If there is one thing that drives me nuts it’s people who can’t manage to keep conference calls in their allotted time.  I had someone schedule a call for 12:00-12:30 today.  The call ended at 12:59 only after I told the host that I had another call scheduled for 1:00 (and one of the people there still wanted to keep going).  The group that called the meeting had no agenda, and no plan.  Further, the majority of what they wanted could have been handled via email.  If they’d sent us their questions ahead of time, we could have answered most of it and spent our time ironing out the important stuff.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a good agenda for a conference call and to alot enough time to get the work done.  It’s disrespectful of everyone involved to do otherwise and to just keep going after the alotted time has elapsed.

It also pissed me off because it meant that I didn’t get lunch until 2:15 (which is the most important part of the problem). 

Brent at The Ville doesn’t like PETA very much.  I can’t say that I blame him.  In early celebration of International Eat an Animal for PETA Day I ate at Boi Na Braza for lunch today.  I don’t go out for lunch often, but today we celebrated a friend’s 25th anniversary with the company for which we both work (and which I will not name here; I may have to start borrowing Denny Wilson’s acronym “TCIDNN”). 

Since the 15th is a Saturday, I will have ample opportunity to go anywhere I want.  Perhaps I will make a return visit to Boi Na Braza (or I could go to Fogo de Chão).  Decisions, decisions.  They cook great big cuts of meat on skewers and bring them around to your table until you can’t stand it anymore.  Nothing says, “Go to hell, PETA” like a good Brazilian churrascaria.

Link via Emperor Misha.

Having returned from my little trip (just over 300 miles), I’ve got some road related stuff for a Sunday evening.

• Note to truckers: Some of us four-wheelers are listening to you.  You should be ashamed of yourself for those nasty things you were saying about the drivers on I-635 on Friday afternoon (around 2:45pm), even if they were all true.
• On the other side of the coin, thanks to the truckers for blocking the obnoxious “last-minute merging fools” on I-20 Eastbound in the construction near Canton.
• When the sign says “Right lane closed ahead”, it’s just good sense to get in the left lane (or stay there), rather than staying in the right lane (or diving for it).
• It is good manners (and good karma) to move to the right if your vehicle is not capable of maintaining the posted speed (or if you are not willing to do so).  Speeding up when being passed is bad karma.
• Why are the worst maintained vehicles always the ones loaded past their rated capacities?  Perhaps there is a correlating factor here…

Three conference calls (one with a demo, where I was doing the demoing), 34 emails (all with one problem or another), and a blizzard of instant messages.  Now just why did I think working from home would be less hectic?

My. Brain. Hurts.

Somebody definitely forgot to pay the heating bill for this part of Texas.  It’s been sleeting, snowing and generally disagreeable just about all day.  We don’t know how to handle this crap here in Texas, so I guess I’ll just stay inside and work from home until this mess melts away.

I may share my pictures from this afternoon as soon as I get them developed (I was using a disposable camera that I keep in the truck “just in case”, rather than my digital).  I got a pretty good shot of some cows huddled under a tree looking miserable and covered with sleet and snow.  Or at least I hope I got a good picture.  I shot it one-handed while driving (don’t worry, we weren’t going that fast, the drivers in front of me wouldn’t go over 20 mph 🙁 ).

Dang, there goes the sleet again (and just to liven things up I’ve been hearing thunder in the distance).

Another in a series of random crap from my head…

• I take a break from this blog thing for a couple of days and all hell breaks loose.  I still haven’t managed to get through my normal blog list yet (and it appears that Bill Whittle has cooked up another great entry that I haven’t had a chance to read yet, but everyone else is raving about it).
• Is it just me or have people been jumpy, grouchy, and generally discombobulated over the past few days?  I’d blame the full moon, but it would be unscientific of me to make such a superstitious statement.
• It seems that the hate-filled invective of the pro-Saddam appeasement crowd (and the left in general) has been unleashed over on the weblogs of Megan McArdle and Andrea Harris.  Maybe the full moon has hit the left as well.
• According to my handy VFW calendar, the Desert Storm ground offensive began in Iraq on February 24, 1991.  The 12th anniversary of that will be one week from today.  If we’re going to go in there, then let’s damn well get it over with.  It’s unfortunate that we’re going to have to keep futzing around with the UN and the EUroweasel appeaseniks (I suppose it’ll be worth it if it helps Tony Blair, but it had better not cost us any strategic or tactical advantage, which could mean more lives lost on all sides).
• I saw a Dodge Ram today with a pair of balls hanging from the trailer hitch receiver (if you’ve ever seen the south end of a bull, you’ll know what I’m talking about).  I’ve seen propellers and various other humorous devices, but I’ve never seen balls on a truck before.  I thought it was damn funny, but I have to admit that I’m easily amused.   Update: Here’s a link to the product.

