Big Brother, Part 2

Earlier this year I posted a picture to Facebook where I said "Big Brother is Watching My Neighborhood Today." It was a picture of a Google Street View car parked in the lot where I had gone for groceries.


For the comfort and convenience of my non-Facebook friends, here's the picture:

Big Brother is Watching

For some reason, I looked at their Street View of that parking lot today.

Well, lookie there!, there's my car (the white Prius)! You can see the little Apple sticker on the rear window.

View Larger Map

And here it is from the front as the Street View Car is leaving the lot.

View Larger Map

I did a crappy job of parking.

I'm famous!

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Butt it's the Jonas Brothers!

The most interesting things show up on the bulletin boards at work. Somebody is trying to sell a Vespa. It comes with PROOF that this very Vespa was used IN TWO ISSUES of People magazine featuring the Jonas Brothers!

How can anybody pass this up? It's a year old and has been discounted a full 9% off the original price. Surely it's worth more than the original price since it's had the Jonas Brothers' butts on it. Clean butts!

No, Dolly, it's not a vibrator!

Why the loving look at her flashlight?

It wasn't the swine flu but...

I uploaded my latest YouTube masterpiece on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday it got a handful of views. The views came mostly from you, my loyal readers. A few people happened to find it by searching for terms like "dehydrator."

Thursday there wasn't a single view of it. I was bummed.

When I checked first thing on Friday morning there had been one more view of it. Before he went to work I whined to Jerry that it looks like dehydrator videos aren't as popular as Blendtec Blender movies.

Then things changed.

I was burning a vacation day Friday (I've maxed out on how much I can accumulate). So I was always near a computer. About an hour after Jerry left for work I checked again. There had been something like 20 new views of the movie. A few minutes later there had been five more. And through the day the view counter just kept rising at a pretty steady rate.

I had gone viral!

YouTube gives us insight into how people discover our videos and where they are watching them. That information shows up the next day. So I was looking forward to Saturday morning to see what had happened and where it was happening.

Nothing.

Sunday. Nothing.

YouTube's Insight feature was broken. Their support page said their engineers were hard at work fixing the problem. Right. They were at home enjoying the weekend. Lazy engineers.

So I had to wait until this afternoon to see what happened.

Sure enough 94% of the views had come from email or other non-web page sources (like instant messages). Somebody found it and told two friends who told two friends and so on till all the world was getting in on it (just like with shampoo)!

Well, not the whole world. It has had 183 views now. It's been seen in at least 40 of the states. There have been only a few views in the rest of the world. And the pace of new views has slowed to a crawl. But there is potential to become the next Numa Numa dance.

Wish me luck!

Giving waste the brushoff

You know how some guys flush as they approach the urinal? And they flush (and flush and flush again) while they're going? I suppose the sound of running water triggers a Pavlovian response with their bladders. Or maybe they think that the sound of running water will mask the noise of their peeing so nobody else in the bathroom will know what they're doing.

We all have our little idiosyncrasies in the bathroom.

There's another one I've never quite understood. In these times of water restrictions we are being reminded that we shouldn't leave the water running while brushing our teeth. I never knew we were supposed to run the water more than what's needed to wet the brush before brushing, rinse it afterwards, and to get a mouthful or two for rinsing and spitting.

I'll bet people leave the water running through all those steps because it's just so much trouble to quickly turn the knob or slide the lever twice between each of the steps. (Think of all the calories that would be burnt if we all did that! The nation's obesity epidemic could be cured if we all turned off the water while brushing.)

So imagine my bewilderment when I encountered someone brushing his teeth at work. Our bathrooms have faucets that turn themselves off after they've run for a few seconds. This guy mashed on the knob to get the water running, wet his brush, pasted it up and started brushing. The water turned itself off.

He mashed the knob and continued brushing. The water turned itself off. He mashed and continued brushing. Again and again.

So much for my theory that it's too much effort to turn the water off. This guy spent extra effort to keep it going.

My head reeled.

