I should snap photos whilst driving.
The sunrise was absolutely beautiful this morning. The sky was filled with a wide variety of red hues. But as they say, “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”
The sun gave way to clouds and by the time I got home tonight we had a couple of inches of snow on the ground.
Ugh.
Someone please tell Mother Nature that it has been declared spring and she should start behaving accordingly. Just don’t give her Chiffon.
Look at Kmart doing the Apple thing and e-mailing me my receipt. This is because I used my “Shop Your Way” rewards card and apparently an e-mailed receipt comes along with the other benefits.
I’m holding out hope for Kmart and Sears, we need more choices outside of just Wal*mart and Target.
For the ultra geekish, though Sears and Kmart (both owned by Sears Holding Company, which was formed when Kmart bought Sears) both have the same registers at their checkouts, they are not running the same software. Sears is running custom software that was written back in the late 1980s when a company called Compu-Add got their big break by providing all the computer equipment for the chain. Kmart is running the generic IBM retail application (I think it’s still called Retail Application). I know, I’m a dork.
The weather folks predicted rain today. There would be lots of rain with highs in the upper 30s/low 40s. Murky but manageable for a Monday.
It is 11:30 and 2 1/2 inches of snow has fallen since I arrived at work at 07:45. Yay for meteorological accuracy.
I have decided that I must be stupid. Living in this part of the world gives us snow when many Americans are talking about the wonders of spring, gives us the opportunity to pay some of the highest taxes in the country, let’s us listen to politicians croak on and on about how great they are in an accent that doesn’t apply to anyone north of Westchester and gives us the dignity of living in an area known as the Rust Belt.
Stupidity.
I dream of desert sand, warm winds and dry air. I’d be downright giddy over a mobile home that has an adjacent storm cellar. I don’t care if I live in a shack the size of an outhouse. If I’m warm, have some sort of job (even though I have to ask “if I want fries with that”) and have my loved ones still loving me, I’m good.
I don’t need Park Avenue. I’ll settle for the Haney place.
Happy first full day of spring!
I am wearing the obligatory green today. The green clothing with the red beard is making me look like a leprechaun. I guess that’s what I should be striving for today.
Folks ask if I will be drinking green beer tonight. I don’t know why we think green beer is a good thing. For starters, there’s no way you’re going to be able to make any sort of proper Irish beer green. (I think it would only make a good bottle of Guinness more ‘murky’ looking, like algae in an old fish tank or something). Secondly, any beer that is so lite that it can be dyed green isn’t worth my time and lastly, I don’t drink.
I know, that betrays the Irish in my heritage.
I hear there was corned beef and cabbage in the office yesterday, but since that was my day off I didn’t get a chance to try it. Someone else brought some pulled pork BBQ which isn’t very Irish but was quite tasty. I like it when my co-workers show off their cooking skills. Everyone benefits.
In this neck of the woods, the day is evenly divided: sunrise was at 0710 and sunset is at 1910 EDT. This means that spring is close by. It’s currently 56 degrees fahrenheit as I write this. To celebrate, I won’t be drinking green beer but I will be walking the parking lot at work during my afternoon break. It’ll be an encore to the same walk I took during my morning break.
I am very saddened, but somewhat fascinated, by the tragedies in Japan. I am finding the US news outlets to be somewhat contradictory in their assessment of what’s going on over there so I’m following various sources on the Internet and from news outlets from abroad.
The part that fascinates me is the stories of hope. This morning I read that a man was found sitting on the roof of his house after the tsunami hit. The interesting aspect of this was that the man and his roof were 10 miles off the coast in the Pacific. Apparently he had survived the crushing waves and had drifted out there.
That gives me hope.
Watching video clips of the tsunami wiping out entire villages or hearing stories about how there are entire trains missing is very disheartening. Reading that nuclear power plants are thisclose to meltdown is scary. But the stories of hope and survival give us a moment of triumph in a horrible, unimaginable situation. I can’t imagine what folks are going through. I hope I never find out first hand.
In this day and age it’s rather fascinating to see how easy it is to donate to help those in Japan that need our assistance. Sending the message redcross to 90999 let’s you make a $10 donation charged to your cell phone bill. That’s kind of cool.
I wish I had the resources to go over and help. Instead, I hope the universe shares my thoughts and prayers with those that need them.
42% of my yearly incentive bonus from work went to taxes. 42%. And when I use my incentive bonus to buy anything, I’ll be paying one of the highest sales tax rates in the United States on my purchases. This bothers me too.
I’m either getting old or starting to think more. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.
My thoughts and prayers go to the people of Japan as they deal with this latest blow from the Universe. The earth is such a magnificent and awesome living thing that can be so fragile at the same time. The earthquakes seem to be getting more frequent and more fierce; whatever you think about 2012, it does give one pause for a moment.
During my commute this morning I wanted to catch the latest news. *NPR’s coverage was lacking, in my opinion, so I started spinning around the dial and finally switched over to AM where I found a strong signal with non-stop earthquake coverage. The talk station is rather conservative, but it never hurts to hear all points of view and quite frankly, I felt that the earthquake news was beyond politics anyways. The female anchor was almost giddy when she announced they would be going commercial free to bring the latest news on the disaster. News people get happy about this sort of thing, and I get that, the rush of diving into a big project at work. I think some people lose sight of that when it comes to news.
I sent a message to my sister prompting her to get a hold of her friend in Hawaii to let them know what was happening as Hawaiians were probably sleeping and some might sleep through the tsunami sirens. Hopefully everyone involved is safe and sound.
The station was still on in the car when I left for lunch so I listened to the rantings of the substitute host for Glenn Beck. As I said earlier, it never hurts to hear all viewpoints. That’s the only true way you can formulate your own intelligent opinion. A very smart man reminds me of this from time to time.
