joeware - never stop exploring... :)

…did I place my ass at?

Swamped

Oh yeah, it is attached, no chance at losing that. Good thing too, I have just been so swamped with stuff. I am hoping to play a little catch up over the holidays here. No doubt I will fail but I will certainly give it an effort. You may find I blog over the next week like a 42″ Pike flopping around in a 15 foot bass boat sort of tossing and turning here and there and going every which direction until I clunk myself good in the head or flop overboard. I have some drywall work I have to get done in the kitchen and actually hopefully also paint as well. Plus well there is the whole gifts and family things that go on.

Work

Work has just been terribly eventful the last few months with some hugely bad news for me personally in the last week regarding my manager. The whole reason I actually came back to work for the company I work for. He gets things done and leaves you alone while you get things done. He pounds you if you do something wrong, he pats you on the back when you do something right. If you need something he gets it for you or explains to you why you don’t want it in the first place. Other than that he stays away. He is about as anti-micro managing as you can get. I could easily go a month without talking to him at all since he was in Colorado and I am in Michigan. He hires what he feels are good people and then lets them do what they feel they need to do. A very good system. A very good manager. I have been lucky to have a few really good managers, sucks to lose another one. On the positive side, the last time he was my manager and I got re-orged to another manager I was fired within like 2 weeks. It is doubtful that will happen again, in fact, several managers would all love to have me on their teams and the main concern from everyone is that I will quit since I won’t have my old manager any more. Rest assured, I am not quitting right away. I told everyone I will watch to see what happens in January. We are working on doing some pretty interesting things and as my former manager told me when I chatted to him about this unfortunate event said something like… “Even without me you still have it pretty good although you are very underpaid.” 🙂   I said that I will watch to see what happens but certainly I will be looking closer at what the head hunters send me now.

Google Picasa

Oh if you play with images at all, you may want to look at Picasa from Google. Very cool. I saw it on a recent business trip and finally loaded it and looked at it. It is one of the smoothest tools I have seen, just beautiful.  Rocket fast as well. Plus, the easiest/best red eye reduction and auto color/light/saturation correction I have seen yet. I am going to point it at my folders with about 43,000 images this weekend and see how it handles it.

Microsoft Expressions

I downloaded the Expressions Web Creation software trial this week. I am curious to see the FrontPage replacement. I have been looking to revamp joeware.net for some time now because the Frontpage “goodies” annoy me every time I go surfing through the structure with SmartFTP and if I want to make small changes FrontPage always wants to upload a zillion new things. I have thought about going to a nice retro look too. Gray backgrounds with courier new font, all driven by perl cgi… I would prefer something zippy though and maybe Expressions is what I want to do it with, we will find out. Oddly it doesn’t seem to be available on MSDN Subscriber downloads. Since it replaces FrontPage and FrontPage was there that doesn’t make sense to me. I wonder if Google is going to come out with a Web designer package. If it were like Picasa I expect I would end up running it.

No Air Pistol for me it looks like

I ordered an Air Pistol to get myself as a end of year / work bonus / christmas gift present. I looked around for a while and settled on a nice Weihrauch HW 40 PCA (.177 caliber). It is a single shot pellet pistol with about 410 feet per second max velocity. It is nice because it is supposed to be highly accurate and is a single stroke pneumatic meaning no CO2 cartridges. I am not looking for a gun to shoot creatures, I just wanted to do some paper and metal trap target shooting. I even ordered the match pellets instead of the tear through everything pellets. Unfortunately the day after I ordered the pistol I get a nice email saying my order was canceled because the State of Michigan won’t let you have a pellet gun with a rifled barrel unless you have a permit from the police department. If the pellet gun had a smooth bore barrel I would be fine even if it fired at three times the velocity. This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. I can’t seem to find any local shops that carry that brand which is upsetting as I picked it because it appears to be good solid German quality, however I did find out that the Beeman P3 is very similar and there is a place not too far away that carries it so I will go take a drive at some point and see what the story is. If it is something I can handle through the gun dealer, I will do it, if I have to muck with the cops, I won’t bother.

It isn’t looking a lot like Christmas

I have friends in the Pacific Northwest and friends in Colorado who say they have been simply BLASTED with snow this week. Here in southern Michigan the weather is actually quite amazing for December. While we have had small snow falls with maybe an inch sitting at one point, the last few weeks have been getting up into the 50’s. I love it. This is just fine for me. I grew up in Northern Lower Michigan, I saw all the snow I wanted then. If I want snow now I can go find it easily, it doesn’t need to be all around me for months and months. I don’t know if that has had impact on me but I have been having a rather good time shopping for presents this year. Normally I hate going out into the malls and shops and looking for things during this time of year. The people all annoy me near to death. This year I have spent more time in the stores than ever except for when I worked retail and I am fine doing it and I am even nice and cheery and smiley to the retail workers which seems to shock many of them. I think that even though I have some crappy things going on at the moment that really test the limits of my patience, overall I am doing very well and really quite happy with myself and the people that are in my life and excited about what is to come because I feel some amazing stuff is just around the corner for me. Sure there are all sorts of things I would change if I could, decisions I would handle differently, exercise I would have done more of, food I would have ate less of, things I wouldn’t have bought, other things I would have bought, all sorts of things that could be changed but overall, things are pretty good in my corner of the world.

  joe