All Better Now!!!

It was a combination (ok about 75%) operator error, and 25% who the hell knows, but a few bucks and two glasses of Shiraz for the "computer guy" and I'm back up and running. Sorry if you were looking for a huge essay on other stuff.
This morning is one of those where it's all beginning to pile up on me, and it's only 5:30am! A good friend asked me to re-do her resume as she was approached by a bigger firm and they've just about put her name on the door, but they need a resume. Ok that was about an hour of "pilot verbige" (that's where you tke words put them together in an order that assures the reader is so in awe of the content that they simply ask if you need more money to come work for them, a/k/a BULLSHIT!!)
Now I belong to a local community service club, but work has kept me from the last four meetings (once a week for breakfast meeting on Thursday mornings). I should go today, but the platre is already overflowing! I've got 9 annual budgets to cobble together and submit to different Borad of Directors, about ten legal "proxies" to put together and get out to voters, a calendar of "Annual Meetings" that will mean about three a week for the next eight weeks in a row, a week left on the "other job" to finish and collect my 12 weeks of "severance and vacation pay", a new 42"plasma TV that I didn't even ask the tech who installed it how to make iot work and told him to show my wife. (So much for the male ego, I have surrendered the remote controller to my wife!) My Administrative Assistant just gave her two weeks notice (more money, better benefits! SHIT Sorry , slight delay while I went for cup #3 of coffee. (Not bad, three cups in 90 minutes and just coming into the full awareness mode of morning and the sun is not even up yet! Yea, I win for another day!)
See I told you I need my "Pub Experiance"!
Shit! Just remembered I have to go in to "job 2" tonight and do payroll for the troops because it's three day weekend coming up and of course the payroll department isn't working on Monday. Here's how the weekend (our Labor Day holiday) stacks up;
Friday 7:30 to 4:30 pmJob 1
5:00 to 9:30 pm Job 2
9:30 to 10:00 pm Quick pub visit
10:30pm to 5:00 am Sleep period
Saturday 5:am to 7:00 am -Surfing, blogging, caffeine intake mode
8:30am to 4 :00pm Job 2
4:00 PM to 6PM Pub Expieriance
6:00pm to 9:30pm Dinner and a movie (Date night) with my wife after she
gets out of chior at 6:00 pm
9:30 pm to (nevermind this is classified "For her eyes Only")
Sunday 6:am -extra hour sleep period (YEA!!)
7:00am to 9:00 am off to church
9:00am to 3:30 pm Clean up "the pit" prepare for Monday meeting (yeah it's a
legal holiday, but when one of my Board of Directors calls for a meeting of
the entire membership (sigh) duty call and I have to chair it and be the
referee)
3:30 pm to 5:30 pm - Pub experiance, catching up my sports scores, results,
trading "expert monday morning" knowledge on Tiger Wood's mistakes
this weekend
5:30pm to 7:30 pm - Make Sunday Dinner (My "kitchen therapy" mode!)
7:30 to 9:30pm "Boob Tube Time" (actually sitting there plannng my week
and pretending to know what's actually on the TV!
9:30 to 5:00am Sleep period
Monday 5:00 to 6:30am Surfing, blogging, caffeine intake mode
6:30 am to noon Travel and Board of Directors meeting
12:00 to 1:pm travel back to my own zip code
1:00pm to 9:00 pm Job 2
9:00 pm to 10:00pm Pub Experiance
10:00 pm to 5:00 am sleep period
Tuesday 5:00 am---aaaah, back to the regular week's toil

This is a lousy exercise! I'm already tired and I'm still twenty-four hours away from the beginning!
HEY!!! Hope y'all have a great end of the week and a fun weekend. If I didn't like working so much I'd probably be pissed off! (I am demented, but I'm on my way to some private goals which in a couple of years will make life a lot easier!
-30-

Another week battling good and evil, or a "Windows" kind of day!

