A holly, jolly Christmas

Well, this has been an enjoyable Christmas. I've really started to like the holiday since I've had kids, and it's getting more and more fun as they get older. Anisa was REALLY into it this year and Jasmine started to more at the end. Next year is going to be a blast when they're both old enough to be fully into the Christmas swing.

Santa came through for them with a bike for Anisa, a Sit'n'Spin for Jasmine, a Koby bear that listens to the kids and interacts with them, and some books and movies, too. I'm always amazed that Santa makes the rounds as much as he does and that he manages to stay as relatively slim as he does. He must have some awesome workout program to stay in shape after eating millions of cookies and drinking tons of milk!

I hope you all had a happy holiday season!

Is it February yet?

Whine of the day:

What really sucks at work lately is the fallout of recent layoffs. It was sad to see people go, but I could understand the reasoning behind it and at least most of them volunteered for it. What I don't understand is why my department didn't lose people and yet is having to shoulder the brunt of the discomfiture. The thing is, the way it's all shaken out, my department actually is "losing" a person since they're being shifted to doing different work and yet we're not allowed to do anything less. So the desk with the smallest staff in the room is expected to "do more with less" and nobody really seems to care. And somehow, it falls on me to *cue Tim Gunn voice* "Make it work!" Yeah, doesn't that make sense? Stick the guy who's been in management for less than three months with the responsibility of doing 5 people's worth of work with only 4 people. Awesome!

Now, it does make me feel good in a way, knowing that they trust me enough to pull this off after the short time I've been doing what I do. And I'm managing to find ways to sort of make it work, but it just means the next month is going to suck. And what really sucks about that is, I've really been enjoying the actual "work" part of my job lately. I've been doing some fun things with coding and data that I think will make things present better all around and has let me really tap into the computer geek I am a lot more. But, when I can only find time to work on that stuff maybe 30% of the time while I'm dealing with everything else, it's just hard to enjoy it as much as I should.

Non-whiny stuff:

I'm really looking forward to Christmas this year. The girls are getting so excited about Santa coming. At dinner last night, Anisa looks over at me and says, "Only two mare days until Christmas Eve, daddy!" and had the hugest smile on her face and a twinkle, a gleam, and maybe even some sugar plums dancing in her eyes. Jasmine is still not quite old enough to really "get" it all yet, but she's feeding off everyone else's excitement and is bubbling about it too.

I can't wait until we put the presents out tomorrow; they've stayed in our closet so far since the first present we put out didn't last more than a couple of hours before the girls decided it needed to be unwrapped. I guess we'll just have to wait until next year to try having presents stacked out there for a couple of weeks. :)

Alright, time to head to work. Whee!

The oppressive tyranny of the cold

This is just getting ridiculous. It was down in the teens over the weekend, and I check the weather this morning before heading to work and it's FOUR DEGREES. I am not pleased about this development. As I mentioned earlier, I left Wyoming - It should not be this cold in Missouri!

I swear, I could move to Ecuador, on the flippin' equator, and still find myself looking at single digit temperatures at some point in the winter... Ugh.

The bright side? At least there's no ice storm! How much would that suck, an inch of ice on everything while hovering near 0ºF.

Other than the cold, it's been a pretty good weekend. Spent some time with the fam, watched some football, read quite a bit. Oh, speaking of reading - I've been digging eBooks lately. Maybe it's just the computer geek in me, but I actually enjoy reading books on my computer. It's just a handy thing. I typically listen to music when I read, so since my whole library of tunes is digital it's nice to not spend 20 minutes picking and burning a CD to listen to before I read. I just sit down at the 'puter, push play and start reading! It doesn't hurt that they tend to be a lot cheaper than paper copies.

My only worry is, what happens long-term? Imagine it's 300 years from now - how are people then going to read these things? With a paper book, you know that all they have to do is open and start reading. But with eBooks, there's that pesky encoding thing. Not only do they have to find the file somewhere on a hard drive, they have to know that this specific type of file needs to be opened by Adobe Digital Reader... oh, and it HAS to be on the same computer it was on because of the DRM restrictions. With music, I don't worry as much simply because until the last century and a half, there was basically no possible way to pass music on. Yes, there is sheet music but that's not the same thing as the actual performance of the book. Plus, music isn't all that "informative" - it's artistic and can be a commentary on life and the world, but it's not involved in the preservation and pursuit of knowledge.

