This morning was the start towards really losing some serious weight. After completing the soup diet…well, we kind of bailed on it after 5 days, but it wasn’t because it was too hard. It’s like when you are learning to drive a stick-shift. You can only start and stop so many times. At first it’s really hard, but after awhile it just becomes easy, but tedious to keep practicing, so you stop. That’s pretty much what happened with the diet. I felt that I had gotten everything from the diet that I wanted, so it was time to stop. I started the week at a whopping 243 and yesterday morning I weighed in at 231. Not too shabby for a week worth of watching my intake and eating healthy stuff.
So the plan of attack now is to get myself down to 205-210 by the start of December. This morning Laura and I started back up at the gym down the street. It was painful to be back in there, I’m not going to lie, but at the same time, I feel good to be getting back to a healthy lifestyle. Laura and I have yet to really set out a game to attack the weight loss, but I think that it’s going to involve lots of running and a bit of weight lifting to get our metabolisms really going. I’m excited about it. It’ll be nice to fit into some of my pants that I used to wear when I left school, not to mention just feeling good and being in shape again.
Last night Ryan and Fran stopped over for some fajitas, which were amazing. Laura marinated the steak for a few hours with a ton of garlic, jalapeno and cilantro. It looked kind of funny going onto the grill, but damn was it good. I actually have a good portion of it for lunch today, so I’m looking forward to that. It sucks though, because I got into work around 11:00 this morning because of a late start and traffic being terrible on the LIE. I hate that highway… there is just no way around it. There’s no other way to get to my job, or at least no way that I know of.
On Saturday I took a step towards making my computer at home a little faster. I ordered two 1 Gig memory chips. I didn’t really expect them to come yesterday, but to my surprise they did. The must be in a large box because the mail guy didn’t send them through the slot in my door, but he did leave the little slip saying I had to pick up the package. What I don’t understand is how he came around 10:00 in the morning when Laura was home and “tried to deliver” the package and she didn’t hear him. My contention is that the lazy postman didn’t feel like carrying around the box so he just left it at the post office and wrote out the slip so he didn’t have to bother. Most people probably aren’t home and it wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s just annoying that I didn’t get my damn memory because he was lazy. Oh well, what are you going to do?
Hopefully Laura will take a little bike ride down to the post office today and get it for me. That would be nice of her (Hint hint)
Anyway, I have to get back to my training.

Today was just a bitch of a day. After coming off a great weekend where Laura and I were amazingly productive, I came to work with a hopeful feeling. I am greeted by my supervisor and his boss standing in the hall chatting. My supervisor, the one that is supposed to be teaching me Informatica, brings me outside and tells me that he’s leaving my company. I’m like “freaking great…I couldn’t even get him to help me out and teach me all that much when he was here…now what the hell am I supposed to do?”
Apparently, because he has such a specific skill set, he was a major contributor to the project that I am on, so the client would be very unhappy to have him leave, therefore, his whole departure is going to be quite hush hush. Again, very irritating to me. The other fun part about it being so closed lip is that I’m not supposed to know about this whole change of personnel. Because of the most recent development at my job, and because I have been working here for around a month and haven’t really done anything of value yet, I did what anyone else in my position would do. I complained to a hire up. Well… I wouldn’t say I “complained” but I did send an email to the head supervisor here letting him know what I was up to and that I felt that I could be learning more than I am, so we’ll see how that goes. He said that he’d meet up with me tomorrow morning after he had a chance to talk to the people that were supposedly supposed to be giving me some instruction.
This morning I went to the car rental place to get another vehicle for a week of driving to Long Island for this project. When I got there, they gave me the typical treatment and brought me outside and gave me the choice between three cars:
“Well, there are three choices…you could have the Taurus, the Camry or for $10 more you could have the Dodge Charger.” Yes, it’s true. I took the 240HP jet black Dodge. It’s okay… I think the SRT 450HP version would be a bit more of a thrill, but this one is comfortable and has a decent sound to it right around 4000rpm.
Anyway, it’s about time to get some work done.

Quick beer fact of the day: The first nonnative American is born on the southern tip of New Amsterdam- later to become lower Manhattan. His name is Jean Vigne, and he is born inside the first known American Brewhouse, Block and Christiansen’s, that opened two years earlier. Even better, little Jean would grow up to become a brewer and America’s first natural-born beer maker.
Fun right?

