The Cat's Nuts

Please read this article on Slashdot and tell me how this makes any sense...

That is what I hate about this country. It was the video games that did it...RIIIIIIIiiight. That's what cased the dumb ass to murder his family. Murdering your family isn't even part of the game!!! If he walked around on the street and blew away some stranger or fucked a whore and then killed her, that I could understand blaming it on the game, they have nothing to do with one anyother. So if I read a comic book, I'm going to become a genius because I was reading? Ugh... fucking money grubbing people. Take some responsibility for your actions and recognize that nothing hurts a child more than poor parenting.

Posted by Michael at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

First off, I would like to start off this post by saying that I am officially discouraged by my "new" job. I got a call today from a woman that has been working on a project in Tampa for the past 5 months. She currently lives in NYC, but travels to Tampa on a weekly basis. She was explaining to me that she wanted to be moved off the project and how they needed someone like myself to fill the roll. She then goes on to explain how often times she is sitting around with nothing to do, but the company that she is working for just feels a strong need to have a "Business Analyst" on staff. So pretty much I was told that they are going to attempt to send me down to Tampa every week for an undisclosed period of time to sit around and do very little work. While the majority of working class Americans would probably love this, I am appalled and probably going to be looking for a new job pretty soon if I get stuck doing that. I think it's fucking miserable to be passed around for three months and when you finally do get put on something, it's half way around the country and there isn't even any work! Ugh... needless to say, my voice will be heard in this one. I've already told the girl that was trying to pawn off the situation on me that I'm not interested and that I am already stir crazy from not doing anything. I think that on Monday I will express my severe distaste for the possible position. We'll see how that one works out.

On a brighter note, I figured that I would share this rather disturbing video. Enjoy!

Freaking strange, right? I particularly am disturbed by the smoking bit at the end... just strange. Where did they find that little man?

Last night around 8, I got a call from one of the people in HR that needed help today at the Columbia University Career Fair, so naturally, I said that I would go and help out. It went through without incident and it was nice to finally be back up at Columbia and not feel that pit of hate welling up in my stomach. :) Nice, right?

Tomorrow is the Columbia homecoming tailgating....I mean football game. I'm guessing it's not going to be all that thrilling, but at least it's supposed to be nice weather. As of currently there aren't any set plans for what we're going to be doing after the game, but I'm sure it'll involve drinking some alcohol, so that'll be fun. Laura is planning on doing an LSAT this weekend, so we've gotta find a time where she can do it. Hopefully she'll just do it tomorrow morning so that we can go out boozing tomorrow night without her having to worry about taking a test. Speaking of tests, the other day I took a math section of an GMAT to see how I would do. Out of the 37 questions, I only got 23 right. At first I was shocked, and then I started to go over the ones that I missed, and realized that literally, all but three questions were missed because I was rushing through and didn't read closely enough. It was reassuring that I wasn't a complete and total moron. I think that with a little practice, I should do fairly well on the test, which is going to be necessary if I am going to be attempting to get into grad school at any point in my life.

Last night Laura and I headed down to Barcade for their Rouge Brewery Night. They had 20 different Rouge beers on tap. It was a good time getting to sample all the various brews. Unfortunately for me, something was up with my system and I felt so strange from the beer, and got drunk way faster than should have been humanly possible. Granted, I was stumbling drunk or anything, I had only had 4 beers, but I totally felt woozy. More strangeness in my life.

Mile time of the day: 7:21.... Yes. it’s crappy, but I was out drinking last night, on my feet all day, and there was a strong head-wind, so I have flock of excuses handy. We'll see how I can do tomorrow after an evening of sobriety.

The plan for the evening is a dinner over at Ryan and Fran's place. Fran just accepted a new job for a bunch more money, so she's probably happy as a clam right now. I don't think that Laura and I have hung out with those two in probably close to a month, which is strange considering how we hanging out together all summer long. Guess that's just the ebb and flow of friendship in the adult world.

Posted by Michael at 06:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This past week has pretty much been a bust. For the past three days, I have been working from home, going through some Cognos CBT (Computer Based Training), and while that is all good and well, you can only learn so much by going and reading through stuff. Supposedly, there is some work to be done in the office regarding this software, but it’s yet to be presented to me, so I’m not going to hold my breath about that.

