RedJen's Rearview Mirror

* The longer the title, the less important the job.

* Everything can be filed under 'miscellaneous.'

* Never delay the ending of a meeting or the beginning of a cocktail hour.

* To err is human, to forgive is not company policy.

* Important letters that contain no errors will develop errors in the mail.

* There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but there is always enough time to do it over.

* If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you will get out of it.

* If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done.

* At work, the authority of a person is inversely proportional to the number of pens that person is carrying.

* When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried.

* No one gets sick on Wednesdays.

* Machines that have broken down will work perfectly when the repairman arrives.

* Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it, makes it worse.

Someone has secretly replaced the ogre who has been playing my boss with a human being. This makes me confused. I know that at least two people in management have spoken with him recently about me, but the person I spoke to today didn’t bear much resemblance to the one I’ve been dealing with for the last three months. I’m not going to start turning cartwheels or anything, but it was a pleasant exchange for a change. The person who has been hounding me for months about a piece of work that wasn’t possible to do until recently actually told me that he wasn’t hung up on getting it immediately. He actually said that I didn’t actually have to work this weekend. Really, did he get replaced or returned?

As you've probably noticed, I haven't felt much like writing lately. It would seem in the absence of my own voice, I have somehow been provided with other things that I find interesting or humorous to post. This morning saw the arrival of Day Light Saving time.

The clock is running. Make the most of today!

To realize the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed a grade.
To realize the value of ONE MONTH, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.
To realize the value of ONE WEEK, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.
To realize the value of ONE HOUR, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.
To realize the value of ONE MINUTE, ask a person who missed a plane.
To realize the value of ONE SECOND, ask a person who just avoided an accident.
To realize the value of ONE MILLISECOND, ask the person who won a silver medal in the Olympics.

Treasure every moment that you have! And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time.

And remember that time waits for no one...

QUESTIONS:
(The answers can be found in the "Continue Reading...")

1. How many months have 28 days?
   
2. How many species of each animal did Moses take aboard the ark?
   
3. If a plane crashed on the border of the USA and Canada, where should the survivors be buried?
   
4. How far can a bear walk into the woods?
   
5. What is the value of coin dated 24 B.C.?
   
6. How many grooves does a 45rpm phonograph record have?
   
7. A camper leaves her camp, hikes 1 mile south, then 1 mile east where she sees a bear. Then she hikes 1 mile north to arrive at her camp. What color is the bear?
   
8. If a rooster lays an egg on the peak of a roof , will the egg roll to the left side or to the right side?
   
9. If a south bound electric train is traveling at a rate of 66 miles per hour and the wind is blowing to the north at 35 miles per hour, which way will the smoke blow?
   
10. On which side of a chicken are the most feathers?

See how you did. I got 9/10 correct before looking.

…only two left until the weekend. Did I mention I’m tired?

The theme of this week is finding things I enjoy at work and concentrating on them, mainly because I’m not at all comfortable with the idea of really trusting my boss. He’s playing like everything is nice. We’ve only had a temporary problem with communication. I’m not buying this, I’m kicking butt and taking names.

I have to wonder exactly why someone would think that putting a link to a site referring to adult content with juvenile males would be okay. That’s insane! I’m getting sick of all the stupid spam I’ve been getting in my email lately. Now I have to go through my blog and the blogs I host to clean out the smut links.

We haven't seen you in a while, but I hope all is well.

Yikes, is it April all ready? So with me in NC and Claire in Iowa, do you figure Cass will end up in Maine?

Images on the sidewalk speak of a dream's descent
Washed away by storms to graves of cynical lament
Dirty canvases to call my own
Protest limericks carved by the old pay phone

In your picture book I'm trying hard to see
Turning endless pages of this tragedy
Sculpting every move you compose a symphony
You plead to everyone, "see the art in me"

Broken stained-glass windows, the fragments ramble on
Tales of broken souls, an eternity's been won
As critics scorn the thoughts and works of mortal man
My eyes are drawn to you in awe once again

And in your picture book I'm trying hard to see
Turning endless pages of this tragedy
Sculpting every move you compose a symphony
You plead to everyone, "see the art in me"

And in your picture book I'm trying hard to see
Turning endless pages of this tragedy
Sculpting every move you compose a symphony
You plead to everyone, "see the art in me."
~Jars of Clay~

When the world is quiet and time stands still, are you content with the silence or do you reach out beyond yourself? Do you ask questions or are you content with what you already understand? Do you ask for riches, knowledge or understanding?

There is one prayer that I have always felt quite personal about and always comes from my heart. From the time I was child, I’ve always begged for the same things:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Lions and Orchids

Thank you Feral Girl, I needed a laugh and I found this in my email from you.

Not Badger, Bunny: Easta' Bun

There's no getting around it - I'm a geek. Last week, I used a binder clip (fancy paper clip) to put my hair into a ponytail. Today, I was so caught up in editing code that when I left work and went to the gym, I didn't realize I had a pencil in my hair until after I was done working out and my trainer was helping me stretch. In fact, he's the one who found the pencil.

