The UnionEmpire Strikes Back

As promised, today's post is about the SBC strike. It started on Friday and ended officially today. Not only that, but the CWA agreed to a contract, so that should be the end of this nonsense (providing the union ratifies the contract which they should). Thanks to all of you who sent your prayers and offered any assistance we required. It meant a lot to both of us.
So, this past weekend, Debbie was working 12 hour days Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. As you can imagine, she was really tired (as if providing energy for 2 people isn't exhausting enough). I actually said this when the union announced a strike, but I felt it would be best in the long run and, as it turns out, I was right. Debbie and I really wanted to see her best friend, Caryn, and her family this weekend. Without the strike, I don't think we would have been able to go. Now that the shenanigans are over, we are all set to drive to Alpena late Thursday/early Friday.
All we need now is for the IBEW to agree to a contract (which expires in June) and we can solidify our plans to go to Denver for my brother's wedding. Don't get me wrong, we're going no matter what. But our hope was to extend the trip to about 5-6 days so we could traipse around Colorado seeing the sights and visiting friends. Otherwise, Debbie plans on calling in "sick" for a couple of days so we can be there for the wedding. I hope this all gets resolved soon because the price for a plane ticket to Denver right now is REALLY good ($202/person non-stop). That's provided we take the extended trip, I haven't checked the price for the weekend trip (though I doubt it will be cheaper)

My Sense of Civic Duty

Well, today I had that dreaded of all events ... jury duty! Actually, I was kind of looking forward to it. Maybe get on a 1-2 day trial ... dispense some justice ... Twench style! (Do they allow the death penalty for a speeding ticket ... that would be my suggestion :)
Anyway, everyone who was called in for jury duty got placed on a panel. 3 panels were for 1 trial and I was a member of the 3rd panel. After we walk into the courtroom and sit down, the judge explains what to expect. My sense of civic pride rose ... I could dispense some Twench style justice ... I could be a productive member of society for once. Then I heard these words: "The trial should last about 3 weeks"

*gasp*

At that sentence, civic pride went right out the window. THREE WEEKS!!!! Holy cow ... to be honest, I wouldn't have minded that long of a trial if I wasn't going on vacation this weekend, my wife wasn't 4.5 months pregnant, and my parents weren't visiting in just over a month (which means I have a LOT of work to do ... I don't know what that work is, but I'm sure Debbie will tell me). Fortunately, the real kicker for me is that I'm having foot surgery next Thursday. That alone was enough to be dismissed from jury duty ... WOOHOO!!!!!

My next post will address how Debbie and I are coping with the SBC strike. Until then ....

Watch the lumbering oaf

It has come to my attention that people are having problems viewing the lizzy video. The problem stems from the fact that the movie format is something called motion jpeg. I have not found a way to convert said format into the more ubiquitous mpeg. This means Windows Media Player will most likely not be able to play videos captured on my camera. However, QuickTime can read this movie format. If you are feeling brave (or if you are a coward, but have a technologically brave friend), go to the link, download it, and install QuickTime. Its fairly easy and this is a viewer made by Apple, so it's a reputable source. Once you have QuickTime installed, you should have no problem enjoying the lumbering oaf video :)

From Bad to Worse

Well, all of Debbie and my plans for the next several weeks have been thrown out the window. Word came down today that the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union has announced a strike will commence in 24 hours. Once that happens, Debbie has to start working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week to help cover the shortage. This means no vacations, no trips, no nothing. I won't go into a lecture on why unions are now too powerful for their own good, but we are not happy with this development obviously. I don' know what else to say other than ... CRAP!!!!! (that's not the actual word I was thinking, but this is a family blog).

:(

Comment Fix ... Take 2

I have been communicating the comment issues with Blogger.com for the past couple of days. We think we may have this worked out, but I want to make sure. So ... feel free to comment on anything (maybe my athletic ability if you've seen the movie from my previous post).

Digital Camera Fun

Debbie and I decided to test out the movie mode of our Canon A80. So, what better subject to introduce you all to than our little Lizzy zipping around the backyard. Pay no attention to the lumbering oaf in the sweatshirt :)

Be very careful, the file is about 7 MB so it may take a while to download depending on your connection bandwidth, but it is worth it ... especially if you want to see me try to run :D

*UPDATE* 5/17/04
It has come to my attention that the file format I used for the video (AVI) may not be universally accessible. Let me know if you are having a problem viewing the file so I can gauge the need to convert this to some other form. Also, if you happen to know of a free way to convert AVI's to MPEG, I would greatly appeciate it.

Heard from Blogger.com

So, I got an email today from Blogger.com in response to the comment problem. Specifically, I got the same response I give testers who tell me a problem ... "I can't reproduce it ... might be fixed ... try it again" God, I hate me. That's such a smug response, but since I give it all the time, I understand where this comes from. So, in the name of testing ... please please please submit comments and let me know if they show up withing "minutes" as promised.

And I thought my life was sad

When do you know someone has no life? When they do this!

<waits for readers to go to link and come back>

Yes folks, that is an entire apartment redecorated to look like various parts of the USS Enterprise NCC1701-D. It could also be the E, but we'll assume he based his model off the TNG series which was the Enterprise D. Now ... I know I'm a geek (read previous sentence for proof), but this is well beyond the realm of geekdom.
Now, here are some hints on looking at the pictures. Databank 3 contains before and after shots which is probably the most useful. There is one other picture that I want to point out. It has been surmised that no one in the Star Trek universe ever went to the bathroom since no toilet could ever be found (my opinion is that the replicators need "raw materials" cuz 18 oz T-Bones and Hot Fudge Sundaes just don't come from thin air). File 4.6 shows that this gentlemen indeed does need to use the facilities (left side of picture) and therefore could never be part of the real Star Trek universe. Better luck next time poser.