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It’s right around 4:15 and I’m again sitting in the ever fun “War Room” basking in the warm glow of the florescent lights. Amazingly enough, I was into the office at 10:15 (when I’m supposed to get in), and I have yet to make contact with my direct supervisor. For most people that would be a great thing, just going about your business without interruption, but for me, who has no “business” going about it becomes quite hard without direction. So what have I done all day? Well, besides emailing quite a bit with Laura, I’ve just puttered around doing stuff for work.
Last night, as I was walking out, I ran into my supervisor…we’ll just call him Bill. Bill tells me that his boss (refer to previous posts) has something important to talk to me about concerning where I’m going to be working and what I’m going to be working on. He tells me that his boss, let’s call him Jim, is going to speak to me tomorrow morning, which just happens to be today. Now, as it rounds towards the end of the day, I have still not spoken to Jim and it’s not for a lack of trying. I realize that I am the most impatient person I the world and that I should just be happy that I’m not being flooded with terrible coding or some other crap that would just be tedious and miserable, so I suppose that I’m happy to be out on the job site, but at the same time, I don’t like the fact that I’m getting no guidance or feedback, so that sucks.
One of the nice things about not having any real work to do, is that I am free to do whatever training programs I’m interested in, and that includes learning about Linux. It’s nice to go through an actual training program that explains stuff about Linux. I feel that as an operating system, it’s pretty easy to use and get around in, but there were lots of little questions that I just never bothered to ask, and using the training I have really gotten a better understanding of the way it works. I also got the chance to do a little more SQL Server training, and that’s been good, but not nearly as interesting as working with the Linux training. Additionally, I feel that SAP may be my next training materials seeing as how there has been talk that I’ll be doing some work with that, even though, from the little experience that I have with it, I think it’s a terrible horrible piece of software. Oh well, what are you going to do?
Today is day number two of the soup diet. I have to say that it’s perhaps the strangest diet ever. The first day consisted of eating just the soup and fruit. That wasn’t so bad because I just got a huge pineapple and ate that all day along with a bunch of grapes, a few apples and various other juicy fruits. For someone like myself who loves sweet things, it wasn’t too bad. For Laura, she kind of struggled with it. But, at the end of the day we made it through. Now, for the second day, it’s the same concept as yesterday, but today we’re eating only vegetables and soup. I’m not going to lie… I hate today. I never really realized how few vegetables I liked. Another problem is that any of the good vegetables, like corn or avocado are off limits because they are “bad” for you. Ugk.. oh well. I’m pretty hungry as it stands, but I’ll get through it, because at the end of today, I am allowed to have a baked potato. Yes.. that’s right. I’m even allowed to include butter on it. Yes, I know it’s amazing. Oh, and tomatoes are out of the question too. The remainder of the week is just as strange, but I’ll keep you informed of that as it comes up… I mean I gotta save SOMETHING for the rest of the week’s blog posting.
So the time has come upon us once more….yes, that’s right, it’s almost football season. There is only another two weeks or so before the start of the first pre-season games. August 12th is the first game of the Dolphins, which is against Jacksonville, so that should be a potentially decent debut for them…and more importantly, their amazing off-season acquisition, Daunte Culpepper. It’s going to be a good season.
Once again I have gotten myself into a situation where…you guessed it, I’m the commissioner of the fantasy football league. I’m going to really put my foot down this year and everyone is going to have their money in by the time the draft goes off. I’m not going to bother going into the season without people’s money, it’s just too much of a pain in the ass. Hopefully, everyone will see it my way and get it done.
Well, now that I’ve wasted a solid amount of time, I think it’s time to get back to my Linux training. Fun times.

