Randy Charles Morin blogs for the sake of blogging.
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Supposedly this commercial, which is pretty funny, was banned. What a homophobic world we live in. If that was two girls kissing, then it would be a hit beer commercial.
Excellent commercial! I don't understand why it would be rejected. I think it communicates a great message.
Thirty-minute Star Wars spoof. Way funny!
R|mail.By definition, a company is an organization. In reality, most companies are disorganizations.
Almost every single manager that I've ever had, was an accomplished programmer with no managerial skills whatsoever. When the company promoted these people to managers, they not only lost their best programmer, but they gained a really bad manager with no experience and no training. Programmers are promoted to managers and they are not offered any managerial training. This is why engineers have come to love Dilbert, as every one of their managers makes every single classic managerial mistake over-and-over. The same programmer who laughed at his bosses, gets promoted and makes the same mistakes.
R|mail.By definition, a company is an organization. In reality, most companies are disorganizations. Most employees want training in their field of expertise, but I think most employees would benefit more from organizational training. A small organizational improvement in most companies would remove a tremendous amount of wasted time.
Most every meeting in every company that I've worked for is scheduled in the hours before or the day before the meeting actually takes place. Quite often, attendees don't show, because they are unaware of the meeting or had previous commitments. This leads to meetings which start one half hour to an hour late, as attendees are rounded up. This means that several people are sitting around for up to an hour with better things to do. Sometimes, key attendees don't show and the meeting turns into a complete waste of everybody's time. All meetings (except emergencies) can easily be scheduled with 2 business days of notice, thus giving all employees adequate time to reschedule and prepare for the meeting. If you improperly organize a meeting where 8 people waste one hour, then you've effectively wasted an entire man-day of work. In other words, had you just stayed home that entire day and not wasted those 8 people's time, then your company would be no worse off.
R|mail.I've lost connectivity to google.com from my home network. Unsure the reason. If I use Remote Desktop to access a computer outside of my network, then everything is fine. It may be a problem with my ISP (Rogers Communication).
Update: It's back! My entire universe was in a state of confusion. iM addicted to Google.
About five years back, I started a company that went onto some reasonable successes. At this company, I worked with this person, who IMHO drastically underperformed. At the end of every meeting, this person would have a list of TODOs, which grew in time, because they never actually completely any tasks. After numerous deadline misses, they promised to deliver the final specification on Monday. Monday came and passed and no specification was heard of. Eventually, I completed the specification myself, which was widely critiqued by the person who failed to delivery it in the first place.
This person was also in charge of payroll. I was paid a fixed amount per month, but my monthly paycheck was always less than the fixed amount. The person would multiply my monthly salary by this, divide by that, multiply this, divide that and it would come up to a figure less than my salary. They said, this is how payroll was done. BTW, our company was building payroll software, which made the situation all the more ridiculous.
Eventually, I quit, partly because of this dummy, partly because I was getting ripped on salary, but mostly because the CEO refused to fixed the situation. When I quit, they promised me a big severance package, but since this dummy was in charge of payroll, I never actually got it. I complained a couple times, but eventually gave up. Later, when I got my T4 (Canadian tax stub), it didn't even add up to the salary I was paid.
Years later, this person still works for the same company and every employee that I'm friends with and works with this person, complains about them.
You might think that I'm complaining about this person. Truth is, I'm not. I'm complaining about their bosses. How does this person survive? It goes to show that you don't really have to try to succeed in corporate North America. The entire system is dominated by bosses that are afraid to manage their subordinates.
Kent Newsome participated in a really interesting pyramid linking scheme. Basically, you copy the following grid, while adding a link to your website. Then others copy your grid and pass it on, with your link and their's. Read more on Kent's blog.
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Today, I decided to try out Yahoo's Flickr Uploadr on Microsoft's Windows Vista. I've previously had trouble using the Uploadr on XP from my network. Yahoo! was never able to figure out why it doesn't work on my network. They blamed it on my Linksys router (ya right!).
It installed OK! I then selected the pics I wanted, right-click to get the context menu with the option Send to Flickr... Unfortunately, the option wasn't present. I then selected one picture, right-click and the option was present. Two picture, present. It turns out that the option is only available if you select 15 or less pictures. I wonder if it's an idiot from Yahoo! or an idiot from Microsoft that is making photosharing more difficult than it really has to be. Is this a known issue?
In the end, the Uploadr failed anyway, just as it did on my XP machines. Flickr still sucks!
R|mail.The family wheeled Grandma out on the lawn, in her wheelchair, where the activities for her 100th birthday were taking place. Grandma couldn't speak very well, but she would write notes when she needed to communicate. After a short time out on the lawn, Grandma started leaning off to the right, so an orderly grabbed her, straightened her up, and stuffed pillows on her right. A short time later, she started leaning off to her left, so again the orderly straightened her and stuffed pillows on her left. Soon she started leaning forward, so the orderly again grabbed her, then tied a pillowcase around her waist to hold her up. A nephew who arrived late came up to Grandma and said, "Hi, Grandma, you're looking good! How are they treating you?" Grandma took out her notepad and slowly wrote a note to the nephew:
"Bastards won't let me fart."
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Hat tip to Dad!
I believe these are the first public service announcements about blogging and user-generated content (posting online).
Awesome action clip from the upcoming Transformers movie.
R|mail.Mark Evans jockingly wants employers to ban the Internet. Mark points us to an article about how employees waste and average of 2 hours per day on non-productive activities. That seems low. My biggest beef in life has always been that most office workers have no idea what an honest days work is. I don't know how many times a subordinate of mine was warned countless times about their working less than 10 hours per week and I was unable to get them fired. The problem isn't the employees. It's the employers. If the guy doesn't do work, then fire his ass. Otherwise, the employees will run all over you. Now, you don't have to carry a whip, but if you discipline the biggest problems, then everybody will have a little more fear in them about wasting your dollar.