Happy Belated Mother's Day

So ... here it is ... Wednesday ... and I haven't even mentioned Mother's Day yet. As most, if not all, of you know, Mother's Day carries a very special meaning. This year, my wife got to celebrate it as a Mother-to-be! Yup, we are expecting our first child in October of this year and I am excited beyond words! Boy or girl ... doesn't matter, I'm just waiting to be a daddy! Now, since we are pregnant ... oh ... wait ... since my wife is pregnant (last time I checked, I didn't have morning sickness or a pressing need to update my wardrobe), that means we need to attend classes despite the fact the humans gave birth and raised children just fine for thousands of years without taking any classes. <TANGENT>Ah, the things intellectuals do when they have a baby. They feel the need to read every book they can, they take classes to "make sure they are doing it right", they practice breathing! Bill Cosby had a great bit on this and how, despite all the classes and how well they did, when it came time to give birth, that knowledge went right out the window when that first pain hit and his "wife stood up in the stirrups". <END OF TANGENT> So, naturally I had to get something for my darling wife, and I decided on a Pajama Gram. I had heard good things about their quality and one friend in particular swears by them (may be obsessed, but I'm not making judgments here). Other than that, Mother's Day was pretty normal since neither of us has family in the area. I mowed the lawn, she did some laundry, typical Sunday type stuff.

I still haven't heard back from blogger.com about the comments issue, but I am hitting publish on my blog a couple of times a day, just in case someone out there feels the need to comment. Until they get that fix, feel free to post as many comments as you would like, just don't expect them to show up in the "minutes" timeframe blogger.com promises. Until tomorrow!

Is this the right class?

As some of you may have read the last time I took an exam for this class, I had the momentary desperate thought that maybe I had somehow wandered into the wrong exam and that's why none of the questions made any sense. In the final today, I was fortunate I was able to avoid that panic. The questions seemed reasonable and I felt I knew the answer to most of them. Thus ends my long 5 year journey towards achieving my graduate degree. So, what do I get for all my effort ... Diddly squat ... bupkis ... nada ... el zilcherino. That's right folks, I get nothing out of this other than the pride and joy felt in enduring (emphasis warranted I might add) 5 years of this crap. Well , I do get one other little thing. On those surveys where they ask you to check the box corresponding to your highest education level ... I can now check a new box (of course, you also can check a new box by the less arduous task of aging).

Stupid comments

There seems to be a slight problem with the way Blogger.com handles the comments right now. I don't know why, but they don't show up until I republish the blog. Doesn't seem to be useful if I don't see the comments or get emails until I republish the blog. So, if you post a comment and it hasn't shown up yet, don't fret. It's just the way this system works right now. Hopefully, I'll figure this out soon, but not til after I take my exam at 2 today.

Speaking of the exam, this represents my last class before earning my Master's degree in Telecommunications and Software Engineering. I'm pretty excited about this. I've been taking 1 class a semester for 5 years and I have finally reached the end. The one suck think is that for the first time ever, my professor is not allowing students to take the exam at remote sites. So, I have to drive to downtown Chicago to 33rd and State today just to take my exam. This means I'll be heading back home at the height of rush hour >:( Stupid professor!

New Blog Format

Regular readers of this blog may notice a slight change. While perusing the web today, I came across the following article on Yahoo!. Blogger.com, the web site I use to create this page, recently released a bunch of updates. Since they went through all that trouble, I figured I should try to use some of them. One item you may notice is that comments are now available. So, feel free to let me know what you think. Other than that, I've also added a title to the posts, changed the format of the archive links, picked a new template (I hope you would have noticed that already), and change the timestamp to my preferred 24 hour clock. Why a 24 hour clock? Because if it says 1, I want it to be 1 in the morning. Otherwise, I might get confused and think it's 1 in the afternoon ;)

Any thoughts, comments, complaints, questions, insights, ... um ... *checks thesaurus* ... divination (heh), post a comment and let me know!

Book Worm Achievement of the Week

Today brings another Book Worm update. The latest high score in my obsessive playing is not 450k achieving rank of "Grand Archivist". Between this, Day of Defeat, Yahoo! Pool, and Yahoo! Euchre, I don't think Debbie is too happy with my time commitments. "Sorry dear ... I would love to spend some time with you, but I'm up to 300k in Book Worm and I want to get some pool time in"

Yeah ... she'd really love that one.

Week 7 Basement Update

Just a quick note to let you know that the Week 7 Basement Update is now available! Enjoy!

Twench's Technical Jargon Explained

Welcome to the 2nd edition Twench's Technical Jargon Explained (See 2/21 post for first edition). In this week's segment, I will explain to you, my faithful reader a new sport sweeping the geek nation by storm. The game is called "Google Whacking". No, this isn't a dirty game, get your mind out of the gutter. How do you play "Google Whack"? Well, it's quite simple. You create a 2 word google query that is so obscure, google can only return 1 hit. Now, the 2 words must be real words and cannot be contained inside quotes (inside quotes, the words are treated as a phrase rather than 2 distinct words). Here are some examples of google whacks:

diction hodgepodges
slurring unicyclist
onomatopoeic crabapples

These are just a sample of the thousands of google-whacks already discovered. If you want to find out more google-whacks, go to http://www.googlewhack.com. One side note to all this fun, it is interesting to note that once you have found a google whack, it is important to list it on the Googlewhack website so that it is no longer a google whack. I myself may have just ruined 3 perfectly good google whacks by posting the links above.

Until next time, this has been Twench's Technical Jargon Explained.

Week 6 Basement Update

As promised ... here is the Week 6 Basement Update. Enjoy!