Saturday, July 29, 2006

Gotta love Tai's

So as the end of a usual evening we ended up at Tai's. They funny part is that like all evening I do not believe that I am going to end up there. Tonight though we ended up running into a guy from HS. DJ was a guy who I knew through HS but got to know through dating female friends that we ended up double dating. However I have always thought he was a really great and nice guy. Based on this I am hoping he comes to the party that we are all attending tomorrow/today. Life is weird and sometimes I feel that they bring people back together for a reason. I feel like this guy could be a good/great friend if he makes it past this weekend and attends this party. Otherwise I may never see him again except at the next reunion.

Life is confusing and sometimes you just have to go with your best guess. It may not be right but at least you made a choice. From there you can figure the rest out.

I am sorry. I didn't think.

Sometimes we do things because we are so excited for others that we forget that they themselves want to tell people. We don't do it out of any ill will. Just because of our over excitedness to let people know. I did this recently. Also at no point did I mean to poke fun at any career that any of us would ever choose. I sometime just feel sarcasm is needed to have fun with life. I have some much respect for the accomplishments of anyone who would be willing to just change their career and go after another career that they choose. I think that doing that shows an incredible amount of maturity. I apologize if at any point my sarcasm would be seen at me making fun of anyone's chosen career. I sometimes make sarcasctic comments just to enterain people that read this blog. At no point to I instead to hurt people based on my comments. I would hope that even though sometimes I am sarcastic about serious situations I am more looking to congratulate them. I am sorry if anything I have written would be take badly or I apologize for posting something earlier then I should have. Sometime I just get so excited about people that I love's accomplishments that I can not keep my mouth shut. I do not do this with the intention to hurt anyone.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Little Stevie and his new friend

Mark informed me that our dear friend Steve went out and bought himself a manly scooter. A Vespa to be exact. Now this new buy of Steve's comes only weeks after his brother just bought a motorcycle. Mark made this lovely picture and had 900 disperse it at work. I guess Steve's mid-life crisis has kicked in a little early. Man am I jealous of him.


Wednesday, July 26, 2006

How do I get this to happen?

In case you don't know Hutch and I are taking a rock climbing class. Well on the first day we had to go around and introduce ourselves. This one guy who looks to be around mid to late 20's starts off saying that he's from England but normally lives in Denmark and just sold his company and is not retired. Last night after class we all went to the nearby pub for a beer. I got to talking to him for a bit. He is in the process of selling his company to IBM. He holds 17 international patents on software products/designs that he has done over the years. The crazy part is that he was contacted by IBM for the buyout. He was not looking to sell but they just called him up and offered a hell of a lot of money. He said he will make 500grand a year on interest off of the money from the sale. Talk about crazy.

The problem he has is that he doesn't know what to do anymore. We kept trying to give him idea's however he had done almost everything. He seemed very well read. He has travelled all over. He has a pilots license, has sky dived, is certified in scuba. We went through everything thing we could think of. One thought was him to get his phd and teach at a college, he already has a masters. The best suggestions came from someone else that he become a blacksmith. Wouldn't that be kind of fun to be able to open a forge even though no one will probably need anything from him. I also through out to become a horse cobbler.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Break in class

My god, So I am taking a class on Database Design that started on Monday. Second class I am really am fighting to not fall asleep. This break could not come soon enough. Teacher just keeps rambling and never actually gets to a point. I am hoping he gets to one before the class is over.


Mt. Everest here we come

Hutch and I begin our rock climbing class last night. We are learning the basics with rock climbing on an indoor climbing wall at a gym in Chicago. Yesterday it was a lot of fun but incredibly hard. When we got there people were already climbing they made it look so easy. However that is definitly not the case. My forearms are so tired right now. Which I learned at the end of class meant that I was climbing incorrectly. I already have to fix my technique.

Here is a photo of Hutch and I at class.


Monday, July 17, 2006

Who is this guy named Steve?

NOTE: This is a post that I wrote a while ago and just noticed that I save it as a draft instead of posting. I believe its still valid though.

There is a secret little fact in Hollywood that some of our friends stumbled upon a few years back. So far I have seen no evidence to prove otherwise. On Memorial Day weekend our theory was once again reinforced.
Hypothesis:
If a guy is mentally or physically challenged, completely idiotic, socially retarded, a complete douchebag, or even a donkey then the character will be named Steve.

