Ahoy ye lubbers and me buxom beauties! Today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Step back from that thar 'puter. Down some grog and take out the ol' hornpipe for today be fer celebratin! Arrrrr!

The disorder and some examples.

As I was reading the disorder article, I checked my desktop and had the following open:
  - 1 Mozilla browser window open with about 8 tabs, checking 2 email accounts (1 yahoo and 1 hotmail), Slashdot homepage, slashdot articles, Google News, and the two articles listed above
  - 1 Mozilla browser window open with several tabs reading more Slashdot articles
  - 3 IE browser windows open to my current work task(s) (ASP pages)
  - 1 IE browser window open to check another Yahoo email account
  - Lotus Notes open to check my work email
  - Lotus Notes Sametime (office instant messenger)
  - 2 Microsoft Visual InterDev windows open to work on current projects
  - SQL Server Enterprise Manager opened for work on current project(s)

And on my SECOND computer at my desk, I have another browser window (Mozilla Firebird) with multiple tabs opened to ANOTHER hotmail account and a few pages on Apache.org

Back to work (HA! riiiiiiight.)

Since I can't seem to get it out of my head, I might as well start writing down all of my thoughts about the movies before I forget them. (I'm also doing this so that when the final movie comes out, I can point and laugh at everyone and say "HA, told you so!"... or, if my theories are waaaaay off, I can just deny that this account is acctually mine.) ;)

I'll be giving each of my theories in separate thread-responses below for organizational purposes. (yeah, i'm just geeky that way.)

And..... BEGIN!

I read this article this morning:
"How Hydrogen Can Save America"

and this afternoon (just hours later), I read this:
"U.S. House set to pass $550 billion tax cut"

To save you time/effort of reading them:
          1. The first article is about proposing that the US govt spend around $100 billion (roughly the same amount we spent on Kennedy's space program in "today's dollars") to seriously jump-start the hydrogen production in the automobile industry [to begin to replace oil] over the next 10 years.
          2. The second article is... well, just read the title of it.

Grrrrrrrrrr!!!! Forget the HUGE tax cut. Redistribute some of that money and put it where it could be of some use! The next President I elect will be someone who supports hyrdrogen [over oil] and wants to put more money into the space elevator [so that we could get rid of the shuttle/rocket program almost altogether]. You can read a little about that [the space elevator] in the same issue of WIRED here

This whole "business world" thing baffles me more and more with each passing day.

I have a boring job where (step 1) my boss tells me what needs to be done, (step 2) I plan for it by drawing up site and database diagrams and other menial tasks that just need to be done for documentation purposes and (step 3) I complete it WAAAAY ahead of his expected time. This gives me plenty of time to read up on randomness and wander the building. :-)

Now, I originally thought that I was the only person this happened to. HA!!! Not by a long shot! Over the past few weeks I've noticed several people in my building constantly walking around (seemingly) from office to office.

I was reminded of a Dilbert strip where Wally is teaching Asok how to work "smarter" not "harder". Wally tells him Step 1 is to start walking quickly through the halls all day while carrying a bunch of "importantly looking papers" and just snarl when anyone tries to speak to you; this makes it look like your job is more difficult/stressful than theirs and they won't bother you. (Step 2 was something about making sure your toothpaste matches your shirt and to just get toothpaste stains on it so you don't have to wash it as often.)

Anyways... back to the subject: I swear that this is what people do in my office building! (Step 1 that is; I haven't witnessed Step 2 yet.) People are constantly wandering past my desk to the printer or to the bathroom or to other cubicles or wherever. I recently took it upon myself to follow some of these "pacers" and see what a typical day was for them. To my absolute astonishment, these people seem to have even LESS to do than I have! I'm serious! Here's some examples of these people (men and women both):

walking from cube to cube to chit-chat with each other - Two ladies spent the ENTIRE AFTERNOON (that's a full 4 hours!) yesterday talking only a few cubes away from me.

taking frequent trips to the bathroom - One guy seems to spend 3 to 5 half-hour sessions in there every day, so, unless he has some serious bladder problems, I'm assuming he's takin naps on the crapper all throughout the day.

constantly hovering around the printer - A few people (but one guy in particular) seem to just hover around the printer/copier for most of the day. I assume this is just to be able to get a good whiff of perfume from the Administrative Assistants or something because they're miserable at home, but whatever. They just contantly make trips over there, even if nothing is printing out, or if they DO have something to print out that has multiple pages, they will do so 1 page at a time and make a separate trip for each sheet. (This one was brought to my attention a few weeks ago when I had to to the typical computer-geek-guy thing and fix someones computer settings.)

And this, I'm sure, is just the tip of the iceberg. I plan on doing much more research in this bold new business world that I have discovered. It truly is amazing that this can go on while the company just layed-off several thousand people, but whateva! Not my problem. I'll just use my time finding out who wastes the most time; that way I'll have someone to point a finger at when they decide to cut my job. >:-)

I guess Scott Adams really knew what he was talking about when writing those Dilbert strips. In my 4 years since graduation I have witnessed MANY of those strips, which I used to think quite comical, actually happening in currently thriving businesses.

I thought for a moment that I really didn't have to much to do at my job (through no fault of my own); my boss gives me work and I typically finish it a long time before he expects me to. This gives me massive amounts of time to do my own personal research on the internet. [read: allows me to surf for pr0n... jk.] This gives me time to look up [what I call] cool and interesting facts and tid-bits of knowledge.

This random knowledge I have researched in my freetime here began ranging from different programming languages and techniques to different database management systems. After a while, this got boring [Reading up on programming got boring? Get outta here!], and my personal studies took a whole different turn. It went in a direction I would have never guessed; I started reading up on history. Primarily ancient history (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Rome, Easter Island, Stonehenge) and religious history (origins of different faiths). I have no idea what started me on this path, but somehow I was led there. (Maybe it was because I started watching too much of the Discovery, History and Science channels. Maybe it was from reading an article on Slashdot. The world will never know.) This then led me into the philosophy arena (and Nitzsche).

To make a long story short (too late), after all of that, I turned back to science and read up on even more randomness: astro-physics, particle-physics, multi-dimentionalism, conspiracy theories, NASA Advanced Concepts, nanotechnology, Einstein, Newton, ant colonies, hive/swarm intelligence, antigravity/floaters (which never really existed and is now known as ion propulsion), cellular automata, string theory (theory of everything), cellular biology, genomics ... I even started to learn to read Egyptian heiroglyphs and read about Operation Clambake (the truth about Scientology).

ALL of it interests me!!!

This just ended up making my life more miserable. Now I'm contenplating whether or not I made the right career choice with just being a software developer. ok, I won't even elevate myself to that level: i'm a friggin web-monkey. I design/develop internet sites and the databases that run behind them. and it BORES me now! I COULD do more, but the job-market sucks so much that there's really no opportunity for me to do anything else at the moment.

I just WISH I could win the damn lottery so I could just quit my job and read up on all of the randomness that interests me. (which is a LOT!)

Yes, another year older. Today I'm 27. Big deal. Whoop-dee-doo. Yee-hah. Watch me get down and funky with my bad walker.

Today, I finally reached the point where my Karma is high enough to post messages starting at 2 points! Yeeeee-haaaaaaaa!

(Yes, the little things in life still please me.)

The article that did it was: ?sid=46052&cid=4753873