(He set a notebook on the shelf by the door on his way in. It had his business card taped to it. It had "Ph. D." after his name. My head reels.)

MLM: Edmund Scientific

I loved the Edmund Scientific's catalog when I was a kid. It was filled with all sorts of fascinating stuff. They had scientific toys and fun pseudoscientific stuff (I got my Pyrex crystal ball from them). They had magnets and iron filings that let you see magnetic lines of force.

They had stuff that was way out of my reach that I could only dream about. There were the motor-driven Celestron telescopes with equatorial mounts! There were the oil immersion microscopes.

How I wished we were rich so I could have all of neat things in the catalog.

But it was a thrill getting less expensive things. It started with filling out the order form. You'd enter the quantity, the item's descripton, the catalog number, the unit price, and the total amount for the quantity ordered (usually just the unit price, darn it!). You'd add up all the lines and Mom or Dad would write a check (thanks Mom and Dad!) and send it off.

Then you'd wait.

Some time later the mailman would deliver a package and you'd get to live your dreams!

One of those packages had a set of fluorescent crayons.
I had a black light. This was back in the age of DayGlo posters that lit up spectacularly under black light. But those were for Hippies. I had better use for my black light. I had rocks and minerals that fluoresced (after all, the word comes from fluorite!). But while I was at it, do-it-yourself black light posters were a fun thing to make. Thus the crayons. Cool, huh?

You'll notice that three of the crayons are missing. Well, either Pough or Dough got into my box of fluorescent crayons and ate some of them. This made for an exciting tour of poop patrol duty. Crayons, you know, don't digest. They come out pretty much the way they go in. With a long extension cord and my black light, the bits of crayons in the Pough poo-poo (or the Dough doo-doo) made for easy pickins.

(By the way, I convinced Mom to throw that black light away instead of giving it to Casa Mesita. It had only a little cardboard taped to its back to keep little kids from being electrocuted.)

Yma Sumac

Along with Judy and Babs, we had Yma Sumac to be enthralled with. Or so a friend who lived through her heyday told me. On his recommendation, I got her first album, "Voice of the Xtabay," and was completely bewildered by what could be the attraction. All I heard was a bunch of wailing.

Was it camp? Or was she like Florence Foster Jenkins and was loved for the sincerity of her performances? Or was she great and I just didn't get it?

Yma Sumac died yesterday. There is now a room in heaven where her fans will be eternally enthralled with her. (And there is a room in hell that will get a broadcast of the performance in HD with surround sound where people with my appreciation of her Art will be in agony.)

So, until we get to have our seat in one of those rooms we'll just have to dream about Yma.

For samples of her singing you might try some that you can find on YouTube.

And here is another version of Yma Dream:


Her obituary from The New York Times.

I Love You!*

One day back in High School I opened my locker to find an envelope that held a handmade Valentine from a formerly secret admirer. It was signed "Love*, Jane" (not her real name) and at the bottom of the card was "*It's true!" This took me by surprise as I had no idea that Jane had any feelings like that for me and I didn't have them for her (and as far as I could tell I never even remotely sent signals that I did). Acting in a mature, high schooler's way, I passed it around my little circle of friends and we all had a good laugh.

I kind of feel bad now but I had no idea how I should have handled it. But I think things probably worked OK. From what I understand, Jane and I have maintained some of the world's parity in that department.

I didn't keep Jane's card. But its memory lived on.

In the box of treasures from my past I found a letter from Karen S. that she sent to me after a Spring Break trip home from college. She apparently had brought along two of her friends and there were some enclosures from them. I seem to have spent time with them but I have no recollection of what might have happened during that Spring Break. It sounds like we must have had a lot of fun together.

Karen's letter started out saying "You're in a heap o' trouble, boy!" It seemed that both Jan and Joyce (the friends) had fallen madly in love with me and wanted to marry me and adopt Donald.

Jan allegedly said "I love him more than the expanse of the sea!" and Joyce said "Well, I loved him from afar before we ever met." They then spent all their time fighting over me and even drew straws to see who was going to get me (Jan lost).

