Monthly Archives: October 2012

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Presented for your approval, a mélange of topics that have made me want to alternately gouge out my own eyes, bludgeon others to death where they stood, and curl up in the fetal position and just have a good cry…

1. Being a whore. I sell my body for money, well, the brain part of my body anyway. I don’t usually give any particular thought to how my John wants to use me for the eight hours he pays for, but sometimes it’s just damned hard to ignore. I’ve run across very few things in my professional life that are more annoying that spending hours, days, or months working on something only to get told “woops, looks like we won’t need that now.” Whether what I’m working on ever sees the light of day or not, my time is reasonably well compensated. Still, it would be nice to know you’re whoring yourself out for something that’s actually going somewhere. You’d think a decade on, I’d be use to just lying back, opening my brain, and thinking of England, but I don’t seem to quite have the hang of it yet.

2. DVDs. Between movies and TV show season, I’m guessing that I have something like 500 disks that spend 99.999% of their time doing nothing but taking up shelf space. For all but a few favored movies or shows, they might only see the light of day once a year or less. The logical solution to no longer wanting these DVDs sitting around occupying limited storage space is to rip them to several large hard drives and serve them up through iTunes. That would be the logical solution except, of course, for the part where no one in the world offers a convenient method of extracting large amounts of data from DVD and converting it to an iTunes-ready file… and no, I don’t consider ripping and encoding one or two at a time to be a convenient method. Sadly, a quick cost/benifit analysis telles me that with the vast amount of time and effort involved in getting my movies from Point A to Point B the hard way, it might legitimately be more cost effective to just put all my DVDs into long term storage and build a new collection from scratch when I want to watch something. Just the thought of having to go that route annoys me to no end when there’s a far far less expensive, but ponderously over complicated solution to be had.

3. Walmart Pharmacy. I don’t know who gave these jokers my office phone number, but rest assured, I will not be coming in to pick up “my” two prescriptions no matter how many messages you leave. Even if they were my prescriptions, when you told me the bill was $510.64, I’d point at you, laugh, and walk away.

Being neighborly…

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Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things one of my neighbors has asked to borrow over the last fifteen months:

1. My lawn tractor

2. Gas for his lawn tractor

3. My circular saw

4. $25 cash

5. My phone (3x)

6. A cup of “dark liquor” (reason unknown)

7. Jumper cables

8. $10 cash

In fairness (and as a point of comparison), here’s the corresponding list of things I’ve asked to borrow from anyone since I moved in here at Rental Casa de Jeff:

1. …

2. …

3. …

4. …

5. …

6. …

7. …

8. …

Whoever said good fences make good neighbors was on to something there. I’m more than happy to wave and say hello or even help out in something approaching a legitimate emergency, but I don’t need to be your friend… and I certainly don’t need to be your home improvement supercenter / liquor store / ATM. Seriously, if you can’t seem to take care of your own stuff, why on earth would I think you’re going to bother taking care of mine? Feel free to keep asking, but the answer is almost always guaranteed to be no.

Honest to God, my own island lair or a 500 acre mountaintop compound with clear fields of fire, a couple thousand claymores, and plenty of concertina wire sound like better and better housing options every single day.

Begin rant…

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The problem with wanting to think of yourself as a writer, or a blogger for that matter, is that you actually at some point need to do some writing. You have to write when you don’t feel like it. You have to write when you have nothing particularly interesting to say. You know to write when you’re tired or have a dozen other things that need to get done. You have to write when it snows, when it rains, and when it’s sunny. You can’t be full of excuses about why you’ll get to it tomorrow or the next day or the next week. That might be why writing in its many forms is, is a hobby. There are nights when all I want to do is bash my fists against the keyboard because words just will not come out of the tips of my fingers no matter how many times they smack the keys. If it weren’t for then needing to replace the computer, there are days I’m sorely tempted to find out of this four year old laptop will blend. But I don’t. I walk away. I leave it sit. I stew about a problematic passage for a day or two and then I come back. All the how-to-be-a-writer books say write. Write every day. Write no matter what. You know what? Some days I just dont have it in me… not three hundred words or a dozen. They’re just not there. Sometimes they come out so fast that my modified version of typing just can’t keep up. That’s the way it goes. Well, it’s the way it goes for me at least. Maybe someone out there is having good luck with the write every day no matter what approach, but I can guaran-damn-tee that it’s not doing a thing for me. Some days, some week, some months are just going to have to be better than others. And if some fancy pants wrote-a-book-about-writing expert on the subject, well, he can just suck it.

