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Showing posts from January 27, 2008

Snowed out?

Hmm. Tomorrow's snowstorm looks like it might be a biggie - if it's pissing down with snow up at Solitude I might give it a miss. Mind you - if it's snowing as much as they think it might, the canyons might be closed. I hope not - this'll be the second week I miss out. Problem is, last weekend they said the same thing, and I missed out for no reason. Decisions, decisions.

Snow day.

Ah yes - another snow day. At least the plows are out this morning working the roads, and looking out over the lake, it seems to be easing off. Looking ahead, the forecast says snow every day except friday next week - so another 10 days of snow ahead. A lot of people are getting sick of it - Paula especially - but I love it. More snow means more skiing, and in the spring, it means more water in the reservoirs. We're at 140% of normal so far this year so lets hope it keeps up like this.

Another 11 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Bloody windows crashed for the third time today. Because of whatever the hell they've done to our machines, it now takes 11 minutes from typing my password to actually being able to do something when logging in to winblows now. That's 33 minutes today. Given that my PC crashes for no apparent reason an average of twice a day, assume 22 minutes a day x 5 days = 110 minutes a week - round up and say 2 hours a week wasted because of crappy bloatware. To put it another way, I pay Bill Gates over 4 days a year of my life just wasting time. I reckon you could put a monetary value on that. We have 18,000 employees in this company. If we're all wasting 4 days a year each, shouldn't Micro$oft be paying us for this? Some quick maths and I reckon that means Micro$oft costs us $280,778,400 a year in lost time. That's quite a chunk of change.

The marketing people didn't really think about this did they?

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On BMW's website at the moment, they're promoting the new X6 - what they're calling a 'sports activity coupe'. Mmm. Yeah. Didn't do too much research into the name I guess. The BMW SAC? Does that means it's bollocks? Or does it mean the people who will drive it are dicks? They could have just as well called it the BMW Scrotum.

And so the culling begins.

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From the tech headlines this morning: After a fairly challenging year, struggling web media company Yahoo posted a 23 percent decline in fourth-quarter earnings and announced plans to cut 1,000 engineering and software positions, or roughly 7 percent of its total headcount. So no change there then. Instead of offering pay cuts, or cutting the number of managers and administration staff, or any number of other more suitable options, Yahoo has gone for the knee-jerk reaction and laid off 1000 engineers. Typical. It puts me in mind of this sensible and well-written article that no corporate manager or CEO would ever read or consider, becasue it employs logic and common sense:

Blowy.

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This was the car yesterday when it came time to go home. There wasn't that much snow - 15cm at most - but it was being driven by very strong winds, as evidenced by the snow cornices on one side of the car. Neat.

Bloody hell!

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Oops The previously lovely clear and sunny day transformed to a 40mph blizzard in a matter of about 3 minutes. These pics from my webcam are timed about 2 minutes apart, each. So four minutes from top to bottom. In the same time the temperature went from +7°C to -3°C

Another storm that never was.

The weather guessers got it wrong again. The huge winter storm that was supposed to blow in this weekend never arrived. I missed a day's skiing because I thought there'd be so much snow that the canyons would be closed. Cut to this morning - dire warnings of a horrible morning commute because of 10 inches of snow. In reality? Blowy, warm, 5°c weather and clear skies to the northwest where this storm is supposedly coming from. The roads are dry and clear because it's been above zero for three days !