when I work at home…
see pics of desk. Work computer with dual displays stacked on left. Uber workstation in center. Hard Drives stacked on speaker. So on and so forth.
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Yep, that’s right. I’m having writers block right now. Not that I’m an author or well known blogger, but as of late, there just hasn’t been much worth updating people about. Oh! Here’s something, Jen and I got a new car. We bought a “Previously Owned” Audi A3 Sportback Sedan (Sportback is marketing talk for wagon, despite that it isn’t very wagonlike) I will post pictures as soon as I take some, my main camera lens is malfunctioning right now, so I only have my little camera. Also, I’m waiting for the ugly snow/sand/salt/mud to go away. I can tell you this though: It’s fast, fun to drive and has very good handling. The stereo is really good for a stock stereo and the whole roof (pretty much) is a moon roof called the “Open Sky System”. It has a lot of refinement in the areas necessary and it gets pretty good mileage. We bought used to get better value, and it was a $14k difference in price, quite worth it. My favorite feature: The lane change turn signal, it blinks for a minimum of 3 flashes with a quick “Lane Change” tap on the control lever. Love it. Almost forgot, it’s a 6 Speed Manual transmission, Jen and I are driving purists after all. 
hilarious video of drunk squirrel
This video was shared by my friend Darby. It happened right here in Minneapolis, It’s pretty darn funny.
happy birthday markus!
Last night we had a surprise party for my friend Markus. It was real tricky. First we told him we were going bowling, and we even went to Elsie’s in Northeast Minneapolis. After we had sat down, gotten menus, beers and started chatting with Charlie, Steph and Elliot the news came. Markus’ roommate Kiara called and stated that water was leaking in the basement and it was more than she and Kendra could handle. Markus was quite furious, so we all decided to go with him to help fix the problem. Markus and Ryan went out to the car while Lee and I worried about paying the check. Actually, we finished our beers and just stood around, to give Charlie, Steph and Elliot time to hopefully beat us back to Markus’ House in very south and very east Minneapolis. After Lee and I had waited long enough for what we felt was almost the limit for Markus, we went out jumped in the car mumbling about the crappy cash machine. 
The ride to his house was normal, but not necessarily hurried, Markus was quiet and we all kept making jokes about how we would soon be wading through poop and sewage in Markus’ basement. He was definitely stewing. When we got to his house, Charlie was just heading downstairs and I had to quick block the window to hopefully keep Markus from seeing him. It worked perfectly. Markus was almost all the way into his laundry room before he realized there were 20 people in his basement wishing him Happy Birthday. We got him. The night was fun and everyone had a pretty good time. Jen and Molly showed up about 12:00am, and we hung out until 2am. Finally coming home to sleep, which we did until 11am. It was awesome. Happy Birthday again Markus!
in the end
This is what the snowfall amounted to at our house. Officially it was about 12″ with some of the southern suburbs get 17″-19″. Most of the people I work with are not driving in to work today, and I don’t have any meetings, so I’m working from home. That means that I’ll get a lot more done than usual. Yeah! Oh, and an extra blog post.
Here are the promised pictures.
sorry for the crappy theme
Something is broken on my other one… I’ll use this one as it’s functional, until I can repair or find a new one. 
major snowstorm
I’m sitting here in my cube at corporate and I can barely see the other corporate buildings or the stores across the highway. We’re supposed to get a lot of snow and they might close the corporate campus tomorrow. They already issued a News Flash empowering leadership to establish whether their teams leave early and/or work tomorrow. Yeah! Here are some pictures.
As always, click them for larger versions.
Happy Birthday to Carson!
My Nephew Carson will be celebrating his First Birthday this weekend! Yeah Carson.
Here’s a picture, he’s so darn cute.
so true - Gates vs. GM
-VS- 
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash…Twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
this is gonna hurt
Windows Vista launches today. thankfully so does Office 2007. Why? Am I excited? No, with Office 2007 launching at the same time as Vista, at least people will be dazzled by all the new effects, new menus, the glossy almost iridescent buttons. The new ways to do things, the “holy crap where’s my stuff now”, the look at all these control panels. There are also bound to be a few hours spent hitting windows key + tab and flick the mouse wheel to play a little “program roulette”. This is good, people like to drive new cars, they should like to drive new operating systems too. That snappiness that a fresh install and an Operating System with high-powered requirements can give you. After all, hardware is still ahead of software in terms of speed. In fact, Vista’s quite fast… in fact so fast it beat a lot of 3rd party developers out of the gates. There is a scramble on for security software, next generation games, next-generation video cards and of course next-generation…WAIT! My scanner isn’t working, and what are all these other computers showing up on my network? Wait, I’m not on my network, I wonder what this linksky network is, man my neighbors are weird. Thank God for Microsoft, as much as everyone wants to hate them, this is the mess we’ve made ourselves. We want all this crap to work together, we want it to be the same everywhere. We want it in our native language, we want it to work easily yet be powerful. Could you imagine if nuclear bombs were simple? Anti-Virus software and Starbuck’s locations would be the least of our concerns. Since I work in the service industry, primarily the IT services industry a lot of my Microsoft hate goes to a very realistic understanding of the core issues. Stopping trying to get a good deal on something you want to be reliable, fast and last for a significant amount of time. Spend a little more, get the service plan and don’t by the “off-brand” software packages that is a tenth of the price of what you really need. It’s going to cost you the rest in my labor charges. So, let’s all be nice to Microsoft, listen to concerns and keep notes on the problems we have. And probably the most important thing I can say, lets hold off on purchasing and installing Vista for a bit. I’m going to need my computer up and running to help you fix yours. (Of course I’m running Vista already, but it’s Release Candidate 2 in a Virtual Machine, I know it’s not pretty but Best Buy doesn’t support Vista on our Enterprise PCs yet.)
And yes, I spelled LinkSys wrong on purpose.