Real Conversations in IT

me: Hey how's it going?
other guy: It's good. You know . . . January.

I didn't know. I have absolutely no idea what that means.

you know it must be important . . .

This is the kind of stuff I love.

Fantasy Football Controversy!

This picture is only here because I should have gotten Andre Brown on waivers! GAHHH!

Anyway, what's up with you peoples? I've been busy unsuccessfully trying to pick-up guys off waivers. Also have some ankle injuries and a little MFPF (mofo plantar fasciitis). These are all very exciting and interesting things, I know. theMomica and the children are well. Lincoln said today, "You're so funny daddy." So, he's pretty much really, really smart.

Becoming Crossfit?

So, I've joined this gym near my house.  This is a departure for me.  I've never been "gym guy".  Not that I'm too cool or cool at all, but I've always preferred working out on my own and feeling the burning shame of failure with only my own person.

Crossfit is not like that.

What is it?  You can read all about it here.   My barebones-simple explanation is that it focusing on functional movements, without neglecting building strength.  It strives to create strong athletes who would be competent in any endeavor.  You don’t do much standing around; the workouts are short-ish but intense and sometimes make you feel like you're going to die.

It also has a strong Olympic lifting component, which I’ve always wanted to try.
But the olympic lifts are more like learning a golf swing than a bench press, so I've never been willing to try on my own.  This was wise.

The coaching is a big advantage.  You’re getting small-group training every time out and coach Dave is the real deal.  He's even complimented my "tight snatch."  Joking aside, there a lot of criticisms out on the etherweb about the deficiencies of Crossfit.  I think the root of those criticisms is most likely poor coaching.  Something to keep in mind if you decide to check it out.

Exercises are modified for your abilities.  I'm always rocking a band or strap or walker.  It really can be for everyone.

OH!  And people root you on!  Well, provided they're done and you're not (usually the case for me).  It's kind of embarrassing.  “C’mon Roger!  Keep going!”  “Ok.  Right after I kick my lung out of the way here.”

I’ve also been going at 0600  - which is early, yo.  But, so far, so good.

linuxin' ain't easy

Why do companies hate me for using Linux? I have been happily downloading MP3s off Amazon for years. At first I used their downloader and then through pymazon. I just bought an album earlier today and was met with this nonsense:

Install the Amazon MP3 Downloader We apologize — Linux is not supported. Unless you already have the Amazon MP3 Downloader installed, you will have to download songs individually from Amazon Cloud Player. JavaScript must also be enabled.

I sent them an angry email which surely has Beszos shaking in his 100,000 dollar alligator nutsack boots.

Why do you hate me? Did it cripple Amazon when I was able to *gasp* download a WHOLE ALBUM of songs at one time? I hope you realize that if I have to go log into windows somewhere there is now no reason for me not to use iTunes for my music purchases. Boo on you. Roger

I apologize that this is the first thing I've posted in so, so long, but it ticks me off! And I want all of you 2 to be outraged and tweet them into capitulation. Go forth my winged friends!

newsflash: kids are different

So, don't know if you know, but kids are different. They are not the same. And boys are different than girls. This is not bad; it is. So it goes and as it goes, Sabrina is different than Lincoln. I love me some Lincoln. He's my boy. So when you have one that you're totally in love with and the second is on the way, you kind of wonder how you're going to deal . . . ? Like will new baby be as cool as old baby? Will you love second baby as much? You know you will, but I don't know, you kind of think about it. But then your little baby blue (eyes - for now or forever?) is born. And you think you must have been insane to think you wouldn't fall instantly in love. Because you do and there is plenty of love to go around. And she just smiles and smiles at you. And you think, "I hope when I'm older and she's a teenager and I say, 'I love you baby blues,' she'll still smile like she does now. I know she won't every time, because I will be an annoying dad, but how about most of the time? Anyway, I miss you guys (which like none of you are guys). I am just busy with aforementioned babies, work (which over the course of the 13 years I've been there is kind of unusual, but over the past year or so is quite common) and school. I am still plugging away on my masters' pre-reqs and it is typically enough work/time to consume what I normally would spend blogging. But I have made this excuse before. Oh well, you know the deal. I'm still here though. And occasionally here.