If you have a Microsoft system and you haven’t already, go and get the critical updates that were released Tuesday evening. At least four of them have been deemed critical to the systems at work, so just take care of it. Getting a computer virus really sucks and if you can be proactive about patching your system before it hurts you, you should.

On a similar note: if you don’t have a firewall between you and the internet, you are asking for trouble. If you need a free one, Zone Alarm from Zone Labs has a decent free model. If you don’t want to take my word on it, go to CNET and check out their software comparisons.

To recap:

1. Patch your Operating Systems as needed (be proactive!). Big software companies don’t like to tell people their programs are broken, so when they tell you they are broken, fix it.
   
2. Get tested. Make sure you have an anti-virus program that runs AND routinely (weekly) get an updated list of viruses.
   
3. Practice safe Internet (Make sure there is a firewall between you an the internet. You never know where someone else’s program has been.)

(Devine),
Surround me as I speak,
The bridges that I walk across are weak
Frustrations fill the void that I can't solely bare

(Devine),
Don't let me fall apart
You've held me close to you
I have turned away and searched for answers
I can't understand

They say that I can move the mountains
And send them falling to the sea
They say that I can walk on water
If I would follow and believe
With Faith Like a Child

Sometimes,
When I feel miles away
And my eyes can't see your face
I wonder if I've grown to lose
The recklessness I walked in light of you

They say that I can move the mountains
And send them crashing to the sea
They say that I can walk on water
If I would follow and believe
With Faith Like a Child

They say that love can heal the broken
They say that hope can make you see
They say that faith can find a Savior
If you would follow and believe
With Faith Like a Child
~Jars of Clay~

Well it's Saturday and I just woke up from a wonderful nap. I'm not sure why, but I've gotten into the habit of waking up at the (ab)normal time of 7 am on the weekends to feed the critters, getting some breakfast, checking my email and then taking a nap where I usually sleep longer than I did before I woke up. I have no clue, but I suppose if I can't convince my body to just sleep in on the weekends, this will have to do.

I had two interesting conversations in the last few days on similar topics. Now that I've slept, they have me thinking.

I was in a meeting on Wednesday morning, where once we'd taken care of business, the four of us began chatting about things that need to be done around our houses. One of the people I work with just bought a new house and may be qualified to start a lawn care consulting firm if he ever gets bored with computers. I now know way too much about how to pamper and care for a new lawn, starting from dirt. A second (D) commented on how his neighbor would love to have the first for a neighbor. It turns out that D would be quite content with grass that his children can play upon, rather than the perfect manicured lawn his neighbor obsesses over.

(I'm just trying to let my lawn grow and get green before I start mowing it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Once the lawn care seminar was over, D and I went back to my desk so that he could ask me some more specific questions about how to administer the data that was addressed in the meeting. This makes sense because I wrote the tool he'll be using for this task. D reflected that his family is the token white family in the neighborhood where they live. They live in a nice neighborhood of $250k + homes, where the families are well above the poverty line and are most likely composed of at least one successful professional and children. D expressed frustration that no matter how much effort he has put toward making friends with the people of his neighborhood, his family is kept at arms length and treated as questionable.

D's comments brought to mind the confusion I felt when I moved to Columbus and started college. I moved from a small midwestern town where we had about 3 African American families. While the population was primarily of Caucasian descent, there were also those of Asian, Middle-Eastern, Latino, Pacific Islander and African descent. If we had been required to meet certain percentages of people termed minorities, we would not have been able to comply for lack of people. What we did have was a common upbringing, where we were told from the beginning that regardless of skin color, everyone was equal. Billy was about 2 years ahead of me in school and he was the same as the other popular upperclassmen. He was on the football team, he hung out at Pizza Hut after the game on Friday night and he dated a cheerleader. The cheerleader was and still is Caucasian.

(Cover your eyes, shocking information to follow.)

I just finished a 6-week power lifting cycle at the gym. The awesome news is that I dropped a net of 6 pounds, increased my max bench press by 25 pounds and decreased my body fat percentage by 5%. What makes this so great is that based on the advice of a nutritionist, I altered my eating habits so that I’m pretty much eating all the time and I gained 5 pounds before my body became convinced that I was really going to keep eating and my metabolism kicked in. So if you count the 5 pounds I put on after starting, I actually lost 11 pounds, but I’m going to say I lost 6 pounds and my metabolism kicked back into gear. My max bench press had been the same since I was a senior in High School, so to have a 25-pound increase is great. The actual goal for the last 6 weeks was to decrease my body fat percentage by 3%, so I’m thrilled to have surpassed that goal.

Another thing that has come out of this training cycle is that my body responds well to heavy weight training. Apparently this isn’t the case with a lot of women who are looking to reshape their bodies. Many women can do a lot of cardiovascular work to burn off body fat. I, on the other hand, apparently need to ramp up my metabolism through strength training. I’ll admit, the day after a good workout, I really like being able to feel that my muscles have been taxed. It is a good feeling, it lets me know that I worked hard at something and that gives me personal satisfaction. It is also nice to know that if I have to, I can lift heavy objects on my own.

