3 bad kicks in one game?  Dude, did they do the Heimlich on you after you choked that bad?

Hat Tip to Very Demotivational: Demotivational Posters That Demotivate

OK, I went 2 and 2 on Wild Card Weekend.

For Divisional Playoffs, here are my picks:

Baltimore and Indy – Indy
New York Jets and San Diego – San Diego
Dallas and Minnesota – Minnesota
Arizona and New Orleans – Tossup.  I’ll go with Arizona.

Dear Lady on the Sidewalk,

This morning, I was about 10 meters behind you on the walk into the office.  Even with a slight breeze to my back and a stuffed up nose, I could distinctly make out the perfume you were wearing.

I realize that after a few seconds you can’t smell your own body scents, and this can make it hard to know when you’ve used too much, but please try to better regulate the amount you use. 

Here are some guidelines:

If after dousing your carcass, you can tell a difference in the amount of perfume left in the bottle from before you marinated yourself in it, you might be using a tad too much.

If your family pet won’t come to you because it’s too busy snuffling up water from its dish to get the pain out of its nose, then maybe you should cut back.

If birds drop dead as you pass under trees, then maybe you need a perfume sponsor to help you put on the appropriate amount.

Thanks much for your consideration,

DB

A woman in Washington has been charged with assault for switching the wires in her husband’s saw because she was angry with him.

Reminds me of why I don’t work on electricity with Irish Woman around.

A few years ago, our dishwasher died.  We went to the store and bought a new one.  Delivery was free, but the salesman wanted $150 to install it.  Being a manly man (read moron), I decided that I could install it myself.

The new dishwasher was going to be delivered sometime on Saturday, so I wanted to disconnect the old one after work on Friday.  It took me about an hour to get all of the molding and cabinetry out from around the dishwasher.  After I had gotten the thing pulled a few inches out from under the counter, I saw that the power line was soldered in.  I would have to cut the line and run a new one.  No big deal.  While I found my wire cutters in the toolbox, I sent Irish Woman down to the basement to hit the breaker.  After a few minutes, the lights in the kitchen went out.

I shouted downstairs “Is that the right breaker?”
She heard “Did you hit the breaker?”, and of course answered “Yes!”.

I took hold of the power line, and cut through it.

POW!

Next thing I knew, I was across the room, smacked up against the refrigerator.  All of the lights in the house are out.  I had not only blown the breaker for the dishwasher, but had also blown the house main.

From the basement, as I did a quick inventory of all my parts and pieces, I heard:

“Honey?….. Sweetheart?……”

About a minute later, I heard her coming up the stairs, slowly.

I growled “Do not come back up here right now”.  I then heard her head back to the dark basement.

I collected myself, found a flashlight, and headed down to the basement to hit the house main breaker.

Luckily I was not hurt.  I learned two things that day:

1.  Switch off your own breakers.  What happened was my fault, not hers.
2.  The Irish Woman is a jinx, and I will never do anything remotely dangerous around her.

That’s my philosophy, and it’s worked well so far.

In other news, the body politic is shocked, shocked I say, to find that over 20 Congresscritters spent our hard earned tax dollars to attend the failed Copenhagen conference.  And of course, Madam Speaker Pelosi (D – Xanadu) was one of them and won’t offer an accounting of the money spent until all of the paperwork is in.  Which will probably be sometime during the 2015 to 2016 time frame.

This is nothing new.  When I was stationed in Germany, we always knew we would have congressional delegations come through just prior to Octoberfest.  And wouldn’t you know, Mrs. Congresscritter would come along to see how the military families were holding up in our harsh Bavarian outpost.  And we were never surprised to learn how many congressional staffers would show up to watch a technology demonstration in the Mojave desert and have to fly in and out of Las Vegas, with a quick stay in Sin City to prepare for and recuperate from their trip to the desert wastes.

What strikes me about this one is the scale and absolute arrogance of those who went along.  And this one isn’t on one particular party.  Both parties were dirty on this one.

