Category Archives: Work

LJ – Bottoms Up!

Posted on by
Reply

From 6/20/2003

I got this message forwarded on to me from the head MD at our local health clinic:

Dear employee:

Alcohol use among college students is a serious and growing public
health problem, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services. Their comprehensive report, entitled “Healthy People
2010,” demands a reduction in the prevalence of binge drinking on
campuses. Forty percent of college students have engaged in binge
drinking – defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row for men
and four or more drinks in a row for women – in the past two weeks.

I distinctly remember my freedom to drink myself silly back when I was in College to be one of the best fundamental lessons of my entire life. The freedom that came with College life, and the ability to intoxicate yourself willfully, even dangerously, was the perfect teacher of “Actions have Consequences”. I found the pleasure and pain of that entire part of my life helped me understand many things, including personal limits, unintentional weight gain, and a new appreciation of ultra-intense headache pain. A dry campus, or one for which this message later on urged, that concerned staffers mentor students not to drink, robs these students of the chance to learn from the most effective teacher possible – pain and agony – and the ability to drink until your obnoxious roommate becomes a permanent visual blur.

Drink Up Kids!

Can you hear me now?

Posted on by
Reply

When infrastructure fails, it takes an absurd amount of legwork to compensate. This is my story of this absurd compensation. I’m writing this now because I might as well, it’s not like I have anything I can actually do without this particular infrastructure.

My work computer used to be on the internet, now, not so much. No sites are really accessible so now I have to find another way onto the network, as my employer can’t manage. Although to their credit, they are trying to fix it, but this problem has plagued us for months if not years, so I’m not holding out much hope.

So, Ethernet is a complete loss. What else can we use? I have an unused 4G Verizon Pantech USB card here, so I plugged it in. Turns out I need VZAccess Manager to make it work properly. Still can’t access the network however! What is a geek to do? I set up my iPhone for Personal Hotspot and connect that way. It’s slower but I’m actually on the network now downloading VZAccess Manager from Verizon.

Then once that’s downloaded I’ll close my Personal Hotspot connection, install the software, then get the 4G modem up and running. A part of me laughs bitterly that I have to go to these lengths just for the basics of my job, but that’s the nature of this place. I’m not going to cast any aspersions on Western, I’m done with that. You only complain when there is some glimmer of hope that things may get better.

So that got me thinking, if we’re all having these problems and there are 42 of us, and these 4G cards cost 42 dollars a month, that’s $1,764.00 dollars a month for internet services that are more reliable than the local network at this University. So, do we pay a hefty monthly fee to Verizon to replace our network? Of course not! We’ll continue to struggle and make do with the network we have here, as useful or not as it is.

I just find it hilarious how far I have to go to access the network. I would laugh if I wasn’t crying so hard. Oh well.

LJ – The Elderly Will, but What About The Young?

Posted on by
Reply

From 6/20/2006

The Senior Vice President of the consultancy group we hired was in today, wanting to talk about how we are segmenting the phonathon program in our Annual Fund. It came up in the meeting about how it’s not ethically invalid for a university to purchase email lists from email list providers, how that a students previous experience with their university is very much different from a corporate relationship.

And just what do y’all think? Would you be comfortable if the University that you graduated from paid some email-list salesman for your email address? Is it ethical? What say my readers?! I wanna know!

So we got to talking about how people behave when exposed to our phonathon program. I relate it to my experiences with telemarketers, in so far that for me, my telephone is not a warmly lit, fuzzy welcome mat to every Tom, Dick, or Harry caller. I make it a matter of personal right to disconnect a telephone circuit when it suits me, if that is hanging up while someone is trying to sell me something, so be it. Ultimately I think it comes down to the fine sensation of whether or not you have a vested interest in communicating with someone, or if they are being intrusive (maybe insolent, even) in persisting their contact beyond your desire to maintain that contact. I find it very easy these days to simply hang up the telephone when a stranger tries to sell me something I do not want.