The other day, Laura and I were talking about my job and about how unfulfilled I am with it in the recent months. Granted, I have only been working here for three months, I have yet to really be challenged in any way. Laura and I have spoken in depth about how both of us were so much more driven when we were younger, naïve and in high school, and how things seemed to have changed. I know that for me, one of the biggest things that has altered my methodology of life (sounds very academic), was when I was out of school for two years, just hanging around without many goals. One of the things that I was really looking forward to with this new job was the ability to set goals and to really work towards making myself better. While that’s all good and well, it’s been a lot harder than one would have thought, but I think that things, in the next month or so, should be getting a little better.

Not two seconds ago, my boss just came up to me and told me that I should be able to be sent out on a project as a Cognos report builder, so that’s cool. My whole two days of self training seem to have done the trick. Now if they had only told me that I could do that two months ago, I would have been in the clear…ugh… love that hindsight. Let’s not count the chickens before they hatch, because I still haven’t been put on anything as of yet, so I’m still in limbo. We have a conference call today at noon where we are going to be talking about the reporting software that we use internally, and how that’s going to change, so that should be useful information into what I will be doing with Cognos in the next week or so.

Things on the home front are going well. Laura and I have gotten in a little rhythm in terms of working out and at least doing some active things, which is good. I’m feeling better about being the fat slob that I am, because at least I know that I’m working towards bettering myself…kind of funny how my work and personal life mirror one another.

Last night, Laura and I went out to a Graduate School Fair at NYU to check out a few of the law schools that Laura is interested in. Her ideal schools of choice are University of Texas and Vanderbilt, so we stopped in at the Vanderbilt table to talk with the guy at the desk. He was helpful, but more than anything, we were there to get some literature, which we were able to procure. If you are a loyal reader, you will know that Laura has been diligently practicing for the LSAT. She is going to be taking it in December, right before all her law school applications are due, so she’s going to be a little stressed out for the next two months.

With Laura’s impending LSAT, and our house being a mess, and my general lack of ambition, I have decided to take some action. Last year around this time, Laura and I instituted a “Sober October” in order to quell the mid-week consumption of alcohol that we had gotten so accustomed to. So in the spirit of last October, I have dubbed this October, “Gain Control October”. Yep… I’m dedicating this month to getting myself into a better position in my life. That means getting the damn house to be clean, and have it stay that way, and build habits that are conducive to that point. It also means that I need to stop wasting my time playing video games when I could be doing other useful stuff, such as studying up on Cognos so that I can get some satisfaction out of work, but mostly it just means really focusing on not wasting time and energy on useless things. While one might consider this blog to be useless, I feel like it provides me a place where I can let me feelings and thoughts out and also provides me with a forum to make silly contracts with myself. So here it goes… October is coming and I’m going to kick it’s ass.

Posted by Michael at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Laura and I just got back from a run. I did my typical timed one mile thing, just to see how much I have lost since the last time that I did it. Back in March I was running it almost every day, and pulling in some pretty respectable times for a 235 lb. ex-athlete... I was coming in around 5:45ish, so that was pretty decent. Today I clocked myself, without really pushing at all, at 7:32... Yes, it's considerably worse, but I figure that if I run it tomorrow, I'll get in around 6:45. Ehhh... at least it's something to keep my mind off the terrible pain that courses through my body during this joyous experience.

In honor of my feeble running skills, I figured that I would go on YouTube and find someone else that can run fairly well, or at least used to be able to, so without further delay, I present to you....Walter Payton:

Damn that man can run.

As of this week, I am officially teaching myself how to write and run reports using Cognos. One of the web pages that my company runs uses Cognos as a business intelligence reporting tool, and they need some additional reports run. I am going to eventually by writing up those reports, but in order to be able to do that, I am in the process of learning the software. Should be worthwhile. Thus far, it seems to be pretty straight forward, but I'm sure that once I get into things, it's going to get more and more complicated.

I haven’t' really been in much of a blogging mood recently, and there hasn't been a whole lot going on to warrant it anyway, so I suppose that works out fairly well.

This past weekend Erik and I brewed up a batch of porter and "small beer". Originally, our plan was to brew using the same recipe that we used during the first time that we brewed...ever. Erik had ordered all the stuff, and on Saturday morning we commenced brewing. All was going well until it was time to drain the grains that we had dumped into the lauter tun (it's a cooler with a filter at the bottom), and that's when it all went wrong. A long story short, the filter kept getting clogged with grain and various other flow problems, so Erik and I eventually went out to the dollar store, purchased three sieves and filtered water through the grain....2-3 lbs at a time. It was miserable. It added two hours to the time it took to brew. The batch was supposed to come out to be around 1.085 o.g. (density) and it only amounted to 1.056, so it was .02 off, which is around 2-3% less alcohol than we were supposed to have. Hopefully, we'll have a good batch of yeast that'll convert lots of the sugars and give us a solid 5% beer. In addition to the porter, we also took the grains, after giving them an initial washing, we did it again, and took those runnings and made that into a separate beer. That one is called a "small beer" and should only be around 2-3% alcohol in total. I have no idea how it's going to come out, but it'll be interesting if nothing else.

