My employed friends almost daily remind me of the travails of life in corporate America. I’d still like a job, thanks.
Month: September 2005
Many of my friends, acquaintances, and former co-workers may be shocked by this, but I agree with Lee: let’s stop talking about Windows.*
If for no other reason than that it’s the same old thing every time Microsoft releases a new version. It’s one thing if persons who have a thing or two invested in the whole usability thing rattle off the pros and cons of the latest Windows interface, but it’s a waste of time and energy to wade through the myriad blatherings by countless Macintosh enthusiasts who feel it is their duty to yet again remind everyone that Windows isn’t as good as the Mac OS.
My wife’s PC has Windows XP installed on it. (With Service Pack 2 and the numerous other patches installed, of course.) It sucks, okay? I don’t like having to dither around on it. But XP is better than Windows 2000, which has to have been the best version of Windows up to that point. No doubt after a bumpy start, Vista will be way better than XP, despite whatever usability fallacies it may suffer.
Microsoft has stolen from Apple. Apple has stolen from Microsoft. (Cool switching, anyone?) The Mac OS is still ahead of Windows in terms of design and usability. We get it. Can we stop talking endlessly about it now?
At least wait until the final product is released…
* (Please note, they’ll be shocked by the Windows part, not the agreeing with Lee part. Well, maybe some of them will be shocked by the Lee part, but likely most of them will just wonder “Who is Lee?”)
For my guys in and from New England, as submitted to Reader’s Digest by Gayla Bieksha, of Hubbardston, Mass:
Blood may be thicker than water, but baseball beats them both. I learned this after explaining to my two boys that they were half-Lithuanian, on their father’s side, and half-Yankee, meaning their other set of grandparents came from an old New England family.
My younger son looked worried. “But we’re still a hundred percent Red Sox, right, Mom?”
Jon asked the question. (It makes me feel old to realize he’s talking about high school classes in his remarks.)
I was getting ready for work. Kel and I had just changed places in the shower; she was watching the Today show when they went live after the first plane it. While I was shaving, I watched the second plane fly in to the second tower.
“A second plane just hit!” I yelled in to the bathroom.
“What?!?!?” was the reply from my wife.
“The first plane was no accident,” I told her. The early speculation after the first plane struck was that it was an accident of some sort. I, and millions of others, knew right then it was no accident.
We both finished getting ourselves ready, watching the news the entire time. I was on the road to the office when the first tower fell. Tears were in my eyes, and the thought that kept running through my head was Those poor people…
I was at work for around an hour before they sent us home. At the time, my wife was working in the tallest building in downtown Dallas. Building management shut it down; my wife never even made it up to her office to be sent home. We spent the rest of the day in the living room, glued to the news.
Yesterday, Jeff said:
On another subject, tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of 9/11. What’s there to say about that? It seems like a lot of Americans would like to forget the events of that day. I don’t really blame them. Denial is a legitimate reaction to trauma. But I think we’d be better served by remembering than forgetting. I think we’d be better off taking the day tomorrow to think about what happened on that Tuesday morning four years ago, to remember the shock and the horror and the grief. Because I think that remembering it will honor the dead and fill us with a terrible resolve that nothing like it shall ever happen again.
Likewise, the Toad implores us to never forget.
Our pastor touched briefly on this in worship this morning. Our church is involved in several different areas of providing relief services to persons displaced by Katrina. We’ve adopted 22 families that have been relocated to the Dallas area, among other initiatives. One thing Tim told us was to keep a marathon mindset with regard to this help we were providing. Just as too many people in this nation lost sight of what 9/11 meant for our country, too many people will forget about the hundreds of thousands affected by Katrina in the coming months. We can forget neither.
Keep the long view in mind. Pace yourself; the war against the Islamofascists who attacked us on 9/11 will be a marathon, not a sprint. Do not forget.
An unsolicited copy of the premier issue of Men’s Vogue arrived in the daily post.
What.
The.
Hell.
???
The Oz has spoken.
I use Safari Enhancer to kill the brushed metal look of Safari. I just used iTunes Unified to change iTunes 5’s Unifed-Metal look to normal Unified.
So why is it my chat client has to have brushed metal? What the hell is wrong with me?
A friend wondered via IM this evening why New Orleans is getting all the press, post-Katrina. My response was because it’s New Orleans. Gulfport, Biloxi, Pass Christian: they’re not famous for anything, whereas the Crescent City is famous for food, music, and floozies. (And not necessarily in that order.)
Also, the water came in to Gulfport, et al, then left. When you have a metropolis that’s below sea level, the water comes in and it stays, aka, the “bowl effect.”
What is doubly unfortunate for Mississippi residents is their state’s decision to put all of its eggs in the basket of the casinos, some of which are now in the middle of highways and further inland. These were previously floating casinos, mind you. Personally, I saw little in terms of results with regard to the casino revenue bootstrapping the state up from the bottom of every good list and off the top of every bad list things are measured by. Perhaps the silver lining for Mississippi will be the forcing of the state and local governments to look at alternative forms of revenue, etc., instead of relying on gambling, which, let’s be honest, annually took in more money from its own residents than it did tourists.
This was especially true once Louisiana legalized gambling, and goes back to the point of being famous mentioned above. Why go to Gulfport or Biloxi to gamble when you can do it in New Orleans?
So in the hope of showing at least a sliver of the Internet-using population why Mississippi is as deserving of your donations as the Big Easy, I’ll point you to photos of the devastation courtesy of the Florida Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.
I realize with a new, slimmer design, Apple would want a new moniker to grace its smallest-iPod-with-a-screen, but who came up with Nano? That word should imply something very small, as in smaller than the Shuffle, which the Nano is not. Better they had kept the Mini name for this range of iPods, or possibly gone with Micro.
Ben Stein rips in to the media and Angry Left over the Katrina-is-Bush’s-fault blame game. You know it must be bad if it’s raising Ben’s ire.