Ok, so depite all the technical wizardry sitting around my "dungeon" (a loving title assigned to my computer room, or "pit" as my wife calls it) I will be the first to admit I struggle trying to keep up on these "techy" things. But on to my adventure.
I'm not even sure what I was doing, but the computer started to go crazy on me. My little Security/Virus Protection program just started multiplying. The little icon that usually sits so placidly in the bottom right hand corner of the screen with all it's other little icon buddies just started replicating itself, until at one point there were over thirty of them,...and all the other little icon buddies were no where to be seen! I figured out they were just hiding from the gang of security icons who had taken over. It was annoying, but I could live with it, for a while anyway. Then the next day as I staggered upstairs to the "dungeon" with my hot cup of coffee at 5 am to see what happened in the world while my Blackberry and I were recharging our batteries, a strange thing happened. Everything seemed to be ok but suddenly up pops this stupid window message telling me my copy of Microsoft windows was not "genuine"! Now long ago in my mis-spent childhood with computers (mostly Apple back then) I was known to have a few "bootleg" things on my 'puter. However when I was forced to become a "Windows Slave" a combination of my total fear of the blue "screen of death", all the stories and rumors about the "evil empire" of Microsoft and it's covert plan to rule the world through it's software and then it's raw power of control over people. (I had visions of whimpering little people, begging and pleading just to see the titles on thier incoming e-mails, a "Super 'puter" that charged you unilaterally set fee's for use and simply took them from your bank account, you know, things like that!) Well I cleaned up my act and absolutely refuse to have a single thing on my 'puter not approved, bought and paid for, with receipts, backups, and original disks and manuals stacked in the four foot piles here in the "dungeon". (Light just popped on, ..maybe that's why my wife calls it a pit! I think of them as reference materials but I can see where someone may think the piles are more like those stalagmites or stalagtites you find growning in caves. Note to self: try and pick up the place a bit tomorrow afternoon.)
Then it started doing it's own thing. Like downloading my e-mail and leaving it open just long enough for me to read the titles and WHAM, the whole program just closes up and is off the screen. (Yes Virginia there really are "thought police", I have seen them, they are in my 'puter this week!)
After three or four days of the usual stupid operator stuff, you know, un-install almost everything you have and hope with each "continue" button you hit the problems all miraculously go away, I had to give up. I was going to bed running mental lists of programs and installation sequences, living in fear that tomorrow would be the last time my 'puter would function, and then I'd be stranded, just like the "Survivors" on some sterile, 'puterless Island, forced to use #2 Pencils and that paper stuff. God know I've been using 'puters so long now I don't even know if I remember how to write words any more as opposed to typing them. (Note to self: check the garage and see if I kept an old typewriter as a backup or emergency stash)
By Tuesday I was desparate! Then I saw "the computer guy", our companies outside technical consultant, walking through the office. "Yo, Chris, got a minute?"
Seems he does do outside work sstuff for a fee so I grabbed him quickly and he happened to be available that evening. I had a Board of Directors meeting I couldn't get out of at 5:30 so I had him meet me in the parking lot of my office at 6:30 and we'd head out to my house to "fix" things. (First Board meeting I ever held standing up! But we got it done and I was the first one dashing out the door after the motionto adjourn was seconded.
Stay tuned for tomorrows installment as we raced through traffic to perform the emergency lobotomy on my 'puter that would save it's life and my sanity.
Is it a worm?
Is it a virus?
Is it just a stupid operator error??
Or is 'puter in deeper water that we first suspected?
Would the techy turn sadly to me after beating the keys frantically for ten minutes and simply recommend "hospice care"?
We'll all find out tomorrow!

-30-

It's getting close!!

