As I woke up this morning on the far side of the planet (Taiwan) I am saddened to see that 51% of Americans put Bush back in office. The international reaction was predictably muted, but it is obvious we haven’t made many friends around the world with this president.
I look forward to returning home and hearing how it is we ended up with the same guy in charge as when I left.
After a bit of a travel streak out promoting some new products for the company, I am back in town for a few days. Looks like there is more travel on the horizon, however, thanks to a large amount of folks who just haven’t seen the technology or heard the pitch. Bummer for me.
I hope to be able to get at least a little laundry done and do those important but mundane things like pay a few irregular bills, get the car tag renewed, get smogged, buy groceries, etc. If not I think I’ll have a wave of notices stuck to my door in the coming weeks.
I’m spending this week in NYC on yet another press tour stint. Again I’m with the group I went with last week and I’m no better off this time than I was last time. In fact, I’m a bit worse, thanks to sharing a room with one of them.
I also happen to be at the tale end of the same cold that I picked up in Dallas two weeks ago. It may end up that my cold is the only thing that gets me so peace, since no one wants to be around people who cough and sneeze.
It’s a good bet that this week will be painful and it hasn’t even started yet.
I’m back from my Texas trip to a friends wedding and I brought back an old friend: the common cold. I am now coughing up lung cookies and feeling generally really poor. On top of this I have the joy of a splitting headache and one of the worst travel stories on record.
For those of you following my travails as an immanently soon-to-be-unemployed person, take a look at my spiffy updated work history and business network on LinkedIn.
After years of trying to fight the good fight I’m looking for another job again. It isn’t by choice, but my official search has begun in earnest this week. There are some opportunties within the company, but I will look outside as well. It bites that this decsision to look wasn’t a voluntary one, but it has to be done nonetheless.
If I could learn to be dispassionate about what I do I’m sure things would go smoother for me. Until then, I need to find something else that drives me to get up and do the daily grind. I hope that I can find that soon, else the bills really start to pile up!
It’s always a fascinating experience to hunt down and eliminate bugs. It is even more so when the bug is “no satellite info” displayed on the TiVo screen. So it was with great surprise and unhappiness that I found this message on my TV last night and no signal present on the TiVo.
I checked the usual suspects: tree branches blocking the dish, loose cables, a TiVo reboot, temperature check, etc. All of these turned up empty. Since it was late I went to bed and wondered what the problem could be.
This morning I trekked out to the cable closet at the end of the complex. There I found dozens of coax cables cut completely through. Seeing this, I decided to go pickup a cable / line tester at Fry’s. To my reserved amazement, yes, some of those cut wires were indeed mine. How did this happen? Why would someone do this?
Just a few hours after doing all of the legwork to determine this, a Comcast technician drives by. Our conversation goes like this:
After that he sped out of the parking lot faster than I’ve ever seen an installer go. Something tells me that they probably did this on purpose, since clearly there are bits of cut cable and coax ends strewn all over the closet. I think I’ll be having some words with Comcast shortly.
For the second straight year I had a pretty sucky 24 hours leading up to and after my birthday. I spent most of the day loading equipment, moving heavy objects, and generally sweating, working to tear down a tradeshow booth. I woke up my mom early in the morning (sorry!) and hung up on my brother. I then had to rush to check out of the hotel where I was staying and sit in the lounge for 4 hours before I could go to the airport.
Although the flight back happened on time, again I had the distinct honor to sit next to someone who could not fit completely into their assigned seating, thus spilling over into mine. He watched South Park and GI Joe DVDs for most of the flight. I just tried to catch a little sleep and listen to some music. Upon arriving a few minutes early at San Jose, in typical SJC airport style, there was no gate crew. This left us sitting in the airplane for 10 minutes while some employees were rounded up to allow us off the plane. Then I sat in the baggage area for the next 40 minutes waiting for something, anything, to come off the luggage belt.
By the time it was all over and I got home it was almost 1am. When I got up the morning of the 16th I managed to find a wasp and get stung in the ass.
Again, a stunning birthday for the record books.
Anyone that knows me also knows I have done some dumb things in my life. Most of them are blissfully concealed by my sheltered personal life. Some of them are amazingly dumb and public, especially when it comes to work.
So you can imagine my surprise when I see my former employer doing really dumb things without me causing them.
To be fair, press releases and public posts are rarely what they appear to be. However, when you see commentary like this from your press release partner, you have got to step back and know that the public will smell something fishy.
This is one time where I’d bet my inside contacts can’t even tell me what is going on. I hope that John Carmack finally gets his other venture off the ground so that he can leave the PC world behind and tell us what really happened.
I think that is the most links I’ve ever put in a post. Wow!
I had an interesting “outside the box” experience today with the 4Runner. For reasons unknown, I listened to a buddy of mine and took it in to another service center to have it looked at. The prognosis on first glance looked grim: this truck looked like, acted like, and smelled (yes, it actually smelled) dead.
Then something miraculous happened: they called me today and said that it was mostly fixed*. How could this be? Surely it was a mistake. So I zip over to the garage, listen to the whole story skeptically, pay my roughly $530 and take it for a test drive. And it works! I don’t know how, but this little garage just took a $7500 repair job and replaced it with about $600 worth of work.
I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but is seems like the Toyota dealership screwed me on the last service visit. It’s not like this doesn’t happen often (this is me we’re talking about) but in this case the screw up was so bad it could have ended with the 4Runner destroyed or in an accident. As one co-worker puts it, “this sucks rocks.” Looks like a rant session at the dealership is in order soon.
*Long story just a bit longer is, with one more service visit (and another $400 out of pocket) the 4Runner should be back to normal. It was some sort of combination of shot timing belt, broken cog/gear thing at the front of the engine/transmission, and a whole lot of misfiring that caused the truck to act dead. Now it’s running as good (if not better) than it ever did. One more part replacement should take it off the critical list. Moral: never believe the dealership, ever. Lesson relearned again.
It is inevitable that this will happen, thanks to my heavy travel schedule. The airline (Alaska) has “temporarily misplaced” one of my pieces of luggage. What makes this sting all the more is that its a roll aboard bag that I never check. I was just lazy today so I checked it.
This must be some sort of psychic message to me to fly less. Or at least travel lighter.