I’ve been called “cold and heartless” by various people because of my self-serving right to hang up the telephone when I really want to.

Then, shortly afterwards I tried to open up the notion that todays alumni that are graduating may not behave in the same way that this consultancy firm is telling us they will. I suspect that the nature of the game has changed and we are not compensating for that change in gameplay. In the past, when you were smart, when you were lucky, when you really wanted to, you went to a University and pursued a bachelors degree. The drive was personal, it was uniquely desired and all your own. You went to a prestigious institution, you took classes, you were serious about it, and you really loved your time there because it was something you were fully wanting to do. You graduated as a class, you knew other people in your class and they were your friends. As you all aged, your deep affection for where you went was carried along and as you were a success, you made sure that the place you went to, the place you were lucky to go to, was in some small way bettered later on via a nice big donation or a series of smaller donations over time. This is how it has been since the beginning…

Until around the 90’s… the 90’s changed a lot.

Instead of a culture and world where you could get a job out of high school, now you can’t, really – and be “successful” or “happy” and who doesn’t want that? So you need more education. That’s the fundamental change in the game. It went from “want” to “need”. When it became a needful thing, it became common. Every dullard went to college, everyone did, everyone took their SAT’s, everyone borrowed or had family to support them through school – because the culture was pounding it into your head that there was absolutely no future at all for high school graduates. Because of this it stopped being “K through Twelve” and started to be “K through Sixteen”. This is a fundamental change in how we perceive our education. K-16 now puts college as super-high-school. It’s wonderfully optional (no, no it isn’t, if you want to be happy), but instead of being “optionally desirous” it now is “optionally needful”. This change had effects in one direction, but not in the other. Keep in mind this unidirectional change, it’s important.

Since going to a University (or College) is needful more than desirable, this has changed how people who are undergoing it perceive their time. Now college is common, everyone does it, even the morons. You don’t have to be smart really, you aren’t there because you really want to be, you are there because you’ve no other choice, it’s another pressure that is put-upon you as you grow. This little nugget of pressure grows into adversity, suffering, and anger. You care not a drop for anyone else who you deal with in a day-to-day basis because it’s just like high school, only now with cars, apartments, jobs, and the first glimmers of true adult independence. You are a slave to your credit-hour achievement mark – you strive for 120. You might have friends in college, but nobody ever really expects those relationships to matter, they didn’t in high school, why should they matter in super-high-school? When you think back to your college days, what is more common? A tight-knit group of like-minded people who really desired to learn and grow or the perception of endless adversity as “The Grown Ups” blocked each and every move forward you made, grumbling and pissing and moaning as you passed by. Does it feel more like a real honest achievement or rather does it feel like a trip through a food mill in which you avoided successfully the paddles pushing you into the mesh below?

This isn’t the only change either! Not only did the situation change, but the people playing the game changed! Now kids are growing up in a K-16 world where they attend not Universities or Colleges, but rather ESP’s. Educational Service Providers. I’ve written about this before, how in the heyday of the long-ago, a University Professor was up on a dais, his lectern, where he professed, taught, and lead. The University of the long ago was a place where you respected your professors, there was a little fear, a little trepidation and a lot of obeisance. This was how it has been and how it was “meant to be”, but it didn’t stay that way. Instead of this notion of a University being a special place, now it’s an Educational Service Provider. The professors? Educational Service Provider Employees. The students? Educational Service Provider Customers. Now instead of the old way, when going to University was special and marked you as being exceedingly bright, you are just like all the others in the giant throng of the K-16 food mill. Students now treat their tenured professors like a customer would treat a clerk behind a counter. Students email professors making demands, being full-of-themselves with “Customer is Always Right” mentality. It doesn’t hurt the development of this when the University system regards students as “Walking Streams of Income”. The University treats the students like cattle, so the cattle treat the University like it’s a farm. The nature of the game has changed, even the nature of the place has taken this change.