Look, politicians have been taking advantage of their positions since the first cave people decided that Og the Magnificent could be the head of the hunters.  But in this day and age, they should know better than to think it will happen without someone noticing and raising a stink.  One would think that a sense of shame would stop them from doing something this stupid.  But then again, that would presuppose the existence of a sense of shame and duty.

I attended a project planning meeting this morning with one of my customer groups.  We spent the time going over what they wanted to do over the next year or so.  It’s going to be busy. 

We went over how much effort my work would be, and then the DBA gave her two cents.  We were able to estimate that it would take about half of our time for the first quarter, and then only support time after that.

Then we got to the programmer.  This was the guy who drove the conversation for the most part, and had listed out all of their requirements.  When asked how much of his and other programmers’ time would be necessary to get to the high heights they want to go to, he started tapdancing.

Nothing like watching someone who wants you to work hard for him squirm when asked to quantify how much work he is willing to do to get to his destination.  My day was complete.

We took BooBoo out to play in the snow yesterday.  He wasn’t too sure about it at first, but got into it once Girlie Bear and I started pulling him around on the sled.

I think I’ve hatched another snow gopher.

OK, this is a bit of a rant, but please bear with me.

I’m an IT guy.  IT is pretty heavy on self improvement and continual re-learning of your job.  I do everything I can on my own to learn about new tech and methods, but occasionally it’s nice to just go somewhere and spend dedicated time learning.  I definitely get more out of training when it’s away from my laptop, desk phone, and constant stream of meetings.

A good answer to these is conferences.  There are classes, break-out sessions, and demonstrations that I can learn from.  SANS makes their conferences into classes with a conference thrown in.  That’s my favorite way to do it.  You go to conference stuff from 6 to 8 AM, go to class from 8 to 5, and then do conference stuff from 5 until about 10 PM.  Yes, after a week you’re kinda psychotic from lack of sleep, but your head is buzzing from all of the things you have been exposed to.

Problem is, conferences and good training tend to happen in really nice places, such as San Diego, Los Vegas, and Orlando.  I’m not complaining.  I like going to nice hotels and nice places as much as the next person.  It probably makes it easier for the vendors to attract people to their event if it’s in a resort type destination.

However, there are a lot of people who go to conferences in those places abuse the situation and skate out for an afternoon or three.  I never have, but there are those who do. When I was new in IT, I was always being told about the partying that went on when the more senior guys went to conferences and training.  Lots of guys took the opportunity of being away from work and home to revert to frat boy status. When I got to the point in my career that I was sent to training and conferences, I tried hard to resist that urge.  I didn’t want to get a reputation for blowing off expensive training to have a paid vacation.  And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to be that guy. 

My very senior manager has a problem with paying for people to go to destinations where their work ethic might be compromised.  And that’s understandable.  Money doesn’t grow on trees in IT anymore, and he’s being scrutinized on what he’s getting for every training dollar.  Why spend money to send someone to a class or conference if you’re worried they might spend the whole time drunk on the beach?

But I do want to go to these events.  And since I don’t have an extra five thousand dollars a year to pay my own way, I have to get my managers to authorize the expense at work. And it’s difficult to get that authorization from a skeptical manager when conference based training is held at places like Disneyworld.

I’m going to send a message to my training vendors and ask them to start holding conferences in places like Buffalo, Toledo, Barstow, or maybe even Louisville.  It will make it easier for those of us who have to work hard to get an OK to go if our managers don’t have to worry about us going to DisneyWorld or the Bilagio instead of training.

Apparently we don’t pay enough taxes to get the roads cleared after a light snow fall, because they called off school in Louisville due to slippery road conditions.

My boss is understanding, so it’s no problem to dial in and work from home.  I’ve got quite a bit to do, so as long as I’m productive, this shouldn’t be a problem.

It’s actually cold outside.  With the wind chill, it’s about 0 degrees Fahrenheit.  If it warms up and the wind dies down, we’ll take BooBoo out for his first snow play this weekend.  It’ll be fun to watch Girlie Bear try to teach him to make a snowball.  Maybe we’ll take him sledding.