Year: 2008
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I’ll make you one in woodwork
I finally finished the desk I’ve been building all Summer. I started it not long after the kids broke up for summer recess, and I promised myself I’d get it done in time for Finn starting the 4th grade. As it turns out I over-ran by a couple of weeks, but a career in SAP has taught me that this is close enough to be called on-time. I started on this uncharacteristically-ambitious project because Finn needed a new desk so he can knuckle down to some serious schoolwork (hey, a father can dream, can’t he??). Most of the desks in… Read more
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Stairs: The Silent Killer
A couple of years ago, I bristled at a fellow employee berating me for running up the stairs at work and not using the handrail. I argued that using stairs is something that we educated people should be trusted to be able to do without the need for further instruction or the helping hand of a corporate mother-figure. Apparently I was wrong. At my last location (which I’ve thankfully now vacated – geez, what a deathtrap that turns out to have been!) there were signs aplenty around the stairwells (of this two-story building!) advising people to hold the handrail, watch their… Read more
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Internetting as a Contact Sport
I’ve been avoiding the ‘social networking’ sites for a while now (I’m not exactly a social person at the best of times…) but recently I’ve started to feel a bit left out, as everyone else I know seems to be joining in, and my paranoia had me thinking that maybe it’s all some great club and everyone but me is having a jolly old time of it all. I don’t normally make a habit of bowing to peer pressure, but when Farhad told me I needed to sign up for Facebook I thought I may as well jump on the bandwagon. I’m… Read more
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Back in the Saddle
You have to admire their powers of persuasion. The project that was trying to pressgang me a while back have finally managed to second me onto their team. Officially I’m on an 80/20 split, but both projects think they are the 80% so my workload has increased from “Ridiculously busy” to “Sleep, what’s that?”. The work itself is about the same (Change Management / Knowledge Management), but this new project is just starting out so it will be nice to be able to make the right decisions from the outset as opposed to coming in mid-project and trying to get… Read more
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More Rolling Than Coasting
I’m currently in Florida, on the second leg of a two-week family vacation. We arranged this quite some time ago, and decided that we’d drive across as it would work out cheaper than flying. Obviously I hadn’t counted for the rampant rise in gas prices, or the fact that the Explorer only gets around 17 miles to the gallon when I made this decision. But even so it was still cheaper to make the 2,000 mile round trip by car, especially as there were seven of us (the in-laws are also over). Plus, my loathing of air travel would see… Read more