The Cat's Nuts

I heard an interesting story last night and figured that I would share it with the group.

My Jiu-Jitsu instructor has a 12 year daughter that participates in the youth program and is a fairly skilled fighter for her age group.

Apparently, the other day in school, a boy took a bag of candy from her and refused to give it back. Instead of going to the teacher, the proceeded to jump on his back, throw in the hooks (wrapped her legs around him and put them between his legs) and proceeded to choke him out until he let go of the bag of candy...after falling to the ground in an unconscious heap. Needless to say my instructor had to go into the school to talk to the principal. That's some good stuff. You know she got a high five when she got home.

Posted by Michael at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Okay... so randomly, I like to search for myself on Google and see what comes up and where it comes up. Today, I was searching and found something very interesting....

Apparently, there was a modual sent into space in 1999 to intercept a comet (I remember this) and onboard, it had a few computer chips with 1,000,000 names on it. Well....my name happened to be on that chip. I have no idea how, but it was and now, until the sun explodes, my name will be digitally inprinted on a silicon chip, floating in space. Pretty neat.

I can only assume that my father was the mastermind behind this as both my brother and mother are also listed. Go Dad.

Posted by Michael at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So what's new in my world since yesterday. Hmmm.. not much. Melissa broke her finger playing softball, so that's pretty horrible for her. She's heading off to the hand specialist today to see if she needs to get it pinned. Apparently she broke it in two places and one was right through the knuckle of her finger. That would not be good, and of course it's the right hand pointer finger, so it's going to be in the way quite a bit, but I suppose that getting pins are a little bit better than losing range of motion in your finger.

Things at work are quiet. As usual. We've officially slated a December 7th release of the next iteration of the dashboard, which is a month later than we thought it would be, so we're again going to have more time than we need. I am going to try to plan some sort of Caribbean vacation with Melissa when she comes down this weekend, and it's probably going to fall right into the testing portion of the release, but that's fine. There's really no need for both me and my co-worker to be present during testing as he is fully capable of doing what needs to be done.

I'm really looking forward to this weekend, and speaking of which, I gotta see if I can find a hotel room in Athens that's fairly worthwhile because frankly, I don't want to have to drive home at 9:00pm after being out tailgating all day. Going to have to look into that today.

(5 Minutes Later)

Yeah....that's not really an option. Don't think that I am going to be able to find a hotel. Oh well. Going to have to see what other options are presented as every hotel in the area is packed for the night. Guess other people had the same idea...with a little planning. Hehe. oh well.

Posted by Michael at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally broke down, after living in Atlanta for 3 months, I finally bought a GPS Unit. I was so sick of not knowing where I was going and printing out MapQuest or Google Map directions, I just had to get something.

On ECost.com, I got a nice little TomTom One for around $170. It's very basic, but it does the job it needs to do. I didn't need all that multimedia garbage, and MP3 player, Audio Book reader...blah. Waste. Just needed something so that I could plug in an address and get there. Simple and it does the job and does it well.

This weekend I finally got my satellite TV from Directv installed, so that's a huge relief. I ended up having to have 4 different appointments. One with Dish, and three with Directv because they kept screwing up my order and not sending the tech out with the appropriate equipment that was needed. Anyway, it's all done now and I have the NFL Ticket so I'll be able to watch as many Dolphins games as I can stomach.

This weekend, Melissa is going to be coming down and we're going to head over to Athens to watch the first college football game of the season at Georgia State. They are ranked this season and are expected to do well, so it should be exciting being at a college where there is actual excitement about the football team, unlike Columbia, who's disdain for their football team is well documented.

I was just about to go and post this entry when I realized that this is my 250th blog entry. Whoo hoo... good for me. Well, not really, but it's something to note.

Work is really slow right now as we are preparing to start testing and most of our construction is complete. Looking forward to getting into testing so that the days are a little faster and a little more full.

In just about two weeks I will be flying up to NYC to see my cousin get married. Very exciting....well..not, not really. I'm kind of annoyed that I had to spend $260 on a flight up there in the peak of high priced summer flying season. From what I gather, there is a chance that the wedding may not even go off, and THAT would be irritating. Oh well, I'll just go with the flow and see how it all works out. j

Recently, I have been getting into conversations with people regarding how I like living in Atlanta versus living in New York, and frankly it's a hard thing to explain to someone unless they have lived in NYC. There are some great things about that city, I'm not going to lie, and there are always a million things to do, even if you are just walking around aimlessly, and that's a great perk, the fact that you can just walk around without point and have a wonderful time. I would have to say that the biggest thing I miss about New York was taking a Saturday, and just walking 10-12 miles through the city, seeing the sites, walking through central park and just enjoying the day. While that is all good and well, there is also a huge negative side to NYC. At any given moment, you are surrounded by people. Especially on the subway in the morning when you want nothing to do with anyone that's there. In addition to that, you (speaking as a white male) have to deal with the reverse racism that streams forth from the angry minorities on the subway. Don't take that as a racist comment, but I have been verbally assaulted and abused too many times while riding on the subway to take lightly to the plight that is present in that city. So in regard to Atlanta and how it compares, I think it's also important to look at where I grew up.