After my flaming post yesterday talking about the terrible lunch that I had from my first day at client site, there is some good news. Tuesday, my second day, the head executive guy came up to me and brought me into the hall and had a talk with me about my role at the client site and what he hoped to get done with me while I was here, so that was really nice. He let me know that I could come and talk to him and whatever…pretty much just made me realize that I’m not here just to rot in the corner and keep our of trouble.
In more homebound news, Laura and I have been thinking about starting a major change of lifestyle and change the way that we live. To kick it off, we’re launching into the “Soup Diet”. Yes, I know…it sounds lame, but apparently it’s a good way to detox your body and really get yourself feeling good about losing weight. Today is the “fruit day” where you eat nothing but fruit and the soup that you make. The soup is pretty much just water, V8, some onion soup mix and vegetables. It’s not too bad, but since there isn’t a microwave around here, it kind of makes it rough because I have to eat it cold. Apparently I can put it in the blender and make a vegetable “smoothie”. Yuck! Oh well… I’ll suck it up for the rest of the week because the diet is only a week long process. After you have been detoxed and lost that first little clip of weight, you go and just eat healthily. We’ll see how this will work. People claim losses of up to 17 lbs in a week and I just can’t believe that shit. I mean I expect that I’ll drop 5 lbs… sad as that is, it’ll bring me down to 240…Yes, I’m a fat bastard. Oh well. We’ll see how that goes.
I’ve been pretty delinquent about putting up pictures because recently I have been working a “real” job, so I’ve not had much time at home to edit and set them up. But speaking about my “real” job, I have to get back to my work and end my lunch break.
Brad, check your mail.

After a little harassment by Brad, I have decided that I’m going to take a break from my very busy work schedule and tell some tales of my life. Yes, I have three short stories to tell you, so here I go…
#1) The Tale of the Urine Trail
This past weekend Laura and I decided to head up to the Bronx Zoo to check out the animals and be outside in the heat. It was a beautiful day as Laura and I boarded the subway for the long ass trip up to the Bronx. Living in Brooklyn means that we have to go into Manhattan to get on the 4/5 train to head all the way up into Ghetto Bronx. We ended up on this 5 train heading uptown and there were a few tourists that were asking questions about the express trains. One “kind” person started to talk to them about it, but apparently he forgot to use his inside voice. This man has the loudest voice I have ever heard. It was honestly painful to sit in the subway car with him. Normally Laura and I would just suck it up as the crazies do their thing, but in this instance, we couldn’t stand it and had to leave. So at the next stop, after making a few loud remarks ourselves, we got up and moved to the next train down. Initially this seemed like a great idea. There were open seats, so we were able to take a seat on the way up to the zoo. Then we realized what situation we had walked into. In front of us was a nice Mexican family. About 6 of them in all, with 2-3 young children. As Laura and I are sitting there, the mother takes the little girl and stands here between her legs. I look down and see that the little girl is peeing on the train. I’m not talking like “Ohhh Mommy…I couldn’t hold it so I dribbled a little.” Nope, we’re talking “Damn…I gotta go and I’m going to let it rip”… At first I was thinking “That really sucks for that poor Mother.” Then I realized, as the woman reached into her purse to get her daughters underwear, that she had instructed her daughter to piss on the fucking subway. Granted, I’m not one to talk about pissing in public, but at the same time, there is a HUGE difference between pissing on the subway platform and pissing IN the damn train. I couldn’t believe it. Totally disgusting.
#2) Tale of the Peeping Perchers
Saturday night, Laura and I decided to stay in and not bother wasting time and money going out. Seeing as how I was flat out broke (I’ve been paid since then and it was glorious) we ended up staying in. Now, for those of you that may be too young to know, when two people are attracted to each other and left to their own devices, stuff happens. As it were, Laura and I were messing around in the bedroom, not doing anything too crazy, but messing around. At some point during the adventure of the evening, we decided that it was time to shut off the lights, so I got up to flip them off.
There is a strange thing that happens during the night when you turn off the lights. Instead of the windows just showing your reflection, you can see out of them, and if you looked out our window when I flipped off the lights, you would have seen the heads of around 8-10 people leaning over the roof of the apartment next to us, staring into our window. As soon as the light when out, they scattered. Needless to say, Laura and I were a little pissed off. We went into the kitchen, keeping the lights off, and went over to another window, and there we sat and watched, and sure enough a sentry came out on the roof next door to check on the “sexual miscreants” to see if there were any further hanky panky going on.
You know, I’m not a very timid person, and I don’t even care that someone was watching while Laura and I were messing around, but the fact that it was an entire group of people, just staring in and gawking, it just makes me a little ill.
#3) The Tale of the Awkward Lunch
Yesterday was the first day in which I was out at the client site. I picked up my car, a nice little Mazda 3 Hatchback and drove out to the middle of Long Island to meet up the with the Executive Manager that manages the project out there. From what I have heard, this guy is a Ivy League graduate consulting phenom who climbed the entirety of the consulting ladder at my firm in a matter of 6 years. Needless to say, I was excited to be working with him and learning from working under him. Upon meeting him, I was terrible disappointed. He was a smug and cocky individual. Within 20 minutes of getting into the office, he, my direct supervisor, another guy in my division, and I went out to lunch. I’ll give you a rundown of the fun points in the conversations:
a) “So do you know SQL Server?”
“Ummm not really. A little, but I was an Econ Poly Sci Major, so I didn’t do much that in school”
“An ECON MAJOR!…Jeez… (Speaking to the others) My God…we have to talk to the HR department about what we are really looking for in recruiting.”
b) (Coming from the Princeton Executive) “So Michael….these two guys are going to be the ones you can talk to if you have ANY questions….read: Don’t bother me”
c) The three of them were talking about how the client doesn’t understand things and asks stupid questions and how irritating it was to them. I chimed in “They must be Econ Majors”
Needless to say, it wasn’t the best lunch ever. I’m a little worried that I’m not going to be getting a whole lot of guidance of help here, so we’ll see. I should be getting back to trying to learn a little bit about this damn Informatica program. Oh well. That’s life I suppose. I did get an AMAZING paycheck yesterday in the mail, so it makes it a little easier to deal with, I’m not going to lie.

