I was in another exciting business meeting today. I shouldn’t complain, I don’t have nearly as many meetings as some of my coworkers. In any case, it was a conference call, with a handful of us in the room and another handful inside the speaker phone. I was doing my normal thing, doodling. So was one of my coworkers. Near the end of the meeting a non-doodling coworker pointed to the doodlers paper and made a smirky face, then pointed to his own notebook, full of notes, and nodded disapprovingly.

So, what does all this mean? If found two useful links:

CareerJournal: From Doodling to Daydreaming: An Office-Meeting Survival Guide

In fact, meetings have become so tainted that they now go by a host of other names. They’re dubbed briefings (meetings that last longer than intended), seminars (expensive meetings with handouts), presentations (meetings preceded and followed by many other meetings), videoconferences (meetings with technical difficulties) and conference calls (meetings with eye-rolling).

Associated Content: The Secret Language of Doodles

Many people who doodle may seem like they’re not paying attention to what’s going on around them. Actually, they’re very focused, but not on the doodling—they *are* paying attention, and the doodling is helping them do that. They may not even realize they’re doodling until someone points it out to them.

[ De-motivational poster from Despair, Inc. ]

So, between watching Donnie Darko and Heroes I think I’ve got this whole time travel thing figured out. One can create time, or at least the illusion of time, by simply not sleeping.

Let’s see, after work yesterday around 5pm I went home, put more memory in my Ubuntu, then went to church for some churchy pizza, beer and spiritual parenting. The class was happy and good, and we of course stayed after for the chatting and stuff. Then we went home, and of course the kids don’t fall asleep in the car anymore, so we had to put them to bed. I think I finished that around 11:30pm.

I went down to the basement and did a shorty exercise routine - 20 mins on the bike, 1 set of weights. Went upstairs brewed some coffee, put it in my thermos and headed of to work around 12:15am.

I drank the coffee.

I worked from 1am to 3:30am, then headed home. There was no way I was going to sleep. So, I installed windows xp inside a vmware virtual machine in my Ubuntu. Then I installed office, mainly so I could get the two apps running that I can’t get running in Ubuntu, publisher and access. I don’t much like them programs, but I still need to be able to open the publisher files and the openoffice database can import tables from access, but not the queries or the forms and the stuff. Wow, I’m out of it - does it show?

So, I headed to bed around 5:30am.

Then I done woked up at 7, tooked a shower, and then I woked up at 7 and … uh, I woke up, then I made some shower and a breakfast and woke up the childs and. Did I mention that yesterday between work and churchy I dropped of a roll of film at the 1 hour film development at the CVS? So, this morning after the waking up and stuff, I went to drive my daughter to school, we stopped at CVS to pick up our 1 hour prints. I was told that I had filled out the wrong envelope, and should have filled out the identally looking 1 hour envelope, and that my film was in the pile to be sent out to a lab. Thankfully it was still in the pile, so we took it out and put it in the 1 hour pile - so, I’m giving them another 8 hours or so to pick up my photocd and prints. This is why I don’t do the film.

Ok, then we started the drive to school - taking the backroads as usual to avoid traffic. But, there was a big accident, so the odds had switched, and my commute time trippled, and thinking I had left early - ended up arriving 20 mins late.

We listened to some from the top podcasts in the car - and there was this one with these two 12 year old piano playing boys. The music was fantastic, but the interview even better. One of the boys said the best invention ever was food. The announcer bunny said the best invention ever was the thermos. I agree. He said that it keeps the cold things cold and the hot things hot, how does it know the difference? Fantastic.

Oh, I forgot to mention that my daughter fell in love with the blue dress barbie at the CVS, and I had to tell her that she can ask Santa for it and she can’t have it now. She cried because she said that someone else might buy it in the meantime, so I had to tell her the truth about Santa:

Santa and his elves have their own factory, and can make any toy in the world. Mommies and Daddies and Grandmas and Grandpas have to buy toys in the regular stores made in regular factories, and sometimes they run out of the right toys and it is very hectic especially the day after Thanksgiving. But Santa doesn’t have to worry about that, because he can custom fabricate anything.