It appears that some people are taking the “terror” warnings seriously.  At the Denton Wal-Mart last night I observed a number of people with carts full of bottled water and the shelves were nearly completely empty.  This was a bit annoying, since I was there to replenish my own supply (but not because of the alert).  I drink a lot of bottled water, primarily because of the convenience, but also because of concerns about the water supply.  Denton gets its water from Lake Lewisville, which is one of the busiest lakes in the country for boaters.  Until MTBE goes away, I’ll stick to bottled water.  Anyhow, I tend to go through 6 to 8 bottles a day (with the added benefit that I’m less likely to develop clots in the legs since I have to get up all the time ).  But I digress.

I’m getting kind of tired of how these alerts are dubbed as “terror” alerts by the media.  I’m not afraid of these Islamic nutbags and I’m certainly not terrorized by them.  I think my general state is more of aggravated annoyance, with a hint of anger.  Maybe we could start calling them “annoying Islamofascist dipwit” alerts.

And as for the duct-tape and plastic nonsense, I didn’t bother to even consider that recomendation to be serious.  If you sealed your house well enough to keep out chemical agents, you’d suffocate.  And if the gas (or spores or whatever) is already at your house, it’s too damn late to be putting up plastic.

I was digging around in my email folders looking for something and came across this rant.  I didn’t write it.  I originally encountered it on Slashdot a while back and sent it to some people in an email.  It was originally written by someone named Andy Walton in a Usenet flamewar concerning how Usenet was administered.  Someone made the comment that “Freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.”  Which is a familiar refrain that we often hear from those who would trap us in the straitjacket of regulation to the point that all we have is responsibility and no freedom.  To which Mr. Walton had this reply:

And responsibility without freedom is not responsibility at all.  Totalitarian control of human beings means the death of responsibility, as everyone is “just following orders.”

<engage rant mode>

I would rather be a brain-dead junkie in a gutter with a sticky copy of Hustler as a result of my OWN stupidity than a clean and well-fed automaton in a tiki-taki house with my actions dictated by you or another self-anointed earthly representative of God’s Will ((C), All Rights Reserved). I want to run through parking lots like a lunatic, fall and scrape my knees. I want to color outside the lines. I want to cover myself with lime Jello and run down the street shouting random lines from Finnegan’s Wake (are there any non-random lines in Finnegan’s Wake?). If I want to smack my skull against the wall, damn it, it’s my skull and my wall. If I want to sing the Leave it to Beaver theme in Esperanto while whacking off with topless pictures of Sandra Bernhart and standing ankle-deep in a galvanized steel tub full of Kraft Honey Dijon salad dressing, that’s none of your business.

And if this means that I’ll be shot as an anarchist when the revolution comes, so be it; I’d rather have the worm-eaten stench of a private tomb than the prim, sterile, chrome-lined common tomb which people like you want to make of the Earth. And when they decide that you’re not quite orthodox enough, I’ll save you the next spot over up against the wall.

<rant mode off>

Clear enough?

That’s got to be one of best rants of all time.  It takes a truly sick and twisted individual to come up with that whole Leave it to Beaver/Esperanto/Sandra Bernhart thing.

I have to admit that my brain works in strange ways.  I often set out to do one thing and end up with something completely different.  The tiniest thing will often send me off on a tangent.  Once I read that rant I forgot what I was originally looking for.  It’s sort of the electronic equivalent of going into a room and forgetting why you’re there.  Oh well, I guess it’ll come to me one of these days.

As an early adopter of DVDs I’ve been pleased by the progress they’ve made in the past few years.  It’s reached the point where most video stores now have all the new releases on DVD and no major studio would dream of releasing only on tape.  I will now only rent or buy movies on DVD.

The unfortunate downside of this, though, is that the DVD format is not as robust as VHS in the rental market.  DVDs are susceptible to scratches and because of their higher data densities are more sensitive than CDs to this problem.  I’ve always taken great pains to avoid scratches and fingerprints on my CDs and DVDs.  I only handle them by the edges when possible (and in the truck, where I have a front-loading CD player, I tend to only use copies rather than originals to avoid permanent damage from scratches to the original).  Unfortunately, it appears that a lot of people are not as careful as I am. 

I mention this because a friend recommended Requiem For A Dream a couple of weeks ago.  I rented it yesterday and tried to watch it last night.  I got through most of it, but there were several times where my DVD player froze and had to jump ahead to get past a bad spot on the disc.  When I took it out and looked at the data side of the disc it looked like someone had hit it with a belt sander.  That or they’d been using it as a hockey puck on a concrete surface.

Anyhow, I just wish people would exercise a little common sense and remember to be kind to the next person who gets that DVD.  It’s a simple thing to just put the disc back in its case when it’s not being used.

As someone who was actually a drummer at one time, I would like to tell all the “peace” activists of the world to lay off the “drumbeat of war” crap.  Oh, and stop abusing drums in your protests.  None of you skanky unwashed fools have a lick of rhythm.

This rant brought to you by free association from the rantings of the inestimable Juan Gato.