Here are their testimonials to their love.

Jan's Valentine	(back)
Joyce's Valentine	(back)

Later I got another letter containing:

Jan's desperate attempt to win my heart.

Karen's letter had this to say about their trip back to Luther College in Iowa:

We had bunches of fun wearing our eyeballs at the people in Nebraska. (Especially in Omaha.) We made a sign that said "Hubba Hubba", too. Old ladies did not like it. You definitely had a nasty influence on these people. (Thank goodness—Jan used to be very boring. Now she is only semi-boring.)

I guess "Hubba, hubba!" was something exotic for Jan and Joyce. I have no idea what eyeballs they wore.

The letter finished off with:

P.S. Please try not to break their hearts too miserably.

P.P.S. Jan said you could move to India and marry both of them. (How romantic.)

Well, Jan and Joyce, I hope your broken hearts have mended by now. It would never have worked out. You see, how can I say this?, I'm (oh, just be blunt!) not Lutheran.

The saddest day

While I was searching for a souvenir for a recent post, I ran across several treasures in my souvenir boxes from my youth that, like it or not, I'm going to share with all of you.

For our first stroll down that memory lane, here is a letter to the editor of The Lookout, the Los Alamos High School newspaper, that I signed that Brian Lanter and Colleen wrote. I thought that I was going to get to help write it but they apparently didn't need (want?) my help. (They needed to use big words, some of which I still don't know, so I guess I couldn't have effectively contributed to the letter.) I don't remember whether it got printed.

The newspaper had printed a story about a recent snowfall that made the local skiers and their Snow God very happy. Colleen, Brian and I were not fond of snow and took umbrage (how's that for a good word, Colleen?) at their promotion of one (false) god over another.

So, on this saddest day of the year, the day the sun leaves our hemisphere for six painful months, here's our letter to the editor.


OK, here's a quibble. "Spalpeen" seems to be only a noun but was used as an adjective in the letter. And "morrhuol" doesn't show up in any dictionary I've found (either on my computer or on the Internet), though it is defined in the Google results. Somebody liked to show off his or her vast vocabulary.

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Hey, did you notice the use of "there" where "their" should have been used? Boy, I'm glad I didn't have a hand in that letter!

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Just because I had a few spare minutes, here's the letter for search engines to index (typos and all):

Dear Editor,

Actually you're not all that dear, and this is not going to be a nice letter (no, not at all nice). We, the disciples of the Sun Cult, are incensed! Why? You ask why, after what you've done to us? As an established religious cult, we stand adamantly behind our constitutional rights to equality. We therefore resent, sir, the blatant bigotry and callous treatment that have been our lot at the hands of your unworthy rag. You spalpeen miscreants, you fatuous hypocrits, have you no sense of social propriety, have you no vestige of civilized decency, have you no cognitive faculty, have you no rubber galoshes?

Three issues previous, in this moribund mouthpiece of corrupt winter promoters, you deemed it appropriate to glorify the snow god, while failing utterly to extend the Sun God those aggrandizements and encomia due so august and resplendent a diety.

What insensate gawks you must be, to allow the tramontane vagaries of vehement vituperators to violate the vestal virginity of verisimilar verbalization. Only the willing pawn of the basiliskine juggernaut of unbridled press would have refused to publish our supplicatory epistle, in which we requested equal representation.

Therefore stand warned that our glorious leader has revealed unto us his divine design for the demise of the snow god and the subjugation of his followers. Those who have slighted the Sun God to curry favor with the snow god shall be hoisted by there own petard. Resistors will be calcined by his refulgent wrath as they writhe in the mucilaginous morrhuol of moral decay.

Be it also know that the last true snow melted before the presence of our lord on Sunday, March 4. Any subsequent appearance of “snow” is but an illusion, drawn up by the ignoble snow god to tempt the followers of the True Lord.

