AlanBarber.Org
Monday, January 31, 2005
How to kill yourself in 4 easy steps
Step 1: Drive 10 hours straight to New York City on a Friday.
Step 2: Spend all day on your feet Saturday roaming around the city.
Step 3: Drive 10 hours home on Sunday.
Step 4: Go to work on Monday and load 1500 boxes into semi trailers.
Oy is my back sore! It was a really really really fun weekend and worth the pain. I got to go on a little road trip with the love of my life. We saw some beautiful areas of the country while on the road. We got to spend another weekend in our favorite city!
We saw some wonderful pieces of art at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) and then some really stupid pieces that I don’t know why they would be in a museum. I’m sorry folks but painting a canvas blue and calling it “untitled” is not art. It’s laziness! I’m not an artist and I know I have zero artistic talent so if I see something that I could do in 5 minutes then I refuse to consider it art.
Anyways, I’m tired as heck as I’m sure my car is! Poor thing got a major beating this weekend. It must have run over hundreds of potholes, been running at high speeds for hours and put more than 1200 miles on it in. Other than the crappy seats with no lumbar support the car (2004 Chevy Malibu LS) gave a wonderful ride.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Johnny Carson dies
It’s another sad day for TV as former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson has passed away. He died this morning from complications of emphysema.
Johnny was before my time so I never really watched him on the Tonight Show but I still respect the man for being one of TVs great legends. To be on the Tonight Show for 30 years means you have to have done something right.
Goodbye Johnny! You’ll be sorely missed by many.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Inauguration of President of The United States of America
“I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”
It’s official now! George W. Bush has been sworn in and is now President for another 4 years. I actually missed the swearing in and the speech since I was at work. However, I did tape it so I’ll be watching it later tonight.
Regardless of your political views, who you voted for or for that matter if you even are an American at all; you have to be impressed by what is happening today.
The Inauguration is proof of the superiority of democracy over all forms of governing. Every 4 years this great country gives its citizens the power to elect their leader. Though the process can sometimes get heated and seem crazy in the end it always works out. The winner is sworn in at a ceremony in which he then takes over control of the country. There are no coups, civil wars or bloodshed just peaceful transition from one leader to the next. It has happen without any major problems for over 200 years and should continue till the end of time.
I love this country!
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Apparently, it was all a lie!
I remember back during peak season (the Christmas holiday) at least 2 managers at UPS said it would slow down drastically during January. They told me that it would be possible to get an entire week off because they would have too many people and end up sending people home every day. If you asked your supervisor, he would gladly let you just not come in because it’s easier for him to plan knowing you just won’t be in all week.
BULL SHIT!
My girlfriend and I are planning to drive to New York City so that she can pack up everything from her apartment there and move back here to Ohio. Ore plans were that we would head off Thursday morning so that we would have all of Friday and Saturday to pack up and spend one last weekend in NYC.
I asked my super today if I could have off the two days next week. He just laughs and says we don’t have enough people that come in to guarantee I can get the days off. Now I think that’s crap. Just for the record I’m doing about 1200 boxes on Mondays and it tapers off each day of the week to where I do only about 800 pieces on Friday for my truck. During peak I would do 2500-3000 average per day and even once I did 5000! Last Friday we had 5000 pieces for the whole area!
I think they can live without me for two days personally. We only have 12 people on the roster for our area and they only run 9-10 a day anyways. The problem apparently is that too many others don’t show up for work, which I find hard to believe. I’ve see the same people every day at work for the last few weeks. Where are these supposed slackers that don’t show up? I’ve never seen any strange faces of these mysterious employees just appear once a week or anything.
I know I’m not exactly the model employee but I sure work hard. I think he could be a little nice and work with me on this. Since I’ve been working there I’ve only asked time off twice and missed one day of work. I asked off once for a job interview and once to pick up my girlfriend from the airport. The one day I missed was during the last big snow storm. Our area was under a level 3 snow emergency. For you that don’t live in snow areas, a level 3 is basically the worst. It means most roads are un-drivable and in fact if the police, sheriff, or highway patrol catches you on the road they can pull you over and give you a ticket! So there was no way I was going to go to work that day.
So Mr. Supervisor, let me get this straight? I come in to work every day, where I’m usually the first there and usually the last to leave, I bust my hump and help out wherever I can. All I want is two days off, when the load will be low anyways, but you can’t give it to me?
Thanks for nothing!
Sunday, January 16, 2005
ExpressionEngine Version 1.2.1 Released
The fine folks at pMachines have released an updated version of ExpressionEngine. Compared to the previous releases this one is pretty minor in scale as far as changes/updates go.
The main new features they added are:
* A stand-alone version of the “publish” form, so weblog entries can be submitted from any page.
* An improved plugin manager. Plugins can now be browsed and installed directly from your control panel. Big thanks to Chris Ruzin for this feature.
* URL mapping for people who migrated from pMachine Pro, allowing pM style links to point to their new EE location.
* Redesigned template installer which allows new template designs to be incorporated more easily.
I’m downloading the new version right now. As usual I’ll be testing this release out for about a week on my private test server before I install it on the live site. No offense to pMachines but every time they’ve done a new release they end up putting out bugfix releases within a few days. So, I figure it’s best to just play with the new version for a while in the safety of a test environment while I wait for the bugfixes to come out. It seems rather silly to install the new version on the live site only to install the bugfix version a few days later. I’m out in the boonies and only have dialup! Doing major uploading like when you install a new version of EE takes a long time for me. Once a week is my limit.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Getting back into the programming groove
I decided today to get back into programming after being burned out from work for so long. I work at UPS loading boxes every day. Loading boxes all day is about the most brain-dead a job you can do. You would think I would come home and want to programming just to use my brain. Yet, I just don’t feel like it.
I haven’t written a line of code since the middle of October. So, today I made the effort to get back into coding. I had started several programming projects a while ago and just stopped. They projects were add-ons for the ExpressionEngine web publishing system that I’m using.
I really haven’t done any coding today. Today was just prep and setup. I’m making a FreeBSD 5.3 test server to do the development work on. Right now I have the OS installed but I’m doing a buildworld on it in order to update everything and patch security holes. Tomorrow I’ll get apache, mysql, php, etc installed and running. The next day I’ll finally get ExpressionEngine installed and my special backup/rollback procedure configured and running.
Then after all that I’ll actually get around to start coding!
I’m sure I’ll have enough on my plate for a while but I’m already thinking of some other programming projects I’d love to work on so we’ll just see how much I manage to get done.
on 01/09/2005 at 10:43 PM
Blogging • Computers & Technology • Work • BSD • ExpressionEngine • (1) Comments • Permalink
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Mr Snowman says Hello
We got some more snow dumped on us last night. Weatherman said 1 to 3 inches… but we must have had 6+!
Well after I finished getting the driveway cleared I made a little snowman for the front stoop. He’s about 14” tall and hand packed as the snow is too fluffy to roll. Aren’t snowmen just fun to look at?
The problem is, right now it’s about 34 degrees (f) outside and he’s starting to melt now. His nose and mouth fell off. That lump to the left of him was his little dog. But like Mr Snowman the dog is also melting. He had leafs for ears and a stick for a tail.
I guess I could have fixed it for the picture but I’m freezing cold from being outside all morning and didn’t want to go back out. So, I just snapped the picture thru the window from the comfort of my warm house.
It’s only the begining of January and I’m already sick of snow. We still have a good two months of this stuff. UGG!