Remember when I made mention of the importance of this unidirectional change? The students changed, the academy-component changed, but the University hasn’t. I suspect that as the alumni who graduated from contemporary University get old enough to give, that they won’t. That what they’ll remember isn’t how wonderful their time was spent with people of equal brightness, all shining brightly – but rather they’ll remember their acceptable time, spent with people of pitifully equal brightness, shining dully. The path that alumni relations takes has to be fundamentally different, we can’t use the classic indicators anymore, we can’t depend on “Class Identification” or “All your Friends” or even “The University that Cares” because obviously, they don’t really (will 2439-0790 please step forward!). Instead of these approaches there will have to be new approaches made, and I don’t really have a lot of faith that we can even read the rules for the new game, let alone play it.

So I sit back while this consultant is going on and on about “if they aren’t ever going to give, then drop ‘em, ignore them and concentrate on those that will.” and I think to myself that if they aren’t going to give, ignoring them is exactly what they expect. There is no reason to change, to see if the path we are on is taking us in the right direction, after all, alumni will always give.

Always.

Death and Taxes

Posted on by
Reply

Last October my home mortgage, which was an ARM went from 5.8% to 2.75%. I went from worrying about the ARM going up to worried about my tax liability. So this year I processed my taxes and everything worked out. I claim 2 exemptions on my W-4 form at work, and I’ve grown accustomed to being able to take more of my pay home with me than leave in withholding.

So of course, the APR on my mortgage changed, so did that change how much mortgage interest will be? Of course it does. So I wrote an email to Wells Fargo Bank (they that hold my mortgage) and I asked what the projected amount of interest is that I’ll pay on my home for 2012. The response from WF was worthless – it amounted to “Yes sir, you have an ARM” Yeah, I KNOW THAT.

So I called WF. Talked with a nice lady who estimated my mortgage interest would go from about 3400 to 1000 or so. Definitely a change. So I went to TaxAct and filled out the W-4 calculator and it told me I should change to an exemption of 1. So I did that. Then as I sat there I was looking at my calculations and utterly forgot my HELOC! So I went back and added the interest from the HELOC, which is fixed, and then I saw that I was back to an exemption of 2. So now we’re on a deathwatch to see if I confused WMU Payroll enough with my flippity-flappity W-4 exemption fiddling.

At least for 2012 I don’t have to redo my budget to take into account less take-home pay. That’s a huge stone off my shoulders! Whew!

Synchronicity

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes you can’t explain how things unfold. Previous generations labeled things like this kismet, or fate. A really tremendously great word for what I just dealt with could be called synchronicity.

A few days ago while I was marveling at my silly dress-up vest with the finished pockets sewn closed, I was standing under an old-time fixture that I had installed all on my own. Frankly it was going to turn out to be a nod to the past any way it unfolded. It was either going to be the fixture we eventually chose or a “in the spirit of” Tiffany-style lamp. So either way we were going to install a fixture that prized the past. We noticed the “Edison Style” bulbs immediately and almost in the vein of “love at first sight” these fixtures trumped the Tiffany-style stained glass ones almost instantly. It helped of course that the “Edison Style” was $45 while the “Tiffany Style” was $90. We could afford a small bit of throwback style for half the price.

So while I was looking at myself, all trimmed and shaved (for what it’s worth) in a dress vest, under an “Edison Style” bulb it had to be synchronicity for what transpired tonight. For the past few days I’ve been dwelling, at least mentally, in a space that appreciates how excellent really old designs are and sometimes these designs are actually pinnacle moments. They are wonders, marvels, true magnificence that once expressed can’t really be improved upon. It takes a real romantic to even entertain that an old thing retains value. In some ways I sense that old things not only retain their value but augment their value because they last, or touch something deep inside that means something very important to you.

