Wednesday, January 03, 2001

Gotta get back on the exercise program. Too much brined, roasted turkey, stuffing (recipe varied by using fresh herbs and adding bacon), stuffed pork tenderloin, sweet potatos with maple syrup and pecans, and double-chocolate torte. An entire Christmas dinner made from recipes off the web!

...but now I've got to start running and working out again. I'm thinking about getting one of those Sportsbrains, anyone have one? Thoughts about it?
9:32:37 AM | link

Friday, December 22, 2000

I've added the blogvoices comment feature. Don't ask me why, just wanted to.......If you want to comment on any post just click on the "Let's Talk" link and go to it.
8:48:17 AM | link

Thursday, December 21, 2000

We went and checked out a new Cuban restaurant in my town the other night. It was very good. We sat down and the bus boy brought us some fresh bread and a bowl of some kind of spread. We asked him what it was, and he scurried off to ask someone who knew. In the meantime, we tasted it and determined that it was hummus. The bus boy comes back, and polite as can be, informs us that the spread is pumice.

No wonder it tasted a little "gritty" :-)
9:46:35 AM | link

Ok, write down this date, December 21, 2000. I have officially become sick of winter, and snow in particular. We have had something like 20 inches of snow so far this winter in the Chicagoland area, which is quite a lot since winter only officially begins today. It has been snowing pretty much on schedule, every other day, and I think that it will continue like this until sometime in May....

The only good news is that I did get my snowblower repaired.
9:42:39 AM | link

Monday, December 18, 2000

I watched some of the Bears versus 49'ers game yesterday. It is clear to me that the Bears have become the laughing stock of the NFL....They stopped Jerry Rice all right, but gave up an NFL record breaking performance to the other guy. Their offense is pathetic to boot.

Oh yeah, Cade really does suck terribly.
1:20:09 PM | link

Monday, December 11, 2000

...blizzard warning late this afternoon and tonight...

Today: Heavy snow. Becoming windy this afternoon. High in the middle
20s. Northeast winds 15 to 25 mph becoming North at 20 to 30 mph and
gusty late.

Tonight: Windy and very cold with snow and blowing snow creating
blizzard conditions this evening. Total storm accumulations around one
Foot. Low 5 to 10 above. North winds 25 to 35 mph becoming Northwest.
wind chills dropping to near 40 below.

Oh Boy. Procrastination is going to be my downfall....

Last year I bought a brand-spankin new, mongo snowblower, even used it once or twice. Then I went away for a weekend, and it snowed pretty heavy. My wife, being the trooper that she is, decided to use the brand-spankin new, mongo snowblower to clear the driveway. Five minutes and one rolled-up newspaper ingestion later, the brand-spankin new, mongo snowblower is totally inoperable. That was about 10 months ago mind you, can anyone guess if I got the brand-spankin new, mongo snowblower repaired AT ANY TIME OVER THE SUMMER.....OR IS IT STILL SITTING INOPERABLE IN MY GARAGE?

Yeah, you got it.
2:55:44 PM | link

Friday, December 01, 2000

Yuck. Very much Yuck. Read about it here.
10:53:47 AM | link

Wednesday, November 29, 2000

I almost forgot about this; a couple of weeks ago I was on a business trip to Philadelphia. There were some people from my company who were staying at the Loew's hotel on Market Street. Well, this one lady gets to be friendly with one of the people working the desk, so he moves her onto the "executive" floor. Turn's out that The Artist Formally Known as Prince, (is he still called that?), and his posse are also staying on that floor. The desk-guy tells her that Prince was so worried about fan attention that his people carried him into the hotel in a big suitcase.

Freakin Weirdo.
9:35:50 AM | link

Friday, November 17, 2000

"George W. Bush is not president of the United States. Al Gore is not president of the United States. What do you say we just leave it that way?"

--David Letterman

9:15:24 AM | link

As a loyal Chicago Bears fan, and longtime season ticket holder, I am appalled and disgusted with this site:

www.tradecade.com

Just kidding.....actually it is hilarious, and I couldn't agree more!
9:13:46 AM | link

Thursday, November 16, 2000

Yep. Just like he said.
3:47:02 PM | link

chad (chd)
n.

Small pieces of paper or cardboard generated by punching holes in paper tape or data cards.

[Origin unknown.]
1:21:47 PM | link

Friday, November 10, 2000

"Bush is going to take these Greens to school, and we're all going to pay the tuition."

Mike Casey of the Environmental Working Group, blaming Ralph Nader's supporters if Al Gore loses and the environment suffers under Republican policies.

8:22:48 AM | link

Thursday, November 09, 2000

Ok, let me see if I have this straight:

• About 100,000,000 people voted in the 2000 Presidential Election.
• Gore is winning the popular vote by slightly less than 100,000 votes.
• Bush is currently leading in Florida by somewhere around 1000 votes.
• Approximately 97,000 people in Florida voted for Ralph Nader.
• If the Florida numbers stand, Bush will be the next President with the 270 Electoral votes needed.

