• Finding tidings from home in all the wrong places

    There are times (thankfully not very often) when I’m sitting in my office and I have this overwhelming feeling that I’m in the wrong place. Usually the right place is someplace at home, preferably in a more horizontal position. These times have come a little more often since my little boy was born.

    This is when I’m glad I have a web site and internet access at work. It’s cool that a few others can occasionally peek in at our little corner of the world, but the best part about this site is that I can peek in on things at home whenever I feel like I’d rather be there. It brings a little piece of home to where ever I happen to be.

  • Can a quarter of the Earth’s population be wrong?

    I have decided that I don’t need anymore rounding as a person. Friends, it’s time for a diet. In true gadget geek form, I’ve immersed myself in lists, digital scales, digital nutrition books, and spreadsheets. If commitment can be measured in collateral stuff, then I must be in it for the long haul.

    How am I doing it; South Beach, Atkins, Weight Watchers? Nope, I’m sticking with good old fashioned starvation. The great thing about starvation is that you always know when it’s working, if you’re hungry then you know you’re sticking to your diet. Why, in just a couple of days I’ve found it can be a real boon for my perception of self worth. Every moment of every day can be a rewarding experience. As I see it, there’s only a couple of drawbacks to starvation: 1) it’s not much better for you than being overweight; and, 2) it’s a difficult lifestyle to maintain long term.

    Oh all right, I’m not really starving myself. Well, I’m not exactly starving myself anyway. After extensive internet research (insert groan here) I’ve put together a rather complex (hair-brained) system of food substitution and calorie counting. Out is all of the crap I’ve been eating at work and snacks at home. Out are all of those crap frozen dinners. In are more nutritious snacks, based on a combination of their flavor and nutritional value. In are more wholesome frozen dinners. In is a Palm based spreadsheet for tracking everything I eat (just like a good bureaucrat). The one drawback to this system is we’re quickly learning it’s MUCH more expensive to eat healthy.

    Ah, junk food, I guess you’re damned if you do and broke if you don’t.

    On a side note, I have a question, where exactly did the expression “hair brained” come from? Was it originally meant to be an unflattering metaphor for women’s intelligence? (Based on the stereotype that women typically have longer hair then men?) If so, please know that I meant no offense Cheryl.

  • Embracing bureaucracy

    The dream of a paperless office died about two hours and thirty-three minutes after our “paperless” case management system came online more than ten years ago. Since then our capacity to do lots of work has gone way up, but it has resulted in a flood of paper; with nary a reduction in sight. It is with this in mind that I have proposed a new measurement standard for work. Counting the varying “units” produced is so ’90s. Since every bureaucrat worth his weight in paper knows that anything worth a damn has a form assigned to it, I say the new universal measurement for office productivity should be the pound (not to be confused with British currency).

    “John, the employee of the month, produced an ASTOUNDING 2.2 tons of work this month! Let’s hear it for John!”