So I stood there, in the civil twilight of pre-dawn right before work. Standing under an Edison-style bulb and appreciating my reflection in the hall mirror and being filled with a feeling that something quite like this could have been how my predecessors felt in the 1800’s when all this technology was brand new. Nobody then marveled at the warm yellow glow from an Edison bulb as a matter of romance, they saw it as an improvement to paraffin, naphtha, or beeswax candles. So for some strange reason I thought of someone I never met, ever in my life but only know through Ancestry.com. That would be my second great grandfather Fernando Race. The father of my maternal grandfather, Allan (I think). So oddly enough I had technically summoned the shade of my second great grandfather and it was something very deep and meaningful.

I never EVER knew any of these people. The only memory I have of my maternal grandfather is little blazes of bright memory. Me sitting on his lap while his model trains ran around his little train village in the basement of my grandparents home in Ithaca. It’s true that scent can bring you back, and it does for me. Funny enough if I catch WD-40, an industrial cleaner and lubricant, and it’s scent, accessing these memories of my grandfather all becomes very plain and very simple and they kind of burst forth right into my mind. Scents carry memory, alas, nostalgia. So getting just a scent of WD-40 puts me right back there. So thinking about the past also helps put me “back there” and frankly I find it highly entertaining that I find myself preferentially dwelling in the past where things I take for granted would mostly likely be interpreted as high sorcery.

It wasn’t until a few days after my “in the past” reverie that I called my mother out of the blue. No reason for it other than I love her and miss her terribly and the missing feeling goes away a little bit when I talk to her on the phone. So I called her on my way home from the gym. People at work who find me … unique… (a great word, I love it) always ask to visit with my mother to see if that can explain why I am the way I am. Why I’m emotional and ebullient and always say whats on my mind. I laugh at my coworkers who puzzle over my behavior at work. If they knew my parents, they’d understand I wasn’t crazy but that I was as they see me, which is beloved (and special, huge heaps of special) 🙂

Then my mother laid two big whammies on me. The first took my breath away. I don’t really want to delve deeply into it for it’s subject matter, at least not now, but while dashing down I-94 going somewhere between sixty and seventy miles per hour she laid a HUMONGOUS whammy on me. It was a challenge to retain my composure and not drive off the highway into a ditch. The news she shared created a new emotion. It was a complicated knotwork of surprise, shock, and a heavy dose of what would be if you mixed “Eureka”, “Synchronicity”, and patent incredulity. Baked at 350 for one hour and seasoned with a kind of half-joking expectation, almost a kind of odd deja-vu sensation.

So I dwell here, thinking about things and people in my life. It’s important not to say too much lest I give it all away that I know, but I’ve been waiting many years for this to happen and this has awakened the voice of my power animal, my totem if you will. He talks to me in my own voice, and comes from deep within, my intuition and I’ve learned to respect that part of me, or him, or both. I will dwell where I am, quiet and waiting. That’s what I think I should do and that’s what my totem is telling me outright to do.

Anyways, beyond the unavoidable teasing which I apologize for of the previous section, it wasn’t the end of the whammies my mother laid out on me tonight. She shared with me some things which I’d rather not share here, but bear directly on my random mental roulette ball landing on the Races and Tuttles. I could have chosen anyone from my past, and thanks to Ancestry.com and my Uncle John and my Mother I don’t really have to wonder much anymore, that who I thought of first would come, in a way, forward through time and tap me on the shoulder and in a very roundabout way give me a wholly unexpected hug from the 19th century all through the agency of nobody else but my very own mother. I hate to be cryptic about this, but I feel I have to be circumspect. Suffice it to say, in a very strange and surreal way I feel like this part of my life was meant to play out this way, and that Fernando Race, his son, or his grandson – my grandfather dwelled closeby me that day when I was caught in my reverie of the past.

It wasn’t until I talked with my mother tonight that so many tumblers all clicked into place. I don’t know exactly how much she appreciates what has happened, but for me, at the focus of this storm of synchronicity, with so much all colliding all at once as if it fit together so perfectly that it lacked seams, that these two things will likely come to pass if I do not meddle in my fate. Time and time again I have been ringside as I have attempted to meddle in my fate and been handed my hat for my troubles. This time I won’t. It’s very Zen, but in a way, to move forward I have to remain perfectly still.

