Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

Today IBM announced the World Community Grid (see www.worldcommunitygrid.org). It was in the local newpaper (see the article IBM, United Devices team on new research grid). At work several member of my department were extensively involved (although I was not). It’s nice that my kind of work is in the popular press. We even had a news reporter (R.J. DeSilva) from the local NBC affiliate (www.kxan.com) came and visit today. John, our manager, was interviewed in our lab. It’s supposed to be on the 10 o’clock news tonight. Neat!

Sheesh, I got another training module to do today. I had to mention that I had completed the previous one. This one’s on Energy/Utilities, and like the last I also have very little interest in this job – so I continue to be bored and misused. Oh well, I was told to do it. If this continues for much longer, I’m thinking of doing another job. At least I’ve got more vacation coming at Thanksgiving and Christmas. So instead of starting on this job today, I worked on decoding the internal network protocol for IBM’s LoadLeveler. It was like breaking a code, and time flew by – unlike when I’m doing these training modules.

Well on this past Friday at work I finally finished that job that I felt was a total waste of my time. It was an education module, a presentation, consisting of 42 pages with detailed speaker notes including segues. IMHO, I didn’t have the necessary expertise to do it, but I was told to do it anyways. My feeling is that it is total junk – content free. Nevertheless, it is supposed to be a 40-60 minute module. Just reading the speaker notes to myself took about 50 minutes. So there is more than enough material time-wise. Supposedly I won’t have to record it. They’ll get some else to do that. I am so glad it was done. Yippee! Now I’m not going to shout my completion from the roof tops because they might assign another module to me, which is not something I want to do. Ugh!

Well I’ve been asked by my spouse to prepare to sell a bunch of stuff on e-Bay. We’re in what I call “purge mode”. So, I’ve made a little photo studio and I’m taking pictures with the digital camera for the ads. She hasn’t told me everything that is going to get sold, that is, we haven’t written a list yet, but I can get prepared. I look forward to doing this work because this weekend is a bit slow and it’ll keep me busy. Also she said she would handle the mailing which I consider the biggest pain of doing this. In any case, It’s been a long long time since I’ve done any e-Bay stuff, so I’ve got to re-familiarize myself with it: userid, password, listings, PayPal, etc. Luckily I’ve kept all the old HTML listing I had used in the past, so I’m planning on just updating them. But before I do any more of this, we’re off to do some errands – see ya later…

One of my co-workers, Annette, came by to show me school photos of her two beautiful girls. As a response I opened up a browser and showed her mine. How did I do that? I went to their weblogs and showed her their pictures. Well almost all of them. My dear middle son, Matthew, just restarted his weblog (that’s great) and although he’s got a slick digital camera he’s still not got any pictures (hint, hint). Maybe he doesn’t know how to do it, but I’d be glad to show him if he asks.

Ol’ hazel eyes lookin’ at cha. [Matthew here’s a sample picture so you can get the HTML that’s needed to display an image. Oh, one more thing, you need a website where you can upload and store your images]

We left last Thursday for Sanibel Island to visit Kathy’s college roomate, Annelle, and her husband, Mike.

They’ve live on this island paradise for years. Yet it had been over 30 years since they were together and it seemed like only a month. We all talked, chatted, and laughed for hours on end. We had a wonderful time. Yet only a few weeks ago they lived through hurricane after hurricane especially Charlie that devastated this island. They are still working to cleanup the mess which was still evident. Trees, stumps, brush, siding, and roofs were still in disarray. In addition we went to lunch with MaryFran and Bob in Naples, Florida.We arrived back this morning after getting up at 4:30 AM to catch the flight back. We’re zombies.

We’re travelling today to visit family and friends and to have a short break by ourselves. Love ya all and see ya in a couple.

At work we had a fall picnic yesterday. It was for the organization that my department works for so over 50 people showed up. The organization is the “e-Technology Center” or just the e-TC (where “e” typically stand for “electronic” as in e-business, but nobody says that word but just says “e”). The weather was warm and breezy. BBQ was served with beans and potato salad, and cookies for dessert. As part of the festivities was a mummy wrap where one person stands and another person wraps them in two rolls of toilet paper. The winner is the first person to use up all two rolls, and after that the audience voted, by clapping, for their favorite. Along with the food and games, they had put several pumpkins on the picnic tables along with carving tools and booklets of patterns. So I took it upon myself, with some help by members of my own department, to carve a pumpkin.

Note: I used one of the supplied patterns with a slight adjustment to it. Instead of having “PARTY” above the bat, I put “e-TC”.My pumpkin didn’t win the applause vote, but it was near the top. In any case, I had fun, and it was a nice break to the day and at the end of the week.

Well it’s now been two days since I’ve started on this awful job. I’m collecting the information, creating the materials, and writing what I have to. Right now I think I’m about 50% completed. All I just have to do is continue each day to focus on it and just get it done. At the end of the day I’m beat.

There isn’t much happening, mostly it’s work, run and sleep. But I’m very happy that all my children are posting again. I missed it when they weren’t.