For as it is written in the Book of Truth: “WE LIKE TO EAT (Oh yes, we do), BUT MOSTLY WE LIKE TO GET VENGEANCE!”

Yours Truly,

Tony Alamo in the news

After I graduated from New Mexico Tech in 1978, Poss and I took a road trip to Washington, D.C., our nation's capital. On the way there we had a meal at a restaurant in Alma, Arkansas, where I had grits for the first time.

At the restaurant I picked up a tract where Tony Alamo tells us of his life and conversion to Christianity. I seem to remember that the restaurant was owned by Mr. Alamo. What a thrill it was to eat where a great evangelist spreads the Word of the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation! As Poss and I drove east, I read his story. The nutcase somehow got stuck in my brain. He occasionally shows up in the newspaper and the stories often somehow seem to catch my attention.

His sainted Susan died in 1982 and Tony was planning on her resurrection. He's been jailed for tax evasion from his sequined jacket business (he apparently didn't pay his cult members followers wages that should have been taxed). He's apparently been charged in various child abuse and brain washing incidents.

Today's news article was about a raid on his compound for a child pornography and abuse investigation. According to Mr. Alamo, little girls reach the age of consent at puberty.

And Poss and I ate at his restaurant!

Anyway, I saved his little tract all these years as a souvenir of our trip to D.C. It's not worth reading but here it is anyway. (The blots are Windex.) The news stories from today are interesting in a very scary way.


And as I was commanded, I didn't destroy the tract and am now passing it on!

Successories

You've probably seen Successories^® products. Their motivational posters feature beautifully photographed scenes and extraordinarily apt sentiments that high-powered managers strew around their workplaces to inspire their extraordinary teams to perform at 110%. No, make that 120%!

I had a manager who had many of these posters around the office and in the conference rooms. Most of us felt that they were rah-rah, cheerleader-y drivel. We enjoyed the products from Despair, Inc. that are parodies of the Successories. They feature the same sort of beautiful photography but sentiments befitting the Dilbertesque environment we work in. Wally's desk surely holds the Pessimist's Mug that lets you know when the glass is half empty.

But there might be something to the Successories items (or at least the people who think that they're swell). The manager who provided us with all that inspirational sap left the company and started his own company. He sold it to a big, multinational company for megabucks, started another company and sold that one to another company for more megabucks. He made many people rather wealthy.

Our marketing group seems to have seen those posters and have decided that they can show potential customers that we can be just as inspirational.

Or something.

There are some posters on the wall outside the bathrooms in the part of the building where they make presentations to potential customers. I guess they're supposed to see that they'll become high-powered competitors in their fields if they use our product.

But the posters are lacking the beautiful photography of the Successories. And the sappy sentiments. Heck, I don't know what the point of the posters are. They wouldn't inspire me to buy anything.

One tells them that we'll make their companies smarter.
The model doesn't really give me the impression that intelligence is to be found here. He's just somebody smiling for the camera. And I'm not sure what the swirls of light are supposed to inspire. That he's getting brighter?

The one that really bewilders me is the one that says we'll enable business growth.
How does a bored looking person staring blankly into the camera illustrate that a company is going to make its customers' companies grow? What are they trying to tell me?

I'll never understand those people in Marketing.

Stirring controversy

The videos I post to my blog through YouTube are available for the world to see. People all over the world have seen my little films and some of them take the time to make comments.

My Black and Tan movie has gotten three comments from the world. Two of them came about 20 minutes apart this afternoon. The comments I've gotten for it are (one is slightly edited for sensitive eyes):

• F**king awesome
• HERETIC! You can only make a real B&T with Guinness. You're hereby banished from me pub, blackheart!
• Murphys Is way better then guinness!! Nice pours. whats the bottom beer?

(The last two came in rapid succession.) This movie is getting about five views each day. It's going viral!

I've gotten comments on my How to See "Dial" from Inside the Bar of Soap contribution to WikiHow. Some people just aren't impressed. The comments on that how to are:

• Cool.
• ummm. interesting. kinda pointless tho...
• Who the h-e- double hockey sticks would do this? for entertainment? That is so sad, i'm going to cry!

