Have you ever wondered why a retreat (especially business ones) is called a “retreat”? I guess it retreats from the normal business hassles and worries to allow more insight into what is really going on. Our retreat today (yeah, a whole two miles from our offices) covered what I am told is the usual initial retreat items such as SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis, mission statement formation, vision statement formation, and some brainstorming sessions. It was… different. I personally have never been on a retreat, been plenty of camps for IT people and technical seminars. This retreat was more of a team building and catch our breath experience with some information about changes in the way things are being done. We are in the mist of a departmental shake-up (don’t worry, no one lost jobs or will be losing jobs) that started about a year ago which moved some of the sections to different departments and added new directors. So far it has done a lot of good not just for the departments but for the university in general.
Of course the f-word, furloughs, came up and none of the news is good. I’m worried now how I am going to make my mortgage and car payments for the month that the three-day furlough is planned to occur (though it still has not be approved and it is a slim possibility that it will not happen at all before January).
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Nothing much new going on today. I have a business retreat I have to attend tomorrow and I was swamped with the usual work load of problems and finding solutions to said problems and, at times, holding user’s hands as they navigate through problems. Everyone is worried about furloughs, which is especially hard on us since we work for a university and the pay is not that great to begin with.
“So, why don’t you get a better paying job?” First, in this economy it is not wise to go job hopping. You never know if the job you just wrangled will be on the list of new furloughs or layoffs. I’ve been laid-off once already and it is not a pleasant experience and this time I have a family to take care of. Second, who will do my job? It is hard enough to get new hires at my current price range, most want a great deal more money and can get it easily somewhere else. Third, we have too many people retiring from the department as it is and we are hemorrhaging experience at an alarming rate. Yeah, I know it is just a bunch of excuses, but they are real and have terrifying consequences.
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I get a lot of spam in my email accounts like most other people do. I don’t exactly know how the spammers get some of my addresses, but they always manage to do so after awhile. I still do not fully understand the whole concept of sending huge number of the same email over and over again is supposed to be good advertising. Yes, I realize it is usually for male-enhancement pills and dating sites and I know that some people (somewhere around 5%) actually do respond to some of the spam. Since email is cheap I can see how the profit outweighs the cost, one person buying the product (and many times it is a legitimate product if not a reputable one) can finance millions of emails.
But I really don’t understand spamming little known and sparsely read blogs.
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I received an email (I was so excited someone actually read my blog and wasn’t a spam bot) asking me about my blogging history. Blogging history? I had to send a reply to exactly explain to me what she (yes, it was a she which means girls do exist) meant by “blogging history” (yes, I’m doing the “fingers” quotation “movement” as I “type” this) and she replied that I was an idiot and should stop stalking her… uhm, that she wanted to know a timeline of when and what about my blogging, like when I started, how I started, what phases the blog went through, if I was wearing pants at anytime I was blogging, that sort of thing. I was going to the story of stone soup today, but I guess I will do a LIST!
The history of Yoggie blogging…
- Mid 1997 – buckled down and created a website. Nothing much there as I copied most of the elements from other people’s website, though I used my own design. Included on the front page of the site was a thing I called “Site News” that I updated on what was happening with the site. This a plain HTML page that was updated maybe every 20 days or so, primarily about the site itself with some clever (at least I thought so) anecdotes included.
- End of 1997 – “Site News” morphed into “What’s New” becoming a server-side include text file that was easier to update, and the content became more of a journal.
- May 1998 – “What’s New” and the web site news separated into two distinct entities and old “What’s New” entries went into an archive page. Pretty much was updating the information every couple of days.
- June 1999 – found this wonderful software that allowed you to install and update a weblog on your site. It was still all HTML but it used templates and had a built in archive system. All you had to do was type in your blog entry in the software and it rebuilt your entire index page and added archive HTML pages. Beat doing it by hand. At this point I was posting just about everyday except on weekends and holidays.
- Late 2000 – started playing around with Java, Javascript, PHP, and MySQL to come up with some way of making it easier to post blog entries. Was not aware of the work being done in Movable Type and other blogging software. Never got very far with it.
- Early 2001 – I was invited to share my blog hosted by another person so I started blogging using more sophisticated server-based blogging software.
- January 3, 2003 – I started blogging with a sub-domain of a dear friend who decided to share some server space to host my blog.
- Mid 2004 – I felt bad about smooching on my friends so I bought my own web hosting plan and set up my blog there with Movable Type. This was the point I lost everything prior to January 3, 2003 (always do backups). I was at this time blogging one to five times a DAY EVERYDAY. This was also back when I had a list of blogs I checked daily, had lots of fellow bloggers on my blogroll, and was up to a B-list blogger with A-list bloggers consistently leaving comments.
- Late 2006 – decided that the name of my blog “A Lackluster Blog” was too mundane (and there were other blogs using similar names) and went for the less descriptive “The Mighty Yog Blog” and picked up the domain name yogblog.com and .net (funny, when I picked the name, no one was using Yog, now there are hundreds of them). This is caused a bit of a problem and I ended up loosing my contacts because the person that picked up my previous domain name ruined my reputation. This was also the time I switched to WordPress.
