Aimless Wandering

So I’m watching the coverage of the Florida primaries this morning and the anchor on the unnamed cable news channel I’m watching actually asked some senior member of one of the campaigns:

So what do you think your chances are on Super Tuesday?

As if the campaign member was going to say anything other than we’re going to win it all and our candidate is going to be the next President….

So you put on your resume that you’re an experienced web designer.  You even own a music sales website that you claim to have designed.

In preparation for the work that you were supposed to be doing on our website you were told at least 5 times by several people not to work on the live version of the site.  You were told repeatedly that a development server existed for you to design your pages on and test them out before you implemented your changes on the live site.

So off you went to go work on updating and redesigning the website.  Not surprisingly, after looking at the underlying code on the page you discovered that the design is fairly amateurish at best and decided to work to update the templates used.

On the plus side, you created a CSS template to standardize the design and layout of our webpages…

What you didn’t do - was create that template on the development server!  Knowing that our webpages as originally designed DIDN’T conform to any real design standard, you should have realized that the pages were going to act somewhat unpredictably when you applied that CSS template to them.  That happens to be exactly why we told you to work on the friggin development server!!!!

Even worse was that you didn’t even bother to go through the site to see what happened after you had applied the CSS template.  So you had no idea that the template had screwed up several pages.

Then you ran in to a problem as you were working on a page so you contacted the server administrator for help.  When the server administrator discovered that you were doing development work on a production server  he told you to stop - your response was to argue with him that you were just creating CSS sheets and editing HTML and not writing scripts!

Then when OUR boss confronted you - you got rude and actually yelled at him!  YOU were wrong.  YOU ignored what you were told, YOU were the one who broke the pages.

When you were asked why you deliberately ignored what you were told you came up with ridiculous excuses.   First you told us you didn’t have access to the correct network - you were reminded that wasn’t true.  Then you told us that you couldn’t work on the laptop you were issued because the display was too small and you couldn’t read it.  Then we reminded you that you could use one of the monitors that was at the desk you were working at…

Then you tell us that you don’t understand what the development server would do because you don’t understand how that would help you - even though you can’t remember what the page looked like before you screwed it up!  Then you gave me a blank look when I explained that if you screwed up the page on the development server, what was on the public server would be untouched - and you could compare the two SIDE BY SIDE AND SEE WHAT THE CHANGES WERE!

The bottom line though.  This is just one more reason why I have absolutely NO CONFIDENCE in your abilities - real or claimed on your resume - and if I had any control over the situation, I’d fire your ass already…

I love to travel, I love going places and seeing new things, or for that matter just re-experiencing old favorites. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve done quite a bit a traveling, so I know what to expect. Even still it never ceases to amaze me when I encounter somebody who just doesn’t have a clue. Now I’m not talking about somebody who doesn’t know to take their shoes off – oh no I’m talking about somebody who must live in a cave!

This week I flew out of the smallest airport I’ve ever been in. The “terminal” was so small that the baggage carousel at Los Angeles (where I was headed to) wouldn’t have fit inside the terminal building. The terminal is so small that security is in another building (as is the waiting room). After clearing security and waiting for our flight, I actually heard a woman say “I can’t believe they made us go through security here, I thought that they would take care of it right after we got off the plane in Los Angeles…”

Ah yes, because we’re not concerned about the bad guys getting on the plane – Nope they can get on the plane, but we just can’t have them arriving in Los Angeles! I was tempted to ask her when she planned on getting her money changed to the local currency in Los Angeles…

So I stumbled across this auction on e-bay.  The seller is either a blithering idiot, or a genius.  I’m not sure which.

An e-mail address, heck a crappy e-mail address on yahoo, on sale for $329.99?!

Who would buy this?

Maybe there’s an idiot out there bigger than the seller?

So I’m working in one of our classrooms today and watching MSNBC as the House of Representatives debates the bill regarding the President’s redeployment of troops in Iraq.

I’ve got to say I’m stunned… Shocked…. Amazed..  What has blown me away?  As Representative John Boehner finished speaking on the floor of the House, somebody’s cellphone can clearly be heard ringing!

Are you kidding me?  Congressmen (and women) are certainly important people, but WTF?  You have staffers, let them answer your phone.  If it’s that fricken important your staffer can come and get you!  There shouldn’t be any reason that ANYBODY needs to have a cellphone with them while on the floor of the House of Representatives, or for that matter in either chamber of Congress.  However, if you that inseperable from your phone, at least turn the ringer off!  Set the thing to vibrate!

Then again, is anybody really going to sit in either the House or the Senate while it’s in session and yack away on their cellphone?

I like the ringtone on my phone, yet I almost never hear it…  Why?  Because I find myself in front of classes, in meetings, etc and so I normally leave my phone on vibrate so that I don’t disrupt what’s going on around me and call undue attention to myself.  It makes sense to me, but apparantly doesn’t make sense to the folks in Congress…

So I’m playing with the news feature on the Wii, it’s quite cool. You can zoom around the globe and news stories from around the world show up as little icons that you can click on. It’s not perfect, stories from Birmingham AL show up in Birmingham England, and I didn’t know there was a Stuttgart Arkansas, but there is… Of course it shows up in Stuttgart Germany, but what’s a few thousand miles between friends right?

Anyway I wouldn’t have noticed the Stuttagart Arkansas error if it wasn’t for this story from the AP that showed up on the Wii (in Stuttgart Germany)

“Train Hits Pedestrian Talking on Phone”

Stuttgart, Ark - A woman eating from a bowl and talking on a cell phone walked past a railroad crossing gate and into the path of a freight train, police said Monday. She later died.

Investigators suspect the incident Sunday was an accident but have suppoenaed the 26 year old woman’s cell phone records to find out whom she was talking to.

“She wasn’t paying attention,” Lt. Mark Duke sad.

Gee, you think? It was hardly going out on a limb to make that conclusion! With that difficult case under his belt, I hear Lt Duke is next headed to assist OJ with locating “The Real Killer!”

It’s been a while since I browsed through the photos at the US Navy’s Safety Center. Right after I was there the last time I realized that I should have let you come up with the captions… So after a new visit to the site for some fresh fodder, I bring you the first photo of my caption contest, click on the photo for a larger version:

Now, my prize budget is quite small… As in non-existant. The prize is envy… As in the winner of the caption contest will be envied by those who couldn’t come up with as amusing a caption as the winner.

Rules: Since this is my site, I’m the judge, and my decision is final. However, bribes will be accepted, just make sure they’re good ones!

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!

Now everywhere that I’ve been that I’ve had to do anything remotely related to managing computer systems it was always made clear to me that you never did routine or schedule maintenance during normal business hours. In specific you never did such work during what could be considered a period of moderate to heavy usage…

With that in mind, what genius at Blogger/Google thought that it was a good idea to do scheduled maintenance from 2PM to 3PM Pacific time?