Posts from — March 2008

My hours of operation at work are:
Monday - Friday
8 a.m. - 5:15 p.m.

Driving in this morning I watched some maniac weaving in and out of his lane obviously distracted by something. After catching up to him at a traffic light, it turns out he was fiddling with his stupid on board navigation system. Pay attention you moron.

In the office I often see people walking down the hallway reading their Blackberry’s paying no attention to anyone around them. Are they really that busy to disconnect from polite interaction with other people?

And loud cell phone talkers are constantly annoying me almost everywhere I go. Do they really need to make that important call where everyone can’t help but hear their stupid conversation? I don’t think so. What can all these people be talking about? Hang up the phone you slobs. And don’t even get me started about those idiotic bluetooth devices people wear. No you are NOT that important, you are just a loser.
So because people don’t practice simple manners in public, I think these devices should be banned from use. If you can’t drive and talk on the phone or pay attention to where you’re going in the hall, get rid of the damn thing until you can use it correctly.

One of my favorite authors ever Arthur C. Clarke, died yesterday at 90. I have very fond memories reading his books when I was younger. They were a big part in the development of my interest in computers and technology. I guess there will never be a TWA flight to a space station orbiting the moon in my lifetime but it was fun imagining it while reading Mr. Clarke’s stories.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

There are loads of very useful Web 2.0 pages available on the internet. Here are the sites I use regularly:

Jott - call Jott and it will transcribe your voicemail into an email. So don’t type to send a text message, just use Jott. If you want to send an entry to your blog, call Jott and it will do it for you.
Remember The Milk - a very handy online To Do manager. You can even send a Jott to RTM to add an item to your to do list.

Grand Central - give people your Grand Central phone number and your cell, house and office phone all ring simultaneously. When you sign up, ou are assigned a local phone number with the usual features like voice mail and caller ID. Right now its in beta and its free.

Page Once - from their site: “simply select your personal accounts from social networking, email and travel to entertainment, banking, credit cards and add them to your personal page.”

Mint - “the free, automatic online way to manage your money.”

Stuffsafe - online home inventory.

Sheesh, I didn’t need the bottle cap to tell me that.

I’ve started to write letters of complaint to companies that do things to annoy me. I wrote to BBC America to protest the huge banner that blocks the bottom of the screen during the entire broadcast of my favorite show.
The general manager at dealership where I took my car for repair last week got a stern letter from me about the bad service I received from their cashier.
And everyone remembers my famous letter to the Heinz ketchup folks last year.
I know this campaign of mine may not always produce results but it makes me feel better. If you want to start kvetching, there are several web sites that give advice about how to write an effective complaint letter.

Mark has some clever ways to deal with telemarketers. He comes up with funny lines to have fun when they call trying to sell things to him.
One bit involves the telemarketer calling and asking for his wife. Mark responds by asking “Are you the son of a bitch who is sleeping with my wife? Don’t ever call here again!” Click.
Another favorite is when they again ask to speak to his wife, he replies in a depressed tone “She’s not here right now and I don’t think she’s ever coming back.” Speechless, the telemarketer hangs up and never calls again.

Even at work I often hear him talking loudly into the phone acting like there’s a problem with the connection. “Hello? I can’t hear you. Hello?” Then he hangs up. Then we know its another call from a salesperson he’s trying to avoid. It’s very funny.

His tactics work well and the people rarely call back to annoy him.

It’s weird but for a short time now I’ve been noticing two phrases being used over and over.  “To your point” and “that being said” are being used in conversations all the time.  I don’t recall ever hearing them prior to about a year ago.  Just an observation.

New feature for the site: click on the links below each entry to add the article to your favorite social networking sites like Digg, Del.i.cious and StumbleUpon.  You’ll find the icons by clicking on the title of the entry.

So I attended a meeting this morning. It’s a rare occasion for me to accept a meeting invite since I think they’re all a huge waste of time. But a friend was presenting and I promised I would go to support her.

Yesterday the attendees received an agenda and presentation materials to review before the actual meeting. I read with interest all the new things coming up within the IT department. We’re getting an updated version of MS Office, there is a new trick to fixing a problem I’ve been having with laptops and our migration away from the previous owners network domain will soon be complete.

Then at the actual meeting, I listened with little interest the exact same things, word for word I just read in the presentation materials the day before. One by one these boring people (sorry friend), came up and read verbatim right from the slide. I just don’t see the point of these snoozefests. I read everything I needed before the actual meeting in a fraction of the time.

Then there are the  morons who ask questions by just restating something that was just said a moment ago. Speaker: “We’ll be migrating the domain over by the end of March.” Attendee: “Question. So when will you be migrating the domain over?” I wanted to slap him.

All these presenters should take a lesson from Steve Jobs. I like his style of presenting, he’s energetic and gets the audience involved. The visuals are creative and you never see him drone on by just reading what’s on the slide.