Another semi-useless spot on the web…
I’m sure not all smokers are inconsiderate idiots, but it seems that many I encounter are. At the airport last Sunday, I couldn’t help but to shake my head at the smoker in this picture sitting on the bench that says “Thank you For Not Smoking”. It was kind of tricky to get the picture without looking too suspicious. Click on the left picture and then look closely at the bench; an enlargement of the sign is in the second picture.
This past week at WWDC, most men that left the restroom washed their hands which is good news. However, many never took hand washing 101. The first part of hand washing is water, the second part is soap and the third part is actually rubbing hands together for at least 15 seconds. It is particularly disgusting to see educated people not washing their hands. Several years ago, a family friend mentioned how he always uses a paper towel to open the bathroom door when leaving. I’ve gone one step further and use my elbow to make the paper dispenser eject the towels. There are so many germs around that I just can’t understand people not washing their hands. Yuck!
The other day, I wrote about the highway signs saying “Flex Your Power” and using energy. Someone from the company that runs the “Flex Your Power” campaign (they’re a marketing/PR firm) commented that the signs served a valuable purpose. In my opinion, stating the obvious isn’t valuable. In any case, neither my wife nor I saw the signs lit up yesterday. Is it a coincidence that after my post they were turned off or was it that the energy usage dropped? While the energy usage did drop (drop in temperature), shouldn’t people still conserve energy?
I wonder how much money the state saved by turning off the signs. We’ve always been told to turn off the lights when we leave a room; now CalTrans is turning off the signs when it has nothing useful to say. (I’d be more than happy to accept a check for a portion of the money saved.)
In this time of high energy usage, the big buzz is on conservation. So much so, that CalTrans has lit up the freeway billboards with something like “Flex Your Power. Converse Energy.” Hmmm…how much energy does it take to light up those signs? Brilliant. The media and energy officials are saying to keep the thermostat at 78 degrees if you can. I’m thinking, if I put the thermostat at 78 degrees, the temperate in our house would drop by 6-10 degrees! People really need to use fans and suffer to some degree. We have air conditioning, but have never turned it on. Why? Cooling our house for just my wife and me with our dog is a complete waste. Others should follow suit, in my opinion. Our electricity usage is lower, I think, in the summer than in the winter despite the heat. In the winter, we run our heat in the early morning and in the evening; it is gas forced hot air, so the fan on the furnace runs to blow the hot air around.
I try to do my part conserving energy, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Look at all the store signs that are lit up. How about turning those off? We were at the mall the other day and the mall management was going around shutting all the store doors to keep the cool air in the stores (it is an outdoor mall, like most malls in San Diego). Do you have to be a rocket scientist to realize this? The stores all fear that people will think they’re closed because the doors are shut as evidenced by the handmade signs that said “We’re open”. I’m sure there are tons of other things people can do to help, but they just aren’t doing it, which keeps stressing the power system and conservation is only talked about when the system is close to being maxed out.
If high electricity bills aren’t enough, I’d hope that people have some sense of responsibility to the environment and learn to conserve.
Yesterday I was in a parking lot and heard a car alarm go off. Like any good citizen, I dashed over to the car to make sure it wasn’t being stolen. Ha! Did you really believe that? Car alarms are almost completely useless. A better system for car alarms is a GPS tracking device (on the lines of LoJack, but LoJack requires you to report the car stolen which could be too late by hours especially overnight) that alerts the police when the car moves without using your coded key. That is probably the most effective way to recover a stolen car.