I'm talking about a couple of things here. (Sorry, the mind is a bit fractured this week) Well let me back up a bit. I'm a very ordinary man, so why is my f#######g computer giving me shit! My little virus program "icon" which comes up in the bottom right of the screen with all the other little funky icons is behaving like a rabbit in heat chewing cases of viagra! I just looked down and there are probably twenty something of the same stinking little red "M" in the little white box. I put my mouse on one and they start disappearing, I move my mouse away and they start popping up again! AND yesterday the damn machine starts telling me I do not have a "genuine" copy of windows on my machine. I tried to get another program from the happy company, McAfee, and got an invoice saying "this is your receipt", the system says to click here to download it, which I do, it goes through all it's gyrations and says it's all done, then what happens? A little window pops up and says I may not be protected "click here", so I do, the screen says my computer files and e-mail are not protected click the "fix" button to correct this, so I do, then the little box opens and tells me "one or more problems can not be fixed becasue of an error" so what's next? Uninstall and re-install. What? everything. So first I'll uninstall the damn virus program, then download the new one I bought, noooo! "McAfee can not be completely uninstalled" (Who's running this F******G computer McAfee or Me?
If I tell you to strip and go naked you damn well better do it, I am the operator, the big kahuna, the boss, the guy who pays for the electricity you consume, the hand that feeds you, the pimp who keeps you in a fresh supply of sexy new pieces of hardware and software to use and abuse, but you are forgetting the prime directive....."DO WHAT I TELL YOU!!!!
There was a time when I would piddle and play with it and eventually get it fixed, but that was then and this is now. I'm too damn busy! Two jobs (thank God only two and a half weeks left on the old one), coming into the EXTREME busy season of the new job (more on that when I open another bottle of wine and start to feel reallllly behind the eightball), an overwhelming desire to just strangle the shit out of someone just because (attention FBI e-mail reader program, we are talking hypothetical, words used for emphasis, please read my comments to Sarah Michelle in Perth regarding my personal convictions on terrorist and random killing of human beings for verification of my stability. Thank you!)
I guess I'll be needing a short vacation, away from my high tech toys, away from the oppressive humidity, away from the idiots on the weather channel shitting green bricks about a thunderstorm off the coast of Africa and starting the subtle "gloom and doom" of the world of "eyewall speeds", dropping barometric pressure curves", and of course the ultimate "put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye" comment to raise the hysteria level about six giant clicks, "An Air Force reconnaisnace flight will be investigating later this afternoon"
Oh and if all this crap ain't bad enough the Boston Red Sux (oops! Freudian typo!) have begun thier slide into the bowels of the basement in the tables, losing FIVE games in a row to the New York Yankee's. Man ther just ain't nuthin working good around here! Oh and my last little green blood pressure pill is sitting in the jar, so that means I have to go and confront the wonderful world of the pharmacy again! Talk about an evil place!! Every time I have to go and get a prescription for my wife, or something for myself I can't help but listen to the bored clerk just slinging the little white bags up on the counter with the automatic little voice prompt "And do you have any questions for the pharmacist today?" "Yes I do, why the fuck am I paying all this money for this shit and it's been on the market for three thousand fucking years, haven't you idiots paid off the R&D costs yet?"
Every once in a while I get the "happy" phamacists assisstant who smiles and tell me to look at how much I've saved with my insurance prescription card. You want to talk "saved" how about three fingers of Jack Danials and call me in the morning! That works too and one day you just miss the wakeup call forevermore!
Well I feel a little better, having ranted appropriately for a while. Time for another cup of coffee, beating on my computer some more, then off to the wonderful world of telling the old farts who bought cheap condo's and can't afford to insure them anymore that they have no choice, just go knock off a little convienence store, or three or four, and come across with the money by the twenty-second or we'll slap a lien against you. (God it was more fun tying the gorgeous young blonde virgin to the railroad tracks and twisting the ends of my waxed little moustache and chortling with glee, than threatening these nasty ass senior, seniors. They may be old but they are vicious!!
-30-

The "Global Village"

It's a Sunday evening, 7:45 pm, and I sit here in sunny Florida in my airconditioned townhouse, waiting for my wife to finish a Chicken Tettrazinni I started for supper. (She was out at this ecumenical chior practice, while I skulled a few pints at my pub before coming home to cook supper. It's a mutual understanding thing, I don't piss and moan about her chior stuff and she doesn't piss and moan(much) about my pub time). But now onto my point!
A few minutes ago I was jotting off a reply to a blog by an "Aussie" friend of mine, Lucy. Then I clicked over to another blog by another "Aussie" named "Sarah Michelle" and popped off another reply. These women are intelligent, thinking, and have valid viewpoints on the world! A far cry from most of the "airheads" of American blogs!
I certainly hope this does not sound negative, but as a 61 year old American, I can't stand the level to which we've allowed ourselves to deteriorate!
More on my rant after dinner, check back tomorrow!
Peace and common sense forever!
-30-

techie toys and gizmos!

