Dominica’s migraine was so bad last night that we just skipped dinner entirely. She slept for a few hours with Oreo while I worked on the podcast. When she got up we took the opportunity to go down to the new healthclub in our building that semi-officially opened today and we took a quick tour of the portion that it operational. Technically we are allowed to be using it this evening but no one else is and we would feel weird. But our plan is to start using it tomorrow. At least I plan to do that. I am really just looking for a cardiovascular workout. Not trying to bulk up or anything. Just need to get a little bit closer to actually being somewhat sortof in shape. But boy will it be awesome to have a gym right in the building! I have never had that before and I am quite excited.
While we were out and about in the building we also took the opportunity to pick up our bowling shoes. Everyone in our building get a pair of bowling shoes so that they can use the bowling alley whenever they want.
Our big happy news today is that we made the final payment on Dominica’s 2002 Mazda PR5. It is the first time that we have ever paid off a new car and own it outright. I bought my yellow PR5 before she bought hers but mine was traded in on the Mazda 6 so we didn’t pay it off before it was gone. What a great feeling it is to never have to make another payment on the car. Pheww. I also made a payment on the Mazda 6 today. But that car won’t be paid off until August or September of 2008 so we still have a long haul with that one. The BMW has almost a full five years left to go but hopefully we will be able to shave some off of that.
I talked to John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, this morning and he is taking the day off of work to come down to New Jersey for a Magic: The Gathering tournament this weekend. He might be able to make it out to Warren for lunch before continuing on down to Tom’s River in South Jersey where the tournament is this weekend.
As with most Friday morning, this morning was nice and slow. Fridays are very slow in the morning and busy in the evenings. Dominica decided that she is going to run to Target today during her lunch break to do some needed “we have a healthclub” shopping. Neither of us has been working out in so long that we don’t have any workout clothing and we want to get started today so that is a priority.
Before leaving for the office this morning I managed to upload all of Dominica and my wedding pictures to Flickr. That was a lot of uploading but now, finally, we are able to share all of our wedding pictures with everyone. I know that people have been anxious to see all of the guys in their kilts!
Okay, this one might be a little to techie for a lot my audience but Joel on Software had a great article today on how management consultants fake productivity tests to IT managers. And for those who can’t believe that things like what happen in this article really take place I am here to testify that yes, they really do. It is because IT workers find the obviousness of the ability to game the system and the completely counterproductive nature of the metric so great that we are constantly amazed that management knows so little about what they are managing that they can only serve as a threat to productivity or, at best, a pointless cost center. Just about everyone working in IT knows, it would seem, more about management than management graduates. How can this be? We have no idea. That is one thing we definitely cannot explain. The bottom line is that this would never (almost never) if managers were required to have greater competence than those people that they manage. People are never productive when they know that they are working for a person who has not managed to demonstrate the ability to do the jobs of the people that they manage. If they can’t do the job then they cannot understand the complexities of the tasks. Even Burger King knows this and expects every manager to be able to do every job in the place. Even if they aren’t the best burger flippers they have to have done it enough to appreciate the demands of the position.
Everyone loves cat web sites. This might be the best one yet: Cats That Look Like Hitler. What could be better?
I got home from work pretty late tonight – just a little before eight. But my last while at work was very slow and I managed to watch a ton of Rocketboom. I am rapidly catching up with all of the episodes that I have missed over the last several months.
I got home and tried on workout clothes that Dominica bought today and then we headed straight down to the building’s health club “Club 1180” for our first workouts in forever. I put in a full half an hour on the eliptical machines. I would have worked out longer but I got paged in to work and had to head back to the apartment to work. But really, I think that half an hour is probably enough for my first day working out. Dominica put in about twenty two minutes. So our plan is to be back in the gym tomorrow. But we will see if we manage to stick to that plan or not. It’s the second day that is hard. But we will sleep well tonight.
I am very excited about the statistics that I am seeing from podOmatic. In a bit less than twenty-four hours and on a weekday the show had sixty downloads from podOmatic and an additional fifteen or more from OurMedia! Not too shabby. PodOMatic reports that the SGL Podcast hosted there, even after months of inactivity, is still getting downloaded hundreds of times a week! Now that is encouraging and very, very cool. Now that I am back to doing the show maybe we can get those number up again.
For dinner we just stayed in and had salads and pb&j. We popped in Big Trouble in Little China which is totally classic ’80s Kurt Russell that I haven’t seen since, well, the ’80s.