What I’ve found strange/interesting is almost immediately I have 6 “followers”, random people that I don’t know and as far as I know don’t have a connection to.  And I haven’t written a single word yet.  After signing up I started following a couple of users off the top of my head, but is this normal?

I’m aware of the über-expensive Herman Miller Aeron chairs, and have read lots of reviews by people who swear by them for office comfort.  But justifying spending a thousand bucks on a chair, heck even $400-500 used, seems crazy.  Now they’ve got the Embody chair, and I want.  Of course, it ups the ante at $1600!

Daaaaaaaaamnnnn.  But it looks so awesome – and if it made the work day more comfortable, then why not?  If you think about it, I spend probably 8 to 9 hours of the day in a desk chair.  A $50 OfficeMax chair that we probably tried to find the cheapest deal on.

It’s a sad state of affairs that we spend the majority of our days either in bed, or in an office chair.  The rest is likely split between a car and/or a couch.  We’ll invest in a good bed, probably even a comfortable couch at some point.  Why do we ignore the office environment, heck even the automobile environment (what do they have out there for ergonomic comfortable car seats)?  Is this overpriced marketing, or are we vastly underspending on needed work environment benefits?

I think I either need to find a rich startup, start a rich startup, or find some crazy coupons.

Ah, who am I kidding?  I wouldn’t have it any other way!

My work email, which I didn’t check!, 1730 unread messages when I got in this morning.  Granted, all but ~150 of those were from an automated process that errored out and spit the message back to me, so those were easily cleaned up.  But still, I had 150 messages to go through when I got in, trying to piece together what’s going on, where things are with projects and whatnot.  It’s a pain.

Then there’s the RSS feeds.  I can’t seem to find a specifc number on Google Reader (it only says 1000+), but my breakdown has 1000+ for the regular news sites, 1000+ in tech-related sites, and ~600 for misc blogs and websites.  These are all feeds that I usually read or at least skim in the reader each item.  All in all I’m left with literally thousands of stories that are unread, and no idea what has been going on in the world over roughly the past week and a half.  Am I really that much of a slave to the Internet?

I need something that summarizes the summaries for me!  I’m thinking now I’m just going to “mark all as read”, and figure that if it’s important I’ll find out about it eventually!

On a somewhat related note, I’ve been reading the first book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time now for over a year.  I’ve have multiple coworkers recommend it, and friends rave about it, so I took the opportunity to waste a gift card on set of the first three books.  Lately, I’ve found myself on quite a few cross-country airplane trips, and spend much of the airtime reading.  But I just can’t get into it.  I have no idea why – I enjoy fantasy fiction, and have read many of that genre.  I’ve flown through the last few fiction books I’ve read.   But the Eye of the World just isn’t drawing me in.  Blasphemy, I know, but what the heck?  I’m going to finish it one way or another (maybe in the next year?), but I’m doubting I’ll check out the rest.  [shrug]

However, Michigan (Kalamazoo?) has decided to screw the pooch and completely hose things up.  This is the new path, to get from Northbound 131 to Eastbound 94:

What.  The.  F-.  Not only was the ramp to East 94 from 131 CLOSED FOR CONSTRUCTION TWO YEARS AGO, but we had to completely make a large loop just to go the right direction.  Bah!

And don’t even get me started on the reasons I’m out here…I’m not even sure where to begin with that.  I might address some of those concerns in a later posting, but I guess we’ll see.  I’ll just say that it looks like I’m on the brink of a possible IT nightmare, one of those stories you read about in tech journals and say “whew, glad that wasn’t me!”.  Yay?

I’ve been keeping my eye on another blogging platform, MovableType, and think I’ll try moving to that.  I was hoping to wait until they released an upcoming open source version; currently it only offers a “free for personal use” version.  At this point I think I’ll take the plunge anyhow and maybe move to the open source version once it comes out.

I’ve read some comparisons of the two, and I think I should be able to do what I do in Wordpress in MT4, and supposedly some of the things are even easier.  The big difference I can see is that where WP sort of hacks together caching so it loads faster and doesn’t hit the database so often, MT builds posts into static pages.  So, here’s to looking forward to some changes in the coming weeks – with at least a new theme, and better stability!

Elapsed time before end users tell you they are randomly unable to make outbound phone calls, or repeatedly get busy signals, or keypresses don’t register on voicemail: 2 days

4+ hours on the phone with tech support, both foreign and domestic, finding a “solution”, and still not sure if it’s actually fixed: Priceless

Let’s just say this comic sums up the past couple weeks quite well. Sigh…..