Posts filed under 'Schtuff'
Peeking through the local community college’s summer course catalog, a few classes jumped out that would seem to not be quite as useful when taken online.
‘Hypnosis, the Magic of’, whose course description includes “Learn to use hypnotic suggestion on yourself and others”. Look into my blue screen… you are getting sleepy..
‘Get Funny’, whose course description includes “Write one-liners, use physical humor and find ways to target your audience.” Oh, that ctrl-alt-delete combo gets me every time!
And my personal favorite: ‘Goodbye to Shy’: “Become more confident in social, professional and romantic situations. Learn how to interact with and relate easily to others” – so long as all interactions are via the computer. Hey, babe: I find your typing quite sexy. Can I buy you a PayPal credit?
May 15th, 2007
It’s Labor Day weekend, and my answer to the inevitable question tomorrow at work for what I’ve done will be “Blissfully nothing”. That’s not technically true: I did a bit of work on Saturday and pushed out a deployment, and have some plans to do some light housework today, including making my second great dinner of the weekend, but compared to the usual race, this feels like ‘blissfully nothing’. I’ve read that vacations of shorter than a week or two aren’t enough to recharge you, and maybe I don’t know what a fully battery recharge feels like, but I have to admit to feeling much more energized today than I have in a while. I’m reading Runner’s World and planning next year’s marathon; thinking up neat menus for dinner tonight; daydreaming about various craft projects; making a laundry list of fun and interesting projects to play with on maternity leave (some technology related; some not. Maybe another post will have a running list of ideas…). It’s a wake-up call to me that I’ve been running around half mentally asleep of late, just focused on work and how to solve that interesting bug or how to work off the pile of not so interesting bugs. Don’t necessarily have answer as to how not to get into that state again, but a good first step is even recognizing that I’ve been in it.
September 4th, 2006
Just a quick update, to make me feel that I haven’t abandoned my blog baby. As time challenged as I’ve been, I’ve been working very hard to not abandon my kid babies, my dog babies, the baby who’s kicking (hard!) inside of me. I’ll not compare my husband to a baby, but I’ve been trying to not neglect him, too.
The short and sweet update: since my last post/confessional, we’ve been to a wedding in Texas, been to a funeral in Frostburg, crammed in more hours working and fewer hours sleeping than I though possible for a pregnant woman, and unofficially dropped out of an MBA program. I’ve crammed a ton of software development into wee hours of the morning, and thought I was going into labor in the mall, some eight to ten weeks early. Tiny bit of stress going on around here. Wish there were a great end in sight, and more musing going on at this site. Keep mentioning to Jas as we talk about X or Y that there’s a blog post here and a blog post there. Here a post, there a post, everywhere a post post…. But you’ll have to be stuck with Old McDonald singing in your head instead for a little while, as I’m going to sleep!
July 23rd, 2006
Keep thinking that the next improvement on my commute (beyond my own personal teleportation device) would be a scooter or motorcycle to get me to the train station. No more hopping in the car and going – just hop on my two-wheeler to get there. (Note that the straight bike isn’t a great option, ’cause I’m a chick who’d rather not get to work sweaty.)
New option to consider: the Wheelman, seen originally by me off of Hacked Gadgets with accompanying YouTube video. Clocks in at 16-19 miles per hour, with an hour and a half ridetime on a tank of oil and gas. Apparently my dress code for work would have to downgrade a bit, as would my belly.
June 11th, 2006
I’m in that geographical range that the Weather Channel has been warning about a nor’easter for. We woke up this morning to what looks to be 6-9 inches of snow. The weatherman says our area got, on average, a foot. Doesn’t look quite that tall to me, but haven’t been out as yet.
Lest you tag me as lazy, the reason I haven’t been out is I’ve been dealing with a system issue for my client, interacting with the network admin team down in Texas, testing the deployed patch, and then waiting around for the go-ahead to deploy into Production. Now I have the go-ahead, and am waiting for the admin team to call back so that we can actually get this done. Grrrrrrr…. up since 6:30 am (and I’m not an early bird) and still not done with dealing it at 12:30. And still don’t have my walk shoveled.
February 12th, 2006
It’s snowing the first “real” snow of the year. Not that 1-3 inches is that big a deal, but it’s better than the dusting we got earlier. The whole point of this wonderful post is to direct you to a WashingtonPost article that was wonderful… To give you a hint (and a taste, in case you read this after they’ve taken down the article), the title is: “The Wipe Stuff
Milk & Bread Are Staples of the Storm, But Toilet Paper Brings Up the Rear”. Turns out the whole MBTP (nice acronym: milk, bread, toilet paper) run thing is a myth. We all have plenty of the white papery stuff in stock to deal with being snowbound as the white fluffy stuff falls from the sky. Wonder if the MBTP index is just a victim of BJ’s.
December 6th, 2005
H5N1, aka avian flu, you have the honor of being the only virus I know by a name other than “bug”. The papers have added a new word to my vocabulary: “pandemic”. I assume it’s something like panic-epidemic.
Advice abounds as to how to avoid the flu: get your flu shot (it won’t help, but the authorities are still advising it). Stay away from chickens. And my favorite, from a flu expert at the UK Health Protection Agency: “Avoid being in touching distance of [birds that could be affected]. Don’t kiss chickens.”
Will keep that in mind.
October 26th, 2005
In the theory that writing it down will let my brain get off the spinning carousel for a while:
- hmmmm, what would that new tattoo look like?
- kid 3?? what on earth would we do with 3 of ‘em?!
- performance appraisals: gotta make ‘em worthwhile to him (I only work with hims on my teams at the moment – not being sexist) and to me
- it’s hard enough to get her to sleep at our house. How on earth do you expect a sleepover at YOUR house to work?
- dirt-biking: yeah!
- OPIC, OPIC, OPIC… why couldn’t I remember what that acronym was during the exam!
- I swear if I have to debug another firewall issue, I’m going to … set fire to the daggone wall
- “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please to put a penny in a poor man’s hat”
Brain spinning faster, not slower…. Brain wave acceleration. Or maybe that’s just the beer talking.
October 6th, 2005
We got us a new puppy! Rufus, whose name comes from both the movie Dogma, and from a surprised recognition that the name actually comes from the Bible (Romans 16:13 – Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord). Somehow puts Chris Rock’s portrayal in an even weirder light.
Rufus is a beautiful pup: his mom is a huskey and his dad is a border collie, so he’s got these wonderful blue eyes and ears that stand up. We took him to a church picnic yesterday so that he wouldn’t have to stay in his crate all afternoon. I think we rated an extra notch or two by our Sunday school kids, just for having such a neat puppy.
The girls are getting used to having a puppy in the house. He’s done the Snoopy grabbing Linus’s blanket thing a bunch of times to Callie, and grabbed Cora’s teddy bear a bunch of times, too. So far, the teething damage has been minimal: he seems to have more fun grabbing something and running with it rather than chewing on it. Looking forward to maybe having a running partner when he gets a bit older – little guy’s fast!
August 9th, 2005
The last couple of years have been hectic, work-wise, such that my workaholic nature easily amassed a large PTO balance, since I never really took any time off, even given that I had to eat my PTO balance down to 0 when my daughter was born. Our company has a limit of 120 hours that you can carry over from year to year. I started the year with 119.
Did some math tonight. Given my accrual pace and the limited amount of PTO I’ve taken thusfar this year, I need to take 15 days between now and the end of the year just to break even to the 120 barrier again. Plus I’m taking a week of training at the end of August that doesn’t count towards those 15. So, we’re talking a month away from my various projects in the next six. Uh, I think I’ll be losing vacation time. Damn.
July 3rd, 2005
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