Aimless Wandering

See, this is just another reason why I need to go back to England. First there was Tanks-a-Lot (www.tanks-alot.co.uk although their site appears to be down) where you can drive around retired English army tanks. I first heard about Tanks-a-Lot on American Chopper when the Teutels went to England. The episode pops up on DiscoveryHD every so often, if you have DiscoveryHD you should watch for it…

But this, this is something even better. In a field in Leicestershire you can play paint ball WITH TANKS!!!!! :D

The good folks at Southfields Farm are offering two hours of tank warfare for just 79GBP or $148. Now it may seem like a lot of money for two hour of paintball, but did I mention you get to drive TANKS!!!!! (www.funday.com)

Each battle consists of two tanks, each with a crew of three plus an observer/instructor. Your ammunition is ping pong balls filled with paint fired at 300 feet per second, because of that battles are conducted with the hatches closed

Rumor has it that they have a paintball bazooka and paintball airstrikes in the works as well

Check out the story in The Daily Mail

So I posted a few weeks ago about our purchase of the SmartParts Digital Picture Frame (which incidentally is on sale again).

We bought two of the frames, and the one for the house worked really good.  Last Monday I finally got around to setting up the one for the office, and things didn’t go quite well.  After getting it all setup I discovered that the remote control, which according to the manual is needed to put the frame into slideshow mode, doesn’t work.  Yes, I do on occasion read manuals.

Well, being that I’d never heard of SmartParts before, I couldn’t surpress the feeling of dread as I sent their support department and e-mail.  I figured that I might get a response after about a week…  However, imagine my surprise when about an hour and half after I sent the e-mail somebody from SmartParts give me a call.

After asking me the normal but needed newb questions (is the frame on? does the remote have a clear view of the frame? etc) he quickly declared that the remote was bad, but told me the undocumented way to get the frame into slideshow mode without the remote. The tech then told me that they would send me a new remote as soon as they could.  I translated that to mean 4 to 6 weeks or so.  Wow was I wrong!  The new remote came in on Saturday.

So… Good job SmartParts!  I’ll definately buy your products again with confidence.

So, you discover an item that your life at work just wouldn’t be complete without…  Being that good steward of scarce funding $’s you scour high and low on the interweb to find that most necessary of necessary widgets.  Then you go and fill out the necessary requisition forms (in triplicate!)and submit them…

Then you wait, and wait, and wait…

Finally, after two months of waiting (or is it three now?) somebody returns your phone call…  It seems that despite the fact that vendor A is the cheapest around, they couldn’t order from them.  So supply folks used their list of alternate sources for stuff (after waitng two weeks to reject the order from vendor A) to try and place the order from a different Vendor.  Order gets submitted (after sitting for another week) and hangs around at Vendor B for three weeks, before Vendor B declares that they can’t get the item being ordered….

So after another few weeks goes by (and multiple phone calls and e-mails to the purchasing folks) we get the call from the purchasing folks, “hey we’ve got this two month old purchase request that we still haven’t filled, do you still want this stuff?”   So after several minutes of a one sided conversation (somewhat heated) about customer service, workflow management, with a few repititions of “GET ME MY STUFF” thrown in for good measure…  It seems that the most necessary of necessary widgets has FINALLY been ordered…  For about $50 more per unit than originally priced out at…  And you know it’s been so long since I first did the purchase request that I don’t even know any more just how many widgets I ordered in the first place!

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…

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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