2-liters of pop

For when you have 5 minutes to pour yourself a beverage.

Netflix: I Am Love (2009)

The movie's description is:

Oscar winner Tilda Swinton shows off her multilingual skills in director Luca Guadagnino's atmospheric melodrama in which family dissension, unbidden desire and other tensions bubble to the surface during the patriarch's birthday party. When the seemingly picture-perfect Recchi clan gathers at the family villa to celebrate the great old man, the veneer of civility quickly falls away in this Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.

How I hate thee, let me count the ways . . .
I hate your preening self-importance.
I hate your extreme close-up food porn money shots.
I hate that there wasn’t a gang of murderous robots to destroy the Recchi family whilst giving everyone tetanus.
I hate your really dramatic music preceding someone . . . *gasp* . . . walking out of the room!
I hate that Tilda was a Russian, but “became [so] Italian” that she forgot her real name!
I hate that one person died, but you didn’t follow it up with more deaths.
But most of all, in every way, I hate Oscar winner Tilda Swinton’s multilingual skills.

overheard

She reads everything that isn’t nailed down.
That’s some aggressive reading – if you have to start nailing down your Twilight books and whatnot.

holy lolz

Why is this so funny?

She's a girl!

(Lincoln was not amused.) My only excuse is I have 2 kids, yo. And school's back in session. *AND* I'm working on a big rah-rah project at work. My apologies to my Canadians. Though you may have seen this via facebook wizardry which I have yet to grasp. Mom, baby, big brother and dad are all well.

Jimmy Stewart is totally German.

I'm watching The Mortal Storm. Spoiler alert - Nazis are bad. Hitler has just taken the Chancellorship and Stewart is not on board. I love me some Jimmy Stewart, but he plays Aryan with the same "aw shucks" midwestern sensibility that made his career. At any rate, it's an interesting juxtaposition. Snugglebears is still in utero. Although the last couple of nights, it looks like SB is trying to escape from the inside. Don't worry. I will keep you posted. For now, "Well now . . . I don't think I can heil, there, you know?"

2-month hiatus

Wow. How have you survived without me? I know it must have been difficult. The night-terrors, the shakes, the sense of longing and loneliness. For all this you can blame, Cuddlebunnies 2: No more Mr. Nice Guy and Intro to Discrete Mathematics.

CB2 is still stowed safely away in theMomica's lady business, but preparations for said bunny continue at a frenzied pace. I had to update BR4* to make it a livable room for LL. He *loves* it because it's blue and blue is his favorite color. It is also the only answer he'll give if you ask him what color something is. What color is this orange? BLUE! Silly monkey. Although he has started saying yellow as well. He usually will ammend his answers to the correct ones, but there's a 95% chance everything's blue out of the gate.

And then there's homework. And actually it's been going really well, so I can't complain that the time invested has been wasted. But it has separated me from you and for that, I weep. Not like tears or anything, it's a mapley syrup. I have been eating too many sweets.

Thus, for the 50th consecutive post, I promise I will not post more. CB-to-the-2 is due on 12/30, so shit's about to get real yo. I will drop yet another notch down the power rankings and be forced to change more diapers. Oh the humanity.

not to get all political

But wow. Don't go putting "onerous demands" on people in Alberta. Yikes.

RS2 is my favorite.

(Excepting the hour when RS4 is taking my car into the shop.)

I mean, I figured that went without saying.

Oh, want to go down to my football game tomorrow? Lincoln might want cousins there . . . not sure how entertained he'll be by watching me hyperventilate from being like 40 pounds over weight right now. But man, was that a good cookie.

wtf? write your own blog

Ok, so I know I've been horribly negligent. I can honestly say that I've been spending lots of my free time working on Discrete Math. (Bron - it's still won't make out with me!) Does anyone still come here? I mean, I rarely do.

