PhoneBoy Says

The guys from JibJab are at it again…

In catching up with the RSS feeds, I ran across this article on Web Worker Daily about being undermanaged. It made me think back to my most recent performance review and reviews in the past. Basically, though I have a few bosses and they point me in a general direction, they pretty much let me do my thing. I check in with him when I need help with something, which isn't that often. I work across the organization to accomplish my goals and do my best to help others accomplish theirs. And, as a result, my performance reviews has almost uniformly been excellent.

Part of the reason I am undermanaged is that I am physically away from the office. The management I can be offered is limited to phone and IM most of the time. However, I have also consistently proven myself not to require a ton of management. So maybe I'm being undermanaged in the average sense, but for me personally, I am being managed just right. I suspect others require different levels of management. A good manager will manage different people differently.

Yes, it's what you think.

I have mixed feelings about this. I grew up with a lot of things going on in front of me that I shouldn't have seen, though it mostly involved the consumption of certain illegal substances instead of sex. I did walk in on my mom and my step-father once. They weren't having intercourse, but it was clear that it was the intended conclusion. I didn't ask questions because, quite frankly, I had seen worse in porno movies by that point.

Personally, I am not a big fan of doing the dance of love in front of my kids, nor am I a big fan of doing "illegal substances" in front of them either. Do I think people should be thrown in jail for doing these things? I really don't know. That stuff happened in front of me and I turned out okay. Is it the government's job to ensure that people are "decent" parents, whatever that means?

The Nokia Tune, otherwise known as Grand Valse on some older Nokia handsets, has become the perennial tune one hears as the default ringtone when they buy a Nokia handset. Nokia recently came up with versions of this ring tone for the MIddle Eastern market (with a tip of the hat to Darla Mack):

Of the bunch, I think the old labeled "morearabic" is the best of the bunch. I might even go so far as to put it on my phone, though I hate the trouble of moving ringtones from phone to phone.

Jaden & Gracie love dancing to this Joan Jett song on the Shrek soundtrack.

I decided I'd replace the custom banner on my site with this "work of art," if you want to call it that:

Basically, I had taken a picture of the moon with my Nokia N80 Internet Edition, which I posted earlier:

Unfortunately, the picture had a lot of noise in it. I was able to clean up most of it in iPhoto, but iPhoto has an irritating problem: I tried to size the picture exactly to 940x200 as required by Vox. iPhoto could never tell me if the region I selected would actually be 940x200.Punting, I decided to take the original and head over to my good old friend The Gimp. They have a Mac version, and clearly trying to figure out how the hell to accomplish what I wanted was beyond my patience. I did, however, happen to stumble on a happy accident that looked kind of cool. So I said, what the hell, and there you have it.

Bouncing, of course. Taken with Nokia N80ie in Sports mode.

Oh, how I love Weird Al. While I've never heard the original R Kelly song, I have to believe Weird Al's parody of it is just masterful. An animated video to go with it.

I am looking at my calendar for the next several weeks, and I realize that I am going to be a waterlogged sponge when I get done with it.

Next week will be relatively easy as I am taking the week off. Jaden has half days, which will mean lots of kid time.

The following two weeks, I will be taking a CISSP class from the comfort of my home. It means two weeks of mornings listening to all the wonderful ways you must understand security if you want to get the vaunted CISSP certification, which I am going for this year.

Once that class is over, I'm taking a Product Management class in New York City. Found the one I took last year helpful, so I am going to take another. It might be an interesting career direction in a few years, but meanwhile, it helps me in my job today since I spend a lot of time dealing with Product Managers.

And FTW, I am also starting a weekly class on Intrusion Detection Systems thru SANS. The first two classes will overlap with my CISSP class as well as my Product Management class in NYC. The times don't overlap, fortunately, but it does make for a couple of very soggy days brain-wise. That class runs through early July.

If I seem a little out of sorts next month, you'll know why.