Michael Graves Personal Blog

I wasn’t going to post this…but what the heck. It’s just too funny…and true to life.

Many thanks for the folks at Crunch Gear for pointing this out. very helpful in overcoming the general Monday-ness I’ve been experiencing. Funny stuff, that.

Late this week my new business cards arrived. This is perhaps the first positive confirmation of the fact that I was promoted way back in December. After many years occupying the post of “Sr Product Specialist” my new title is “Systems and Sales Engineering Manager.” Here’s a scan of the new card so that you can see for yourself.

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Not long ago we bought a birdhouse. It comes from Burt’s Birdhouses in Carmine, TX. Burt makes his birdhouses from reclaimed wood and tin, so they all look well aged.

This past weekend I got a 4×4″ post and mounted the birdhouse. Now all we need are some tenants. The cats are quite excited about this new addition to the property.

Since the telethon for Haiti last Friday I’ve been listening to some Leonard Cohen. It was inspired by Justin Timberlake & Co singing “Hallelujah.” Specifically, I’ve been listening to his 2009 double live in London CD. What an amazing poet & singer.

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Here’s the rest of the lyric. Just brilliant stuff!

There’s a certain wisdom in recognizing ones own limits, even when they are most inconvenient. This afternoon is an excellent case in point.

I’ve been making use of a small music system in my garage. It’s a Logitech Squeezebox mated to a pair of M-Audio BX-5a powered monitors. I hacked together a little wiring harness so that I could wire in an old JBL powered subwoofer. The ensemble sounds pretty decent…for a garage.

The trouble is that my wifi doesn’t make it reliably out to that corner of the place. As a short term measure I’d run a great long Cat 5 lead from the office to the Squeezebox. Wherein I take “short term” to mean a couple of months ago. That kind of thing drives my wife nuts. A wire, plainly visible, and worse strewn across the floor! Sacrilege!

So this afternoon I thought that I’d pull a cat 5 lead from the wiring rack in the office, through the attic over the garage to where the Squeezebox resides. I’d dress it in nice and neat. No problem. That’s about a 30 minutes task.

However, I had to terminate the ends with RJ plugs. While I think that I can claim to have many skills, terminating networks leads simply isn’t one of them. That process took me over an hour, for just two ends!

I am humbled in the face of this apparently simple task.

This kinda confirms what I’ve always suspected. I missed the connection to aliens though. Guess I’m just not paranoid enough, yet.

See, I told you so. You can go back to your soaps now.

Friend and fellow VUC alumni Fred Posner has a nice post today about TSAs behavior over the past week or two; TSA Fights The Real Problem – Bloggers. I find myself in agreement, and as a blogger I wonder if they find me to be a threat to passenger safety?

TSA really is perfecting their keystone cops routine. With every new incident they try to inflict ever greater scope of inconvenience upon the traveling public. All in the name of increased security of course.

What they overlook is the fact that security is an illusion. When they issue new security directives, and they are as blatantly asinine as this most recent bunch, they undermine the very illusion of security that they are seeking to enhance.

Well, kinda phase 3…we didn’t get as far as I had planned. That’s what often happens when you have both a day job & a mortgage. We added a lit red bow to the top of the faux tree built around the pine. Then a bunch of blue LED icicle lights to the porch. The goal was to do what we could before Saturday’s occurrence of our annual neighborhood festival known as “Lights In The Heights.”

Then we thought that we might do a last minute DIY holiday card so we took a few pictures of Shadow sitting on the font porch wearing some LEDs on his harness. We took him on a walk through the neighborhood to see a lot of the decor, but were weren’t able to see “Lights In The Heights” in its entirety due to the cities runoff elections. We were obligated to attend one of the mayoral candidates functions that evening.

Feel free to click on any photo to see the full-sized image.

Despite my best of intentions we didn’t get time to to the whole PC controlled lighting thing. Perhaps next year.