- February 2007 to mid 2008 – I got into such a funk that I was blogging less and less, sometimes going weeks with no entries. That kind of thing kills you readership and your rating in the blogosphere.
- Mid 2008 to present – I climbed back on the horse and forced myself to start blogging again. Currently up to blogging once or twice a day and looking into getting myself back in the limelight of the blogging ranks.
Yes, I was one of those early bloggers, one of the dinosaurs. Not like Justin Hall, who was the pre-life ooze that spawn us bloggers back in 1994, but I pretty close to the original source.
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It is list daaaaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!! (Yes, I just made it up.)
- Sometimes I wonder just who is deciding what will be on the news. Is there some supercomputer sitting in a frozen warehouse crunching up numbers, statistics, and probabilities or is it some guy with a dart board and too many martinis.
- Why when you see one ant on you that you suddenly feel like there are thousands of ants on you when you know there isn’t? Do ants have some sort of mind control that they used to protect themselves from giants like us that convinces us that we are wearing ant coats?
- When it gets dusty in space (and it does so quite often) do you use a vacuum cleaner?
- Who decided that yellow paint on the curb would mean no parking? Why not orange or pink? Was the paint store having a sell on yellow paint that day?
- Why is the glass half full or half empty and not the glass being too tall?
- Why in Star Trek: The Next Generation does no one listen to heavy metal? What happened to the punk rockers and the spiked hair? I mean, the most contemporary music we hear is jazz played by Riker.
- Another thing about Star Trek, why has no one thought to transport (through the transporter no less) a bomb into the enemy’s engine room. My strategy would be to weaken a part of the shields enough to transport a photon torpedo near a power conduit or inside the engine. One boom and the ship is either destroyed or incapacitated. (That bothered me the whole Kazon story line during Voyager when the Kazon supposedly did not have strong shielding technology.)
- What possesses me to come up with these lists? Why does possesses have so many s’s?
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- Taxman :: IRS
- Material :: Girl
- Format :: hard drive
- File cabinet :: files
- Ignore :: pain
- Super! :: man
- Fireproof :: door
- Blockbuster :: Video
- Snooper :: Trooper
- Good will :: Hunting
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One of three or four Doctor Who specials that are taking the place of regular season episodes (first Torchwood then Doctor Who, what’s next The Sarah Jane Adventures?), the first being the Christmas special The New Doctor and the second airing tonight on BBC America called Planet of the Dead, the third, The Waters of Mars, is coming soon. These specials are to serve as the swan song on the current Doctor and to lead the way to a proposed Doctor Who movie (with the current Doctor played by David Tennant) and the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith).
I stupidly thought the show was coming on at 9 PM Eastern, but I was wise enough to set the time based on the name of the episode so when I turned on the tele I didn’t miss the show. In my opinion the episode was pretty good, the story was solid, most of the plot holes patched up before the end of the show, and the character interactions (between The Doctor and Lady Christina de Souza, the other actors barely existed in the script). The story gives an open end to a possible revisit of the main protagonist later. I loved the hero worshiping scientist.
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Writing Five
1. Do you like your handwriting?
Not really, I tend to write too fast and not neat enough.
2. Do you prefer to print or write in cursive?
Sort of a combination of both.
3. Do you think handwriting should be graded in school?
Yes, you need to know how to write and how to write legibly.
4. Do you prefer writing in pencil or pen?
Depends on what I am doing. Usually it doesn’t matter.
5. When you write in ink, do you prefer a neutral color such as black or blue, or a fun color like purple or green?
I prefer purple, but you have to use blue or black for so much these days that I don’t get much of a change to use the color.
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Tonight is the last part of the Torchwood: Children of Earth miniseries. So far it has been pretty interesting with some twists and turns I don’t usually expect from the writers of Torchwood and Doctor Who. I really can’t go into any details as there are probably many people who still haven’t seen the miniseries. Let’s just say that I am happy with the show, but I’m not too happy with the direction it seems to be going. I guess I will reserve my judgment on miniseries until after the final episode has aired.
See y’all later, I’m watching Torchwood.
Update: I am impressed. We learn a lot about Jack in this episode, even to the extremes he is willing to go when the need arises. It really seems that the ending was written too much to elicit a particular response than actual drama or story. All in all, the miniseries was good and I can see why it did so well in the U.K. I hope that another season of Torchwood is going to happen.
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You that dark mood I talked about a few days ago? Well, it is still here. I can’t seem to shake it and it have been with me for a few weeks now. Yeah, every once in awhile a bright spot will come along and make the day worthwhile, but the down and out feeling just keeps creeping back in after the light moves on. Like i said before, and if you remember this dark mood happens from time to time (read my blog if you don’t remember), I will get in a moody, dark funk. But this one worries me, I’ve never been this down before… well, I take that back, when the love of my life in college just up and walked out of my life I seem to remember I was pretty bad mood for weeks and my best friend put me on her “suicide watch”, like I’d actually kill myself – too much of a coward for that. My best friend was worried more that I was going to do something stupid like have sex with a prostitute and then marry the prostitute in a fit of misguided passion.
What do you do to get out of a funk?
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