Aimless Wandering

So the other day, I was walking through one of my classrooms where we typically have a TV on.  The TV was tuned to CNN, where a reporter in Colorado was breathlessly reporting on an approaching snow storm…  At the bottom of the screen, the banner Developing Story was plastered along with the headline “Winter Storm Strikes Rockies.”

Snow?  In Colorado at the end of November?  No way!  Shouldn’t it be 85 degrees and sunny in Colorado this time of year?  Sheesh!  It’s the freakin’ Rocky Mountains, it snows in the Rockies!  Why is a snow storm in Colorado news?!?!?  Now, if we were talking about snow in Florida that would be a different story, but Colorado?  Come on!

So several of the traffic lights have sensors in them so that they turn green when somebody’s waiting.  Instead of the magnetic loops in the road, the sensors are up on top of the traffic lights themselves.  Honestly I’m not sure what activates them, as they don’t always seem to work and the Vespa almost never seems to trigger them.

There are some people who seem to think that flashing lights will have some effect on them.  Case in point, the doofus who was waiting in front of me at the light.  He sat at the intersection for a good 30 to 40 seconds flashing his lights in an attempt to trigger the light…  I’m pretty sure it didn’t work…  Never mind that instead of spending 30 to 40 seconds manually flashing his lights in a futile attempt to get a green light he could have flipped a switch in his truck that would have made his lights flash on their own!  I mean, I’m pretty sure that his truck came with turn signals!

So there’s a story in the Detriot Free Press about a 17 year old that has managed to build a small fusion reaction in his basement.  From the story it doesn’t appear that this is a sustainable fusion reactor, but he is fusing atoms together…  This kid is just the 18th person in the world to create a fusion reaction… And HE’S 17!!!

Need a quick example of a natural fusion reaction?  Look up.  The sun is just one giant self-sustaining fusion reaction.  In the physics world creating a fusion reaction is a BIG deal, hence the reason why only 18 other people have done it.  It’s not exactly the safest thing in the world either, according to the article the biggest dangers are high voltages and x-rays, although while I’m not a physics expert given the amount of energy expended by a fusion reaction, I would think that there would be a risk of a very large explosion.

According to the article, this kid originally wanted to build a hyperbaric chamber.  Now to me, this would seem like a safer (and infinately simpler) project for Junior to take on, his mom however wasn’t keen on a hyperbaric chamber.  She was however ok with him creating a fusion reaction in the basement.  Hmm, build a pressure chamber based on proven and tested formulas and equations, or recreate the atomic reaction that occurs on the sun using highly complex and experimental work?

I think the last line of the story provides all of the insight we need into mom’s reasoning:

I thought he was going to be a cook, because he liked to mix things.”

Right….

So a few weeks ago we replaced our HD TiVo with the new DirecTV HD DVR, the timing worked out well for us since the TiVo started getting flakey the week before the new DVR was delivered. Now that we’ve had it for a few weeks I though I’d share my impressions of it.  Find out the good and the bad on the next page…

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So I’ve known pretty much since I moved into my fancy new office with it’s awsome view down the hill across the facility and into the valley below that I’d be moving out of my office at some point. Of course I had no idea where or when that move might occur.

So last week when I get back from vacation I find out that in an effort to accomodate a contractor that we thought we were getting, preparations were being made to turn a large storage room into an office. Now even though it’s a storage room, we’ve seen that it can be converted into a pretty decent office. Since we had a few minions working for us that needed something to do, they were set upon to start the work to convert the room from 100% storage to 75% office 25% storage. Around the same time I made the remark that it might not be a bad idea for me to move down there since where I am now puts me completely out of touch with what the staff is up to since it’s only myself and one other person in the fancy office up the hill…
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Can I just say that I really hate it when the bozos who work the drive through interrupt me when I’m trying to place my order…

Really, I know what I want when I place my order. If I wanted cheese with that I would have told you to put cheese on it, and since there are other things I want you to do to my burger (after you drop it on the floor and spit on it) I would appreciate it if you let me give you all the details before you tried to lump in all the add ons.

I understand that part of your job is to hustle folks through the system, but trust me Ms Accented Garbled Speaker if you shut up for 15 seconds you’ll get all the pertinent details of my order and won’t have to waste your time and mine asking stupid questions… Even better, if you actually paid attention to what I told you as I placed my order you would hear me tell you I wanted a medium coke. Which means you wouldn’t have to ask me what kind of drink I want even though I already told you!

Then again, there’s probably a very good reason why you’re 35 years old and working the drive through at the local Burger Hut.

Sometimes it amazes me how short people’s memory is… Or for that matter how short the media wants our memory to be…

Take for example all of the headlines about how the Democrats and Republicans are going to work together in the new Democratic controlled Congress, and how the White House is going to work with the new Democratic leadership… RIGHT

Hmm I seem to recall hearing this same song and dance 6 years ago when the President first took office. Anybody remember the whole “I’m going to be a uniter not a divider” speeches the President made back then? The speeches that were made just weeks before the start of 6 years of incredibly divisive partisan politics… So why should we believe that the White House is going to be remotely interested in working with Congress?

Heck considering how positively nasty some many campaigns were leading up to the election does anybody actually think that either party is going to work with the other?

Something tells me that once the Congressional investigations of the past 6 years of governance get started by the Democrats, the Republicans will start screaming about how the Democrats are just trying to shut down government and keep anything from getting done… All the while hoping that we forget that the Republicans did the exact same thing to the Clinton Administration during it’s final years in office.

In case you missed it, what was one of the first things that the President did to work with the new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill? Why, nominate crazy John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. You remember John Bolton don’t you? John Bolton, the man with a history of bullying intelligence analysts to make sure the provide him the reports that supported his arguments, even if the reports are false? John Bolton who has stated that he doesn’t even like the UN, who’s nomination is so unpopular it can’t even get out of Comittee. The only reason this guy has a job is because the President has been sneaking it in as a “Recess Appointment” that allows the guy to hold the job for a year without Congress approving it. So the White House is working with the Democrats by submitting for nomination a guy that they know that there’s no way in the world the Democrats would approve… Right…

So yesterday, just minutes before my boss was to give a presentation, my boss gets a page from his wife. When he returns the call his wife tells him that she got a call from an unknown caller stating that their teenage daughter was involved in a car accident. The caller stated that there were no injuries, and that their daughter was ok, but that they needed to get to the scene of the accident right away.

When my boss’s wife tried to reach their daughter on her cell phone to check in with her, there was no answer. To further muddle the situation, their daughter should have been in class when the call came in about the accident.

So my boss goes tearing out of the office headed for the scene of the accident to check on his daughter. When he gets there he discovers… nothing. No accident, no emergency vehicles, no sign that anything had occured. A few minutes later my boss manages to get through to his daughter who informs him that the reason why she didn’t answer her phone is becuase she was in class and had it turned off…

It appears that the call was a hoax. But why would anybody do such a thing? Not that I condone making hoax calls to 911, but at least when you do something like that you see police cars and fire trucks, but in this instance to me it seems that for the caller the result would be a bit anti-climatic…

I’ve got to say,there’s nothing like returning to work after being on vacation and opening up a staggeringly full e-mail box. Then deciding that since all of that junk happened while you were on vacation that you really don’t care about it… So you bulk delete 150 unread e-mail messages…

Because, heck of it’s important either somebody will send another e-mail when you get back or they’ll just come up and brief you on it…

To be honest though, I didn’t delete all the e-mails… I did read the ones about the package I submitted for promotion… I mean, some things really are important!