Aimless Wandering

Wow, it just seems like a bonanza of worthless crap unique items has hit the internets recently.  Maybe the people who make this stuff haven’t heard that the internet isn’t a truck….

Today we bring you the Hipster Personal Trailer.  According to the product site, the personal trailer launches a new sport called adventure walking.  See, to me adventure walking might be oh… hiking through a lions den in the Serengetti, maybe exploring the side of a glacier, but definately not walking around with a unicycle strapped to my butt!

Judging by the “product page” I’m guessing this monstrosity isn’t currently for sale…

Next up is the “original” Kamodo Ceramic Barbecue, this hand made barbecue will let you burn those unsightly wads of cash laying around your home in style…

 

I love finding oddball stuff on the web that people are selling…

First up, the Containership Power Supply. Intended to be not just useful, this power strip is intended to also showcase the infrastructure that brought you that hideous wall wart that you need to power your latest gizmo. From the website “this ship powers our electronic devices with their cords in its wake.  I actually think its cool… Too bad its just concept art.

Don’t mind your pooch drinking from the toilet bowl? The why not get them one of these:

All you need to do is fill a two liter bottle, pop it into the bowl and gravity keeps the basin full. Find it at Collections Etc.

Have you seen Paramount Pictures 2003 movie The Italian Job? Remember the character Napster? He wanted a sound system that was so loud, it could blow the clothes off a woman… I wonder if the Hornmassive would do the trick for him?

This is a 2 TON 2,000 WATT sound system! It’s intended to project sound 1 kilometer away… However, it’s just a mono speaker you won’t be getting Dolby sound out of this beast.

Sometimes you just have to step back and wonder if some people think before they act….

Take for example the flurry of activity this e-mail sent out by the number 2 guy where I work (please note, names and titles have been changed to protect… well everybody):

From: Mr. Number 2

Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 11:38 AM

To: Everybody Who Works Here That Isn’t a Contractor

Subject: Recall Log - All permanent staff must immediately verify/update your information with Admin

Importance: High

Greetings all permanent staff - after repeated demonstration that the recall log isn’t accurate (people are either not in it at all, or their info is incorrect), I have to mandate that you immediately contact/visit Admin (Mrs. Smith, or Mr. Roberts) to verify/correct your recall info.

Shift Change for permanent staff is not granted today until I hear back from Division Chiefs that everyone in their respective divisions has verified/updated their info.

I’ll admit that we may have systematic problems - i.e., there just might be more than one person who thinks they hold the golden recall log, and maybe more than one official log exists…please contact Mr. Elliot/Mrs. Smith if you believe you own the log.

Division Chiefs, I am standing by for reports, by 3:30…will allow shift change after I rcv all reports.

All staff - should your info be discovered incorrect/out of date in the future, initial action will include an administrative reprimand. Hopefully this heavy handed approach will correct a problem that’s been here for at least my two plus years as Mr. Number 2, probably longer.

It seems innocuous enough, except that there were a few problems with this plan.

Problem 1: We have approximately 350 permanent staff members. So Mr. Number 2 was forcing two people to verify the recall information for 350 people in just 4 hours, 3 if you take into account that he sent it out just as people were leaving for lunch.

Problem 2: If Mr. Number 2 had checked with somebody in Admin before sending his e-mail he would have discovered that Mr. Roberts is on vacation. This leaves just 1 person to verify the recall information for 350 people in 4 hours.

Problem 3: If Mr. Number 2 had checked the Admin staff calendar before sending his e-mail he would have discovered that not only was Mr. Roberts on vacation, but that Mrs. Smith was scheduled to be down with me conducting training all afternoon today, leaving NOBODY to verify the recall information for 350 people in 4 hours.

Mrs. Smith decided that there was no way that she was going to miss the training (which is a good thing since I really couldn’t do it myself), so she decided to auto-forward all of her e-mail to somebody else. Then she set her voice mail to state that she would be unavailable , DO NOT LEAVE ME A MESSAGE!

So we were running bets on whether or not this was going to happen. Even better, we were wondering just who would be the moron who wouldn’t make the call to Admin to verify their data.

Somehow the folks in Admin manage to pull this thing off with just 5 minutes to spare.

So I’ve gotten settled in to my new office. Other than instantly becoming the go-to person for most things technical on the floor, it’s great up there.

But in the nutty place that I work, there’s already talk of another move!

See the Print Shop is having issues with the paper. It’s currently not kept in a climate controlled environment, it gets humid in the storeroom which causes the paper to get wavy and stick together. That causes the printers to jam and all kinds of maintenance issues.

So now there’s talk of evicting “the golden children” (the folks whose office my old desk was located in a corner of) from their current spaces and expanding the print shop into where the golden children are now.

Now, screwing over the golden children is not something I have a problem with. A month after I arrived, they decided to repossess part of my desk and not give me a chance to even remove my stuff from the desk… Even worse was that my boss didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me that I was loosing the desk. Combine that with the fact that they were less than hospitable to me while I was in there office and I don’t think too highly of them.

When the print shop moves, we’ll get our old space back. But we’ll get the entire space to ourselves instead of having to share it with two other people and a few tons of crap. Kinda…

See my boss has now decided that it’s time for a land grab and refuses to give up any space he currently has. That means I’ll keep my office for now, my office mate goes back down the hill to our old space. Well, until 8 months from now when one of my peers is transferred and I’ll be expected to move into his office which is closer to the bosses office. Oh did I mention that I was originally supposed to be in that office when I first got here, but got booted out…

Confused yet?

That’s ok, it gets dumber…

Well, when we moved out of the golden children’s spaces they offered me and my co-worker the desks that we were using. I turned them down (something about making a deal with the devil) but my co-worker took them up on the offer. They made it clear that they wanted the desks out so that they could open up the space and give them more room.