I made somebody cry! That makes me sad.

But the how to has been improved by others. Somebody added links to related wikiHows and another added to the list of Things You'll Need. I had listed only two or more bars of Dial soap. Somebody added "water to wash in." Somebody else shortened that to simply "water."

It appears that the instructions for seeing the backside of "Dial" are important enough to improve. I'm feeling better now.

Though not controversial, one of my Blendtec Blender movies got a comment just hours after I posted it. I'm told "that is an amazing blender." It seems Blendtec Blender videos are popular. Mine have had many views and will be catching up with the Black and Tan movie soon.

By the way, I added annotations to my Blendtec movies. I added bubbles that tell my viewers what ingredients are going into the blender and tips on what I did that I shouldn't have. You can watch them again if you want to know what goes into the smoothie, tomato cheese soup, and blueberry ice cream.

Budding cinematographer and actors

Thanks to Colleen you're getting this post. Colleen remembered that we made a little film way back in high school. That's the early 1970s, you know. I dug into my boxes of memories and there was the reel of film! But no projector.

Weeks ago I asked a friend if he had a projector. He said that his father's 8mm projector was in the rafters of his garage and he would haul it down next time he was up there. Being a bit older we both put this out of our minds at the critical times. Finally, one day I remembered while talking with him and he wrote himself a note. Yesterday he brought it in to work.

The projector hadn't used it in many years. The rubber drive belt had stretched so it no longer drove the works. I replaced it with a rubber band. Amazingly, that worked! I didn't have a screen so I projected the film on the door to the garage. That's the only white vertical surface in the house. (Jerry has a knack for color so none of the walls is white.)

The original images are rather washed out or dark so having it professionally transferred to digital wouldn't have improved it much. The crappy quality kind of gives it a special charm. Good luck making out the action in some spots.

The film stars Karen S., Colleen B., Don M., Poss, and me. There's a cameo from Chris and I think Karen E.

We filmed all the scenes in reverse. Because the film has to be played backward we had to film the scenes with the camera upside down. That way the sprocket holes are on the correct side when the film is loaded backwards. Our little vignettes end up undoing things. It's cute. I hope you like it. (If you don't you only have Colleen to blame! Well, if you like it you have Colleen to thank.)



There's a new poll for this video. Vote!

The Broadway's Best channel is playing in the background. "Climb ev'ry mountain!"

Ray is going to lend me a screen and a splicing kit. The film is in three pieces and I didn't want to reshoot it unless I can do it in one take. It's a pain threading the film and if spliced we'll get to see more of the frames! We'll see if I get around to reworking this epic.

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Results of the poll:
And the Oscar goes to...

Nominee	Votes
Colleen
Chuckie	1
Don	2
Karen
Poss	5

Another Frivolous Coat

Some time ago I posted a piece about grudges that mentioned a grudge held by one family member against a sister because she bought herself a coat. This seems to be a common basis for grudges. In the New York Times obituary for Robert Mondavi there is the following paragraph:

His quest for ever-better wines led to tensions between the two brothers that finally erupted in 1965. The immediate cause was a fur coat that Bob had bought for his wife a few years earlier to wear to a dinner at the Kennedy White House. When, at a family council, Peter accused his brother of using winery money frivolously — for the coat — Bob struck him. The family rallied behind Peter and, at the age of 52, Bob was dismissed from Charles Krug.

Be very careful buying clothes. Your family might never forgive you.

Such an anticlimax!

The shareholders' meeting has come and gone and I hardly noticed.

I got to work a few minutes before 8:00 and there was plenty of room in the parking lot. I followed a large SUV up the driveway and it stopped in front of the front door and let a bunch of people out. I didn't think this sort of person carpools. I was pleasantly surprised.