And that's the catch with books - if they all go digital, there's going to come a time when knowledge might be lost simply because of DRM and file-typing issues. It's yet another reason why I look at Project Gutenberg and love the idea of what they're trying to do. Their goal is to ensure that any work in the public domain is put into a digital format that is readable for as long as we have digital capabilities. They don't rely on PDF or any other encoding scheme as the basic format; it's all just ASCII text that any basic computer system can read and is easily convertible to anything else going forward. I know Google is trying to do something similar with their book scanning program, but I don't know enough about it to know that they're looking far enough ahead to ensure that the descendants of the Digital Age of n00bism (that being us, still caught up in the birthing pains of digital life) can read and hear and share in all the content that we're populating the world's computers with right now.

Adele rocks my socks off

I stumbled across Adele a couple of weeks ago, and I can't say enough. That voice just makes my ears so happy - so bluesy and soulful - and it's superbly mixed with some jazzy melodies backing her up and some catchy lyrics.

What made me pick her up initially was a review calling her "what Amy Winehouse should have been" or something like that. Having loved Amy's "Frank" (i.e., the pre-crackhead Winehouse album) and enjoyed "Back to Black", comparing someone to her is definitely going to catch my attention. I haven't been disappointed, and it's a perfect comparison. Similar voices, similar sounds, but hopefully not similar career arcs.

If you love some powerful female vocals, give her a try. I doubt you'll be disappointed!

WTF?

I moved away from Wyoming. I left it behind. I do NOT live there right now. So tell me this:

WHY THE HELL IS IT SO COLD RIGHT NOW???? It should not be 14 degrees out if you're not living in Wyoming any more!!

Springfield makes it onto Failblog

see more pwn and owned pictures

I've found this hilarious since we moved here. Glad to see it getting the recognition it deserves!

Holiday greetings

A fitting holiday message, given that the source is me:




Kim sent this to me today. Does my wifey know me or what?? :)

Since I'm still up - time to Simplify!

I figure I might as well mention this, since I never have seemed to remember to before when I'm in a blogging mood:

GO GET SIMPLIFY MEDIA RIGHT NOW!!!!!

It is simply the best software out there for making your music library portable and sharing it with your friends. Any time I'm away from the house and have a 'net connection, I can tune in to my iTunes library with Simplify. It streams it all from your home computer and lets you listen. For friends, they can stream it as well. The only limitation is that DRM-enabled files (read: Stuff you bought from the iTunes store) will only play on authorized computers, so they can only see a subset of your library.

I've been using since they came out in 2007, and it's one of the coolest pieces of software I've come across. There were some growing pains, as I'd expect of any large, networked piece of software like this, but they've done a fabulous job. I'm happy for them that they've been so successful with their release of their iPhone app - they're finally making some money back from all their hard work! And if you've got an iPhone, why wouldn't you want to be able to stream all your music from home to wherever you are?? Just knowing Simplify is available makes me want to get one even more.... Santa will bring me one if I ask enough, right?? :D

We've got a few friends on our Simplify account right now, and it's a great way to get to know more about them and what they listen to. Call me weird, but I've always thought you can tell a lot about a person by the music they identify themselves with. I guess that makes me a rather eclectic individual! :)

Late night ramblings

• Man, there are a lot of crazies out there in the world of blogging. Every so often, I'll go through the Feedjit link here on the blog to see what else is being written around the area or browse the Google blog search and just read. Maybe tonight was abnormal, but I found several blogs that just sounded like the rantings of paranoid schizophrenics in the midst of a meltdown - only the posts have been coming for months now! With some of the hatred and prejudice I encountered, it made me a little uncomfortable seeing the dark underbelly of the First Amendment. I'm not of a mind to want to silence these folks by any means, but wow there's some crazy shite out there on the Wild 'n' Wooly Interwebs.

• I hate upset stomachs. I went to bed almost 2 hours ago, and couldn't sleep, which led to my stroll through Blogland. I should know by now not to eat snacks before bed!!

