PhoneBoy Says

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.

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.