Year: 2008
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Safety is in the eye of the beholder
Today, I attended the mandatory hour-and-a-half ‘newcomer’ safety training for my current work location. I’ve actually been here at this location for three months already, but I wasn’t able to attend the last quarterly conduct because I was too busy actually doing my damn job (I was on a site visit at another location). I also learned this week that my project team is being moved back to my old location next month. So learning how to ‘be safe’ at this location at this stage in the game seems like a bit of a waste of time – hell, I’ve… Read more
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They delayed the Dancing With The Stars vote for THIS?
So here’s to four years of non-specific ‘change’. After a solid 18 months of tedious, blanket media coverage, Barack Obama finally beat John McCain in the U.S. Presidential Election, and will now be the youngest and blackest president in American history. Obama has (at the time of writing) some 349 electoral votes to McCain’s 163 (and he only needed 270 to win). This looks like a good two-thirds majority, but is it really? Bear with me as we take a closer look at the statistics. (Sorry, but my eldest was reading up on citizenship for his Scouts badge, so I was… Read more
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Technology: The Great Disabler
We’re pretty tight on security in this company. Not quite Pentagon tight, but tight to the point where some buildings have X-ray machines and walk-thru metal detectors (although thankfully they don’t make you take your shoes off…). Even so, every so often some bright spark in upper management decides to tighten things up a notch, seemingly just for their own perverse pleasure. For quite some years now we have had electronic badge-access to most of our buildings (at least in the United States). So now you can’t get into the car-park, let alone the actual building, without your badge. Hell,… Read more
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AT&T Suck Ass
A while back, I decided I wanted to upgrade to a BlackBerry. I prefer to communicate in writing rather than on the ‘phone, but find that I don’t communicate as much as I should because I can’t be arsed to get off the sofa and walk upstairs to my study and log on to my PC every time I need to fire off an e-mail. I reasoned that if I could check/send emails from the comfort of my armchair there was more chance of me doing it. Plus, I now get proofreading work assignments via email and I like to… Read more
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Dental damn
Yesterday I paid a long-overdue visit to the dentist. I had been going to another dentist near my old office, but I stopped giving them the benefit of my extensive custom following certain ‘billing disagreements’ over what turned into several hundred dollars worth of ‘cleaning’ (and I use the term ‘worth’ very loosely…). I didn’t think my teeth had actually gotten any worse since I left school as I don’t really have a lot of tooth left to get worse, on account of the school dentist (who I swear was paid by the tooth drilled) drilling out a large portion… Read more