I can say that the synchronicity thrills me. So if anyone out there puts two and two and the square root of minus two together and expects that answer, then we should indeed talk. Life is happy there, or at least, it could be.

Vizzini says "Inconceivable!"

Posted on by
Reply

Stafford Vest

Months ago, before I got serious about losing weight Western had “Operation Historic Moment” when we announced that we had received a record gift for our new medical school. As part of this we had a public unveiling of the gift and as such I had to dress up more than I have in a very long time.

For me to be in a suit and tie would require someone to die, barring death, perhaps a wedding of blood kin would be enough as well. So I had to dress up and it struck me that I could go half-way and pull off a black dress vest and a very nice button-down shirt with black slacks. It’s a look that even XXL men like me can pull off and not look like we’re wearing a tent. So off I went, with my heft and found at the venerable JC Penney’s this particular vest pictured above. It’s a black dress vest from Stafford. Paired with a nice shirt it wowed all my coworkers who never thought they’d see me in a nice shirt, a tie, or >GASP< all clean and dressed up nicely.

After the event, I put the vest in my closet and pretty much forgot about it. Then I decided to lose all this weight and over the intervening months I was pawing through my closet and ran across it again. I put it on and laughed. What was tight was now very roomy; I had lost enough weight where I could start wearing fine clothes like this and not feel like a blue whale being strained through linen. So I’ve been dragging it out into rotation every once in a while and I quite enjoy the entire style of it.

This morning it came to a head while I was standing in my hallway under my old-time Edison-light hall fixture:

Edison Light

That I was occupying the same space and time as my 2nd-great-grandfather Fernando Race. Or at least I imagine that bulbs like these, the ones that are very old and cast a wonderfully warm yellow light on everything were the ones that might have lit him from above as well. So I stood there for a few moments taking in the old light style, the vest, which is definitely a retro fashion and chuckled to myself that I am standing at a collision between super-cool futuretech and equally cool bygone style.

So today while eating my lunch I noticed little seams where two small pockets appear to be, but they are sewn closed. I laughed at the stupidity of putting dressing that leads one to think there are pockets there on a flat sheet of fabric. I ran my index finger along the seam and discovered that a part of the stitching that ran along the fake pocket was coming unravelled. It was enough space for me to explore using my index finger and I discovered that it isn’t a faux pocket at all, but a true pocket – finished and everything! So I snipped away the remaining seams on both sides and now I have a better vest than when I initially bought it. Now it has two functional, and whats more, finished pockets!

Which then begs the question that plagues me: WHY THE HELL WERE THEY SEWN SHUT!?! Why go to all the trouble to install and finish perfectly functional vest pockets and then sew them shut! I cannot understand the logic behind this move by Stafford. It was a cheap vest, so perhaps it was a factory second, a mistake. But even then, who the hell accidentally sews pockets closed? It takes a modicum of will to finish a pocket and then more to perfectly try to sew them shut! ODD!

Of course now that I have a nice dress vest with functioning pockets, and a certain romance about the past bouncing around in my head, obviously I went all the way to this:

Charles Hubert-Paris Pocket Watch

I’m thinking it would round out the look and it isn’t terribly expensive. It’s the kind of thing that nobody needs, but would really serve well to confuse people when they meet me. He has a pocket watch and an iPhone. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HIM.

I thrive on that entire idea. It entertains me enough where buying and enjoying the watch may be absolutely perfect. Evil Cackle 🙂 And no, I’m not going to ask people what they think because they’d likely declare I’m silly. And all right, I’ll be silly. But I’m fine with going that way. For nothing more, it’s agonizingly romantic!

