Tag: Life

Looks like my volume of unread mail has passed the “too much” threshold and has hit the level of “down right evil”.

As the years go by I get more and more blasé about celebrating New Year’s Eve. I’m not quite at the point where I need to whip out the walker, but staying up to midnight just to so I can shout “Woo! Goodnight!” doesn’t have the appeal it used to.

New Year’s Eve 2007/8

While I don’t have to worry about the sleep deprivation or hangover there still is post-party fallout to deal with: going into work and facing the inevitable “so… what did you do for New Year’s Eve?”

Well, I, for one, am not going to worry this year. I’m going to party my socks off.

At least, as far as you know.

Lay the ground work

You can’t just roll into a night of non-partying unprepared, you will have to get your act together first.

1. Make sure everyone knows you’re serious about tonight

With all the twittering, facebooking, texting, etc. going on these days, you can’t just show up to your fake party unannounced. First thing you need to do is publicize how excited you are about the upcoming festivities. Make sure it’s suitably vague but extraordinarily enthusiastic. I recommend the use of caps and exclamation points.

“I’m SOOOO stoked for tonight!!!!!”

2. Do a little alibi building

These days people don’t just expect you to have fun, they expect you to prove it. Any party animal worth their salt leaves a wake of twitpics, facebook albums and confetti where ever they go. To get ready, take your camera, wait until it’s dark out, then step outside and take a picture of yourself. Most party pictures are the same: bright flash and dark background.  Smile like you’re having fun and you can pass off the dark background as just about anywhere. Plus, the dark background allows you to stick yourself into other party pics as needed.

Party like you mean it

People now expect you to be partying, and you have photos to back it up with some good times. The key is to keep your fans in the loop throughout the evening. Since watching Golden Girls then nodding off at 8:30 isn’t going to cut it, you’ll need to get some fun ready before you turn in. Fortunately you won’t need to stay up late, you’ll just need to have your computer do the partying for you. Set up a bunch of “parking sucks!”, “awesome fireworks!” and “i’m soo drbunk” e-mails and then have your e-mail client or a web service like time cave trickle out the evidence over the course of the night.

Having a little bit of “real fun” couldn’t hurt either. Satellite, cable TV and even the interwebs give you a great opportunity to still ring in the new year, just celebrate with your fellow humans a few time zones to your east. Here on the west coast I was free to count down the new year’s ball drop in Times Square with my buddy Ryan Seacrest. Just don’t forget, this is also an opportunity for some more party evidence: turn up the volume on your TV and get a little video of you counting down, cheering and singing “Old Ironsides” (or whatever that once-a-year song is). Just be sure to keep the video tight on you, show just the ceiling or the TV behind you. If you don’t have a partner-in-crime to smooch, just fumble the camera to your chest like you’re getting unexpected hugs. Either that or you can kiss your cats.

Seal the deal

What’s a good time without a bit of lasting pain? When you get up on January first be sure to complain to all your virtual friends. Depending on how hard you “partied” you can make a post about anything from how tired you are to your splitting headache to how you woke up next to a tranny.

One request: if you do plan on waking up next to a tranny, please friend me first. I really want to see the reactions.

When weather, traffic or other conditions delay my packages it’s all good and well. The shipping companies can’t be penalized when a package gets delayed due to outside influences.

If my package were to arrive early, however, that’d be great. FedEx, though, has decided that it’s too early to deliver my package. Turns out that if a shipper pays for three-day shipping it doesn’t mean that a package will be delivered in three-days-or-less, it means three days. We wouldn’t want anyone to get two-day shipping for the price of three now, would we?

Taking off my cynical, the man’s out to get me hat for just a moment, I could imagine there’s a perfectly reasonable, logistical business decision for this move. If you have too many packages to handle on a given day (perhaps we’re getting into holiday shipping season) it may be a good idea to hold back packages that won’t be late.

It really comes down to this: it’s MY package and I want it! GIMME! FedEx must realize that, other than my wife, I’m the most important thing in their world. Apparently the memo hasn’t circulated yet.