Initial findings:
We made our first finding of this fact after watching Waterboy and finding of the the donkey or mule that lived in their house was named Steve.

This was reinforced on Memorial day weekend while watching The Ringer. The lead character who is faking being mentally handicapped while trying to fix the special olympics was named steve. I received a phone call the same weekend from Mark stated the same fact.

If your wondering why we would even notice this small little fact then you would need to meet our friend Steve G. Steve is the embodiment of all these characters all rolled into one. Now I do not know whether he has tried to fix the special olympics however I would not put it past him.
Steve stated off as an actor in college. Based on this my new theory is that someone from Hollywood saw him act and has sense then been writing characters with him in mind ever since. Either that or his twin actually lives in hollywood.

Feel free to post your favorite Steve.

I believe Steve's across the world have banned together to save their name with the site below. My point though is further made by the quote below on the site.
"The retarded copy of Michael Keaton calls the real Michael Keaton "Steve."


http://www.chud.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-57887.html

Friday, July 14, 2006

Check this show out

If you have not heard of it yet but there is a great new show called "It's always Sunny in Philidelphia". Its on FX channel on Thursdays. I first saw it when they were sneeking previewing it on Fox. I find it quite funny and I am not sure if anyone else agrees.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

I almost went postal

Yesterday, I could have killed my team lead and second line manager. I will explain why.
The department that Mark and I work in is a specialized IT group that is not part of the rest of the IT departments. Based on that there is a lot of political BS that goes on up at the manager levels about who supports what. Its become especially more prevalent now at our new company because everyone wants to suck up to the new adoptive parent and make themselves known as the good little children.



There is an application that is going to be re-architected. I guess its a big deal. People are still currently fighting over the scraps on this piece. So backtrack a month ago. I small piece of the pie needed to be fixed sooner. I am not sure where the decision was made but it was decided that this one piece (we will call it reporter) needed two new servers to replace the old one. At this point my department has nothing to do with Reporter's servers or application. This guy who I seriously dislike because he is the biggest ass in the world(though works for the company I support) decides he wants to change the rules to the servers and add additional network connections. Based on this all the current support teams throw their hands in the air and say they don't want anything to do with it and it should fall on our departments. I am pointed as the resource. For the next few weeks however they take it back and then give it back to us. So I do not know whether or not I am supposed to be doing anything only information I get comes from my Team Lead and Second line manager. Fast forward to last Tuesday or Wednesday. I get an email stating servers will be here on Friday and that I need to build them and get them into our DMZ at a different building by Saturday, July 15th. My first question to my TL is whether or not the proper paper work has been put in. In IT if you make any sort of change you are supposed to fill out a form called a Request for Change. Its a good idea however its implemented like a small retarded child at our company.
My TL tells me that my second line manager has submitted everything and they only thing I have to do is install the OS and Nic's on the server and then pass it off. I am thinking this is simple. I get the servers late Friday and start building them on Monday. Tuesday roles around and I realize that I still need more information on how to proceed. I contact both TL and SLM and they respond with they are not sure now whether any of the paper work has been submitted. Also neither of them is in the office this day. So I end up spending the next few hours trying to track down contacts and phone numbers for anyone who knows anything about this application. After talking to about 8 different people I am able to piece a good amount of it together. I know also find out that I am supposed to be doing the application install and then supporting the environment once its live. The old support team has walked away.

So thats pretty much where I am. The up side is that I finally got a grasp of the whole thing yesterday and this morning and I am not stressing as much. I sat both my TL and SLM down today and explained that communication needs to be severely improved going forwarded on projects like these because it only makes our department look bad.



Gotta love working for large companies.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Fantasy What?

For all of you that know me, you know how I am a big Sports Nut. Okay stop laughing. Seriously. Unless they plan for a chicago team and even then my knowledge is limited, I normally don't even know what sport the player people are talking about plays. In the last two years, I have come in second or third to last in our fantasy football leagues. Well finally I have found something that I may be good at. This also might be good for Joters xmen ability. Check out his comment on M&D's blog. The RedEye had an article about Fantasy movie leagues. You play the movie exec and get to choose certain movies and then based on their box office earnings you get more money to go out and buy more. This is right up my alley. They also reference another site called the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Check them out.