The Time has finally come where I can say that I know where I’ll be for at least a little while. I received an email from the Project Manager at the site on Long Island, and he let me know that I can head out there on Monday. Whoop-de-dooo! He said in his email Monday afternoon, so I don’t know what that means, but it’ll be interesting none-the-less. He’s supposed to call me today (although he was supposed to call me for the past two days and never got to it) so hopefully, once he does, I’ll be able to figure out what I’m supposed to do about renting a car or at least finding out how to get out there. I have this terrible feeling that he’s just going to tell me to commute for the week and “give it a shot”…ugk. We’ll see.
I recently at work, I’ve been trying to get this repository server running on my local machine so that I can learn this piece of software that I’m supposed to have some sort of mastery, and I can not get the bastard to work. Hell, I can’t even get my email working half the time, so I suppose that running a server with a referential SQL database would be a little over my head. The worst part about it, is that there isn’t even anyone here that I can ask for help. The office, because everyone is always out on client site, is so incredibly dead, so it’s pretty much myself, the secretary, a few higher level people and two other entry level people that are doing the same stuff as I am. Not exactly a cornucopia of excitement.
If I do end up having to travel out to Long Island on the train, I am thinking that I’ve gotta go on a downloading spree and really stock up on some TV series or something like that. I’ve found that downloading TV shows is more bang for your buck than anything else that you can download. For example, a Season of 24 takes around two days to download if you have a good torrent. From that one season, you have a whole 24 hours worth of programming. I downloaded 3 seasons worth of 24, so at least I know that I’ll have myself a good number of shows to watch before I run out of material. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I’m trapped inside a car for 45 minutes each way. That would be strange considering how I’ve never done any sort of commuting in a car, let alone for 45 minutes, and tack on the fact that I haven’t driven with any consistency in ummm..yeah, 6 years. That’ll be interesting. Maybe I can make myself some nice books on tape.
This week hasn’t really been all that exciting in terms of getting stuff done, or really anything. This weekend is looking to be about the same. While Laura and I have some things planned for the evenings, the weekend is pretty free. I was just speaking to my mother the other night on the phone about how nice it is not to have “homework” or school papers and that sort of stuff hanging over your head. You always forget how terrible it is to have deadlines. While they are helpful, they fucking suck.
I will end this post with a fun and interesting new site that I recently found.