I live dangerously through technology! In other words I guess my "hobby" is getting "stuff" for my computers (yup 3 of them. First one that says nerd or geek is going straight to hell!) The sad thing is I love the little gadgets and things that go with them!
About six months ago I bought a software program that let's you talk to your computer and it prints it, is that cool or what? I figured the Great American Novel was within my grasp. You have to read to your computer and the program studies your accent, inflections etc and "gets it right" (of course being from New England and the material to read to the machine being John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address my accent was a shoo in!
Well yesterday I acquired a business card scanner! That is cool, it's supposed to scan the business card, differentiate the name, phone numbers etc and plug them in to my Microsoft Outlook address book. Guess I'll play with that this week.
And what hi-tech toy dude would be complete without a "Blackberry", or as some refer to it, a "crackberry" (yeah it is addictive as hell, and ok my wife is right I need to get a hobby!!)
I like to think I'm on the front line of communication and efficiency in business. (I said I like to think I am, remember those words!)
Included in my never-ending pursuit for "teckky toys" I've even added a few to my blog page. If I may direct your attention to the right hand side of the page as you scroll down you will see a little "button" that says "Guest map" or something to that effect. If you click on it a screen comes up of a world map, another "pop up" comes up with instructions. Give it a shot! It letsd you plant a flag in the area you are viewing my blog from. So far it's only me and the programmers that wrote the program on there. I'm real curious who on this big blue marble is reading my rantings and stuff. (If you want ot get one for yourself click on the other button to the right of the map one and it will take you to the sight where you too can be the proud owner of a map,...best of all it's free!!!)
Well, off to frolic in the property management business and see what earthshaking emergencies occur this day, whilest I develop budgets for at least three of my properties for next year, try and "update" my report for the Boss units that's due every friday to insure my "continued employment options" with the firm. "But of course the hole in your screen is a catastrophic situation, Mrs. Jones. I mean my God at least a dozen gnats could come in the window in the next few days!" (Well I guess it doesn't mattter if the gaping hole in the roof gets fixed today after all it's sunny, got to get someone on the hole in the screen!)
Summers almost over and the eastern european kids who invaded for summer jobs are beginning to go home, not much left here, just the illegal immigrant Mexican landscaping folks. (They go shopping on Sunday, and it's almost amusing to watch. They pool thier money to get the food, and you can tell them easily they have the three heaping shopping carts actually overflowing and more tortillas than I thought the store even stocked! The Mexican food section has gone from a scant two shelves to over 16 feet of six high shelves, and by Sunday evening it's stripped bare!
Well, I'm off like a prom dress to go fight the forces of common sense and dignity, and trying to explain the difference between the spirit of the rule, and the actual meaning scribed on the page.
Oh, got to call my "beaver killer" today as well. One of my places has a problem with the pesky little engineers building dams and screwing up the entire manmade ecosystem causing the water in the lakes which are the street "run-off" from rains and sprinkler systems which were designed to flow into the lake, to in fact be doing the reverse. (After one particularly heavy rain fall last week I got an e-mail form a resident who claimed to be "trapped" in his home because the water was so high. Gee,...hope he got out ok!)
Have a nice day, I'll try!
-30-

Oh my, a whole day off!!

