Moo! The Musings of a Plaid Cow

I have been watching all of the Last Comic Standing episodes (on NBC) and have to say that the showdown at the end of the series was a big letdown from the rest. Only Ralphie May seemed to come to win. Most of the rest I would have turned off just a couple minutes into a show.

Ralphie May performed another routine that was different than the ones that he has done before. Almost completely different. Dat Phan put on the same show he put on twice before. The same type of jokes combined with the same horrible delivery. Tess just didn’t seem funny. At all. Rich and Cory both did a good job, but their performances paled in comparison. Dave Mordal should have been in the finals, but he was beaten by a one joke racist.

At the current moment I am under the impression that the whole show is fixed. The only evidence I have of this is from my TiVo. It often records Comedy Central Presents and several weeks ago it recorded an episode which list Rich Vos as the comedian. He wasn’t, but I can’t imagine how his name “accidentally” got thrown in the mix if there wasn’t already a special of him made.

Quite often I hear that motorcyclists don’t get respect on America’s highways. Perhaps it is because many of their bretheren don’t deserve respect on the highway. I was on my way to work today and stuck in a 6 mile backup (for an accident up the road), but the only two cyclists I saw concerned. One was driving straight up the white line (between two lanes of traffic). The other was speeding by on the shoulder/breakdown lane/emergency lane. I was hoping for someone to open a door in front of them. This kind of behavior shows a complete disregard for the rules of the road and hurts cyclists trying to get respect.

A few weeks ago I talked about the move of the custodial staff to second shift (and the prediction that it wouldn’t take long to return to first shift with their vacuums blazing). Well, the vacuum cleaners are back. (Not all of them, but the large vaccuum cleaners are once again roaming the halls. I was almost taken out by one of these three foot wide monstrosities with batteries that seem to roam the halls at will.

In another instance of stupidity, the powers that be decided to do a little extra road work on the parking lots (or car parks) last Thursday. I say extra, because they already had the main road into the plant closed. To get to the parking lot near the front gate you had to drive all the way around the plant to end up back where you were. So along this detour road they decided to upgrade the paving. During lunch. The only other road into the plant. Since they neglected to post guards at either end I sat for a few minutes on the way out of the plant face to face with another car in the one remaining lane.

I have no idea why they decided to do this on a Thursday. Perhaps it could have waited until Saturday. Or today (Monday) even, since the main road is open again. I guess this explains why I will not be in management anytime soon. I’m entirely too logical.

I have added my concept of a ring banner in the navigation bar on the main blog page. I think it looks pretty good. Please let me know what you think.

Last week we got a notice from the Facilities Organization where I work that as part of “their effort to continually increase customer satisfaction” the custodial staff would be moving to second shift (the area that is being cleaned works first shift). The reason expressed was that “many employees expressed frustration with the closure of restrooms and the disruption caused by the use of vacuum cleaners during regular working hours.” Well that’s soemthing I would have never thought of.

I like having to avoid being run over by the four foot wide hallway sweeper. The cubicle vacuuming that starts in my area at 7am gives me a good chance to visit other co-worker and go for a cup of coffee. Moving my trash can (and recycle bin) once a day so the custodian can get it while I am still in the office gives me strength training. And the hunt for an open restroom which seem to close for hours at a time gives me better endurance and the will to hold on.

Why, oh why, are they taking away all of my exercise and moving the custodians to second shift? It just doesn’t make any sense. At least I can rest well knowing that this is temporary. They are not likely to be on second shift for long. Complaints from both sides will boil up before the end of the second month, and I will be back to my daily exercise plan. It seems the only constant in this company is change. Back and forth. Back and forth.

There are sometimes when you wake up and you know it is going be a bad and it would have been better to have just stayed in bed.

After starting on my way to work this morning I realized that I had worn the jeans that had a big hole in the knee. I managed to spill a soda on my shirt in the car. (You could even tell I was wearing my seat-belt with the clean stripe down the middle.) I had to stop at Wal-Mart on my way to work…for the generic Immodium. Only after stopping to use the fine facilities at Wal-Mart.

That part was interesting to say the least. The porcelian top to the commode had been broken and had been replaced with a piece of plywood. At least they painted it while. And I got plenty of time to read all of the witty comments made by previous occupants. My advice: never let your kids go into a public restroom unless you want to be answering questions that they probably shouldn’t be asking.

Since I have been doing a good deal of editing the template files outside of iBlog (in my favorite HTML editor skEdit), I find it necessary to Reset the Preview State and Preview quite often. I shortened the cycle time on this by using iKey to set up a shortcut that chooses each menu item in turn. Two minutes to set up and quite a bit of time saved. Most excellent.

I got an email that the Quicken beta test will be ending at the end of the month after 2 cycles. Unfortunately this seems to be a pattern of lack of testing of that software.

It should be noted that a software restore (with the provided disks) cannot be attempted unless the hard drive is already formatted for OS9. (And I could find no way to format the hard drive after booting the restore cd. The only option was to boot the OS9 Install CD, then format the hard drive and reboot with the Restore CD.) This sucks.

I really like my macally iKey keyboard, except that with it there is no good way to eject a cd on a newly installed operating system. Once I got booted into OSX (10.0.4) I couldn’t even find a program that would allow me to eject the CD that was in the drive. This is a poor design. The brave of heart can boot into open firmware when the computer is starting up (hold Command-Option-O-F on power-on) and use the eject cd command at the prompt to exorcise the CD.