/rant

Sunday in the Archives…

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Well, it’s Sunday again and everyone knows that means it’s time for another trip to the archives. This week we’re wrapping up the posts from July 2006. No epic rants this time around, but still an interesting glimpse into what was rattling around in my head six years ago. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if it doesn’t seem possible that it was that long ago.

As expected…

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I didn’t have high hopes for my test run with the indoor antenna. Since I live 40 miles from the nearest TV transmitter and there’s plenty of hills and trees in that distance, the antenna was a hail Mary play. Being that I’m only out $7, it wasn’t too costly an experiment. Unfortunately, the antenna failure led me to contemplate Plan B… kit the two small TVs in my bedroom and upstairs living room with Apple TV boxes and stream content as needed. Sadly, Plan B has also hit a snag. A snag in which both small TVs are so old that neither one has the required HDMI port. There are ways around that, of course, but none of them are particularly good. So that leaves us with Plans C and D.

Plan C is to replace the TVs – probably a $400 total expense since I’m looking at the sub-32″ class for both units. Add the two Apple TV units and the startup cost should be right at $600. Getting rid of two cable boxes would get me off the hook to Comcast for approximately $20 a month… so in 2.5 years, option C pays for itself, except for the part where technology has improved in the interrum and upgrades need to be made. Plan D, of course, is to do nothing at all and just learn to enjoy the pucker every time I get my e-bill from the cable company. I know what I want to do, but maybe after Thanksgiving the numbers will start to look a little more palatable.

Overboard…

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It occurs to me that it’s possible I’ve gone slightly overboard in my relentless pursuit of lowering my cable bill without giving up access to Game of Thrones when it starts airing again in March. Since I live in the middle of nowhere (that’s not a complaint, by the way, simply a statement of fact), I’m not sure it’s going to have the oomph to pull in a signal from Philly or Baltimore, but I’m going to be playing around with an OTA television antenna for the first time. That’s not quite true, I suppose. Growing up there was an old TV in the basement that when they antenna was adjusted just right, could pick up two or three channels. Since the only thing I really use the TV in the bedroom for is to watch the morning news while I’m getting ready for work and catch the late news again before bed, I’m hoping that this will be the perfect excuse to jettison one more cable box and its associated fees from my plan. If it works in the bedroom, I’ll duplicate it downstairs. In the event it doesn’t work, I’ll pick up two new Apple TV boxes and just stream content either from the computer or the iPad. At first, this started out as a philosophical question about why I was paying for 200 channels I didn’t watch… It’s becoming something more like a holy quest… and those always turn out just great.

Achieving work-life balance…

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Reaching the end of the year with every hour of “use-or-lose” leave accounted for is something of an obsession around this time of year. After some quick back of the napkin math, it looks like I’ll be opening the new leave year with 232 hours in the bank. Since we can only carry 240 hours from year to year, I’m on the correct side of the allowable amount of carryover time. I’m sure there are plenty of people who “give back” time at the end of the year, but that violates one of the most sacred principles of my professional philosophy – “Gather unto yourself all the benefits to which you are entitled and guard them jealously.”

If my calculations are correct (and I assure you they are), there are 13 work weeks left in 2012. Of those 13 weeks, I’ll work a full five days during only five of them, with three of those weeks being the ones immediately preceding the week and a half I’m taking off at Christmas. Put another way, of the 77 days between now and the start of my Christmas vacation, I’ll only be at the office for 59.7% of them after accounting for weekends, federal holidays, and random days off.

