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.

Well, light, fluffy flakes of happiness are falling from the sky.  There’s almost no breeze, so it’s falling pretty much straight down.  It’s quiet enough that if you stand very still, you can hear the flakes hitting the ground.  Heaven.

We’re projected to get between 2 and 4 inches.  And it’s cold enough that it’ll hang around for a while. 

Everyone in the area is acting like this is White Armageddon, but I don’t think it’ll be that big a deal.  One of the supervisors at work was telling his people what to do if the end of the world happened today, and I piped up and reminded him that it wasn’t going to be raining frogs, just a little snow.  I’ll probably get a talking to for that later.

This morning, the kids were up and doing an ancient Norwegian snow dance in the living room in hopes that they’d close schools.  No luck for them.  A lot of the rural districts around the city are closing schools, but they have to deal with a lot of country roads to get the kids to school, so that’s understandable.

I braved the supermarket last night to do the mid-week grocery shopping, and I seemed to be between waves of the Golden Horde.  The bread shelves were picked pretty clean, so I obviously wasn’t the first one there to get food, but the store wasn’t too busy yet.  I was in and out in less than 30 minutes, so I feel lucky.

So, hopefully in the next few days we’ll be able to take BooBoo out for his first snowball and snowman.  It’s nice that the snow will stick around for a while.

“He would combine complex mathematics, Eastern philosophy, and psychodelic drugs to ….”

Not sure if I’m watching the History Channel or MSNBC at the moment.  They could be describing an aging hippie or one of President Obama’s advisors.  But then again, what’s the difference?

Today, I’m just hoping I can get home before the rock shifts.  H/T to There I Fixed It.

OK, here we go!

New York Jets and Cinci – Cinci.  They’re playing at home, and hopefully no morons injure themselves in warmups.

Baltimore and New England – Baltimore

Philadelphia and Dallas – Dallas

Green Bay and Arizona – Green Bay

So the regular season ends.  My Raiders and Redskins didn’t do so well, but the Vikings have done really well.

I was 9 and 7 for the final weekend of regular season play.  My record for the entire season was 135 and 121.  Just a hair better than flipping a coin.

To a dog is a toddler who decides he doesn’t like the chicken and starts dropping it on the floor.

To a cat is a sunbeam on a shelf above the toddler’s range of climbing.

but I’ve been flat on my back.  I started feeling cruddy on New Year’s Eve, and the next morning wasn’t able to lift my head without help.  I kept trying to treat it at home with Tylenol and such, mainly because I will have to postpone my arthritis treatment later this month if I go on antibiotics.

But after 3 days of laying in the bed, Irish Woman directed me to go to the urgent care clinic.  She didn’t want me to wait until tomorrow when our doctor was in her office.  Doc took one look at me, pronounced me with a bad case of strep throat, and game me a prescription for horse pills, to be taken twice a day.

I’ll be OK in a day or so.  It’s just a great way to start off the new year.

Irish Woman has been run ragged by BooBoo, but Girlie Bear has been helping a lot.  I owe them both a lot for letting me rest this weekend.

Back in January, I made some predictions.  Here’s how they turned out:

1.  The price of oil would go up significantly.   Kind of.  The price is up from the low it got to last year, but it didn’t raise as much as I thought it would.

2.  The economy will continue to drop.  Spot on.  The economists say the recession is over, but I’m still seeing a lot of folks looking for a job.

3.  The housing market will bottom out.  Got this one right, I hope.  Prices are stabilizing.  I hope this is the bottom instead of a plateau before plunging again.

4.  One of the Detroit Big 3 will go out of business.  Well, sort of got this one.  Chrysler and GM are working on making it back, and GM is selling off most of their subsidiaries.  But they’re still independent companies.  Ford seems to be doing well.

5.  A major disaster will occur and President Obama will not react well.  Not even close.  No big disasters this year, which is a good thing.

6.  Iran will get the bomb.  Not yet, but they’re getting closer.

7.  US casualties in Iraq will decline and those in Afghanistan will increase.  Spot on.

8.  Obama will have dwindling approval ratings.  Yep, got that one.

9.  The Republicans will work to make themselves more electable at the expense of their credibility as conservatives.  I’ll take the hit on this one.  They’re making themselves more electable, but President Obama is helping them stay on the right of center by pushing legislation and policies that are very left of center.

10.  The Republicans in Congress will have a hard time keeping President Obama from getting everything he wishes for.  Correct, but with a caveat.  The legislation that Obama and the Democrat leadership have put forward is so polarizing it’s making it easy for Republicans to get unity in their opposition, and making it hard for the Democrats to keep their conservative brethren in line.

11.  UK will beat UL.  Wrong, but the rivalry continues.

So, I got a few right, and a few wrong.  I’ll have my 2010 predictions up in a few days.