Snow today

We got a nice snow shower starting early this morning more so at the house than at work. I think there was little more than an inch or two in Overland Park. But seven or eight inches at the house. I wish I could have stayed home and played with the boys, but someone has to bring home the bacon! Maybe we should think about becoming vegetarians, then I guess I would be stuck brining home the lettuce.

Finally, somebody in a chicken costume who will do whatever you want

I love to find stuff like this. This is what the web is best used for, Stupidity. Check it out, you know you want to.

More chances for pictures

Ethan and Mr Whiskers

Okay after nearly two years in our house we have finally move the PC from the basement were it was rarely used to the upstairs. I have to say it’s not in the optimum spot being in our bedroom but at least it will be more convenient to use once in a while. Not that we have a dark dank basement it’s just no fun being separated from the rest of the family just to use the PC. I am glad I will have more time to post pictures like the one above for you to see.

This must be what space travel feels like.

I think I know what it must feel like to travel great distances through space on a long term mission in extremely large spacecraft. I will get to why I feel this way in a minute but first here is a little back story.
I currently work in a large office building within a still larger office complex with literally tens of thousands of other employees all working for the same company. And at some point in the not to distant past the planners of such work environments decided the best way to make this physically and financially feasible is to put each individual employee into a standard workspace with standard configurations including standard technologies with standard software loads and standard furniture to facilitate each employees daily functions with as little deviation from the standard as possible. This is known to some as Cubelife, or working in a Cube Farm. Because the wide open space of the buildings floor(which can be tens of thousand of square feet on any one floor of a multi floor building) is completely occupied by dozens, no hundreds if not thousands of ten by ten temporary office spaces. All made from modular sectional walls in hued consistently with bland earth tones comprised completely of synthetic materials. Don’t let me give off the wrong impression the space provided is not so confining as say a veil pen used to house domestic cattle in an effort to assist in the production of tender portions of high priced beef products. For one person with their daily activities limited to typing on a keyboard and talking on a phone there is ample space provided. And I don’t intend to imply that these surrounding are completely devoid of all creature comforts, in fact most needs have been thought of and addressed. Restrooms are located throughout each floor at short walking distances, even smaller rooms with a door and a phone are provided to enable private conversations. In addition to these needs there are “Pop sites” or small galleys with refrigerators, vending machines and microwave ovens in various strategic points conveniently located in the same place from one floor to the next much like you might have on a large passenger vessel. My point is that this kind of work environment can not be compared to working in a coal mine without a focused stretch of the imagination. However back to my analogy of the space ship, I rarely leave the building once I arrive shortly after the sun has risen until the end of my day shortly before the sun has set. Due in part to the fact that most all daily needs required to support a human life form can be performed within the confines of the mother ship, I mean building. And many others that could be considered luxuries such as physical fitness activities, dry cleaning for your space suit or shirts, even a minor doctor’s visit can be addressed within a two-hundred yard walk to one of the other buildings. The thing that ends up creeping you out is the fact that you have little if any exposure to vistas of the out of doors let alone direct sunlight. And the constant sound of rushing air through the massive heating and air conditioning system that is ever present regardless of your location within the building is reminiscent of the background thruster sound heard in most well produced science fiction space epic films. Plus there is a team of at least two dozen people assigned to each building for the sole purpose of keeping it free of any evidence of use, the cleaning crew as it were are both very thorough and busy keeping each corner and crack in of the building clean to the point of suggesting sterility much like the same space craft pictured in your favorite yonder reaching adventure. My personal vantage point is further influenced by the double digit number of monitors required to perform my job function, so there is the added impersonal aspect of watching monitors like one of the operators in the Matrix. Who has no immediate value to the mission by which all of mankind will be save except answering the phone when the oh so aesthetically pleasing hero of the universe calls, then pushing the proper button allowing them to return from the harrowing trial.
Okay maybe I have spent too much time thinking about all this but how much time can you spend surfing the web each day?

Discipline, Dude you need discipline!

Well I am such a slacker I find it hard to make my self carve out time to post to my blog regularly. Oh yes I have had some excuses the last couple of weeks because of additional activities at work. But I must confess event though I have allowed myself to go without spending the couple of minutes to try and think of something clever to post I have rarely missed reading my daily web comics! I am addicted to slacking!

Where have you been!

Well I feel remiss because I have not been posting much lately. I have been pretty busy at work the last couple of weeks and that’s were I normally post from (but only when I am on a break or lunch, yeah sure). Last week was training and this week has been little projects and working on my LINK. LINK is the format we get reviewed on. Basically it’s a formal document that we use to connect our achievements throughout the year to the companies overall objectives. In other words it a long painful campaign to toot our own horn whereby justifying our existence on the payroll. Anyway that is now complete except for maybe a brief scan on Monday for revisions and opportunities to squeeze in extraordinarily flattering lies about myself. My point is I should be posting more next week, like you care!

How was your week?

