Personal

The News

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I have mentioned before that I do not watch the news. I can’t stand it. I am not going to rehash all the reasons why I can’t stand the state of news in this country. I used to be able to watch the news for hours, now I can’t stand it. When a disaster hits like the hurricane last week I am forced to the news channels. The thing of it is you can watch CNN for 30 minutes during the entire ordeal and get all the news you will ever get from them. I didn’t watch very much news. I checked out individual news articles online from CNN, NY Times, and the BBC. I like the BBC because it gives an outside view of events in this country.

It is not that I am not interested in current events that I personally block myself from watching news updates. I just can’t stand the way it is packaged and presented these days. I do want to find out what is going on. Gus found a great blog that he passed along to me. it is a bunch of guys at a hosting provider who stayed behind to keep their systems running. You can check out their blog here. Besides the fact that the blog is run by a bunch of guys (and girls) who do what I do for a living, it is also unedited front line account of what is going on. They have feeds for video, and tons of photos. Gus sent me the link saying that if it was in NYC he thought that would be me. I told him I wasn’t so sure. It is true that our data center is one of the safest places in the city, but depending on the situation I would head for the hills! Either way these guys are a great read!

They have inspired me to try and find other blogs like it from people down there living through what is happening. Still searching…

Light Day

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Friday was relatively light day at work. Got allot done since not many people were around. I met my friend Kristen for drinks at this swanky bar near the office. As she pointed out for a swanky bar, they had ikea furniture, and plasma TV’s. I love some places priorities. After a few rounds we hit Angelo & Maxi’s. It was an unplanned visit to one of my favorite steak places. The food was great as always. After dinner we ended up at some dive bar in the village. Kristen liked it because it had a Pac Man machine. I couldn’t recreate my steps finding this place if I tried. I had a good night and then cabbed it home. I don’t even want to attempt a subway ride from the west village home on a friday. It will take too long.

The Picnic

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Well I was going to write all about the company picnic that I was going to on last Sunday. It rained, so we had no picnic. So nothing to talk about. It was rainy and everyone from work that I would hang out with (now that we all had no plans) were either sick or lazy and didn’t want to do anything.

I was with them on the being lazy part, so I did almost nothing productive on Sunday. I played with Sync on my Mac and robocopy for Windows. My goal is to automate backing up of my most important stuff. I have both scripts working. Robocopy can be (and will be) made into a scheduled task to run weekly on my XP box. Rsync needs a bit more work to make it a cron job that runs on a schedule. I may not even do that since my laptop is not regularly plugged into the firewire drive I will use as backup. I may just run the script manually when I want to backup stuff.

The picnic will most likely be rescheduled for the weekend I am away for a wedding. Not a huge loss for me. I always have mixed feelings about all day recreational get togethers from work. The parties usually rock, but the picnic can get a little long. Of course the wedding may end up making me feel the same way:)

What Would You Do?

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The events going on this week have me noticeably disturbed, but more importantly it has gotten me thinking. I wonder what I would do in similar situations? Would you set out to help people in your boat? Would you do it only if they paid you? It is reported to be happening. Would you loot for bottled water and food? In certain circumstances I can see that being necessary. Would you loot for a better pair of shoes if you were having trouble walking? If you said yes to that last one, then why wouldn’t you loot for shoes for 20 of your friends and family? While you are at it, would you loot for jewelry? How about a new TV or computer? I mean you can just take it and plug it in at home and watch cable? Oh wait, you don’t have power. And there is the problem that you have no house left, but you stole a TV. Good for you.

Would you goto a children’s hospital and shoot at the doctors there for no apparent reason? I guess you can answer yes to that one, if the hospital was conducting hideous medical experiments on the children. If they aren’t can anyone explain why in the world someone would shoot at a hospital?

How about shooting at the rescue helicopters. Would you shoot at them if they were going around saving people and weren’t armed? I mean doesn’t it sound like a good idea to take out your rifle and take pot shots at them? Or maybe it is a better idea to flip over an ambulance that was trying to evacuate patients from a hospital?

Or would you be the guy to lend out your generator to a friend if your house had power and they didn’t? Sounds like a good idea. How about letting friends and family use your house (that has power and water) to come over and shower, eat and sit in AC since they have nothing? That sounds humane too.