• Anisa was so funny on the phone when I called home during my lunch break. "Daddy, we got the good cheesy poofs! Not the ones that taste awful, like at Jake and Jenny's!" I was glad I was stopped at a red light at the time; I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. We spent the weekend up in Columbia with our friends. Their daughter is about nine months old now and had some of the baby cheese poofs as a starter food. As you can tell, they were not a big hit with Anisa. Jasmine, however, LOVED them. I think she likes the "good" ones even better, though. It was a fun weekend all around, though. I just wish I'd been in a better frame of mind so I could enjoy it a bit more. Everything that came down last week at work was just weighing on my mind.

I mean, could I have picked a worse time to be promoted? Well, I'm sure there are worse circumstances than this, but it still sucks. I wanted to be playing with numbers and coding some stuff up for the web, not jostling job duties and telling people that, like it or not, you're going to be moving to some night shifts. Maybe it's just me, but if there are 4 fewer people working at putting out a product, shouldn't that product be reduced by something close to 4 people's worth of work? Instead, we get to "do more with less!" Sure, we're cutting our output a little bit, but I'd bet that it isn't even close to 40 hours a week worth, let alone 160. Instead, we focus on efficiency and workflow. Layoffs are a big enough hit to employee morale, but working them harder when they were already being asked to do a lot is not going to make things better. I just hope that three months from now, everyone at work can look back and see this as the low point.

• At least there looks to be some hope for an auto industry bailout. On an objective level, I'm not overly thrilled by it. There's a reason why the U.S. companies are in the position they are, while foreign auto makers are still thriving (though not without suffering in this economic climate). They've made bad choices for years - decades even - and didn't have a plan on how to survive if everything went in the crapper. So now, the taxpayers should foot the bill? Ugh, how crappy. I understand there is a bigger picture here that it affects and it's probably in the best interest of the economy as a whole to try and prop them up until things get better, much like bailing out AIG was probably a good thing for the long-term health of the economy. It doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

On a purely selfish level, I'm absolutely ecstatic about this. The one thing the print media industry can't afford is an even bigger loss in ad revenue from the auto companies. There's already been a big drop, and if any of the Detroit Three had gone under, that would have been a huge loss for us, too. We probably would have been looking at another round of staff cuts in our near future, and that's something I don't want to see again for at least another decade.

I keep hoping that the plan that was put in place factored in the projected troubles of the next year (and that those projections are either accurate or overestimated the troubles we'll face). I just want to be able to hold on to what we have, make it through this rough patch, and come out on the other side better for the experience. I don't want to be part of a company that goes through bankruptcy like the Tribune company has. I'm still shocked that the company that owns the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune is hurting that bad. I hope the commentary that they're the exception rather than the expectation for newspapers holds true.

IsItFunnyToday.com

http://www.isitfunnytoday.com/

This has been a pleasant find. I've been reading web comics for years now, and what I like about this site is that it functions both as an aggregator of comics (which is really helpful) and a social network for comics that lets us all voice our opinions on comics while voting on their funniness. It's not a perfect site yet, but having just launched I think they have a solid foundation to build on.

Some upgrades I'd like to see:
• More complete access to archives of comics to vote going all the way back, with the archetypical "First Comic" link to take you back to the beginning and start from there.

• If you've already voted for a comic while logged in, the frame at the top should reflect that. As it is now, it will say "Sorry, you've already voted" when you try to vote a second time. It should say this before you even have a chance to vote.


I've quite enjoyed the site and they're adding more comics every day (What, no Goats.com yet??), so if you like your daily dose of web comics, give 'em a try.

Number watching in an economic crisis

I've been keeping my eye on several numbers that are big indicators of where we stand as the economy melts down. The biggest one that I pay attention to is the unemployment rate, which officially spiked to 6.7% today. As the NYTimes blogged about today, that number doesn't account for the 637,000 people that have given up and stopped looking for jobs. If that number were included, it would push the unemployment rate close to 7% - a far cry from the peak of 25% reached in the Great Depression, but a disturbing number nonetheless. The percentage is even more disheartening when you think about the population of the country at both times.

Breaking it down to the heart of the issue in the article:

The share of all men ages and 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940’s.

Yeah, that's not good.

Why I love the Daily Show

A clip from Monday, Dec. 1:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mumbai Tragedy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Bits like this are exactly why I love the Daily Show: Serious news with a dose of profanity and humor tossed in to tell a better story.