I grew up in Orange County, NY, about 70 miles north west of NYC as the crow flies. I often tell people that there were more cows than people in my town, and frankly I don't know if that's still the case, but it's a good indicator of the agricultural nature of the area. The nearest town to Westtown, was Middletown, which was past Waywayonda. Whoever named these places had a sick sense of humor, but I digress. Convenience was not something you had. The nearest shopping center was a solid 15 minute drive away, and that was if you didn't get stuck behind a tractor, but regardless, I had a nice childhood and enjoyed it there.

I look at Atlanta as a mix of NYC and Westtown. I can drive my car around, so I'm not subject to dealing with people that car about the color of my skin, and I can go anywhere at any time, which is great. Additionally, there are lots of places for me to go that are very close and I can get to in 5 minutes. There are many parks and in 15 minutes, I can have my bike on a mountain biking trail, so that's another great thing. My apartment is reletivly cheap and it's very nice and safe and a fraction of the cost that I paid in NYC.

So do I like Atlanta? Yeah, I do. Will I live here forever? I have no idea.

Posted by Michael at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's August in Atlanta and it's hot. Go figure. That's a huge shocker I am sure. As hot as it is, I have to say that it's not as hot as I thought it would be. My apartment is around 300 yards from the office where I work and I've yet to take my car to work in order to avoid the heat, and seeing as how I sweat like a boar in the desert, that's saying something.

I went for my first Atlanta mountain bike ride on Wednesday to a place called Big Creek. I was fairly tentative when I decided to head up there after work on Wednesday as I couldn't find my camelback, so I wouldn't have any water as I rode around. I thought to myself "ehh..it won't be so bad, you can go for an hour without water."

I got to the parking lot which is a whopping 15 minutes from my house...but, because of the lovely after work traffic heading up Georgia 400, it took me close to an hour. As I opened up the door of my car, I stepped out into a sweltering 103 degree muggy Atlanta afternoon. I quickly realized that my ride was going to be cut short due to dehydration.

Hesitant, I started off on my way. Big Creek is unlike any other place that I have ridden. Being a Yankee, and never riding anywhere but up in the north and in Colorado, my experience with copious amounts of topsoil is limited. The trails were all hard packed and it was quite dry. The park itself is a SORBA maintained trail system of concentric circles. If you take the left path, the circle continues out, and if you go right, you'll eventually end up coming back to where you started from. It's a rather good system and the trails are so well marked it's practically impossible to get lost, which is always a good thing.

After 35-40 minutes, I quickly realized the mistake that I made in not taking the time to find my camelback, and decided that it was time to head home. Luckily, since the rush hour traffic had diminished, I was able to quickly get back to my humble little home and into the A/C.

Other than my foray into mountain biking, this week has been pretty low key. Melissa just got back from London and Pisa, so it's nice to have her around again....well, around as in only 1,000 miles away. She's planning on coming down to Atlanta over Labor Day Weekend, so that's pretty exciting. I think we're going to go out to the University of Georgia football game on Saturday. It's the season opener, so it should be a good time, even if we don't end up actually being able to get tickets. I also have a hankering to go to the aquarium here in Atlanta, which is supposed to be just excellent.

Other than that, I've finally gotten my computer up to snuff and back to running a plain Jane Windows XP operating system. I've got 1.2TB of data storage available and hardly anything close to that in data to put on it. I ended up having to get a portable USB drive to enable me to easily switch back to a regular old Windows system, killing my dual boot Linux system in the process.

Posted by Michael at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past weekend, I went up to Boston to do some Siebel Analytics training. After the training was over, I went with my brother down to my parents house. Among the various things that we did, I took some pictures of him car. He asked that I post them here, so here they are. The zip file is 144.4 megs, so it's pretty big. Feel free to download them images if you would like, but like I said, it's a huge file and I don't expect that you'll get a very fast download rate, but none the less, here they are.

http://www.thecatsnuts.com/BMW.zip

Posted by Michael at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm currently up in Boston, working on some ever fun Siebel Analytics training. We're currently on break, so I figured that I would use this time to write up a quick blog entry.

Things have been going well in Atlanta. Work's fine other than a little "misscommunication" issue between IT and my team. The short of it was that IT got pissy about how much work they had to do and took it out on the business. It got blown up and a bunch of executives from our firm got involved to try to sort things out...really just making things worse for everyone involved. Other than that, things are going smoothly and we're making our little space on the grand old interweb a nicer place.

Training is going well. I've picked up a few things, but not a whole lot. The really interesting stuff is going to be coming tomorrow when we talk about more of the back end application, because frankly, I don't know much about it and I'll finally be learning something. Today has just been pretty much an introduction to some of the new features that are in the newer releases. Hopefully, the client that I am working with is going to be upgrading to the most recent release pretty soon, and all this training will actually come into play.

This weekend is pretty exciting. On Friday, Scott, Liz and me are going to be driving to my parents house, picking up Melissa on the way and getting to hang out for Scott's birthday. On Sunday, both Scott and my father are going to be participating in the Dark Horse 40, which is an annual bike race that those two have been going to for the past few years. Scott is really looking to sandbag the sport class and see if he can't take home the gold. He's got a good shot, it'll just depend on who else is sandbagging it worse.

Anyway, it's about time that I get back to the training because it'll be starting in a few minutes.

Posted by Michael at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)