It's about time that I settle in for the night.

Posted by Michael at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I finally did it. I went through the 15,000 pictures that I have taken in the past 2 years, and selected around 125 of my favorites. I posted them up on my photo page. If you want the address, just post me a comment and I'll get it to you.

Posted by Michael at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dell. It's a computer company, and I would venture to guess that everyone and their brother has heard of it by now. If not through actually owning one or knowing someone who does, then by hearing the stories of their exploding batteries and other fun fiery problems.

Their top of the line computers are labeled "XPS", and generally are quite nice systems, although a little over priced. Just recently, I honestly, and truly believe that Dell has crossed the line in laptop design. They have created a "desktop replacement" called the XPS M2010. Why anyone would ever need a 20.1" laptop is beyond me, but if you feel like lugging around an 18lb. hunk of amazing computer, this is your bitch.

How do people react to seeing this monster? Check out this article. It's quite funny.

Today is a fairly quiet day, because, seeing as how my Ohio based project is done, I don't have anything else to do. Being the good little worker that I am, I came into the office in Jersey City today to hang out and see if I could help anyone out with any of their work. As of now, I've yet to be successful in finding anything to do.

Yesterday, Laura and I attended the Jets vs. Patriots NFL Football game. We had a nice time at the three hour long sports contest, but the dismal part about the evening was that once the game was finished, if you bothered to stay for the entire contest, you are faced with the grim prospect of catching a bus back into New York. After standing on line for an hour and then riding on the bus for another hour (for a ride that usually takes 15 minutes), we finally got back into New York.

The moral of the story is this: If you are going to attend a football game at the Meadowlands, go to a game that you know is going to be a blowout, that way you can leave at the end of the 3rd quarter and beat the traffic.

Not really feeling like blogging right now, so I'm going to cut this one short. Enjoy the article about the monster computer.

Posted by Michael at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s currently around 8:15, 35,000ft., and 600 mph, cruising towards New York. While normally I would be thrilled to be heading home after spending time in the armpit of the United States, this time, I’m just a little annoyed.

After the presentation was finished, and lunch had been served, it was time to head to the airport to catch our flights. So my two associates and I hopped in a cab and heading over to the airport in Columbus. We arrived at our destination around 1:00pm and quickly were able to check in. Me, being the observant fellow that I am, casually glanced down at my boarding pass and “6B”, this quickly registered in my mind as Gate 6, Concourse B. Thrilled with my deduction, I wished my co-workers well, and headed away from them. They were both flying through Delta and were catching flights out of Concourse C. I made my way through towards the security checkpoint, lazily just going about my business. Because my flight didn’t depart for another 3 hours, I wasn’t really too concerned about time. Upon arriving at the security checkpoint, I was promptly told that I needed to head over to Concourse C where “All Delta flights leave from”…upon further inspection, I realized that I failed to accurately identify the concourse on my ticket, instead I had found my seat number. Realizing that I had already bade farewell to my co-workers, one of them a very high level director in my firm, I was horrified that I would have to walk past them on my way to my gate.

To avoid this tricky, and potentially embarrassing situation of having to explain to my boss how, as an inexperienced traveler, I was unable to correctly identify the concourse on my ticket…I’m sure that would have really spoke volumes about my attention to detail, I ducked into the nearest bathroom to change. Having just come from the office, I was decked out in your typical business casual attire. Utilizing the spacious confines of the handicap stall in the men’s room, I opened up my suitcase and donned my slightly stinky blue jeans, and wholly stinky polo that I had been wearing on the flight over. To cover the fragrent aroma of my manliness, I did what any other self respecting male would do… yes, I applied another layer of deodorant.

With freshly scented armpits, a bag of clean clothes, and my flip-flops flopping, I stealthily made my way out into the terminal. I carefully approached each gate, scanning the seats to see if I could find my co-workers, but luckily, I seemed to be in the clear. Once I arrived at my gate, I took a seat and began to wait.

And I waited….