That's pretty much it in a netshell, right?

Couple of issues/statements:

Pretty clear mandate, no matter which way it goes, eh?

Ralph - tell me again how those 97,000 people who voted for you didn't effectively cast their votes for George W. Bush?

On a positive note though:

In a lot of countries if this situation occurred, the headlines would have read:

Opposition Party Storm Election Headquarters, Several Killed.........or,
Army Loyal to Democrats Sieze Ballots.....or,
Coup Attempt in Wake of Vote Fraud Allegations

instead of:

A Landslide Victory for Confusion.....or,
No, the System Worked....or,
A Country Split Down the Middle

So, the moral of the story is that, pending the inevitable lawsuits and other legal challenges, the system worked, as designed. Now, whether the design is appropriate or not, is another issue.
8:41:12 AM | link

Wednesday, November 08, 2000

Yep, couldn't agree more.

It seems ludicrous in this day and age, a new American Express poll says 66% of American citizens have access to the Internet BTW, we still don't know who our new President will be. And we won't know until at least Thursday evening.
11:01:14 AM | link

Boy, this is a tough one.

If you haven't heard about this, conjoined twins in England, both will die in a few months if nothing is done, one will die for sure if they are seperated and one will most likely live and be sorta normal. The parents are very religious and decide to do nothing, court overrules and forces the operation. The expected outcome happens, one dies, one lives, currently in critical, but stable, condition.

Religious viewpoints aside, because I know nothing about them, nor do I care, I think that the right decision was made.
8:48:18 AM | link

Tuesday, November 07, 2000

If you're American, get your ass out and vote today!
3:59:19 PM | link

Monday, November 06, 2000

Took the patio furniture into the garage over the weekend. Slightly depressing, summer over, fall almost over, typical midwest winter well on it's way......

Also took down the Halloween decorations, nothing extravagant, some pumpkins and a couple of scarecrows. When did people start putting lights on their houses for Halloween anyway?
12:47:16 PM | link

Wednesday, October 25, 2000

2nd installment of Stupid Search Engine Referrals. There was a whole lot'o spankin goin on last week:

1. spank me tall girl
2. spank 14 year old

..and the generic.....
3. spank me
8:58:53 AM | link

Tuesday, October 24, 2000

Whomping budget surplus continues, what to do, what to do?

Budget Surplus?

What should we do with the huge budget surplus? Give it back in tax cuts, ala Bush Pay down debt, ala Gore

2:29:33 PM | link

Two words:

Go Hawks!
9:30:45 AM | link

Tuesday, October 17, 2000

Have you ever tried to paint a white room, a deep, dark red?

It ain't as easy as it sounds....
9:20:52 AM | link

Monday, October 16, 2000

I'm starting a new feature here at "You talkin to me like that?". Each week I will feature the three funniest search engine referrals found in my stats. All will be shown verbatim; capitalization, punctuation, and wording direct from the search referral. Try the links, they're fun! Without further ado:

1. 14 year old girls WITH BIG ASS
2. my wife spank me
3. women, cutting, dick

This, in a nutshell, is why search engines are virtually worthless. There must be some pretty frustrated people out there still looking for BIG ASS, spankings, and women, cutting, dick (whatever the hell that means).
10:28:38 AM | link

Do you want to buy property on the Moon? Well, you can.
9:07:26 AM | link

Friday, October 13, 2000

I am not a Friggatriskaidekaphobe, no I am not.
9:15:51 AM | link

Tuesday, October 10, 2000

Sunday was the 129th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.

Trivia Time:

What is located today at the corner of Taylor and Clinton in the South Loop, the location in which the Chicago Fire started on October 8th, 1871? (answer below, no cheating)

(a) The office building in which I am currently sitting.
(b) A Starbucks
(c) The City of Chicago Firefighter Training Facility
(d) Watertower Place

Answer:
12:14:47 PM | link

There's an article in today's Chicago Tribine about the crumbling infrastructure in our National Parks, more people, more land, and less money. I am a huge National Park fan, see my Yellowstone Page and I have a Glacier Page coming soon.

In these times of plenty, this shouldn't be happening. This would be a good place for the weenie Presidential candidates to put a bunch of that budget surplus we keep hearing so much about.
8:43:12 AM | link

Friday, October 06, 2000

I'm sorry Ben. Really, I am.

I made a mistake the other day. I screwed up.

I installed a new hard drive a couple of weeks ago in my machine at home. After copying over all of my files and reinstalling alot of software, I was ready to start cleaning up the old drive for possible re-allocation into another box.

Let's back up a little......over the past year or so, my son has become a huge Napster fan. He downloads music and plays it on the PC when he is doing his homework. He had over 100 songs downloaded......(you probably see where I am going with this by now)

Back to cleaning up the old hard drive. I did check. I looked in the Napster preferences area and saw that the drive that was being shared was on "C", the new drive. I then deleted the entire Napster tree off of the old drive. A couple of days later Ben asks me why his music isn't playing. This has happened before, loose sub-woofer connection, volume turned down, reboot necessary for some reason.....not this time. All of the songs, deleted. Napster was set up to download songs to a different directory than it was sharing. Shit.