As part of reliving my childhood, I’ve started to collect Legos as I had to give mine up in one of our moves. The Lego sets these days seem so much more sophisticated than what I remember. The Lego City series look neat (OK, maybe I never grew up), so I’ve bought a few of the pieces. During the assembly process (it is so much easier to put these together after going through high school and college :-)), I’ve noticed a number of things about Legos that most people probably wouldn’t notice. For instance, the scale of some of the pieces is totally out of whack. One of the pieces I have is a police dog that is about half the size of the police officer (this is the dog’s body, not head), so that’s a pretty big dog. In the rescue helicopter I put together, it has wheels. I’ve been on a rescue helicopter; it has skids. Maybe some helicopters have wheels, but I don’t think it is common. I know I’m over analyzing things, but I can’t help myself.I also noticed that the rescue collection uses the Star of Life logo which is a registered trademark of the US Department of Transportation. Do I think that Lego has permission to use this logo? I really don’t think so. The trademark for the symbol says: THE CERTIFICATION MARK IS USED BY PERSONS AUTHORIZED BY APPLICANT TO CERTIFY THAT EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE VEHICLES MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS A), THE EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE PERSONNEL OPERATING THE VEHICLE HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS B), OR BOTH. Do the Lego toys meet this requirement? Are the little EMTs in the set well trained? Does the ambulance meet the DOT standards? It doesn’t make any noise (unless I try to sound like an ambulance), so I know it doesn’t have a siren. In any case, I’m having a good time assembling my kits. I just need to find a place to put my new toy collection.
I know at times, we’ve all lost our car in a parking lot. Even for me as someone who always has a clue where my car is parked, I’ve lost my car in the Horton Plaza parking garage. If you’ve never been there, they have fruit and vegetable levels. The problem is that there are 2 concentric ramps, so if you enter the garage from the mall on a vegetable level, you can only get to your car if it is also on a vegetable level and vice versa for a fruit level.
My dad, however, has a funnier story about losing his car at the marathon, yesterday:
I searched the parking lot for my car for about 45 minutes and couldn’t find it. Ah-ha! The Garmin was in my pocket and the last location in its memory was the car location. So I turned it on, set the last location as a waypoint, opened the antenna, and said Route To! It said 200 feet SE. I turned and looked and there it was on the other side of a fence.
I don’t remember the fence being there when I parked. It was a temporary type and I think it was put up to form the exit route after the event.
Good thing, he had his Garmin iQue 3600 with him. Knowing him, he’ll start adding waypoints when he gets out of his car.
Being self-employed and working at home have many benefits. First, being self-employed means that every meeting I have to attend (except for initial client meetings), I get paid to be there even if nothing gets accomplished or I don’t say anything. So you’d expect people to sparingly invite me to meetings. Second, working from home means that most of my meetings are on the phone; good thing there is a mute button so I can be working on something else.
I’m not sure why people like meetings so much, but when I worked for a rather large company, there were days where I’d have 3 or 4 one hour long meetings. So half my day was shot in meetings. Did anything really come out of the meetings? I don’t recall. It seems that many meetings could be eliminated in business if people were more efficient at using email and were more concise. For me, if something goes into a long explanation of something, I usually get it in the first few words, so the rest of the words is wasted on me.
Do people feel important setting up a meeting? Does it make people feel like they’re working? I’m not sure about others, but I absolutely hate meetings and do what I can to avoid them.
Yesterday my wife and I went up to Anaheim and I usually dread the trip to Orange County as it is completely unpredictable as to how long it will take. The traffic can be just awful or we can breeze right through. The trip yesterday was an easy 90 minutes each way; going up, we saw several backups and several accidents which, if we were caught in that, would have easily added 30-45 minutes to the trip. All my worries about the drive will be eliminated when I get my personal flying machine.
May and June are very depressing months in San Diego due to the weather. There is a marine layer that hides the sun for much of the day; it’s a bit clearer away from the coast where I live, but still the overcast makes it kind of depressing. (May is called May Gray and June is June Gloom). However, this year my attitude is a bit different. The marine layer keeps it cooler and makes it easier to run. A slight increase in temperature wears me down quickly when running. Less than 2 weeks until the marathon and I actually hope is it kind of overcast for it otherwise I’ll be going real slow the last few miles!