Anyway, as I've recounted in this space, I wasn't much of a student last time around. I think I defined my own personal "old college try" and Ky earned like 500,000 bonus points for processing that correctly. Ky is like the most likely person to get my obscure rambling jokes. I'm not sure what this means, other than we are disturbing in a similar fashion. I digress . . . well, I disgressed, I plan on stopping now.

I told Janny that "math is hard." Barbie wasn't f#cking kidding. I mean, I know there was a big stink about it, but it's not like she said "Addition is hard" or "Addition of small integers is hard." Who knows what kind of maths Barbie had her hands in? Also, the algebra, it is rusty. As a computer guy working on business systems, I'm constantly using your basic 8x + 4 = 84 kind of stuff, but beyond that, I have to constantly remind myself if a = b and therefore = c??

The last 800 words were one way of saying that I've been doing schoolwork, like a good boy. I am as studious as Alan! (Ok, I think I have mentioned every person who may at some point read this.) It's be depressing if I had the numbers in front of me, but I've probably spent more time on this class than I did in whole semesters of college. This is a gross overstatement, but true enough in spirit. False, but accurate, eh?

So I just bought Cease to Begin off Amazon and am cloud playing it. It is not as awesome as I remember it. My memory had an awesomeness inflation factor of 3. Maybe I am just bitter that I paid 10 bucks for it. Stupid cloud.

Anyway, I still heart you times 2n + 1.

playa!

i'm glad noone saw me air guitar at work

You know Ole Mullholland by Frank Black? Teenager of the Year? Yes? Anyway, there's a part after Mullholland says "There it is. Take it." (and presumably before the St. Francis Dam Disaster) where there's a little guitar riff. I actually caught myself air guitaring it . . . to myself. It was strange as I don't know how to guitar, air or otherwise. Oh well.

"The concrete of the aqueduct will last as long as the pyramid of Egypt or the Parthenon of Athens; long after Job Harriman is elected major of Los Angeles!"

Frank Black not only entertains, but he also teaches.

So, get you some Ole Mullholland, St. Francis Dam Disaster and Llano Del Rio off of your amazon mp3 machine and enjoy some history whilst you rock out!

It doesn't cost a dime to be nice, but it's $154.49 for courtesy.

So, I just got off the phone with AT&T.

I called them with a simple idea. They charge me too much for cable/internet/TV. I know this because if you are a "new" customer you can get their service for like 8 cents a month. Ok, I'm aware that's a loss leader and they make up the money 6/12 months later when your promo prices expire, but the very little you're paying means that the true price is somewhere far below my 154.

This is the game they force us to play. I called and I said, "Hi AT&T person, isn't it silly that all you companies charge 8 cents a month for new customers and then when you have a customer like me, long-time bill payer, good-looking skylarker and whatnot, you hold me over the coals until I switch to BU&U service? How about this time, you give me a lower *fixed* rate and then I won't have to switch and you'll still get my money?"

The first guy I talked to found this irrefutable and put me through to a "specialist." The specialist's job is to argue that AT&T is a really nice company and does a lot of things as a courtesy. If you are curious, in the AT&T vernacular, a courtesy is when you don't charge more for something. "We don't charge you for the DVR box as a courtesy." WTF does that exactly mean? I am passing along 155 of my hard-earned female deer to this company and they claim things are a courtesy. That's like me saying, I use the phone for 10 minutes a month* "as a courtesy." "I know I could use it more and your phone lines would burn down as my dulcet tones whipped across our great land, but I don't want that to happen. Instead, as a courtesy, I don't do that. I never use the phone and as a courtesy to me, you charge me 30 bucks a month." With friends like AT&T . . .