A quick look for freeware to undelete files on Win98 turned up nothing but a couple of non-functioning demos for commercial products. If anybody knows of anything, please let me know, you would make a 14 year old kid very happy.

Anybody know how long it takes to download 100 songs over a 56k modem? We'll soon find out.

Lack of broadband options in my neighborhood is a topic for a different day.
9:08:23 AM | link

Thursday, October 05, 2000

I watched the presidential debate the other night. Some of my thoughts:

Gore Whiny, wimpy baby. Lose the bright red blush man. Ramble on.......

Bush Arrogant prick. Snide comments galore. "Small oil" my ass.

As has become the norm, nobody answered the difficult questions, why piss off ANYBODY.

I am getting tired of having to pick the "least of two evils". Incidently, I haven't figured out who that is yet......
8:33:43 AM | link

Wednesday, October 04, 2000

I bought a new cordless mouse the other day, the old one was sticky and gunky.

It works flawlessly, I love it.
9:52:12 AM | link

Wednesday, September 27, 2000

Road Rage.

My company has their Operations Center and their Technology Center directly across the street from each other a little bit south of the loop in downtown Chicago. The street separating the buildings is a pretty busy thoroughfare, two lanes north and one lane south. There is a crosswalk between the buildings, but no traffic light or stop sign. There are people crossing all the time, to go to meetings, to go to the fitness center, or to the cafeteria, and traffic is whizzing by pretty consistantly. It is especially busy, and dangerous, in the morning when everyone is going to work, there are buses parked along the street, the coffee van is there and it is real congested.

Monday morning one of the guys who works for me is standing on the side of the road, in the crosswalk, waiting to cross when a car whips around another car, and really brushes him back. Well, this guy taps the car's side window as if to say "Hey buddy, watch what you're doing, you almost hit me here". The guy screeches to a halt, jumps out of the car with his fists flailing and knocks my guy down to the pavement. Then he cold-cocks him in the eyeball and continues to beat on him. He is pulled off by a couple of bystanders, gets up, jumps in his car, and takes off.

Thirteen stiches, several bumps and bruises, and an eye swollen shut later, the license number of the asshole has been turned over to the police, and we are waiting to see what happens.

Supposedly there is a traffic light going up here, but my company's proposal to the city of Chicago to erect a bridge over the street connecting the two buildings has been denied......go figure.
9:40:02 AM | link

Friday, September 22, 2000

A couple of good articles about my son's high school football team, here, and here. He's only a freshman, but his team is kicking butt also. As a new school, only 4 years old, this is very nice.
9:55:59 AM | link

Thursday, September 21, 2000

Ok, I guess that I wasn't really back on August 3, but I am now....at least I think that I am.

They are renovating the building that I work in. This is good, we bought this building on January 1st of this year. It is old, it is dark, and it is dreary. The washrooms are small and smell like a port-a-potty on the Fourth of July. Generally, renovation is good, if you can put up with the banging, the sawing, the paint fumes, and the legions of construction workers.

The one good space that already exists in the building is the cafeteria. It is an atrium, several stories high, all glass ceiling (I guess that's what an atrium is!), it had about 15 big, beautiful, and old ficus trees in planters spread all around. I mean these things were huge, about 30 to 40 feet tall.

I came in yesterday morning to see clowns in hardhats weilding chainsaws cutting down these trees! Some bullshit about them being too big for the new seating design.

There is something very wrong about that.
8:49:20 AM | link

Thursday, August 03, 2000

OK, I think that I'm back now. It has been a very, very busy summer.

I went to a concert last night, first one in about 10 years. I took my son and a friend to see Stone Temple Pilot, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers at the New World Music Theatre. Very good show.

A couple of things that surpised me though; everyone entering the venue was totally patted down, that's right, arms and legs spread, empty your pockets and searched. That must be new. Also, $6.50 for a 12 ounce beer, that must be new too......and it sucks.
1:35:39 PM | link

Friday, June 09, 2000

I've been very busy lately, which is a huge excuse for the lack of entries here.

I had my son's eigth grade graduation, much landscaping to do, 70 people at my house for a party, managing my son's baseball team, coaching my daughter's softball team, two big presenations at work.....you guy's know the drill. School's out for summer, which makes my life one kid-event after another.....
9:52:31 AM | link

Tuesday, May 30, 2000

Oops. The ultimate fat finger. Nobody is taking the credit, or the blame, depending on your perspective.
2:43:39 PM | link

Thursday, May 25, 2000

I spent 9 hours on Tuesday digging holes, shoveling 10 yards of dirt, and planting about 50 trees and bushes in my yard....and I had to take a vacation day from work to do it. Now I know why I have a desk job. Couple that with 8 hours of standing around yesterday at a trade-show and that explains why I'm hopped up on Advil.
12:58:14 PM | link