Click the image to go to the gallery
Mount Baker photos, day 3
Click the image to go to the gallery
Posted in Blog, Photos
Leave a comment
Photos from Whistler, BC Day 2
As promised here are the photos from the second day of my vacation in Whistler, BC. I took to the slopes at Blackcomb mountain (Whistler wasn’t open yet, too early in the season) and there was a temperature inversion that day. What that means is that it was actually getting warmer as altitude increased rather than the other way around. While the weather in town was foggy and temperatures were hovering near freezing, once up the slopes of the mountain the temperature had risen over 20 degrees fahrenheit to the mid-50’s with sunny skies. The pictures you’ll see show the town of Whistler way below covered in a powdery blanket of fog. It was a great day to be a skier, that’s for sure. The first photos are of that evening’s sunset.
Click the photo to proceed to the gallery.
Tomorrow I’ll post the photos from the third day at Mount Baker.
Posted in Blog, Photos
Leave a comment
Annoying office behavior
Wow, I didn’t realize how quickly someone’s behavior in the office could become so annoying. It’s an especially big problem in companies where square footage is at a premium and people are forced into close proximity with each other, either by doubling or even tripling in offices or cubicles. Clearly this is something to which a lot of people haven’t yet adapted, and annoying office behavior is the result. Here’s a bunch of annoying behaviors – are you guilty of any of them?
- Using headphones while your computer speakers are still on, and your computer is dinging constantly with IMs and other alerts that you can’t even hear, but everyone within 20 feet does.
- Having one of those uber-laptops that produces so much heat it needs a fan that sounds like a noisy ventilation duct, whose speed varies so the pitch of its whine is constantly changing – and slowly sinking your surrounding coworkers into the dark pit of insanity. Of course, you’re such an ubergeek that you have two other computers sitting on your desk and aren’t even using your noisy laptop – it’s just sitting there as eye candy to show off to the lesser ubergeeks.
- Chewing gum with your mouth open, loudly snapping and cracking away at it.
- Muttering everything you read on your screen under your breath.
- Giving your coworkers a running commentary of everything you’re doing with your day.
- Eating excessively noisy or overpoweringly stinky food at your desk, or making quiet food unnecessarily noisy (like crunching ice cubes). Some foods fall into the “High Risk” category and should be used with extreme caution, like cabbage, radishes, garlic, and of course beans.
- Launching into a lengthy diatribe, technical or otherwise, at the slightest mention of anything on which you have an opinion.
- Attaching every crappy fingerpaint, mucilage, macaroni or other creation of your child’s to any available real estate in your vicinity.
- Clicking your ballpoint pen.
- Nervously bouncing your legs up and down.
- Sneezing so loudly that an entire hallway of people is startled out of their chairs.
- CELLPHONES! I could write a whole post on office cellphone etiquette, but the most annoying of all are talking loudly on them in the hallway, not setting them to vibrate mode while you’re in the office, or leaving them on your desk with the ringer on full blast while you’re in a meeting – just don’t!
Posted in Annoyances, Blog, Musings
Leave a comment
Blogging by the pros is getting on my nerves
As much as I welcome the rapid-journalism-environment of blogging, I long for the now-bygone days of editors. I come across more grammatical, spelling and confusing multiple-rewrite sentence errors now from the big boys of journalism that are downright embarrassing, and make reading these “posts” (rather than articles) a chore of trying to figure out which word the author was trying to use and distracts me from the content of the article. Here’s a particularly glaring example, from which I trackbacked this post:
Three errors in one sentence alone.
Update: Proving it’s gone beyond mere occasional mistake to near epidemic, the following is a direct quote from the ZDNet headlines by Dan Farber:
I know you guys need to get your articles out as fast as you can these days, but please – either re-read your posts and do a better job of self-editing them, or send them through an editor first!