When I got to the lobby there was a table where people were signing in. There were a couple baskets of sweet rolls and cookies for the attendees to munch on while milling around the lobby. I think they turned off some part of the badge reader because it didn't beep at me even though a shareholder was standing between the badge readers when I went through. It usually beeps if anybody is within 10 feet of a person going through it.

The only improvement I saw that had been made over the weekend was the curbs had been painted red. Here is the curb next to my usual parking spot without the chipped paint you saw last week.
And the curb in front of the water main has a fresh coat of paint.

Tomorrow we get to have an all-hands meeting with the CEO and the Chairman of the Board. Then it will be over.

No more sprucing up for a year.

That's Life

The view from my recliner now includes this:Liō is one of my favorite comic strips these days. Some time ago, the San Diego Union-Tribune gave us some comic strips to vote on as their replacement for "Foxtrot." One of them was "Liō." It was the only one that had any appeal for me (and at the time it didn't have a lot of appeal, just more than the other choices). They chose "Bliss" instead. ("Bliss" is starting to grow on me but certainly not as much as "Liō.")

I have to read Liō online (you may have noticed I've had a link to the strip's web site in my "Stuff you should look at" list over there on the right).

Liō is basically "Henry" with a wild imagination.

An entry in the blog for another comic strip I read, "Pooch Café," pointed me to a site that is selling a Pooch Café "laser cel" of one of the comic's Sunday strips. It turned out they had a couple of Liō strips. Including the one I find the funniest of all. It's now on my wall.

You, too, can get a copy at lasermach.com. Hurry. It's limited to 500 copies.

(Yesterday, Liō was hauled off by some men in black. He's being replaced by "Li'l Dicky." He won't say or do anything offensive. Old folks love 'im. It's going to be an interesting strip for a while.)

NO PARKING

The preparations for the visit by the Board of Directors are continuing. Monday is the big day!

When I got to work today, my usual parking spot had an orange cone in it so I had to park a few spots away. I park next to a tree so the car will be shaded a bit at lunchtime so I might not roast while working on my New York Times crossword puzzle after I get back from my walk or hike.

When I went out at lunch I saw why they had kept me out of my space. They added new, very fragrant mulch to cover the bare ground. Other parts of the parking lot had their dying grass covered.

My usual parking spot blocked by a cone

Earlier this week they washed the stairways. Now the floor and stairs shine and seem to have more traction than before. The Board will be impressed with the shininess. (No they won't! Board members use elevators!)

Today we got an interesting email cascaded through several levels of management. We are told that if we need to use one of the labs sometime on Monday and it doesn't really matter when, we should try to be there at a particular time when the Board's tour of the facility should be passing through the lab. They think it would be just swell if there were people there for the Board members to interact with. If they want to interact with the little people, they could simply take the tour through the offices. But we haven't gotten the memo asking us to clean our desks and to take down the Dilbert comics.

The problem with the invitation to use the lab at the magic moment is that nobody in our department is authorized to be in it at any time. Last year somebody got caught pilfering some rather pricey components from the lab and selling them on eBay. Now, to use the labs we have to have special permission.

Monday is going to be fun, fun, fun!

Spring cleaning

Ah, spring! The time for tidying up and the time for annual shareholders' meetings!

Last year NCR spun off the part of the company I'm in to be an independent company. They set up the company's headquarters in Ohio but for some reason they've decided that the company's first annual meeting is going to be held right downstairs here in San Diego.

They expect about 80 people to attend this meeting. I'm guessing most of those are the executives and board of directors and their entourages. I suppose a handful of shareholders will come. They say that the meeting will last about half an hour. It starts at 8:00 A.M. so all the good parking spots will be taken before I get there. I'll have to park in the north forty and hike in. That's OK since I usually park in the south forty. The only problem is I'll leave on autopilot and go to my usual parking spot and have a big hike back to my car.

So, to make a good impression on the royalty and owners, they've been fixing up the property.

This weekend they are going to resurface the parking lot. Our visitors will get to park on dark pavement with bright, shiny lines. I wonder if they'll make wide spots for them and their huge rental cars.