Well I feel as if I have been stealing from the company all week. I have been in a software training everyday this week with the exception of Monday, where I was performing my normal mundane duties. The training is designed for a completely different audience even though I do use the application, so I found some of the information interesting but most of it I will not be using in my day to day activities. So a lot of my time and probably a lot of the company’s money were spent on naught. I would say that the best thing that I got out of this week was the opportunity to speak with some of my peers in none work related conversations. It’s always interesting the little things that people are willing to reveal about themselves when given the opportunity to freely express themselves. I will not go into details but suffice it to say that I like talking to people a lot more when I am able to speak to them about things that are not related to what they do to make money. Such a waste to spend all of your time, energy and emotions on something so fleeting as acquiring money and possessions then to waste the time you have to interact with others on finding out nothing more about them outside how they do the same.

Don't you wish you could do this!

Well I have been in a training class all day for work today. So I didn't have time to come up with anything super clever to put up today but as a consolation I did find this . Oh and this I will post as a public service Zefrank.

Complete lack of inspiration

Well it’s not that I can’t come up with anything I want to put up today, it’s just that I don’t have the drive to make it worth your while or mine for that matter. It must be a Monday, check out the weather.

You have to check this out!

If your like me one of your favorite things about the internet is the crazy videos you can find. Here are two examples that totally rock Cellphone Booth and Car both are well done and make fun of how we behave.

Stank update

Well I am not going to have to burn the house down! I found a product specifically designed for resolving my issue, and although it is not 100% corrected at this point I believe I have found a truly remarkable product that could after a few applications rectify this foul problem. However the name is so ludicrous that I will provide the link but not utter it myself.

Cat-tastrophe

Can you imagine the worst smell you can think of like say cat urine, now picture what it would smell like if you had a large dose deposited down the register for your bathroom heating duct. And just for added effect lets say its like 20 degrees outside for the high so the heater is running pretty much all day. That’s the action packed festival of nasal delights we are having at my house right now. I don’t know how you feel about bad smells, but they drive me batty, and my wife who can smell a soiled diaper and identify the culprit from a ten toddler line up at one hundred yards is troubled to an even greater extent. I have been seriously contemplating how I could tear out the ceiling in my garage to remove the entire ventilation system to that bathroom to get at the offensive odor. I would be willing to dig the floor up with a shovel if that is what it will take!
Well those drastic measures may not be necessary, I have found online that there are several enzyme products that purport to be the perfect solution for this kind of olfactory assault, and as you would expect they all have premium financial cost associated with said products too. But I am willing to pay because it’s far cheaper than razing the place to the ground!
Don’t get me wrong either I am trying to vilify the feline offender. He is a very good pet. He’s an outside cat who requires no system for waste management normally. We simply put him outside for a least a brief period even in the most hostile weather conditions and he takes care of those biological functions on his own, presumably in on the neighbors property as I have never discovered any evidence within my own domain. So I am not willing to murder the fuzzy little jerk over this but I am not going to absolve him of all responsibility either. So from now on the cat formally know as “Mr. Whiskers” shall be know as “Stupid Fuzz Ball”

Naomi and the boys this was taken before thanksgiving

Okay this is an old one, it's from May 21,2004. Ethan on his birthday. I will post more in the next couple of days. 

Learnig new tricks

Well I didn't really come up with a clever posting for today but I did learn some things. my friend Edweirdo showed me some new stuff. Like how to change how the link above shows up. so then I figured out how to add the Weather.com and Yahoo links. I am excited to learn some new stuff.

Winter on my mind

Well the weather is on our minds again today. The weather dudes are saying we could get as much as an inch of ice accumulation tonight. It has been cold all day and started raining before 1:00pm and I can see some ice forming on the trees already. It looks really cool but I would have liked it more if I was stocked up on fire wood and off work for the next couple of days. All of my coworkers are concerned about delays tomorrow morning and me being from Texas and hearing the warnings about poor road conditions this is what my commute to work in the morning will most likely looking like .

well wish me luck.

Woo Hoo! It’s a new year!

Oh I guess that’s not really a news flash, but I do want to say Woo Hoo! I am feeling really good about starting a new year; it’s like jumping into a fresh made bed with super clean sheets.
My buddy Eddie is trying to talk me into joining the company gym with him. Not as a new years resolution, because we don’t want to be part of the 90% of people who start a new years resolution at the gym in January and quit going in February and finally stop paying for it in June. He thinks he’s got a few pounds to loose, but I say like me he’s a fat guy screaming up on middle age! Okay Eddie it’s brutal but true, we are fat now what are we going to do about it!

As you can see I added my first picture to the Blog, I just figured out how to do it. Because I have been handicapped by Microsoft were everything is drag and drop it took me a few days to figure out were I could host the pictures and then get them linked, not to mention getting them sized properly because all our photos are 4mbs. So the one of Josh is picture above is an old one of Josh. Because he’s cute, and it was easier to cut that one down to just show him than it was to try and get at another one while I am at work (on a break). Naomi and I are talking about getting a desk to move the PC into the kitchen, out of the basement. Because it gets almost no use down there where no one wants to hang out. But I am dreading pulling the cable putting in a jack to accommodate the new location, however at the same time I am unwilling to stretch cables around from one room to another ghetto style. So maybe those of you who want to hear from Naomi more often will when she has more access to the PC. That’s it for today rock on! fish