Category: Personal

So after much harassment from more than a few people, I’m doing the whole Facebook thing.  The fear of losing my job this week, and having to network again, was what prompted my conversion.  But I will admit, Facebook is fascinating, and also kind of creepy.  Consider this picture I found of my mother (upper far right side), who has been dead for 14 years, on the Facebook of someone I probably haven’t seen for 16 years.  Found someone else on Facebook I hadn’t talked to since high school, and is in the same industry as I am.

If you’re on Facebook, feel free to add me as a friend, though I am under my real name and not my pseudonym.  Most of you who are regular readers should probably have figured my real name out by this point.

Getting 1/3rd of the folks removed from your company’s IT systems is always quite a bit of work, especially when one of those folks had admin rights to your company network.  I was fortunate that IT only lost one person.  Every certificate and key the company had must be considered to be compromised, so there’s much re-keying and re-provisioning of certificates that needs to be done.  Not to mention cleaning everyone who got the axe out of all the groups.  The folks who got the chop often want personal files, contacts, and calendar information.  All that stuff has to be gone through to make sure it’s not company secrets.  This essentially means my projects are all on hold, and my schedule has just been shot up.

I’ve survived probably a dozen layoffs over my 11 year career, and I’ve always ended up wondering who really was on the wrong end of the deal.  But in this economy I’m happy to still have a job.  The key to surviving layoffs is to be indispensable.  One reason I’ve resisted taking paper pushing management jobs is because in my experience, those people tend to be expendible.  While I am at a management level on paper, I still get my hands dirty, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  The company I work for is still a listing vessel with a leaky hull trying to right herself in the Biotech Sea.  Now we’re operating with a skeleton crew.  We’re either going to get to port with the crew we have remaining, or the ship is going to sink.  The next few months will be critical.

Massive restructuring at work today. Lost 1/3rd of the company. My manager and his manager are both gone. Spent most of the day resetting passwords and deactivating accounts. Sad time for a lot of people. Busy time for IT.

I discovered my situational awareness is a bit better than Bitter’s.  One Thai restaurant we like to go to is found in a mostly vacant, out of the way shopping plaza in Newtown.  Approaching the restaurant, I notice two other vehicles out front, one with Pennsylvania tags, and an early model Ford Explorer with New Jersey tags.  We park behind the Explorer.  Go in to the place, and find two other couples there.  Not unexpected or unusual, since this doesn’t tend to be a busy place on a Sunday.

Bitter and I go in, enjoy our Spicy Drunken Noodle (with chicken).  In the mean time, couple one leaves.  Couple two, who were sitting rather cozily next to each other at the table also leaves, but gives me a funny and not entirely friendly look on the way out.  Enough to make me think “Jesus woman, what did I do to deserve the evil eye?”

Bitter and I take about 20 minutes to finish our meal.  On the way out I notice that New Jersey tagged Explorer is still in the parking lot, and the engine is running.  Condition orange.  Something is not right with this picture.  We’re the only other ones in the parking lot, and they left the restaurant 20 minutes ago.  Had the Kel-Tec in the jacket pocket.  Put my hand in my pocket just in case.  I figure that maybe they had too much to drink, and are waiting to feel OK to drive. Understandable.  But I didn’t notice a bottle on their table (it’s a BYOB), evil eye, our car the only other one around, so yeah… condition orange.

As we approached the Explorer, I heard the soft din of Bryan Adams “Heaven”.  A little closer, and noticed the vehicle shaking a bit.  At this point my eyes are fixated on the windo …. holy beast with two backs batman, those two are going at it like a couple of crazed spider monkeys.  I mean, how does that go?  “Come on baby, the food was hot, you are hot, and the massaman curry just makes me too crazy.  I can’t wait to get home!  I must have you now.”  Back to condition yellow.  Evil eye was because they wanted to get all Evil Jungle Princess in the back seat, and we created a problem for their plans when we arrived.

I am not one to call the cops for something like that.  We were the only other people around, and while I generally tend to think you should be done sex in the back of a car, in a public parking lot, by the time you’re, say, 16, if I had called the cops, it would be for the sin for being from New Jersey, and in my state, playing Bryan Adams at a decible level where I could hear it.  But it’s a useful lesson in observing what’s going on around you.

Get in the car, turn on the headlights and drive off.  Noticed that the movement inside and outside stopped when the headlights went on.  I hope they both managed to finish after our rude interruption.  Nonetheless, I think I will have to talk to my new state rep about making it illegal to play Bryan Adams loudly while being from New Jersey.  We need to have decent standards for public behavior in this state.

Dr. Helen describes a gift she found online that may possibly be one of the worst gifts ever – for the child’s parents anyway.  Her response to the description?

How much must you hate the parents of the kid that you give this to? I can’t imagine how annoying and loud this thing must be. Nothing like a loud magaphone, flashing lights and a working fire hose to bring tranquility to the house.