Well, nothing to do with jewelry per se, but I did replace my own watch batteries tonight.

Over the past year my watches have been slowly dropping off, about one per month. A few weeks back my last running watch finally ran out of will. I had a drawer of 10-15 watches, all without juice and being a cheap bastard I couldn’t bring myself to take them to a jeweler and pay $10 and up per watch to have 40 cent batteries put in them.

Lucky for me there’s this cool thing called the Interwebs. A watch back removal tool from eBay and a pile of batteries from watchbatteries.com and I’m back to being on time again!

I learned two things:

1. You can save money replacing your own watch batteries
2. If there are tiny screws between you and the battery, let a jeweler do it

There was a snowstorm predicted for Wednesday… but it waited until Thursday instead.

I went into work in the morning for a bit to get some work done, the remote connection servers are swamped by everyone trying to WAH (work at home).  To make sure I didn’t get trapped at the office I left at lunch time.  All the stranded cars and the continued snow assured me I made the right decision.

Other than peaceful white coating, the weather has another fun benefit: wildlife. Our bird feeder has a constant crowd of patrons and our hummingbird feeders are helping the littlest customers stay warm (yeah, who knew that hummingbirds stayed here year round?). The cold also brought us a brand new visitor: a pair of coyotes. They must have come up from the park at the end of our street looking for food.

I was able to get some quick pictures of the hummingbirds, quail and coyote, they’re in our big snow gallery.

With the fierce competition for connectivity to Microsoft I won’t get much work done… but that does free me up to watch the show.

My parents were in town for Thanksgiving and I’ve been enjoying Thanksgiving dinner for four days now, but it all started with Thursday’s spread.

 

(Before and after… yum)

It’s stuff like this that makes e-mail fun at work.

Tim e-mailed to let the SharePoint team know he was working at home sick, this was the exchange we had…

Tim:

Hi Team,

I’m going to stay at home with the germs. I heard that it was a popular pastime for the team these past couple weeks.

Tomatoes are not to blame! Please, don’t turn against them.

And don’t worry too much about me; I took a vitamin (Flintstones COMPLETE [More COMPLETE with Choline]) , so everything should be fine.

Sincerely,
-Tim

Reeves:

Since Fred is bigger than Barney is he more nutritious?

Tim

I’d have to assume that Fred’s additional mass of chalk and artificial sweetner contributes no nutritional value.

I imagine molds of many characters, each receiving the same miniscule scoop of vitamins and minerals, moving down a conveyer to a second, varying-sized treatment of filler.

I don’t know if they do anything to even out the nutritive content. Perhaps they’re all liquids that eventually bake or cool.

When they’re formed, they go into a bottle and then I eat them.

That’s how health works.

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You want to know the rest of what’s in Flintstones?

I had a glass or orange juice then brushed my teeth.  Ah, refreshing.

Why does it taste horrible if I drink orange juice after I brush my teeth but it’s tasty when I brush my teeth after I drink orange juice?

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Oh, turns out the orange juice I like is made by Coca Cola company… who knew?

This is much more exciting to me than it is to the rest of the world.  I have cleared my inbox and my workload is now tracked by my task list.

Why is this good?  It now means that I’m not using my inbox to figure out what I need to do next.  Why is that bad?  Because the contents of my inbox are controlled by everyone else more than they are controlled by me… makes it hard for me to be in control of my tasks.

Now I need to actually get the stuff done.  The upside is I know what the stuff is.

The stress of moving and changing jobs has kind of put me off blogging… so for updates I refer to you Paula’s blog.  She has been much better than I about blogging as of late. 🙂

At any rate… after a much delayed flight from Dublin to Chicago we’re relaxing in the American Airlines Admiral club.  I must say, AA is going down hill.  The aircraft here from Dublin was a total beater (our seats had no functioning lights and the channels on the AV system wouldn’t change).  The Admiral’s club is not much better, the seats all look like the upholstery hasn’t been cleaned in a decade.

Yep, delaying my flight for several hours forcing me to have a 5 hour layover makes me grumpy.

Bah!