And I waited…

And I waited…

And finally, the PA speaker came on:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the 4:55 flight to New York is going to be slightly delayed due to weather conditions coming out of Laguardia, we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Armed with this new information, I happily plodded along on my computer, abusing the free internet service that pervades the Columbus Airport. After another hour went by, and our boarding time skipped happily away with it, the PA came on in the terminal again.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are happy to announce that the 4:55 flight to New York via LaGuardia will be boarding as soon as the aircraft arrives in from New York. The flight from New York was scheduled to take off at 3:10, but is still sitting on the runway, so as soon as that flight gets underway, it should be another hour and forty-five minutes until we can board your flight. Thank you again for your patience.”

A collective sigh rang out throughout the culvert where all of the New York bound passengers were sitting, each looking more and more annoyed. I, being easily amused, especially with internet running and time to burn, wasn’t all that irritated. Don’t get me wrong, I would have rather been on my way home, but at least I wasn’t sitting on the runway, waiting to take off like those poor people in New York.

Around 7:30, almost three hours after we were scheduled to depart from a sunny Ohio airport, we were finally allowed to board the plane. After getting situated and familiarizing myself with the exit doors, I leaned my head against the wall of the plane and attempted to go to sleep.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we again apologize for the delay, but we’re going to have to remain here on the tarmac for at least another twenty-five minutes until we can get clearance from LaGuardia to take off.”

Comforted by the groaning sighs of the passengers aboard the aircraft, I again placed my head against the wall of the plane and went to sleep, finally waking to the sound of the stewardess telling us to buckle our seat belts because of turbulence.

I love to fly.

Posted by Michael at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s 9:00 in the morning. In about one hour I will be helping in my first “Business Pitch” given to a large company. We’re presenting to them suggestions on how to better utilize the Data Warehouse system that they have installed in their sales and marketing department. I’m fairly excited about it, but I know I won’t really be participating all that much seeing as how I don’t know much about the software that they are going to be working with. On the upside, because I don’t know anything about the software, the changes of my company wanting me to continue to come out here to work on this project, should we get it, are a bit lower. Who knows though, perhaps they will want me to help out and learn the software, I have no idea.

As of today, I have no idea where I am supposed to go on Monday, so that sucks quite a bit. I’d like to know sooner rather than later, but I have a feeling that I may be again sitting in Brooklyn, waiting to be assigned to something. As I’ve mentioned before, I just hope that I don’t end up having to commute back out to Long Island.

Today, being the 15th, was payday. Unfortunatly, my boss too forever getting my expenses approved, so I didn’t get them applied to this paycheck, which means that I have around $3K hanging out on my credit card till the end of the month. It’s not a good thing, and frankly, I’m a little irritated about it. Although I would like to place the blame on him, I have to take some of it on myself because I never sent out the receipts that I was supposed to send to the corporate office, so that may be another key reason that I don’t have my money. Live and learn I suppose. In the future I will be making sure to get my stuff in on time.

Yesterday was one of the easiest days that I have had since I have worked at this company. I got up and hopped on a plane out to Columbus, Ohio. When I got here around noon, I crawled into bed, ordered room service and watched a movie. Around 4:30, I finally got a call from my boss, telling me that we were going to be going out to dinner soon. Around 6:00, a group of us went out to a fairly nice steak house in the heart of Columbus. After gorging myself on steak and mashed potatoes, the two guys I am working with and I walked back to the hotel where we had a brief 30 minute meeting to discuss this morning’s presentation. After the meeting, I went upstairs and went to bed. So not exactly a taxing day. I didn’t really have to do much at all, so it wasn’t a bad Thursday. In addition to the easy going flow of the day, I found out that Nick, a guy that went to school with me and was on the wrestling team, just got offered a job at my company. It’s good for him because it’s a solid (around $20k) pay jump for him, and it’s excellent for me because I get a nice $1,500 fee for recommending him. Not too shabby. I think the ironic thing about my recruitment fee is that this one fee that I’ll earn is probably more money in commissions than I made in the entire time that I was working at the Legal Recruiting firm in Midtown. Life is funny like that I suppose.

In the past week, Laura has been ramping herself up for the LSAT that she’s going to be retaking. I was made aware that in a previous post I had mentioned that she already took it and was going to take it again to boost her score, and apparently, as per her complaint, this made it sound as if she had gotten a bad score, which is not the case. So, as a correction to that possible misconception, Laura did just fine in her first go-around, but would like to bump her score up a few points. So she is in the process of studying now for the December LSAT. It’s going to make for a harder few months with her studying in the evenings, but if she’s able to get into a better school, preferably the University of Texas, then it’ll be worth it for her. I just hope that she can keep herself sane and not worry so much about it, but that’s left to be seen. For those of you that don’t know Laura….she’s a worrier.

