PhoneBoy Says

Over the past several days, I have been spending a lot of time trying to clean my office. Given the sheer amount of stuff in my office, this is no small task.

One of the tasks at hand is dusting. We have cleaning people come in to do the rest of the house, but aside from a quick vacuum up in my office, they don't do any cleaning up here. And that's by design. Meanwhile, if I want things clean, it's my job. I've managed to dust most of the large folding tables with crap on them. The one with the most crap, including the laser printer, has not been completely dusted yet.

As I make my way around the room to dust, I am also taking the opportunity to go through and find redundant or unused equipment and either put it away or throw it away. I've also given a few small items away over the past couple of days. Take that, packrat genes!

Tomorrow, I'll hopefully complete my revolution around the office and vacuum up. I had the cleaning people forgo my office today because I knew I was about to make a bigger mess with all this cleaning I've been doing. ;)

I ask my question in video:

If you have a webcam, just click on the Reply button above or head over to vlip.com. If you don't have a webcam, post your thoughts here.

What were you doing one year ago today?
Submitted by CassandraMorgan.

In California at the office, talking to management and trying to figure out what it was they were paying me to do, exactly, given how different my job was from everyone else in the group. I remember being told flat out "things are a little uncertain right now, hang in there." Which of course, I did, and (ultimately) managed to take the vague direction I was given and did something productive. My yearly review clearly bore that out.

I've worked at the same place for eight years in basically the same group. I started out primarily supporting products, then into managing knowledge, process, and procedures related to our knowledge base, then back to supporting products for a while, and now I've come back to basically managing knowledge in addition to newer products. I have some say in the process and procedures, but a lot of that structure is already in place and I'm mostly just tweaking it.

One thing I have a clearer understanding on that I didn't last year is that I am, in many ways, leading the group. Not in so much as I am a "manager," but rather I am leading by example. That can be both a good and bad position to be in, but so far it has had a lot more upside than down.

Up until he hit school age, Jaden played with girls more than he played with boys. That was mostly due to an utter lack of pre-school boys in the neighborhood at the time. That's changed and now he has a number of "male" friends to play with now.

Today, I took Gracie, Jaden, and his friend Hannah off to the indoor play place I usually take the kids on a weekend. On the way there, Jaden was playing his GameBoy--something I generally forbid him from doing when company is with us--and she was watching and making comments, and so on. They were having a grand old time back there, as was the case most of the time they were together today that I noticed.

Jaden seems to be, well, a little different around Hannah. Jaden generally considers himself "in charge" a heck of a lot. This causes some issues with his peers and it gets interesting when he tries to do that with us, which is often. However, he is perfectly happy not being in charge around Hannah. In fact, he seems to be different around her. And it's not just today, there have been some incidents at school that suggest that he really likes her.

Of course, maybe I'm just projecting something on him that isn't there. However, I can't help but think back to my first crush, which occurred in first grade also. I believe the girl's name was Jenny, but it's been so long ago, I could be wrong. A redhead with lots of freckles, I know that much is true. I always tried to get her to sit next to me in the bus. I don't think it turned into anything, of course, but I remember how she lit up my day--in much the same way that I saw in Jaden today.

Ah, how I long for those simple, carefree days.

Trying to figure out what to write about this evening. I was listening to my "Unrated" playlist--almost done with that, finally--and the acoustic version of Eric Clapton's Layla came on, which I always liked better than the other version. Figured, hey, it's probably on YouTube, and it might make a good post.

Eric Clapton`s layla unplugged

But I found something cooler: a duet he did with Mark Knopfler:

Layla - Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton duet

Which of course, led to the question: what Mark Knopfler stuff is on YouTube? Well, for starters, this absolutely rocking version of Industrial Disease:

Dire Straits - Industrial Disease LIVE '86

And a live version of Brothers in Arms complete with orchestral backing. Does it get any better?

Mark Knopfler - Brothers in Arms

Clearly, I could search YouTube all night and find righteous stuff to watch and listen to. One more: Why Worry?

Why Worry Brussels 26th May 2006

But I've gotta go to bed.

As we approach Saturday morning, I think back to what I watched when I was Jaden's age. And, of course, my reason for getting up bright and early at 7am on Saturday was: Superfriends!

Superfriends

Another favorite was the Laff-A-Lympics:

scooby's all star laff-a-lympics

There are, of course, several others.

Every once in a while, I get a bug to start cleaning some part of my office. Last night, I worked on my wiring closet, which used to look something like:

Now after some cleanup, it looks a little less scary:

Just some of what got removed is shown below:

In the process of putting some of this stuff away, I decided to throw away a couple of trash bags worth of stuff. Felt good to get that old crap out of my office. Problem is: I have plenty more where that came from, and I only have a limited amount of energy for cleaning before I give up, not to mention other work to do. But I'll take progress where I can get it.

haruszpapamentioned it was now possible to embed Twitter on your Vox page. Notthe same thing as putting it in a sidebar, but at least I can put it ina post…

Of course, it appears you can embed just about anything in a post now. Now if we could only do it in the sidebar…

The whole reason we are supposedly doing Daylight Saving Time is because it saves energy. Turns out the study they're using is a few decades old. Meanwhile, Australia chose to extend DST a couple of months for the 2000 Summer Olympics. Guess what? They didn't save energy. In fact, there was an energy increase.

Will someone please just kill Daylight Saving Time, or at least make it permanent so we don't have to keep changing our clocks and dealing with patching computers, cell phones, and everything else that's got a clock in it? Please?