NPR has been a little weird for me lately. Pledge drives, public money pleas and departing executives all get on my nerves.
I’m catching up on email and other pressing things during my lunch hour today. Let’s see if I can sum up the last two days in a bulleted list:
– We still have a lot of snow and are expecting more tomorrow
– This is my weekend to work so I have tomorrow off
– I’ll probably be shoveling
– I wiped out two weeks worth of work when I tried out a new software package at work. It’s not worth the money they say it is
– The Jimmy is being fixed as we speak
– I love our Jeep
– Gas prices are scaring me
– I don’t care about Charlie Sheen and I fail to understand why he is more important that Libya, rising gas prices, world hunger, etc
– I’m in the mood to go somewhere warm
– I am remarkably centered and focused in this slightly chaotic time
– I wanted a beer but I didn’t have one because the one in the fridge is almost two years old. I’m saving it to water the mulch.
And on we go.
I remember when Dad brought home our first VCR. It was made by General Electric and now that I think about it, had a suspiciously 21st-century Apple-like design to it in a 1980s way. It was made of metal with a black base and went out of it’s way to be user friendly. The VCR tape mechanism popped out the top of the device. It was cool. The first show that we ever taped with the VCR was the Ann Jillian comedy “Jennifer Slept Here”. We recorded it from the over-the-air antenna and watched it 20 minutes after the tape stopped recording.
The very first thing that I discovered about this new fangled device that my father brought into the colonial-themed family room of our home was that, when you used the remote control that was tethered to VCR with a very long cord, you could speed through the commercials that were sandwiched between the reason that we taped the show in the first place. This nifty device could skip each and every commercial if we wanted to put into the effort of getting beyond a blinking 12:00 on the display. This was very cool and exciting.
I have despised ads and commercials ever since.
Fast forward to the present. There are countless ad-supported social networking platforms out there: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, any and all things Google, the list goes on and on. In many instances, a developer will offer two versions of a mobile app (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc) to access these platforms: a free version that blinks a (hopefully) cute little ad somewhere on the screen and attempts to garner some cash for said social platform, and a paid version of the app, where one pays for the app itself and puts money directly into the pocket of the developer that developed the app, even if it’s the owner of the social networking platform itself.
At the end of last week Twitter released an update to the iPhone version of their official app. While the update took away several goodies, such as the ability to pick your own photo hosting service, it also introduced a new feature called the “Quick Bar”. This bar floats on top of your Twitter feed timeline and displays what’s trending at the moment, usually based on hashtags. The first thing that was displayed in my Quick Bar was “#blackpeoplemovies”.
I don’t care about #blackpeoplemovies.
Twitter states that the Quick Bar (which has since been dubbed the ‘dickbar’ after the COO of Twitter, Dick Somethingorother) is to alert users of what’s hot at the moment. One would hope it would say something like “#peaceinlibya” or “#girlscoutcookiesbeingdelivered” but instead it says something like the aforementioned #blackpeoplemovies or “#OMGbieberissuchagod.”
Now, this new Quick Bar is currently confined to the iPhone version of their app but there are hints that it is going to be included in other versions. Of course, one doesn’t have to use the official Twitter app, in fact, since this release I have opted to go back to Echofon. Echofon is an ad-supported app as well, however, the fine folks that own Echofon have also released a paid version of their app which works quite nicely AND it doesn’t include any ads flashing in our face. This is brilliant and quite frankly, something that Twitter could probably take a cue from. Judging by the rather large backlash against the “dickbar”, Twitter would probably hear a collective sigh of relief if they gave the users of their app the opportunity to either a. hide the dickbar or b. pay for the app and blast the dickbar to oblivion forever and ever amen.
Now I know that quite a few folks have got it in their head that the best way for the Internet to grow and flourish is through ad supported content, but like I did in 1983, someone, somewhere, is always going to find a way to avoid those ads and quite frankly I will do everything I can in my contribution to this experience to make sure that I share as many ways to avoid ads as possible with all my brethren users.
Now, back to Ann Jillian. Would today’s über politically correct society enjoy a show where a teenaged boy found the ghost of a beautiful woman living in his closet? I’m sure there would be some sort of backlash and it would undoubtedly be shoved in my face courtesy of Twitter’s dickbar.
#closetsarentforghosts
I got an early start to my Sunday this weekend. I heard my iPhone vibrating a lot around 2:00 a.m.. This woke me up so I figured I better see what all the hullabaloo was about. It turns out work was having an issue with one of our servers connecting to a server at another facility and the midnight shift couldn’t do their job so I had to leap into action and get everything working again.
I had forgotten what it was like to get awoken in the middle of the night by a work related call. Once everything was working again I found it all quite humorous as I went back to bed.
Upon waking at a normal hour, we noted that the flood warning had been replaced by a winter storm warning. They are now predicting 12-15 inches of snow for us by Monday morning. It’s snowing steadily as I type. It doesn’t look too unpleasant, though it doesn’t really put me in a March mood.
Before Earl and Jamie headed out to get groceries, we went to a local diner for breakfast. I had greens and bacon (there’s a contradiction!), Earl had a “gut buster”, Scott had the “slop” and Jamie had the biscuits and gravy. We strive to eat healthy in these parts. We have taken a liking to the little diner around the corner again; our other favorite diner recently remodeled and it just doesn’t feel as welcoming as it once did. The remodeling brought smaller booths and a hurried pace. The diner around the corner, simply called “Sharyn’s Place”, is the type of place every small town needs.
I took this photo over my shoulder. Someday I’ll face the other way so you can see the other half.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!