After a few more mathematical gymnastics and allowing for time at the office only being a third of each 24-hour work day it really breaks down to me only being at work for 19.91% of the next three months. Suddenly even the most batshit crazy day doesn’t seem quite so bad. Apparently the secret is looking at time in aggregate and not at individual hours and days. Hopefully someone will remind me about this the next time I’m tempted run away and join the circus.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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By this time on Thursday, I like to imagine the internet is clamoring to know what annoys me this week. As much as I would have been happy not sitting here at the table dredging through my head for the stuff that I forgot to write down for the last six days, I’d feel bad disappointing the two or three of you who always notice when I don’t get around to posting. So since you’re already here, here’s what annoys Jeff this week…

1. Lack of proper planning. I was off today because I live 40 minutes from work and the vet I needed to go see has an office 30 minutes in the opposite direction. Adding at least an hour to my commute and then only working for a couple of hours seemed like a patently bad idea. What I didn’t take into account when I took the day off is that tomorrow is the Friday before a three day weekend. Why on earth I didn’t think of that in advance and go ahead and make this a five-day-weekend is simply beyond me. I feel a little bit like I failed somehow.

2. Parking lot walkers. The people who walk (slowly) two abreast down the dead center of the travel lane in a big box store parking lot. Either walk like you have something to do, develop some kind of awareness of your surroundings, or don’t act surprised and indignant when I sneak up on you in my 5,250 pound red pick up truck and lay on the horn three feet from your fat asses. On a positive note, I’m grudgingly impressed with how fast you two can move when you’re given the proper motivation. Keep up the good work.

3. On leash walks. It’s great that Winston is feeling better and is healing well. It sucks that his three no-more-than-five-minute bathroom breaks per day are now supposed to be 10-15 minute walks across as many different kinds of flora and fauna as I have available. The walking itself isn’t so much the issue. It’s the fact that when two of those walks are supposed to take place (before work and before bed) it’s pitch effing black here in the backwoods of Ceciltucky. Yeah, this guy is going to be real thrilled tomorrow to be schlepping around the yard for 15 minutes an hour before the crack of dawn tomorrow… and every day for the next two months.

In summary, that is what annoys Jeff this week. Thank you for your attention.

Zip…

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There are a host of things that have popped into my head as potential topics for tonight’s post – the upcoming debate, the fact that Comcast stopped by my blog today to offer assistance, the general batshit craziness that has been the office this week, or the fact that tomorrow is both a day off and also another trip to the vet. Talk about your conflicting emotions on that one. The truth is, I’m just not feeling all that motivated by any of those topics… or by any topic, really. Like so many things in life, sometimes no matter how long you sit here and strain yourself, nothing productive is going to come out. Usually it’s not worth blowing out a blood vessel in your eye trying to make it happen. On days like this, you pretty much just need to accept that you’ve got zip and move on to a more productive use of what’s left of our limited evening. I don’t like to think of it as being a quitter, so much as knowing when it’s time to defer any additional beating of a horse that’s already gone to the hereafter.

Something corporate…

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I’ve spent the last 90 minutes waging my own personal war against Comcast… the company that we all love to hate. If it weren’t for basically needing to have high speed internet, I’d cut the cable all together. Sadly, there just isn’t a viable alternative to cable internet available here in the back woods of Cecil County and I’d end up paying as much for internet alone as I do for the cable/internet bundle.

Up until I made some changes, I had 300 channels of which I watched maybe a dozen with any consistency… something about paying for something I’m not using just rubs me the wrong way. Since my TV is usually parked on some combination of History, Discovery, and Fox News, cutting way back on the number of channels just seemed like the thing to do. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to pin a bright shiny medal on the guy who finally cracks the code on unbundling television channels. Let me pick five for $20 and I’m on it before the ink dries on the deal. Still, I managed to cut my bill in half tonight and I have the funny feeling that I’m not going to miss much even after “losing” two thirds of the channels I had been getting. With Apple TV, Netflix, and Hulu lined up to fill in the gaps, it’s possible that I’m well on my way down the road to ditching cable television completely just to make a small personal statement regarding my thoughts on the services they offer.

Is anyone else out there using Comcast for internet only? As always, feedback is encouraged.