Aimless Wandering

Ah yes, quiet unassuming little Google.  You know the company, the one that has that super simple search engine, with the plain home page that returns accurate results and is probably used by 80% of the world.  The company who’s motto is “Do no evil” but will provide data to the Chinese Government so that they can crack down on dissenters…

 Oh yeah, and then there’s that GMail program of theirs, Google Earth, Google Mars, Google Messenger, Google Video Store, Google…. well you get the picture…

 But what you may not know about is some of the things that Google has been doing behind the scenes…  Things like buying thousands of miles of unused fiber optical cables that were laid a few years ago (aka dark fiber, sounds evil doesn’t it ) or setting up a massive global network of computers known as the Googleplex, which is arguably the largest computer in the world…  It’s moves like these that has many conspiracy theorists wondering if Google is striving towards some form of global domination…

Well this story a few weeks ago in the New York Times, and this follow up story on CNet is sure to add fuel to the conspiracy theory fire.  Google is currently building two “super secret” massive computing centers (each the size of a football field) on the banks of the Columbia River near The Dalles, Oregon and has plans for a third at the site.  You can see a photo of the mammoth facility at the top of the NY Times article.  Coupled with these computing centers are equally large cooling plants, said to tower 4 stories high!  Ok so the “super secret” part is a bit questionable since well, the NY Times, CNet, and probably a few thousand bloggers are writing about the existance of this facility…  Although nobody outside of Google knows just what’s in those buildings…

Originally I had planned on making a post today spotlighting the neighbor’s chicken…  Yes our neighbor has a chicken, and now you’re going to have wait to read my scintilating post about it…  Don’t get too excited trust me…

But instead you get to hear about my evening.  I became convinced not long ago that the three feline denizens of our menagerie formed a pact with each other to ensure that our day just isn’t complete unless we have to clean up some cat puke.

I come home today and head to go and get changed into something more comfortable… Not an issue, until I discovered that one of our residents decided to relieve themselves of that hairball that was driving them nuts on our bed.  If it wasn’t bad enough that they puked on the bed, the did it on my side of the bed, almost on my pillow!

So after getting the boy to bed, it’s time to deal with the present that was left for me.  So, the bed gets stripped, and off I go to try and decipher the organization system of our linen closest (i.e. none).  Just to keep it interesting, I discovered that the sheets for our bed were mixed in with the sheets for the boy…

Then to add to the degree of difficulty one of our cats decides that they need to swat at my legs from under the bed while I’m trying to change the sheets…

You know, as much as I dislike AOL, I really shouldn’t complain about them too much…  The wife was an indentured servant there for 4 years (she was an old timer!) which meant that they paid a lot of our bills…

But it’s hard to ignore the bad press they’ve been getting lately…  By now I’m sure you’ve heard the story (and possibly the recording) of the guy who tried mightily to cancel his AOL account…  If you’ve forgotten, or just want to hear it again, you’ll find it here on the Consumerist website.

But the folks over at CNET’s Buzz Out Loud steered me to this story also over on Consumerist, that’s almost as good.  It seems that a poor woman named Brenda lost her mother in a car accident back in February.  That was bad.  Almost as bad is what happend when she called AOL just 2 days later to try and cancel her later mother’s AOL account…

You’ll have to click below to hear the rest of the story….

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If you read the wife’s blog, you’ll know that she was at Motorcycle School last week, that’s right motorcycle safety classes to ride our scooter…

In reality not a bad thing, we learned a lot about technique and a little bit about what our limits as riders our and the limits of our scooter (aka what not to do while riding). However being a more motorcycle centric class I think I also learned more about motorcycle shifting than I really cared to know….

For the most part the class was uneventful, although I did have a few characters, meet them by clicking below…

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Yes I’ve said it… Feedburner Sucks!

I find their site to be unreliable, and I’ve come to doubt the reliability of their information…

For those who don’t know, Feedburner is a site that is supposed to watch your RSS feed (the feed that lets you subscribe to this blog) and let you know when somebody subscribes to your site.  It’s a way for you to get an idea of how many people are reading your site on a regular basis…

The idea seems great, but I find their execution to be pretty piss poor…

For starters, it’s really hard to get a site registered with Feedburner when you can’t even get to their site…

When I can actually get to the site I’ve discovered that for reasons completely unknown to mere mortals like myself that Feedburn has dumped the few subscribers I had… I know that they didn’t usubscribe because I subcribe to one of my own feeds…

So yes, Feedburner sucks!

Our friendly neighborhood hummingbird was back again…  I actually made it outside during his visit today, he stopped feeding while I was outside and instead headed to a nearby branch to watch me.  I got to see a hummingbird at rest…

 

Apparently this hummingbird has a problem with butterflies, while I was outside he actually chased a butterfly away from the flowers that he’s been feeding off of.  