So over the past few days I have once again tried to update my blog. For any of my few regular visitors you may have noticed the changes. I switched to Wordpress for a few days. I liked it because of the ease in which you could add and edit things. I think that the GUI that it uses is just far superior to that of MovableType. But in the end I went back to MovableType. The reason for the reverse migration was that I still have yet to be able to get listed on Google. Laura, who never updates her page, is listed on Google all over the place. Anyway, I’m not bitter about it. So I was on Google Analytics the other day and saw that Google now has a “sitemap” option where you submit to them an XML file listing all the pages that you want their spider to crawl and the next time that it comes around to you page, BAM you should be listed. We’ll the damn spider is taking its sweet ass time getting to my site. It hasn’t visited since July 7th, so I feel like I’m due pretty soon.
Anyway, its now Thursday and I have yet to hear a definitive answer as to when I am going to be assigned and trvel out to my project, and its kind of getting a little irritating. One of the senior directors (way high up guy) said that there will be no news till all the sudden I should have been out there 2 hours ago. That will be awesome. Oh we’ll.
Last night I was able to download the ETL tool (it pretty much allows different data sources, like databases, to sync up to a main server) so that I can finally play around with it. The connection at work is slow that I couldn’t even come close to downloading it. It was rather funny because yesterday I was on the company’s web page and I filled out a form to get a little demo downloaded, and not 15 minutes later I got a call from someone at the company trying to sell me something. I told the guy “I was just told to learn it. I’m possibly the lowest person in my company. ” He just laughed. Its great to be the low man, right?
Once again, my train ride is coming to a close so I’ve gotta hang up my blackberry. (What kind of dork blogs on his Blackberry?)

Today is Wednesday, my third week of work, and I still don’t have clarification as to where “officially” I am going to be stationed. One of the directors of my practice group (Business Intelligence) told me that he was working on getting me staffed in long island, but I have yet to hear from the project manager out there. After talking to a few people it has become obvious to me that I am going to need a rental car or I will be relegated to spending an hour and a half on the train every day as opposed to 35 minutes in a car. I just hope that it works out like that
For the past few days Laura and I have been working on getting the “cow” data ready to send out to her grandfather’s ranch to assist them with sorting out which calves to keep and which ones to get rid of. It has been a trying process to say the least. In the next year, once I have learned a bit about database design and GUI design, I hope to be able to apply the massive amounts of data to a real database so as to make the annual “update” a non-issue. Hopefully , if what I have been told at work isn’t a lie, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Yesterday, for the first time, we got introduced to the CBT modules (computer based training) at work, so that is exciting. They have everything on there from managing your 401k to advanced JAVA development. I am just glad that they finally gave us access so as to let us start our “informal” training.
Last week I returned my ever flawed Treo 700p. I hated that thing. Granted, the Treo has some nice functions but my phone didn’t work for shit. It constantly dropped calls and the internet hardly ever worked. I was totally sick of it, so I brought it back and got myself a “Crackberry”. Functionally it works much better than the Treo, it just doesn’t have that supper tech feel to it. I do enjoy that its super light and much smaller than the oddly shaped Treo. So as an experiment, I have been typing out this entry on my way to work to see how easy it is, and I have to say that besides the whole hunt and peck of the keys, its working out very well.
Anyway, its about time to get off the train and my fingers are getting a little numb, so I’ll end it here.

It’s 4:00 right now and the World Cup Final is going into overtime. Things are pretty quiet around here because Laura is out with some friends and I’m sitting at home all by-my-lonesome. It’s actually quite nice to be able to kick back and relax and not have anything going on that is pressing. This coming week is going to be fairly interesting in terms of work because it’s the first week where I’m “on the bench” which is pretty much consultant jabber for not being assigned to a project. I’m pretty much going to spend my week talking to people and getting training scheduled and learning about different programs by myself. It’s actually going to be interesting because I can pretty much choose what I want to do (although I do have guidelines) and see how much I can get done and how much I can learn.
Tonight is a planned brewing day, and I expect that Laura and my brewing friend should be here shortly to help with the brewing process. I’m in no mood to brew, but at the same time, at least it’s something to do. I just keep thinking about how messy it’s going to be and dreading the cleanup and the smell, which normally I wouldn’t mind, but with the kicking hangover that I have, it’s going to be rough.
I was thinking about my blog, and all the planned changes that I had for it, so I think that I’m going to take this chance to change my theme and perhaps start using WordPress. From what I’ve seen, there seems to be much more support for it out there. While it may not be the best platform, I know that I can always go back to Movable type if I so desire, so we’ll see. After I finish this post, I’ll have to check it out and see how easy it’ll be to move over to WordPress. It shouldn’t be bad because my host, www.bluehost.com will actually install it for me, it’s just a matter of getting all my entries moved over there. We’ll see.
Anyway, with this hangover, my desire to keep plugging away at this entry is diminished, so I’m going to go and look into setting up my blog in Wordpress.