On a more technology focused issues, it seems that the unthinkable has happened. Yahoo Mail, which just came out of Beta with a new edition, has been overcome by the Slashdot Effect. I didn’t think that it was possible, but it seems that their mail functionality isn’t quite up to par to handle the millions of hits from Slashdot. Oh well. Sucks for them.

Just had to throw that in there. It’s one of my favorites, and as dumb as it is, I just like it.

Posted by Michael at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For those of you that aren't really tuned into the world of gaming, there is another mega blockbuster that's going to hit the shelves in the next year or so and it's called SPORE.

When the game was originally developed, it was going to be called "Sim Everything" but since that is so terribly lame, the instead decided to call it Spore, a much more clever and fitting name. From the original title, I'm sure that you can pretty much figure that this game has a little bit of...well...everything.

It mashes together these games: Snake (yes, the one where you eat the little dots and grow), Sims, Sim City, Civilization, and something else that I don't really know what to describe.

The premise is that you build your creature up from a single celled organism up to a full sized being. You determine how it lives, eats and breathes. It's a pretty neat concept. The game moves through stages and allows the players to do lots of cool stuff. I don't want to go on anymore because I sound like I'm advertising for the game, but I did find this clip on YouTube which gives you a good idea of what the "Creature Editor" is like, so enjoy.

Posted by Michael at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Damn this week has gone fast. It’s Thursday once again and I have found myself in Laguardia Airport. I am once again heading out to Ohio. This time I’m only going ot be out there for an evening, so it’s not really all that big a deal. This time around, we’re going to be presenting out findings from last week. Honestly, had we had one more day last week, we could have put together this presentation without a hitch and just have been done with it, but as it turns out, we had a short labor day week last week and needed to extend it into this week. There is currently a second SOW (Statement of Work) that is being prepared for this company that we are working for, but I don’t know if we’re actually going to get the job. It has been voiced to me that there is a possibility that their IT department will undertake the suggestions that we made and our services won’t be needed after this week, but as of now, we don’t really know.

I am just going to take it as it comes. This past week has been pretty nice because I’ve been able to hang out at home with Laura during the day. We went out during our lunch break the other day and played volleyball and threw the Frisbee in the park. It was a nice change from when I was working out on Long Island, sitting in my car for lunch, listening to the terrible Long Island radio.

During this past week, I have had very little to do, except for yesterday when I was given some of the documents that we are going to be using for the presentation. I was asked to review them for punctuation, grammar, and formatting. That took me quite a bit of time, but the real problem came when I was about to hit the “send” button to ship the newly revised documents out to my supervisor.

“Michael….the internet isn’t working…” yells Laura from the other room…

Ugh. We have the great and amazing privilege of having our internet and cable brought to us through Time Warner Cable. In my opinion, there is only one large scale operation that is run more poorly than Time Warner and that’s the US Government. It’s amazing how you can call Time Warner five different times and each time the people on the other side of the conversation will tell you different things. You would think that they would have a central database that would tell them what the person who you previously spoke to had told you, but no, instead you practically have to talk to a supervisor every time you call in order to get service.

So after an irritating 45 minutes on the phone with a tech person he tells me that the problem is that my cable modem isn’t working and that I need to have a tech out. I ask him “How is it possible that on a sunny day, where my modem was working perfectly all day long, that all of the sudden, out of no where, the modem just dies?”

Needless to say, he didn’t have an explanation for me, but what it came down to was that his script didn’t have the needed response. Eventually, I figured that I would just schedule the appointment. Luckily for me, the closest appointment according to the person on the phone was for Monday afternoon. I explained that I and my girlfriend worked from home, so that was completely unacceptable. My cries were not heeded and I was told
“There’s just nothing that we can do. The soonest we can get a tech out there is on Monday. You can stop into the Time Warner store on 23rd and Park to get a new modem if you like…”

So off I went. I grabbed my computer and started the trek into the city. Laura decided to come with me and we headed up to Time Warner’s store front. On the way, I planned on stopping in Union Square park to use the supposedly “free” WiFi that’s in all of the New York City parks. I find myself a bench, sit down, and crack open the clamshell of my computer. As it boots, I am quickly realizing the terrible truth. I had grabbed Laura’s computer, and the documents that I was trying to send to my boss, who by this time was waiting on me to get the documents out to him, were on my computer in Brooklyn. Misery. So I say fuck it, and Laura and I walked up to the store up on 23rd. Once we get there, it’s a short 15 minute wait and we are presented with a new modem.