I’m considering adding to my list of minimal qualifications for a date. There are two similar, but different options I’m considering:

1. You must weigh more than I can bench press.
   
2. You must be able to lift more weight than I can.

Gotta love being independent. I love the idea of having people in my life because they make me a better person and I want them there. I can survive on my own. I can meet my own basic survival needs, so I don’t need people in my life for the sole reason of performing a task or paying a bill. I have some awesome people in my life and the best are ones that I know would give me anything they could if I needed it. I don’t plan on asking for anything too often, but these are the people I trust beyond all reason. These are the people that I’d do the same for without hesitation.

This is pretty cool. My mom is a lab tech and it is nice to see the people that do the job behind the scenes get acknowledged for what they do.

National Medical Laboratory Week (NMLW) is a special time set aside to recognize medical laboratory professionals. It is a time of celebration for the approximately 265,000 medical laboratory professionals and 15,000 board certified pathologists who perform and interpret medical laboratory tests. NMLW recognizes the vital role these professionals play in every aspect of health care.

I am getting some of the most bizarre spam mail this week. It would appear that the new trend is moving away from s3xy and S*E*X*Y to random words pulled out of the dictionary. I don’t think I’ve seen the word bivalve in print since I briefly took Zoology in college. I guess they expect me to want to read an email with a subject of: “mead bivalve francoise penance dither exercisable row adiabatic circa left satyr haiti remington downcast eightfold berg auditor pearlite bechtel berry”. I suppose I could be concerned that someone lost their vocabulary list for the week.

When search engines first started to get popular, people would put a bunch of text on their pages that matched the background so that when you opened the page you didn’t see the words, but they were there and the search engines saw them. That started to be less useful as the search engines became more sophisticated and smarter. Now that junk mail filters have become smarter about catching garbage subject lines, it would appear that the next thing we’ll be searching for are vocabulary lists.

Today was the first day I had gotten any response from Zanuc since 10/28/03. That's 6 months of no communication with your customers. I know for a fact that I'm not the only person who has tried to contact Zan-SUCK. They are loosing customers because of lack of response and I am more than happy to tell anyone who asks hot to gain control of their own domain names by appealing to Enom for assistance.

When I went to their billing site, I found this:

7:30 am – 4:45 pm working
4:45 pm – 6:10 pm drive to gym, workout, drive home
6:10 pm – 12:30 am working

Spring quarter at Ohio State is filled with sun, games, doing homework outside, pretending to do homework outside and it all centers on the Oval. Most universities have their main common area, for Ohio State the Oval is it. This year the Oval is getting a face-lift.

This spring, the students almost didn’t get to enjoy the Oval, because it was going to be closed on May 1st in order to allow for the construction effort of the face-lift. Two students organized an effort to have construction pushed back until after spring commencement. While they gathered almost 9,000 signatures and a put together a very popular internet petition, the university wasn’t able to come up with the extra $212,000 needed to complete the project on time if it was delayed until June.

I’m sure you are wondering what the heck this has to do with “Drink More Coke!”

Coca-Cola picked up the $212,000 tab. I’ll be drinking Coke for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, a week staring at the wall sounds good about now...

And I thought I left my brain under my pillow this morning…

I got an email this morning from a confused person who couldn’t figure out why the button she was told to push didn’t work and complaining that it should have been better tested. When I scrolled down, I found that she had been unable to get the image of the picture to work for her. The image is in the instructions that say, “1. Go to a specific view of the data. 2. Click the button at the top of the view.” Oops, there’s no code behind the picture in the directions, you actually have to do step one and go to the view to find a button that works…

... and the horse you rode in on!

I'll get into it later...

As you may be able to guess, I’ve had an incredible week. If you buy that, I have a bridge for sale that you’ll love and I’m running a special on ocean front property in Arizona.

To make a miserable story short, I don’t fell at all guilty about taking some time this week to revamp my resume. But I’m supposed to feel good that since I’ve worked over 140 hours of overtime in April, it shows that I can contribute at a high level. For those keeping score: April has 4 weeks, a standard workweek is 40 hours and with 32.5 hours of over time per week, I probably could have earned the same wage per hour working at Taco Bell.

I suppose I was kidding myself to think that since we are in the middle of an audit, it was important to make sure things were documented and current. Silly me, there I went thinking again.

About a month ago, I had the feeling that I would probably be moving on to a different job. I should have gone with that, it would have meant more sleep over the last weeks. So now I have an open release date to look for other jobs inside the company. I’m interested to see who gets to pick up the list things I end up doing that I don’t get credit for every month. There are reports that have to be written and submitted, tools that the department has committed to support and from the discussion that I had today leads me to believe that the support projects aren’t even being considered. It is only the new projects that my boss seems to be concerned with ensuring someone else can take over.

I’m not sure what I’ll do. The idea of working for a smaller company is appealing right now. The thing is I’ve never really worked for a small to mid-sized company, so I’m not familiar with the culture. Right now, I don’t know much. I know that I’ll be making some choices over the next month, what they will be I’m not sure.

So yeah, I was biting my tongue today, when I really wanted to say was: “(Blank) you and the horse you rode in on!”