you non-geeks, this (Open Source) is why Linux is such a quickly-growing community and why it is such a powerful OS today. It's nice to see Apple aligning itself closer with the Open Source/Unix/Linux community. I feel that this is the absolute best future for the industry.
And I'm really excited about their new presentation software, Keynote, too. I've already been able to show screenshots, etc. to our Audio/Visual guys at work and they seem to think it'll be great for doing client presentations, etc. They're currently stuck somewhere between Adobe Persuasion (discontinued) and PowerPoint, which is terrible solution if you care anything about fonts and other graphical things that Microsoft has clearly overlooked with every release. The icing on the cake is that it reads and writes native PowerPoint files. And they work GREAT. Trust me, I've already tried it. (Don't ask how)
That's all for tonight. My goal is to attempt to get to bed before 2am. It looks like I'm on target. Goodnight, Beavis.
By the way, for anyone in need of their Beavis and Butthead fix (images, sounds, movies, etc.), here's a cool place. Enjoy!
January 07, 2003
MWSF 2003
Today, something will happen. Possibly something cool. Possibly something sortof cool. Possibly something boring..but probably not. Today is the 2003 MacWorld San Francisco keytnote speech by Steve Jobs. As usual, the rumors have been flying wildly, and it's anyone's guess as to what will actually be announced. I think the speculation is almost the best part of it. If you're bored around noon today, tune in!
In other news, I somehow managed to NOT touch my Playstation last night. I realized that I had fallen a little behind in my CustomTacos maintenance, so I spent a good part of the evening upgrading accounts and just doing little maintenance things here and there. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If I just had more time to put into that site (ie. full-time job) it could be soooo much cooler than it is now. I feel like it's still not living up to it's full potential, but perhaps it can one day.
January 02, 2003
Back to the grind
Getting back to work this morning has been...painful. After 18 days of not working, things aren't exactly coming naturally to me like they should. TCP? IP? Quark? Fonts? What?
Christmas and New Years were great. Olivia spent WAAAAAY too much money on me and got me a Playstation 2. And life hasn't been the same ever since. I went out and bought Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and a memory card just hours after we opened gifts. What an awesome game. Having a new toy like this could be a very, very bad thing. But it's really fun and it gives Olivia and I something different to do.