Once we got home, both of us were quite hungry and getting to be very short and cranky with one another. We both have this lovely trait where we become highly hypoglycemic and are just bitches until we are able to eat. When we’re both hungry, it’s like fireworks going off. Not a good time, but at least we’re aware. Needless to say the phrase

“You need to eat something!” was heard throughout our apartment a few times yesterday.

When I got home, I plugged in the modem, and waited anxiously for it to boot up. Once it did, I was just a tad on the disappointed side. Yep, it didn’t work. At this point, it was two hours past when I had told my employer that I would get him those documents, so I was on the brink of getting quite irritated. The next logical step was for me to just go and find somewhere that I could get on the internet with my laptop and just upload the files, so I headed out to the neighborhood coffee shop.

I walked into this little coffee shop, Sachmos, on Graham ave, about 200 yard from my apartment. It’s quaint and a little off-beat, but a nice new establishment. When I walked in, the owner greeted me, and informed me that there would be a beat poetry reading going on later if I wanted to come back, but I informed him that I was interested in a small cup of coffee and getting an internet connection. After fixing up my coffee and settling down into a chair, I once again cracked open the laptop to hop onto the internet… no dice. Apparently, Sachmos was having the same internet issues that I was having at my house, so off I went, slightly more irritated than before, cup of hot coffee in one hand, bag over the shoulder and armed with a MetroCard, I hopped on the subway into Manhattan.

I got off at Union Square and figured that I would again, now armed with my rightful laptop, attempt to access the park’s WiFi network. I sat down on one the benches that line the pathways through the park and opened up the network connections box on my laptop. Not surprisingly, there were around 30 various wireless networks in the general area, most of them locked. As I was trying to log onto one of the networks, trying to figure out which network was the “Free Park WiFi”, a sleezy looking Russian man sat down next to me.
“Have you ever been to the Turkish Bath houses on 10th street?”

“Ummm…no.”

“Ohh… you should go. They are great. Lots of celebrities….Sandra Bullock, Madonna….”

“Ummm, yeah. I’ll have to check it out…”

At that, I got up and started to walk towards the one bastion of free internet that I KNEW would work…Starbucks.

Weaving my way through the throngs of people in the crowded Starbucks, I was luckily able to find a small table in the back where I could set up shop and finally send off the email that was rotting on my computer. I’ll save you the cursing and swearing, but it didn’t work. Millions of people a day are able to log onto the free internet at Starbucks, but karma wasn’t with me I guess. At that point Ryan called my phone…Ryan who lives literally 5 blocks from me.

“Hey, whatcha up to? “

“Ugh.. fucking internet….” I proceeded to tell him my story of woe, and he just laughed.

“Dude, I have internet…why didn’t you just call me?”

The motto to this story is that Time Warner Cable should rot in hell. I am going to keep my appointment and when that bastard comes knocking on my door, I’m going to choke him with a length of coaxial cable… maybe that’ll get my message across…. Well… not really, but it would be sweet, right?

Posted by Michael at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In light of my recent travels, I found this little segment of Monday Morning Quarterback on Sports Illustrated.com fairly entertaining.

Enjoyable/Aggravating Travel Note of the Week

I am all for rules, airline and otherwise, that protect our safety. But last Wednesday, after walking through a security line at LaGuardia, I saw the total fruitlessness of this you-can't-take-gels-or-liquids-on-airplanes rule, designed to protect us from those who would take explosive liquids or gels on planes. A 40ish man, traveling in business togs, put his briefcase, laptop and shoes on the security belt and walked through the X-ray machine. No beep. He collected his stuff, walked a few steps down the line, and put his laptop back in his case, and then took a tube of toothpaste out of one pocket and a bottle of contact-lens solution out of another, then put both in his briefcase. That sort of defeats the purpose of the anti-liquid rule and pretty much makes a mockery of it all.

Click for larger version.

Seeing as how today is a beautiful monday morning, September 11th not withstanding, I feel as though I should have something to do...oh wait, that's right... work. Well, last week I finished up on Friday in Ohio and flew back to New York for the weekend. Later this week (Thursday) I am again flying out to Ohio to give a presentation on what we found. So for the rest of the week, my only task is to help prepare the PowerPoint presentation that we're going to be giving on Friday morning. I don't really know what I am supposed to be doing because my boss hasn't gotten back to me yet, but I'm okay with that for the time being. I am going to take advantage of this time, fix up some pictures that I have taken in the recent past and overall just hang out and enjoy that quiet Monday.