Surprise, surprise, a month later the golden children are demanding that my co-worker give up his desk because they think they may possibly get to hire two more people. Hmm, at no time were we told that either desk was being loaned to us, because if we were there was no way we would have taken them… Even worse, my boss won’t stand up to the golden children’s boss and tell her that we’re keeping the desk…

Sometimes I just wonder why I even bother…

Well, actually it was just part of Friday and most of Saturday, then I had to come home for my regular babysitting gig… But it was a good chunk of the weekend… This was actually two weeks ago, but I’ve been pretty busy.

I don’t know what it is about racing historic cars… I mean, I’m not a race fan… I can tell the difference between a Formula 1 car and a stock car, but that’s probably about it. I wouldn’t recognize say Michael Schumacher or Daryl Waltrip or some other race driver if I saw them on the street…

But for some reason, antique (as in 40+ year old) cars tearing around a track fascinate me. Heck, my big secret is that I can hardly be considered a car guy… Which is a little bizarre since I spent a year and a half as the President of a car club, a job I would have had longer if we hadn’t moved!

Yet I headed down to Monterey CA to spend a weekend at the Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca to watch the races… and enjoyed it immensely. You can find lots of pictures from the weekend over in the Photo Gallery.

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I know, it’s been a few days since the last post but I’ve been busy.  I spent a good part of this past weekend in Monterey at the Rolex Monterey Historic Automobile Races at Laguna Seca, there’s a post and a whole bunch of pictures in the works.  Hopefully I’ll have that done soon…

The other thing that has been occupying my time (besides the business) is a package that I’m trying to put together to apply for a BIG promotion.  This is a big deal, and a LOT of trees will be valiantly sacrificing themselves to this cause.  I asked my current supervisor to write me a letter of recommendation to include in my package, and he then turned around and asked me to write the letter for him to sign…  In the end that’s probably a good thing, by boss is a pretty good guy to work for… but he’s a horrible writer!

So, I wrote this nice flowery letter that says in essence that I walk on water, cure the blind, and leap tall buildings in a single bound and in the process managed to work in a statement from Thomas the Tank Engine! :D  I think the boy’s habits are starting to get to me…  I did it in a statement that I wrote about an office reorganization that I put together and completed:

 

Previously one person acted as the main point of contact for all staff needs with the other filling in on an overflow basis, this arrangement often caused confusion and delay as projects were shuffled between the two key staffers on an as needed basis.

Honestly I think the phrase fit in quite well, and I’ve tried to come up with one that fit in better but couldn’t…

 

There’s been rumbling over the last few days over a new tool from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer…

What does it do? Well you’re looking at it. It’s a stand alone blogging tool that runs on Windows XP (and presumably Vista), that interacts with many of the blogging software commonly in use, including WordPress.

The program lets you draft your entry locally on your computer and when competed lets you upload it to your blog as either a draft or an actual entry.

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Washington DC- Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has announced new air travel security restrictions in light of ongoing terrorism threats.  During his appearance on Sunday’s Meet The Press, Secretary Chertoff announced that begining at 12:01 AM, Tuesday August 15, passengers would no longer be permitted onboard commercial airliners arriving in or departing from any US airport.

Citing reports that the suspects arrested by UK authorities on Thursday were plotting to use chemicals that were undetectable by current scanning equipment used by TSA screeners, Chertoff stated that DHS officials felt that this solution was the only one devised that would ensure that terrorists would be unable to harm an airliner in the United States.

“We continue to evaluate new and innovated screening technologies to keep Americans safe in the air,” stated Chertoff “In fact the policy going into effect this Tuesday is a direct result of our ongoing security testing.”

The Secretary discussed an early security screening experiment that was conducted at five pilot airports.  Passengers departing from Baltimore-Washington International (BWI), Logan Airport in Boston (BOS), Chicago’s Midway Airport (MDW), Dallas Love Field (DAL), and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) were prohibited from wearing clothing onboard aircraft in an attempt to reduce the number of banned items being brought onboard.  According to Chertoff the tests were a partial success, as the number of prohibited items that were discovered at security checkpoints increased ten fold.  However the tests were discontinued due to the large number of passenger complaints that were received due to passengers “sticking” to the leather seats onboard JetBlue aircraft. 

TSA officials also discovered that during the test period a starting number of Southwest Airlines crew members onboard flights departing from the pilot airports seemed to be stricken with sudden blindness causing increased flight delays and cancelations.

****NOTE:This is not a real news story, any resemblance to a real news story is purely coincidental, you will still be able to fly on Tuesday.

You’ve got to love the US Navy…  Ok well maybe not, but the US Navy’s Safety Center is a great little organization.  For years they have taken great delight in showing off the less the brightest moments of both military and civilians in an attempt to get people to not injure them selves so much.

While I’m not sure that they’ve managed to reduce injuries around the Navy, at the very least they can be VERY funny at times.

Take for instance some of the photos that they’ve got posted on their website….

Who needs tie downs to keep their load in their vehicle when they’ve got a really, really big guy to lie on top of what you’re hauling?

Oh, but wait there’s more….

 

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I was almost getting to the point where I thought that I wouldn’t need to bring this out, but given the events of the last few days, I just don’t think I have a choice:

 

 

Now don’t get me wrong, I support most of the efforts in place to keep us safe.  Notice I said most, sorry but warrantless wiretapping or warrantless seizure of phone records is another story…

I think the UK security folks and all of the other agencies involved with yesterday’s arrests did a fantastic bit of police work, and I applaud their efforts.

But what bothers me is the knee jerk reaction that was taken in response to the disrupted plot….

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