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Work Report - This blog originally focused on work, but it's now focusing on the collection of quotes I've accumulated.
Mike Crowl blogs in two places on Orble, and more than two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
It’s so cold here tonight my left hand is almost incapable of typing. Can’t seem to do anything to get warm. Still, we could be having horrible storms like Auckland and the areas around it are having for the second time in a few days. That’s something we seldom get in Dunedin, thank goodness.
Well, my original job contract of seven or so months at work has run out, and I’m still working. Still getting paid (obviously the pay people haven’t noticed that the contract’s expired!). My own bosses want me to stay on, and say alternative measures will be put in place if my pay stops from Head Office. So I just keep checking my bank statement every fortnight and assume the money will be there as normal.
A second contract is supposed to be in the offing, but hasn’t quite got off the ground yet – and apparently will cause waves if it does get sent off. I just keep doing the job and keep praying everything will sort itself out in due course. My bosses are both used to working in a kind of chaos approach, so they don’t find it all particularly unusual. I’m a bit more of a person who likes to know what the day will bring, where possible
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It’s intriguing to see how often there’s a search done for the short speech Susan Sarandon gives as the character, Beverly Clark, in the movie, Shall We Dance. (That’s the movie in which there’s an airbrush version of Jennifer Lopez, who, in spite of the fact that she looks like she’d break if bent too far still manages to dance very well.)
The speech talks about marriage being a witness to our lives, and I suspect people go to work looking for it to use as a quote for weddings, though I don’t have any stats to prove that
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Well, we've been in Auckland for its worst weekend in quite some time, though we've been fortunate not to have been where things were worst. We didn't have any power outages, flooding, and weren't in any obvious danger, even when driving on the roads. The only damage we saw, in fact, was on the approach to the Harbour Bridge, where a boat had been blown into the side of the road and badly damaged.
It's amazing that none of the other thousands of boats in the harbours weren't equally badly damaged. Auckland has so many boats that you wonder when people ever get the time to sail them all. There were a few sailing on the harbour when we came over in the West Harbour ferry on Friday afternoon, but at that point there was no sign of the storm.
Apparently one canoeist has been lost in the storm, and so have a couple of boaties. Why do people go out in such weather, particularly when the storm warnings were for weather far more severe than normal. There's a certain kind of craziness in some people, it seems, that makes them think they're invincible. I remember the bloke who put our treadmill together several years ago telling me that many young people thought they were 'bulletproof'. It's an interesting word to use, but very apt
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Treadmills everywhere we go.
We started to get back into using our treadmill again the week before last, walking a minimum of ten minutes at a time. I was going well until I started to have my daily nosebleeds, and that put me off a bit. However, I was up and running the night before we came up to Auckland. Running, literally, up to a minute or more at a time, which, considering I don’t really run anywhere anymore is pretty good.
When I was a kid, I used to run everywhere. It was my normal mode of travel. They’d send me out to the shop and I’d be back in half the time they expected. And I was still running a good deal until I was into my late forties, at least, and maybe later
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I've suffered from bleeding noses all my life (as my mother did) and usually I can get them under control fairly easily. However, last Monday I had the mother of all nose bleeds (or at least the worst I'd had in a long while), and it took quite a bit of sorting to get it under control.
Got up the next morning, and things were stable but feeling very blocked up. On the way to work I foolishly had had enough of trying to read through all the blockage, so gave my nose a gentle blow. Not a good idea. I arrived at work with blood all over my face - relatively speaking.
Got that sort of sorted out, and then at lunch time, off it went again. Left the work washroom spotted with blood (as I was told afterwards - it proved that the cleaners actually did do their job). I decided to go home, because I just couldn't concentrate, and, after having had a bit of a rest, managed to do some work from home
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Made a short visit today, to the new Chinese Garden here in Dunedin. It’s only been open officially for a week or two, but already there’s had to be some repair work. When you go in there are a number of little stands with nothing on them. Seems that there were tabletops on these, but some child stood on one, tipped it over and broke it. So there are no tabletops at all, at present.
Probably the child’s parents were paying more attention to their playstation 3 (or some more portable toy) than to the child.
That problem apart, the Garden is lovely and quite different to what I expected. (Maybe I had a Japanese garden in mind!). It’s perhaps more austere than I expected, but I think that may be because the foliage is still in quite early stages. Once it’s all grown up around the rocks and walls and so on, it’ll look better
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An request in Slashdot for some ideas for a TED conference elicited some snide comments, some helpful ones, and some that looked at items that don’t encourage well-off people to spend more money on toys or diet pills, but rather offer help to people in Third World situations.
I can’t tell you exactly who responded in this way, as people on Slashdot tend to use only usernames, but here’s the list he or she came up with
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If you don’t know what Fenphedra is, you’re not alone. I’ve never heard of it till just now, and that was only because it was pointed out to me by another site – and I got curious. Not because I want a diet tablet to take (I don’t) but because it seems to me that all these diet pills are the same, essentially. They mix up a bunch of chemicals and let them loose on the unsuspecting public.
The following is from a Fenphedra review
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There was an article in the paper the other day about Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls. These are four man-made waterfalls built on New York’s East River. They pour down from great heights (between 90 and 120 feet) and are up to 80 feet across. All the water they use is pumped up from the
River itself, a kind of permanent recycling. (Though I don’t think there are any water purifiers involved!)
You can read a full article on the waterfalls in the New York Times, which includes a video about the falls, with their creator speaking, and lots of moving pictures of them
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I remember years ago reading a columnist (it might have been Jilly Cooper, but I’m not sure) who said that too often we modernise something only to make it less of a tool than it was before. She was talking about taps at that point, as it happened, and saying that a set of taps that had been installed in her house were far harder to use than the old ones they’d had taken out.
Can taps be hard to use, would you think? They sure can. For some reason taps are something that designers just can’t leave alone. We have the perfect type of tap already available to us: you turn the top and the water comes out. You turn the top in the other direction and the water stops – generally
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I got a book out of the library the other day called, A Novel in a Year, by Louise Doughty. It looked promising, having started life as a weekly column with the Daily Telegraph online, and being very popular in that format.
But it doesn’t do what it says. While I enjoy reading it, and even doing the exercises, there’s no way you’d write a novel (in a year or more) as a result of it. You might be encouraged to start, but the sheer hard work of writing a novel, while mentioned early in the piece, is only touched on in a surface fashion
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We’ve been having a tough patch at work. There’s a sort of crisis going on in relation to my boss which is causing ramifications throughout our office. Far more paperwork is being processed and reproduced and copied and recopied and printed and so on than seems natural. In fact it ain’t natural; if it wasn’t for the crisis, we’d be getting on with some real work.
The number of times I’ve started something only to have it interrupted within minutes has become beyond counting; it isn’t the fault of either of my two ‘bosses,’ but it’s very stressful all round. We’ll all be very glad when the problem goes away, which hopefully it will very soon. Though we’re not exactly holding our breath either.
And now the technical stuff has become infested by gremlins. My boss’s new computer won’t send or receive email; the printer’s been threatening to go on strike, and finally did today, and wouldn’t accept the replacement cyan cartridge, which was ultra-frustrating. I finally emailed myself home some stuff so I could print it out here! Even had to download a program in order to do so with one of the items. Pooh
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446 Posts dating from December 2006
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