Posted 9:34 PM by RedSox
The Experiment pauses...

Well for one night at least. I spent tonight fiddling around with my template and am only witing this to cover up the test, test, test stuff I was doing while I messed around with the code using the oldest scientific method - trial and error.

Until next time...

Posted 9:44 PM by RedSox
The Experiment continues…

Not much going on today. Back to work. The day went by quickly for a change as I had a bunch of busy work that I needed to finish and an afternoon meeting.

This is as good a place as any to loudly exclaim, I HATE MEETINGS. I have never come across a more useless waste of time – unless you count conference calls – but that is a whole ‘nother topic. A bunch of people in a room ostensibly to discuss some topic that requires face to face communication. The problem is, there are three types of people in the room.

The first category are people like me - meeting optimizers - who only want the people who need to be there in the room. To me there is absolutely no reason a meeting should ever go more than 1 hour. And that is extreme. Stay on topic. And take off-line all the other bull-sh*t.

Then there are the people who love meetings. They live for them. They carry around their little black book filled with meetings. These are the people who feel the need to invite anyone who MIGHT have something to add. And definitely schedule two hours. Oh, and we need a formal agenda. And some stupid “break-the-ice” game before we stat our weighty work. They feel the meeting is an ideal time to delve into all kinds of tangential stuff that bog the meeting down and makes it last the scheduled 2 hours. Because - God forbid – they actually have to go back to their desk and do some real work before their next meeting.

Then there are the arguers. They feel the need to disagree with anything that the group has decided. The “I don’t get it” people also fall into this category. I don’t know if they feel the need to argue out of principle, habit, or some psychosis. I honestly don’t mind if someone steps up in a meeting and disagrees if they know what they are talking about and have a stake in what’s going on. Too often, however. The arguer has no knowledge of the topic (having been invited by the meeting lover because their department has some guy who used to work with the brother of the guy whose mother dated the uncle of the woman who coded one obscure part of the system) or worse absolutely no stake in the topic.

There is a forth category the people who don’t give a damn. They show up because they have to. Then they sit there fidgiting until they can leave. I don’t really count them because they usually don’t bog the meeting down.

So a typical meeting is 20 people in the room. The meeting starts late because all the meeting lovers are running from other meetings that “ran over”. The head meeting lover lays out the agenda. We play our stupid “break-the-ice” game. (I will modestly say I was the only one in the room who got the brain teaser from the last meeting I went to with a “break-the-ice” game. Not as impressive as it may sound considering the other participants.)
We inevitably start with a recap of the last meeting. This invariably gets the arguer going. Now we have to waste valuable meeting time remaking decisions we made last time. So now 45 minutes has gone by and we are in back to where we were after the last meeting having come to the same decisions we made last time. Now we get into new business and the meeting lovers decide that his would be an ideal time to bring up something that has absolutely no direct significance to what we are discussing. But it dos to one of the arguers and we waste another 20 minute while just two people go back and forth about something that the rest of us don’t care about. Until one of the braver meeting optimizers finally begs them to take it off-line. So now we get to the real stuff and we are only a little more then an hour in. Not bad. We may actually get out early. But no. The arguers raise their heads again. The “I don’t get it” person forces the meeting to a halt. We fight and struggle and eventually the solution becomes clear to the optimizers as we gently push the arguers to our side. A quick look on the clock says, 1:45 minute into the meeting. Hooray! We are getting out early. Oh no you don’t. The head meeting lover won’t stand for that. They utter the dreaded phrase, “So, what are out next steps.” So now we spend the next 15+ minutes putting together next steps that mostly amount to me getting more tasks to do.

That was a longer rant than I expected I to be. Luckily that spares you from my dissertation on conference calls. But I expect the next time a conference call rolls around, I’ll have something to say about that as well.

Until next time…

Posted 8:57 PM by RedSox
The Experiment finally continues…

There has been lots going on since my last post but I haven’t had too much to say. It has been a quiet relaxing weekend. Too quiet and too relaxing. On Saturday, we spent some time cleaning up the house. It really needs it. After the aborted bridal shower, our dining room has been lost to us. It was filled with raffle prizes. Paper plates, napkins, and cups to feed 100. Table centerpieces. And lots of other purple crap that would take me too long to describe. For details about the aborted shower see Boogieshoes’ archive. She pretty much covered everything. So we spent a good portion of the day finding homes for shower crap. Made the dining room nice and clean just in time to fill it up again with Sunday’s project, canning. More on canning below.

So Saturday evening was just me an Boogieshoes relaxing around the house. I did something I rarely, rarely do. Drink at home. I must have had 7 Boddington’s Pub Ales and 2 Yuengling lagers. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Yuengling, they are located in Pottsville, PA and are the oldest brewery in the US. They also happen to make on of my favorite beers which you cannot get in Connecticut. To say I was feeling good would be an understatement. Boogieshoes was getting a huge kick out it so I, of course, played it up even bigger.

I think I really needed to blow off steam. It has been a brutal, stressful month for me. It started right off with the shower disaster, followed immediately by Boogieshoes’ birthday week. Which, due to the huge amount of time we put into the shower, I was woefully unprepared, mentally and financially, for. The next week was the toughest. My father died very suddenly on August 23, 1997. Strangest thing in the world. One night we are all having a great time at my future-brother-in-law’s Stag party and then the next morning, my whole life is different. This was the 5 year anniversary. And for some weird reason it hit me really hard. I would guess it had to do with it being 5 years. That and he died just about a week before Princess Diana and there have been all kinds of news stories because it was 5 years ago. I went out with Boogieshoes and Sockmamma on 8/23 and we had a few drinks but it didn’t really blow off steam. Acting like a complete goofball for a Saturday night seems to have done the trick.

I would like to thank Sockmamma and Boogieshoes for putting up with me that night. I am sure I wasn’t the best drinking companion.

So needless to say, I woke up late on Sunday and we embarked on the next weekend project. Canning. All I’ve got to say it thank God for the Stop & Shop. If I was a pioneer and my winter survival depended on me preserving as much food as I could, I would have died. It was a tremendous amount of work to yield 16 jars of stuff. And you are supposed to follow all these rules. Sterilize everything. Don’t touch this with that. Boil for this many minute if you are at sea level, 10 more minutes if at 1000 feet above, and 30 minutes if you just don’t give a damn. It makes me wonder if the pioneers were sitting out there and saying, “Damn, I forgot to sterilize my lids.” So I discovered that while I love to cook, canning is not one of my favorite things. Still it was fairly relaxing as there was lots of waiting for things to boil and while things boiled.

Today was a quiet day where we have done some more canning and generally relaxed.

I gotta tell you, I am just about sick of relaxing. On Friday it was all I craved but by tonight I am bouncing off the walls. It was Labor Day weekend, after all. Last chance to party for the summer and all that hype. It was very strange not to have anything to do. The pace of our lives is way above the speed limit these days. It is very difficult to down shift for one weekend. Because starting up again this coming weekend we go back to full throttle. Don’t get me wrong, it was really nice to just be alone with Boogieshoes and goof around. I would have to guess that the last weekend we spent totally at home alone was before June. But it just felt weird not having others around.

Well, that should do it for this wildly incoherent, enormously self-indulgent rambling. I had some stuff to say about baseball but I grow weary of the keyboard so they will have to wait. Until next time…