Show Me Your Nuts

Posted on by
Reply

Bolt

At work I have an older red hand-truck that has been used hard and left abandoned when it lost too many parts to be useful. My heart went out to the poor thing, unused and hated because it had only one quarter of the bolts needed to keep the deck together and the other side was supported by one of those little metal clasps that you often times see holding a stack of punched paper together.

This past week I resolved to repair this poor hated thing that was left ignored in the supply room here at work. I brought it into my office and removed the only real bolt that was holding the deck together and it was loose. The bolt itself turned out to be a square carriage bolt 5/16-14. Getting the bolt off was a bear because while it was very loose people still tried in-vain to use the hand-truck to lift objects and so the threads of the bolt were all mashed flat and dug up beyond recognition. I was able to grab the nut and bolt with pliers and wrench the two apart freeing the deck from the main body of the frame. Replacing the bolts was easy after I found the right kind and size. I even went so far as to get lock washers and place them on while tightening the nuts onto the bolts with the deck in place.

Everything worked well and I was able to fix the deck, as well as the axle since on the left-side the cotter-pin that held the hub onto the axle fell off and was replaced with yet another one of those circular paper clasps. The only other thing I had to fix for this were replacement casters so people could use the hand-truck as a standard hand-truck or flip the handle around and turn it into a kind of cart. I ordered replacement casters from Amazon.com and they arrived a few days ago. I went back to Lowes and tried to size out the casters because they weren’t 5/16-14.

As I stood there, in front of the mass of fasteners that Lowes carries it struck me how stupid all of it was. I stood back and marveled at the inclusion of both “english” and “metric” system bolts each with their own thread counts which only made things more murky. I was gratified that Lowes carried a 7/16-14 supply of nuts and lock washers. The logical part of me railed silently against all of this. Why the hell are there still “english” measures when not even the English use the “english” system?!? It’s just us, daft stupid Americans who cling to the concept of an inch, which means NOTHING to ANYONE except dullard Americans who refuse to adapt to the better metric system! I also railed against the various thread counts. Why the hell make the same size bolt but cut in different thread counts? IT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. Why not just standardize on metric bolts and say 5 threads per centimeter and leave it at that! I’m sure there is a mechanical engineer who might come out of the woodwork to tell me why higher thread counts are important. I call bullshit. Why not standardize on one singular measurement system and within that, one standard thread count density?

While standing there in front of all the fasteners I silently exclaimed “This is why we can’t colonize space, we’d die for a lack of 7/16-14 bolts!”

I paid for my parts and assembled the rest of the pieces of the hand-truck together and that’s it. I will likely never need to buy nuts and bolts again for years since very few things in my life actively use nuts and bolts. Computer parts are different. But it doesn’t mean that I find the stupidity any less outrageous!

Can you hear me now?

Posted on by
Reply

It all comes down to trusting the infrastructure. When you can’t trust the infrastructure anymore then it feels as though you are standing in an hourglass and the sand is running out beneath your feet.

This is how I felt after embarrassing myself towards a vendor by the name of eSpatial. I was asked by a coworker to investigate this vendor for geolocating alumni at work. I started their 14 day free trial and uploaded some data, nothing I thought that was too onerous, 250,000 US Postal Addresses. After some back and forth I learned that the trial account only can accept 10,000 addresses, but nowhere was that stated in the trial offer, that there was a limit. On January 12th I sent a link to an eSpatial rep so that they could create a demo account for me and show me what their company could do.

I waited until January 20th and then I wrote an email. I told them that I didn’t like being left in the dark for eight days when it should take them at most an afternoon to load my data and show me what their software could do. Then I got back an email telling me that they tried to email me and tried to call me to no avail. This is when I discovered that the infrastructure at work really isn’t working out for me. Apparently the messages just didn’t arrive. I checked all throughout “Webmail Plus” to no avail and I even checked the “PureMessage” spam system and the messages weren’t in there either. It’s as if the email wasn’t even delivered. Then the fellow from eSpatial told me that he tried to call me and the call never got through. I suspect that my setting my work phone to failover to my cell phone may be to blame on that one. I would put money behind the notion that international incoming calls will not be forwarded by the switches at Western to another line, instead they will simply be dropped. I have my phone set up that way because I absolutely detest voicemail and so I want incoming calls that are inbound to WMU to ring there first and then move on and ring my iPhone. There is a solution for that bit as well, and it involves turning my back on my work phone as well.