My daughter had some other concerns though. She wanted to know how Santa knew which house was hers and how would he deliver the blue dress barbie to the right place. I had to explain, that when I was a kid, this was a serious issue, and lots of mistakes were made. Everything was done manually, not very efficient. But, in recent years, Santa and his elves have completely modernized. They have integrated systems for tracking kids, houses, etc. He gets updated data on his cell phone, which integrates with the sleighs GPS system. He knows who’s been naughty, whos been nice, how much time you’ve spent watching TV, using the internet, he also knows if you are at your house or at grandma’s, and delivers everything to the right place. He’s got bar code scanners and RFID tags to track the exact position of all presents at all times, it is really quite cool.

I’m going to go get some more coffee. It is 9:25am.

PS - When I walked in this morning they gave me a big pen.

The smoking situation at our office had been getting worse. Not only is there a dedicated area in the back of the building, but the smoking population has taken it upon themselves to turn every building entrance into a cigarette-butt-littered smoke-cloud-filled unofficial pollution zone. On one day I counted 15 people smoking near the entrance I was using. The air quality coming in through the entrance was severely bad; the smell was foul and visually smog-like.

I’m sure many others had the same thought as I did, I should complain! But to who? I thought a little bit about who to mention this too, and then quickly got distracted and forgot about it. Well, apparently someone hadn’t, for these signs magically appeared at the end of last week - and I haven’t seen people smoking outside since! I hope it lasts!

A little more history of smoking here: There is a huge outside “deck” which serves as the dedicated smoking area. I am actually quite jealeous - it is a really nice area. Picnic tables with umbrellas, sunlight. It is the entire back side of the building, in between the two wings of the office. The back hallway leading to it, however, should be avoided if at all possible because of the stench.

Okay, so - a few years ago I guess enough people got jealous, so they turned the smoking area into an outdoor lunch area, during lunch hours in the summer only. Which means that people still smoke there outside of lunch hours, and in all the other seasons. And, during lunch hours in the summer, all the smokers migrated to the building entrances.

Of course, smoking near the building entrances is no good. So, a year later they put up some new nice tables on some unused patches of grass on either side of the building near the parking lots. This is now the new dedicated smoking areas, for use when the main smoking area turns into lunch area, during lunch time in the summer.

So. That leaves us with three dedicated smoking areas - of which one turns into an outdoor eating area - which smells like cigarettes and is littered with butts. I guess us non-smokers either eat in-doors, or run through the entrances to get far enough from the building to enjoy the outdoors.

I’m part of a small team that is part of a larger team which in turn, is co-parts of a sub-small team and is divided between the two teams. In any case, there are three of us and we have to share pager duty.

One of the joys of pager duty is being called at 4am on Sundays so that we can identify that we should in fact not have been called, and who in fact, should have been called.

The other joy is that when on pager duty, it is your responsibility to provide coffee on Friday morning. This usually consists of a box of coffee from either Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, and sometimes involves some type of baked good, like banana bread, muffins or donuts.

In my recent plight recently to spend less money, I brought in an extra coffee maker and finally got around to trying it out this Friday. I brought in some Starbucks grinds and a pint of half and half. We have a store of sweeteners, cups and stirrers from all the previous Fridays. I brewed up a pot, and here were the results.

It came out tasting like Starbucks coffee! Yay me!

I did have several technical issues though. Starbucks needs to brew strong, they call for two tablespoons of grind per “cup.” This is twice the amount of most other coffees. The filter basket is just not meant to hold that much - so I either make less coffee, or risk grind overflow. I risked it - made a full 12 cups.

So, had a good sludge of grinds at the bottom of the pot. Everyone had to make a comment on it of course, at least most of the comments were after I had my caffeine. My friend made use of the goo and fed it to his plant. He asked if I wanted it for my plant, which has been dead for quite a time, and I didn’t think it would help.

Later in the day I made a second pot just to prove that it was so much cheaper to do it yourself that I could do it twice a day. This time I cut it down to 10 cups, but the grinds were still pretty close to the top of the filter - still had the same issue. Next time I’ll cut it down to 8 and see how it does. Alternatively, we could use a different brand of coffee with normal measurement requirements.