I emphasized my point. AT&T has no great feature preventing me from switching. I don't use the whole world DVR streaming to my brain or whatever it is, so, no plus there. AT&T is actually a detriment to me because I can't splice a line to watch local/basic cable like I can with "cable". Instead, when I have a Super Bowl party I have to snake rabbit ears out to my porch in the driving snow. To me, it's a commodity, like milk. I said, if I can get 12 months of service for half the price, even if it's just for a year why wouldn't I do that? Even if I have to switch every year. She said she didn't understand why people did that. I said, that I had just explained that it was cheaper and while inconvenient, it wasn't splinters-under-fingernails inconvenient. She said we had a different way of looking at things (I can only assume mine is the correct way to look at things).

She continued to tell me that she lived in a rural area where SHE COULDN'T GET UVERSE. (Can you imagine the discourtesies?) And she's had the same provider for years and never called to see if she could get her rates lowered. It was the strangest thing. It was like she was trying to make me feel guilty for not being a dumbass. What with all the talk of "courtesies" and her unending devotion to her rural tv/isp.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Don't pay for tv/phone. Just get an internet (why is blogger underlining internet as a spelling error?) connection and do everything through that. I would. I so would. But the rub is sports. It's like 80% of what I watch. (The other 20% is typically TCM.) Sports means you can't get the "basic" package. It also means you can't really ditch the TV portion. Sure some things stream, but streaming is a fickle mistress which I'm not prepared to rely on.

It was an odd conversation. She didn't seem to understand the premise that I would like to keep more of my money for myself. In the end, I got $20 off per month . . . for 6 months. So now I'm off to look into Time Warner's and WOW's promotional offers. And the dance continues.

* This is literally true. Well, 11 minutes last month. I told her that I spent more time waiting on hold than what I've used the phone all year - an exaggeration, but not by much.

my new jersey

I need this here to put somewhere else. Know what I mean? Anyway, only like 4% of my good ship reader will get this.

Oh - I forgot to tell you (8 other people I know)

back to school

And unlike Rodney, I need to do well. And I'm scared.

I am taking a class at a college, for like a grade and stuff. If you're keeping score at home, I am now 35. For a while now, I've been thinking about going back, because I'm interested and because my work has a generous reimbursement program. (Well, provided I get B or above, which is the scary part.)

I haven't been in a classroom since 1999. It is a "maths" class as the kids call it these days. It's not Teacher Lady math, it's like math for dummies. Intro to Discrete Mathematics.

I will eventually decide if I want to try to get a masters in computer information systems. That's a long way away since I undergrad-ed in MIS, which was computers for dummies (going into businessy things). So I have a bunch of pre-reqs, the first of which is the intro math course.

I have to go now. I just got the book (where were for-real used textbooks when I was in school? 30 bucks instead of 125) nd I need to commit it to memory before the 27th.

Family Hedge Trimming Power Rankings

As measured by the number of times each member has rendered extension cord inoperable cutting with said hedge trimmers.

theMomica	1
Roger	1
Lincoln	0

Tie breaker was that Monica tripped the breaker and I lost power in the midst of a hilarious facebook comment.

Happy Birthday Roger! World's Best at Everything

(Or, what you get when you make me buy my own ice cream cake.)

tiny moustache

I am wearing a tiny moustache (why do I think there is an o in moustache?) on the corner of my lip. You see, my m(o)ustache hair is blonde and that makes it tough to shave. Not that my hair rips the blades of my razor to shreds or anything like that, but instead since it's so pale, I have a hard time seeing if I missed a spot. Once the shaving cream has been moved, I can't really tell where else to shave.

Post-shaving I will often find myself sporting a tiny, tiny mustache on the corner or my upper lip. On the scale of world problems, this has got to be top 10 - I'm guessing somewhere near the Greek financial crisis (can't you people sell more gyros??!).

So, I am busy with baby. That's a good band/movie name right there. Busy with Baby. Feel free to use it when you start you nice alt-rock band. When that happens, be sure to sell you mp3 albums for 3 bucks. This, to me, is the sweet-spot price for new, promising music. If you're "unique ear" approved, then you may charge up to 5 dollars. But anything more than that is usury!

That is all.