They painted the water main that comes out of the ground to the anti-siphon valves and back underground. It's bright red now. It's on the way from the parking lot to the front door so it's the first thing our visitors will see.

After they cross the driveway they'll get to see the newly planted ivy. It won't have a chance to fill in before they get here. The next thing they'll see are some lights in the ground that used to shine on a tree. The tree's roots were tearing up the sidewalk so it got taken out. Last week there was an electrician digging up the light fixtures and cleaning them up. Now we have lights that shine into the sky that make it more difficult for the Palomar Observatory to do their work.

There is a tile on the front of the building just above the front door that got broken years ago. (I think the window washing platform smashed into it.) Somebody said that they bought just enough of these tiles to cover the buildings when they were being built and they aren't being made any longer. They're repairing that. I wonder how they're fixing it without any spare parts. I'll have to check that out.

Once they get into the lobby, they'll be greeted by a glass partition that has an opening with some badge readers on either side of it. These badge readers are new. We used to simply flash our badges at the receptionist. Now we have to play games with the readers. They have a light that turns green that says we're authorized to pass the partition. But it gives us about a microsecond to get past it. Otherwise it beeps loudly at us and we have to try again. I was getting good at making it through without beeping but they seem to like watching people struggle so they shortened the time it gives us to get through. I don't know what they're going to do to let the dignitaries through.

After they shareholders make it past the badge readers they will go down a gray hallway that is having nicks and scuff marks painted over. The meeting will be held in a newly painted conference room. The walls of the conference room used to have gray, peeling wallpaper. Now it has spiffy gray walls that match the hallway.

I don't know if it is related but last week they shampooed the carpets on the second floor where I work. I don't think that the shareholders will be given a tour of where the product they own is actually worked on. When they were cleaning the carpets they took all the chairs out of the cubicles. When they were finished they put chairs back in the cubicles but usually they didn't put them back where they came from. We get attached to our chairs and their idiosyncrasies. So there was much grumpiness as people searched for the chairs that fit their butts. Mine happened to come back to my cubicle in the first place so I didn't get to join the musical chairs game.

I hope they hold more shareholders' meetings here. It's good to get overdue repairs done.

Thanks but I'll just go without clothes

In the movie "The Devil Wears Prada," Meryl Streep's character explains to her skeptical assistant how elements of this year's haute couture will be incorporated in the clothes she'll buy off the rack at Macy's next year.

I hope it doesn't work that way with men's fashions.

The New York Times gadget in my Google sidebar offered me this item from their fashion blog.

I would feel much more comfortable going naked than wearing this high fashion and I would certainly draw less attention to myself.

Aren't we grownups here?

In one of our coffee rooms at work where we have a coffee machine, microwave ovens, toasters and a refrigerator there are some signs on the wall that make me wonder whether the people I work with got basic training from their mothers.

The one over the microwave ovens:
And one over the sink:

Are there really people who think that tea bags and stir sticks simply wash down the drain (well, by way of the garbage disposer)? Apparently there are enough people who do that a reminder needs to be posted.

Some wit thought others need the reminder and put a similar sign above the sink in another coffee room:

Now, the question on everyone's mind is "What the heck are Teradata trading cards?" I'll try to explain (and, of course, show you)!

Some time ago, the marketing people came up with some little CD-ROMs the size of business cards that had little slogans and images on them that illustrate various virtues of Teradata. When you put them in your CD drive, you're shown a little movie about the virtue. They sent these out to us in random batches of two or three cards at a time. We were supposed to trade our duplicates with colleagues to get a full set. I think that there were eight since they gave us a business card holder that hold eight cards in addition to a card with a summary of the virtues. I have eight so I guess I got the whole set! There was some sort of prize for people who sent in evidence that they watched all of the movies. I don't think I watched more than a part of one.

I'm pretty sure that these were made for customers.

Don't put these down the drain! (Only a couple of these are interesting.)

"Actionable Information"?