She then asks her readers for stories about annoying gifts their kids have received and what ultimately happened to the items.

Not having any children, this isn’t something I’ve had to deal with.  However, Sebastian and I were quite concerned about it while shopping for his buddy’s son recently.  We tested any toy we considered throwing into the gift bag.

I was amused by these reviews for various prepared and canned foods.  For those of us on the go, it’s a good look at what’s good and what sucks.  How can you beat reviews that go like this:

Boulder Ice Cream – Super Premium Vanilla

Says “produced with milk from cows not treated with rBGH.” Well maybe they should be. Cuz this ice cream sucks. Horrible consistency (too globby). The flavor may or may not have been okay, but it doesn’t matter. As the great philosopher Carrito once said, “Ice cream should not be like taffy.”

I will have to reference this before I restock my office Emergency Lunch Survival Kit.  What prompted me to find this was eating a can of Campbell’s Harvest Select Light Clam Chowder, which has the aroma of a can of fresh Alpo, and a taste that pretty closely matches.  I couldn’t even finish it, and  will normally eat anything.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving Everyone.  What I’m thankful for:

• Thankful that Bitter still has her b***h a** in the kitchen making me pie, even though she came down with a cold last night.
• Liberty Safes, for making a prompt and easy delivery of all 850 lbs of my safe.
• I’m thankful that Michelle Obama can spend her first Thanksgiving being thankful for her country.
• My new RCBS media separator.  No more digging through tumbler media to find the cases, then having to dump the media out of them.  Just dump them into the separator, turn a few times, and bingo — clean media.
• I am thankful for a reader for sending me “The Contraption.”  Pictures will be forthcoming, once it’s set up properly.

Enjoy your holiday.

The rain is interfering with me getting my leaves off my lawn, since they don’t blow nicely.  I am sick of rain.  In Southeastern Pennsylvania, it’s been a very wet fall.  Today I attended a Bris Milah for my friend Jason’s newly born son.  For those of you who don’t know what a Bris is, it’s essentially ritual penis choppery, followed by singing in Hebrew, then eating many varieties of smoked fish, and sweet things.  Those of us born in the 70s and who weren’t Jewish only got the choppery, and no food.  Clearly we were gypped.

Before the Bris, Bitter and I went to Babies R’ Us to find age appropriate toys.  Disappointed that they didn’t have “Baby’s First Submachine Gun Upper,” which would have been fun for the whole family, we decided to get a few newborn baby things, and a giant stuffed alien that is larger than the baby.  If he grows up to believe he was once abducted, it will be my fault.  But I couldn’t pass up a stuffed alien.  I just had a rabbit and a dog as a kid.  Toy designers are much more imaginative these days.  Speaking of crap that I wish they had when I was a kid, I can’t figure out whether I would have thought this was the coolest toy ever, or would have been scared to death of it.  If they end up making a model that will walk, I might have to think about kids just so I can buy one.

I am taking this entire week off.  Rather than have to deal with my project and task lists at work, I can concentrate on fun vacation activity:

• Cleaning the leaves off the lawn.  I have too many trees.
• Avoid shaving as much as possible.
• Finish scores for the Gun Blog Rifle League, and make the combined Fall/Winter match.
• Work up a load for .223 using Varget powder, and get down to the club to crony it.
• Reload some .44 Special so I can practice for my IHMSA match on the 6th of December.  It’ll be our last one until March.
• Get the Lee progressive press a reader was kind of enough to send to me up and functioning and start reloading 9mm and .45 ACP all quick like.  I ordered all I need to reload .44 Spl/Mag too, in addition to the .223 stuff.  We’ll see how it works out.
• Clean the house for Thanksgiving guests.  Sadly this is a big task.
• Buy a new and larger gun safe, with fireproofing, and all that happy stuff.  My current one is packed to the gills, and I’d like to get some more collector pieces before imports end up more restricted.
• Think about buying a Glock 30 to replace the Glock 19 as primary carry piece.  The reason I went with 9mm is because it’s common and cheap, but if I’m reloading, I can afford to shoot .45ACP pretty regularly.

That’s basically my holiday plans for my week off.  I will be blogging, but possibly on a different schedule than normal.

Continuing the theme of Hollywood not having any new original ideas, it looks like they are remaking Star Trek.  I’ll probably get kicked out of the geek club for this one, but most of what’s come out of the Star Trek genre has been dreck.  Well, with one exception.  Star Trek II, The Wrath of Kahn.  Best… Star Trek Movie.. Ever!  Ricardo Montalbán was great in that film, and it was really the height of William Shatner’s overly dramatic acting.  It’s a classic.

But I will give J.J. Abrams, who’s Lost series I’m quite a fan of, a chance to show us how it’s done.  I’ve always thought Star Trek characters had potential with writing that wasn’t dry and preachy.  TNG certainly had its moments, but I think a lot of that was Patrick Stewart being a good actor.  Hopefully Abrams version won’t suck.