So how do I correct this? I can’t trust my work email any longer – I’m losing messages and making a fool of myself. I can’t live with doubt that the infrastructure works, and get anything done, so I have to compensate. The best way to compensate is to leave WMU behind when it comes to this infrastructure. My work phone number is now meaningless. My work email account is now meaningless. So everyone should strike those from their records and use a different number from now on, because I cannot trust that the infrastructure provided by my employer works properly.

I have to turn to Google at this point to provide the infrastructure that I need to do my work properly. Ironic if anyone has known me over the past few years that I’m turning to Google for infrastructure, after all, it was my crazy-eyed ranting that implored my workplace to use Google for their infrastructure but fell on deaf ears. So I’ll do it myself. The accounts and phone numbers will still be technically valid and reachable, but I’d rather people not use them. Instead, please use these instead:

Phone: 269-216-4597

Email: andymchugh75@gmail.com

If you have my personal gmail account, feel free to use that, as I trust gmail.com with my email, but no others.

I hate doubt and I will not accept it in my life.

And we're shuffling, shuffling…

Posted on by
1

It’s breathtaking to see how quickly fifty to sixty people can all agree and get together to trounce a huge project. Here at work our VP made some employee location moves which require picking up all the hardware, office supplies, and assorted bric-a-brac and move various people into new physical locations in the office.

Most of the people were already buzzing along by the time I slowly made my way to work. I got in and got settled and it was nice seeing people moving about, all chipping in and helping others move couches, computers, printers, credenzas, and boxes of assorted office supplies throughout our office. I dived in about 9am and had a management approved list, in order, of who was supposed to move where. We all chugged along until about 11:30 and then things started to wind down. There is still a lot to move, but that’s mostly each cubicle-dwellers taste and choice to put this there and that over there.

TPTB arranged a pizza lunch to thank us all for our hard work, and that was a wonderful gesture. Pizza is after all it’s own food group. 🙂 It’s times like these, with people all active and moving about, and funny things being said and people reacting in surprising ways that makes the office feel more alive and vibrant. Not that we should be engaged in musical chairs every day, but this shakeup does make things feel fresher. Of course, the curse will be to try to re-establish a mental map of where everyone is now, as the old mental map has to be forgotten. I’m fine with it if the reward is all this camaraderie.

Asana

Posted on by
Reply

My office is in the mood for a task management suite online to help manage, well, teams and tasks. The tool we’re looking into is called Asana. Personally I use Toodledo to manage my tasks on my own but Asana seems pleasant enough to use.

After the great unveiling during our latest meeting I wept a little private tear for our dearly beloved old email system, Groupwise. It was all of this all secured and centrally managed. Alas, it was a Novell product and much like the Elves themselves, Novell has gone west. I spent a little time caught up in a mental reverie surrounding Groupwise during that meeting, thinking about all the ways we could have made things simpler and easier and work better for all of us. Then I was awoken out of my reverie (alas it only lasted three seconds) and so smiled a nice private smile that just as I had predicted all those months and months ago, that people would have to construct their own ways to cope with us moving away from what could have been a really great system. Now we are moving towards a new system and actually, upon reflection it is better than the situation we would have been in had the-powers-that-be spent a moment to listen to this raving crazy maniac. Everything is bending towards SaaS and Cloud Services, and I actively support this migration so in the end, it’s best for everybody.

One thing I really am looking forward to is to watch these cloud services blossom. Then we’ll be on to Web 3.0 where the semantic web meets cloud accumulations. That’s going to be cool.