Posted by Michael at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Recently I have been pretty slow on the posting of pictures because I haven't taken the time to really edit any, but today I finally found some time and created the image on the title bar of the webpage and I also created this image.

Awhile back I was talking about HDR images and how they can really create an interesting look and totally change an image, well this is a good example of it. Most of the time HDR is used to balance images that have great disparity in their exposure levels throughout the image. For example, if you had someone standing in front of a really bright light, they would be dark the the background would be light, or the background would have to be blown out and the person would be clear. Well if you take 3 images with varying levels of exposure, you can capture all of the details in the image. It's quite neat. In this image I over did it a little bit and upped the saturation and did a little vignetting around the edges to give it a nice frame. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Laura and I are currently getting ready to head out of the house and over to see James for his birthday celebration. After that we're out to see UT vs. Ohio in the #1 vs. #2 NCAA showdown. Should be a good evening. I'm looking forward to it.

Posted by Michael at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Once again the week has passed me by, and the weekend is upon us. I spent the last week in Ohio, but I am now back in my native environment....Brooklyn. Laura and I are doing the typical thing for a Friday....sitting around, not really knowing what to do. I have a few calls out to friends and such, but nothing seems to be planned. I was out late last night for the terrible Dolphins Steelers game, so I'm not really even in the mood to go out and do anything, but at the same time, I'm not really all about sitting around the house for the evening. Hopefully something will come up.

I'm looking forward to the coming week because I am going to be working from home till Thursday afternoon when I head back to Ohio for a night. It'll be nice to be hanging around the house with Laura and putting together a presentation that we are going to be giving on Friday morning in Ohio. Overall, I would say that my trip out to Ohio was pretty good. We didn't have to work late, had an easy going project manager, and got to go to some pretty good bars while I was there. I was told that I will be giving part of the presentation, so that is pretty exciting, but scary at the same time. I'm sure that once I know the material, I'll be fine, but as of now, I'm still learning the stuff. When I took my job, I didn't realize how technical it was going to be. We do a lot of work with data models, and by their very nature, there is a lot of database lingo and theory that is involved. Meshing that into the various tools that are used to create these databases and you have a fairly technical occupation.

Although my job has been getting more technical, I spoke with one of the other people that works with me and she has it much worse. Right after our 2 week orientation, she was shipped out to Florida to attend Siebel training. At the time, I was quite jealous that she was getting some professional certification. Well I emailed her today telling her about a fix that I found for our laptops, and she told me about her job. Apparently she's been up in Canada for the past three weeks working from 7am-9pm doing Siebel configurations...all day...every day... she's miserable. Oh well, I guess all I can do is ride the wave of my good-fortune and hope that I don't get stuck doing something quite as miserable as that.

On a better note, as I'm sure you can see, I have upgraded the theme on my blog. It's a little simpler, and I think it looks better. I still have to work on the image that's at the top, and I need to make up some text for the banner, but as of now, I think it's a good step forward. I also have to change around a few of the links because there are pages on there that I have ceased to use, and well... they just suck.

As for this weekend, the only plans that I currently have are to watch the much hyped University of Texas vs. The Ohio State University football game on Saturday. Should be a good one. Anyway...

Posted by Michael at 08:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's around 11:00pm and I'm sitting in my hotel room in Columbus, Ohio. Things are going fairly well here. While I'm not working all that hard on anything in particular, I am being exposed to lots of different stuff and being given some responsibility. I was told today that I am going to be doing some of the presentation that we will be doing next week, so that's pretty exciting. I will be up in front of a few of the executives from this huge insurance company that we are working for, and I will be telling them all about this data model that we are working with. I'm excited about it, but at the same time, this presentation has the possibility to actually bring business to my firm, so it's nice to know that I may actually play a part in getting the firm more business.

Columbus is as you would expect it would be when the college isn't in session. It's pretty quiet, and there isn't much going on. I am staying in a hotel about 100 yards away from the building where we are working. Before I came, I researched a few of the local bars to see if there were any good places to get a beer in the area. As it turns out, there are two bars that are quite decent that are less than a mile away from where I am staying. In addition to that amazing luck, one of Laura's friends from college goes to Ohio State Law School, so I was able to meet up with her tonight and get a few drinks. It was nice to have someone in town that you know, because it makes the foreign town feel much more homey.

