I draw, I snap, I shop. Images of things go in here.

Moving On Up

This cube is actually to the East side of my old cube.Yesterday, not only did I get a new house, but I also got a new home at work. If you dig back through the Phone Photos you will find a dismal picture of my cramped old little cube, the one with a server on the desk. So now I have a new phone photo of my new cubicle. Just one cube over from my last home, but this one is much nicer. Its probably actually the same size, but with 3 less filing cabinets, no server and a better desk orientation, it is all around a much improved use of space. The only things it lacks is a window view of downtown Atlanta and a door.

So things of looking better from this side of Sunday (I’ll tell you what happened on Sunday later)… I’m moving on up! To the East side! (This cube is actually on the East side of my old cube.) To a deluxe apartment in the sky! (No! No more apartments!)

And with the job calls coming practically non-stop, I think I’m finally getting my piece of the pie.

Just One of Those Days

Thursday the 35thSee that picture? And yes, you are reading it right. The company I’m currently contracting for prints out a calendar for its employees every year. Its one of those things where they put pictures of some people who work there along with quotes about how great the company is, and generally looks like it was designed by a man who thinks that advertising graphics peaked somewhere in the mid to late 1970’s. One of my coworkers didn’t want his calender and I didn’t have one, so I took it. It’s been fairly reliable all year, days of the week in the right order, Saturday and Sunday next to each other making the weekend and Wednesday smack in the middle, all the holidays on the right days, the 4th of July actually on July 4th and so on.

At least until today…

I got curious and checked a few other people’s calendars, all are the same as mine. So you have to wonder, how exactly something like this makes it past the quality assurance, past the test print, and all the way through the several thousand odd print run without anyone seeing it. Or maybe they did. Perhaps the calendar is correct, perhaps today isn’t November 3rd and instead is Thursday, November 35th, 2005.

I can already tell this image will be stuck in my head forever, and every November I’m going to snicker and giggle and laugh and then embarrassingly have to try to explain it, and no one else will think its funny at all.

I Got a New Toy

My New Toy… and I took a photo to show it off. I decided I needed an organizer, and a way to write stuff on the go, and a way to get around the firewall at work (bastards and their need to ban everything!)… so I went to Sprint and got myself an Audiovox 6600. Its a phone, and a PDA, and a camera, and its all kinds of neat.

About the only thing it doesn’t do is play MP3s… well, I think it can, but I’ve heard its not so good at them. It runs Windows Pocket XP, even includes a Terminal Services client should I feel the need to do some server maintenance on the go.

There’s a ton of free software out there for it, and I’m sifting through all of it… now I just need a PocketMMO and I’m set!

There’s No Place Like Work

CubicleI’m sure at least one person out there has wondered where it is that I spend most of my day. And it just so happens that this morning as I got into work I decided to snap a picture of my cubicle. When I was just working for ITCS, doing internal work and client support, I had an office. It was nice and big, I had two desks and a conference table. And I had a window. I arranged my desk to face the door so noone could sneak up on me, and I happily whiled away the hours coding and troubleshooting, and sometimes surfing the web. But those days are gone.

I’m down at BellSouth now, contract for ITCS. The money is better, and the hours more plentiful, but when it comes to work space I got shafted. Hard. See that monitor in the picture? That’s not my workstation. My PC is hidden in the corner. That dark screen you see is an application server. And all those file cabinets? Not mine. They are full of other people’s junk. In the lower left corner you can see a bit of blue. This is a spare chair. Its not mine, but it stays in my cube because none of the real employees want it in theirs, except when they need the extra seat, but they always bring it back.

Someday, I’ll have an office again.

Bird on a Wire

Bird on a wire.So I’m picking up a Creative Loafing as I do every Thursday, and while I’m standing there, a hawk lands on a near by phone wire hanging above the street.

Honestly, I was much closer than it appears in this picture… about 10, maybe 15 feet. But the picture makes the hawk look small and like I was much further away.

Anyway, the bird looked cool, so I snapped a picture with my phone.

100,000

100,000 miles of gas guzzling goodness!No, I’m not celebrating 100,000 hits to the website or anything like that. Today my car crossed the 100,000 mile mark on the odometer. It seems a bit odd to think that I’ve driven that much when you take into account that I’ve only gone outside the Atlanta area in the car maybe a half dozen times at best. 5 years… that is 20,000 miles per year, and almost all of that is driving on highways 75, 85, 285 and 400, going to and from work. My Jeep Cherokee is pitiful… I love the car, mind you, and its never broken down or given me any trouble, but its guzzles gas like its going out of style. A hearty 18 miles per gallon… and at an average price of around $1.50 a gallon for gas over that time, I’ve spent over $8,300 dollars on gas in the last five years.

Wow… there’s so much I could do with that money… even half that money. Perhaps I need to seriously consider a new car…