Yep, got a whole day off, Sunday! My wife is working for the day so I'm just well, on my own!
Planning the day has been relatively easy. I sort of work it backwards and everything falls into place, watch;
9:30 pm - another long week ahead, time to try an get some extra sleep before Monday to make up for that which I won't get in the Monday to Friday timeframe. (Usually it all works out and if you take the total sleep for the week, divide it by the number of days in the week, it usually works out to 5 1/2 to 6 hours a night!)
7:30 - 9:30 watch the "boob tube" (a/k/a television) couldn't tell you what was on as I was doing my mental planning of the entire week with the sonar positioned to the automatic "un-huh" mode when my wife asks a question or comments on something. It's sonar becasue it works the same way. She "pulses out" something, and I "ping" it back. Something like this, "Did you remember to take out the trash and clean out the kitty litter boxes?"(That is a "pulse out"),
"un-huh", (that's a "ping"!) See how easy it is?
7:00 - 7:30pm - eating dinner ("What did you put on this chicken? It tastes like chinese food. And why are the vegetables all whimpy?)
6:15 - 7:00 pm - sipping a lovely Cabernet with just a hint of tannin more than it should.
5:00 - 6:15 pm - "Let's see what's in this cook book that's kind of exotic sounding that I can whip up for the wife with chicken and some veggies. This one looks pretty good except I don't have all those spices,...aw hell I'll improvise, after all how many episodes of the Iron chef have I watched? Some of that shit must have sunk into my subconscious!"
3:00 - 4:45 pm - Pub time!! (So many Guinness, so little time!!!!)
2:00-3:00 pm - Why won't the damn thing work? I followed the damn directions! (the installation process on my latest little techy toy, a color business card scanner that links to my outlook address book,...cool or what?)
12:00 - 2:00pm - all these damn errands to run, hit the book store, the hi-tech store, the going out of business tool store (read tomorrows blog! You want to talk about an ego booster, try this one on: I left as fulltime store manager in May, after almost eight years, but offered to stay on part-time (about 20 hours a week) and help train a new manager, but only until September. That's a four month lead time. Less than three weeks left and they can't find a suitable manager type. LARGE corporate solution: "Well if you can't stay on any more we'll just close the store and eat the cost of the remaining two years on the lease, since no one else can make it work like he did." And we are the largest economic power on this earth? I shudder,...big time.)
11:00- 12:00 noon - write my blog, I've been slacking off lately and reading them more than writing them. (Love the Aussie girl blogs! These young women have thier heads screwed on really straight, I'd hire anyone of them as they know how to think, and have common sense. I don't see them calling thier "shrink" over a broken fingernail like some of our "made in America" princesses!)
There, I think that covers the day. No surprises, no work perse, and ample time for the pub. (Note to all: Since my "pub" is called "Buster's World Famous Oyster Bar & Grille", and the twenty something TV's let them think they are the biggest sports bar around, and it's Sunday afternoon, well I guess it's the weekly NASCAR race, the weekend PGA final, a few also ran baseball games, and talking sports heads, (sigh!) I'd rather watch Soccer, English Premier League if possible, but in any event college and Pro football starts again soon and the land of the Bubba's will rule the Pub for the next 16 weeks!
("I promise to try and write more often, Mom" - used to be my standard closing on letters home when I was in the Military 1964-1969!)

-30-

How intense is intense?

I guess I'm somewhat intense, but I know some folks who are very intense. Intense like so singularly focused and driven that I just wait and someday their entire head will explode, just a loud "POP" and blood and brains everywhere, yup that's how it'll happen! But in the meantime I guess we have to live with them, or try to anyway.
It cracks me up how these folks have "hot buttons". Not just the usual hot button, but a super Warp drive, nitro powered button. Know someone like that? If you hit thier "hot button", dead on, it's like the balloon you blow up and then just turn it loose. They are all over the place, first up, then down, then a zig, and two zags, then a bounce off the wall, then it all finishes as quickly as it started, and usually in a smoldering rage.
The funniest part is watching some one so skilled in recognizing the particular "super galactic, turbo warp, hot button" that they have complete and unrestrained control over the personna whose buttons they push! I've watched it for years, I've had my "buttons" pushed, and I still to this day think it's wrong. It's pure and simply manipulation to the max!
Do you have a "hot button", or maybe just a "warm button"? Think about it. What cranks you up in a heartbeat, and who do you know that can do that to you? Or are you so "well grounded" that nothing can "motivate" you like that?
Incidentally what is the difference between "motivating" and "manipulating", could someone give me a good definition?
If we are "self-motivated" does that mean we've actually fooled ourselves by manipulating our inner self? Yet why is it we are "manipulated" into doing what someone else wants done?
I really don't have a clue what prompted this blog, it was just 5:30am, my coffee was cooling, it's a Monday and work begins again, I still haven't adjusted to a full two days off in a row yet, (well actually that won't happen until September yet) and I'm begining to think maybe I ought to start looking into some sort of an exercise program since I'm spending a lot more time on my butt in a cubicle.
Oh well, it's Monday, a full calendar of events including, getting rid of a dead palm tree, re-doing a dam that breached last week, finding someone to fill a "sinkhole" in a properties parking lot, trying to find out why the water level in one pool dropped over 12 inches yesterday, oh yeah and eleven annual budgets to get oprepared by September 1st.
Today's operational philosophy, "pace yourself, pace yourself, ....there's a cool Guinness waiting at 4:30 for me, and maybe some light conversation to massage my mind!"
Have a good day!
-30-