I am here tomorrow night, but as it currently stands, we aren't going to really be doing a whole lot during Friday, so hopefully I will be able to change my flight on Friday and head home a little earlier, but from what I hear, that's going to be a long shot in this town of consultants with Gold and Platinum ratings on all the airlines, but we'll see how that works out. Worst case scenario is that I end up having a few more craft beers at the local bar before leaving on my regularly scheduled flight. Next week I will be working from home helping to prepare the presentation for the following week. Luckily I only have to be here for one night next week, so that'll make things a little easier.

Last night we had our Fantasy Football Draft, and that went off without a hitch, so that makes me pretty happy. I think that my team is pretty solid as of now, but that's going to change in the next few weeks I'm sure. Frog is already talking shit about how he's going to defend his title, but seeing as how the teams are all different this year, I don't see it happening, but who knows. His team looks pretty solid as of week one. I was able to draft a pretty decent team, but as it stands, I am really missing out on a solid WR core. I am thinking of trading someone for a solid receiver, but I don't know as of yet. TO should be up for trade, but I don't know about that one yet. That seems a little too risky at this point. Gotta see how things go as the season goes on.

Anyway, it's right about 11:20, and I'd like to just lay back and enjoy the buzz that I still have.

Posted by Michael at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Best Youtube Video EVER.

Posted by Michael at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here I am, sitting in the Airport on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day weekend. I’m on my way to Columbus, Ohio to help out an insurance company with a piece of software that they purchased. Apparently, spending millions on software and consultant fees doesn’t guarantee success, so we are going in to pick up the pieces of their broken software and lay out a roadmap to enable the software to be usable.

Normally, I would be fairly excited, but I rolled into Brooklyn last night around midnight from a long weekend of camping on Lake George. Had an amazing time, and aside from the weather, I have very few complaints about the weekend. If you have never been up to Lake George, it’s a very worthwhile trip. The lake water is warm, and perfectly clear. I was even able to coerse Laura into going swimming in the lake. Because of the naturally rocky terrain in the area, there are many exposed rocks and such, so much of the bottom of the lake near the shoreline is composed of large rock slabs, which makes wading into the water much nicer because you don’t have to deal with the muck between your toes.

We left to go to the lake knowing that there was a good chance that we were going to be rained on, and as predicted, it rained. We were lucky in that the two evenings where we were outside, the weather held out and we enjoyed the crisp early September air, but during the night on the first night it poured. As I was in the tent, listening to the deluge upon the top of our tent, the words of my father repeated through my head…

“I didn’t get around to sealing the seems of the tent or putting any scotch guard on it, so chances are, if it rains, you may get a little wet.”

Well, when Laura and I woke up, we were a little wet. Quite a bit wet actually, with puddles on the floor of our tent. Our rain fly that is supposed to cover the majority of the tent and divert the water away from the inside of the tent decided to pull up in the high wind and leave nothing protecting an area of our tent other than a sturdy mesh screen. After sacrificing a towel to the cleanup effort, things turned out fine, but it was still a little bothersome to have to dry out our stuff.

The following day it rained pretty much throughout the day, which was fine, because prior to leaving my parents house, Laura and I went out to Gander Mountain, a sporting goods retail store, and purchased these excellent vinyl camouflage hunting suits, complete with hoods and rain pants. The best part about our camo gear was that fact that they were a whopping $10.00 for the whole set, so we did what any other self respecting campers would do….we bought a set for each one of us. We were quite the site all clad in plastic camo gear. I’m not going to lie, we did have someone ask us

“Did you just go hunting?”

In order to get around the lake, we had rented a 135hp 18’ Bowrider with in-board motor. It was plenty fast and suitable for our needs, so we had no complaints….till the last day. We decided that since we had to check out of our campsite at 11, and return the boat by noon, we would take a nice cruise up to the north end of the lake and see what that was like. After touring around for a bit, it was my turn to drive the boat. After a few little yelling bouts with Laura, we finally settled down into a rhythm in terms of her getting upset with my driving and me testing the limits. That’s when it happened. The motor all the sudden sounded as if it were bound with something. I quickly put it in neutral where the motor promptly died. After a few minutes of trying to get the motor started, we ended up flagging down another boater and sent James to get the people from the Marina. Seeing as how the Bass Boat that James got into sped away at around 60mph, we were quickly joined by people from the Marina. Eventually we got back, got our stuff and were given another boat. It wasn’t a big deal overall, but it certainly wasn’t the best way to spend the last two hours of our vacation.

Anyway, the plane is about to board, so I need to put away my computer.

Posted by Michael at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)