The really messed up thing is all the things I have mentioned here (good and bad) actually are happening right now. The good deeds are things friends of mine have done or are having done to them by other friends down in Louisiana right now. The other stuff is things that people (no, people wouldn’t do that, animals would do that crazy stuff) have done or are doing right now. This is a tragedy on a monumental scale. Why would something passing for a person take this opportunity to steel TV’s, or shoot at friggen rescue helicopters? I have been thinking about this for 2 days, and I cannot come up with an answer. I am just at a loss. At first I wasn’t going to write about it, but instead of thinking of this tragedy I am thinking how these people think stealing jewelry will make it all better? I am glad I don’t live down there anymore. Not because of the natural disaster (where I lived is actually relatively intact) but I don’t want to be associated in any way with the people on the news now doing these crazy deeds.

Why can’t everyone be helping everyone else get out of the city? Instead of shooting at police and steeling? Am I wishing for a utopia?

Disaster Supplies

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All the natural disasters going on have gotten me thinking that I need to stock up on emergency supplies. Frozen pizza and soda will not get me through a disaster. I need to get bottled water, and batteries for my mag light to start.

On that note I need to order more fresh direct. I am running out of food. I have to see when I will be around for a delivery.

My mom’s CD ripping task is almost halfway done. I had a long talk about her taste in music but she didn’t seem to budge:) My Dad is sick with a cold this week. My mom called to say she is sick now. I told her I will be very upset if I got sick from being with her yesterday. Lets hope I avoided it.

I blinked and it is 10:30 already. I need to wind this down, so I can (once again) try to get a good night sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well all week.

Slept The Day Away

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I didn’t sleep very well. I finally went to bed around 2AM. I was tired but sleep never came. I finally took a Tylenol PM around 4 or 5AM. I then slept a bit till 1PM. I finally am up showered, and dressed now. I just dropped 3 loads of laundry in the machines. Man I always used to tell myself having laundry done was almost as much as doing it yourself, but I was just saying that to make myself feel better for shelling out a ton of money to have it done. I was wrong, it does almost pay to have it done. 3 loads of laundry will cost me like $12 (not counting my detergent or time). When I have it done I never pay more than $20 (you pay per pound). for $8 difference, I will have it done for me.

Not sure what the rest of the day has in store for me. Laundry will take like 2 hours. Then maybe off to the bank to deposit some expense checks, then maybe Best Buy. After all it is right near the bank. Hmm, decisions, decisions…

Virtual Organization

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Every once in a while I get on a cleanup binge. I don’t clean my apartment or anything like that. I cleanup my virtual life. I have been going through crap on my hard drives, and removing any unneeded data. I have also been backing up stuff that I may or may not have a recent backup of.

I do this every few months. This time I am taking old CD’s I had of backups going back years and put them onto a hard drive. Recently (within the past 2 years) I have read that CD’s & DVD’s are not the best media for long term storage. So I am putting onto a drive as many backup’s as I can. I have also re-burned much of these old CD’s onto newer DVD’s.

Other aspects of this cleanup is to post to my website any backlog of photos I have. I am working on several updated pages.

On the physical world side I also cleaned my place today. The trick is keeping it clean!

Great Little Site

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Just got some cool stuff over at Thinkgeek. Honesty most of the stuff over there is useless, but man they make useless really fun. I had to hold back on what I wanted to get. I ended up with some really funny Simpsons posters. Next on my purchase list is the Office Space, red stapler.

Online Food Delivery

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Someone at work gave me a link to a website that takes a bunch of restaurants and lets you order from then for home delivery. This is not new. I do it all the item with some places, and have looked at others. What is new, is that this site has almost 100 restaurants that will deliver to my apartment. This is a vast improvement from my previous options.

The downside is the first order we tried for lunch on thursday gave a credit card error the 4 times I tried to place the order. Because I like the concept I will give them time to work out all the kinks. then I will complain. For now I am cautiously optimistic about this cool new site.

Powerpedia, The Missing Weeks

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I have been horrible at writing this July. It is not because I had nothing to write about. I also probably had time to write. I just didn’t feel compelled to sit down and put anything on paper/digital file. Things have been busy both personally and professionally this month. Some huge projects at work all have major milestones coming up very soon. I am trying to get ready for vacation this friday, and about a half a dozen other things have happened.

I have added a few posts for the past week and a half. I back dated some of them so each post was dated near when stuff actually happened. I know it is cheating, but it is easier that way!