 

No, not that kind of baby sit…  Since I have an almost three year old who spent the majority of his first two years alone with me while mom worked I think I’m qualified for that kind of babysitting…

No, I’m now qualified to babysit a group of 18-24 year olds who are notorious for getting themselves into trouble…

 Lemme ’splain…

   My day job isn’t at just a plain vanilla training facility, we have full on resident training classes much like a college.  Our student body is about the same age as the average college, however our students aren’t here nearly as long as a college student would be and here they don’t tolerate a lot of the things that the average college student does.

  Now because these students are notorious for getting in to trouble, some poor sap (a responsible poor sap, but a poor sap none the less) has to spend the night in the dormatory and with any luck deter the students from doing stupid things and getting into trouble…. Or at the very least catch them in the act of doing said stupid thing….  Thankfully, it’s not the same poor sap who has to do this every night, however I’m now one of those poor saps…

Click below to find out some of the things I get to deal with

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Don’t you just love those phone calls…

You know the ones…  Where the person on the other end is freaking out because something of some sort isn’t the way they thought it would be, and it’s just a major tragedy and it’s somehow your fault because you didn’t do what you were supposed to…   That is, they were freaking out at you until you pointed out that you did exactly what you were supposed to do….

Take today for example:

Ring goes the phone, and because I’m just not smart enough to ignore it, I answer it… and hear: (names changed to protect the annoying)

Caller: “Umm there’s a new Medic Class onboard this week, and Bill (no that’s not his name) just got the rooster and hasn’t created their computer user accounts and there’s nothing in the schedule for them and it’ll be a week before he can get their accounts created! AHHHHHH!”  (ok the AHHHH was just added for effect)

Me:  ”Well that doesn’t sound right let….”

Caller (interupting): ” Well yeah I know….”

Me: “Let me check the calendar, because I’m almost positve I scheduled that class for next month…. Yup, here it is, on May 15th the class advisor for the Medic class requested that we schedule them for July 10…”

Caller (sounding puzzled but frustrated and still in a bit of a panic):  “Well, Well, that doesn’t make any sense!  Call the class and advisor and confirm this with them…”

Me (thinking): “ Yes, because it can’t be that the class advisor did exactly what they wanted and oh by the way caller I DON’T WORK FOR YOU!, YOU’RE A CO-WORKER!!!!.”

However, I call the class advisor, and SURPRISE! I had the right info, we’re not supposed to do anything with his class for about a month…  Then I call my co-worker and lucky me get to hear the disappointment that I was in fact correct, and that there was no reason to flip out in the first place…  No apology…. nothing…

All personnel secure from panic attack level 1…

One of the cool things about our house (as weird as this house is) is that our yard happens to attract hummingbirds.

I actually saw my first hummingbird about a year ago when we were in Virginia. One paid us a brief visit to feed on some of the plants that were on our back deck.

However they come here quite a bit. On just our first night here we counted no less than three hummingbirds making the rounds in the yard at once…

Ever since I got my new camera I’ve been itching to get a picture of a hummingbird flying around the yard, but until this evening they haven’t stuck around long enough for me to get my camera out in time to catch them…

Click below to check out our visitor…

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Ok, well I’m not even sure I want to bang on a drum…

But I do know that I have absolutely NO motivation to do much of anything today.  Nope, no desire to do anything… which pretty much explains why I’m sitting here at work and making a blog entry.  Making a blog entry when I have a project list with probably about 5 projects that I need to get done…

I tried to accomplish something today…  Really I did… I spent two hours working on trying to get a coursebook formatted properly (ok it was only 20 minutes, but I claimed two hours on my project log! )  I think it was the frustration of that book not cooperating that finally did me in…

It hasn’t helped my overall motivation that I’m up in my office’s satellite classroom which gets almost no traffic.  At the pace we’re going this month, we’ll have a whole 3 people use the classroom for the entire month of June!  While it’s nice to have the entire room to yourself… It can get boring after a while.

There’s a part of me that says I really should do something productive, especially since my boss (and his boss)is on a big kick to get an accounting of our productivity and hours…  Supposedly they are working on getting another person for our branch, but it may also be because we have a somewhat unproductive member of our branch (not me!)…  Either way they’re looking closely at the entries in our project logs to see what is (or isn’t) getting done.  Although, thanks to our branch slacker I could probably goof off all day today and still look productive compared to him…. hmmm…

Nevermind, I just got an e-mail that is the perfect project for me to goof off with…  Simple to do, yet easy to stretch out over a few hours and still look productive… excellent!