Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

It’s just after 7PM and I’m still at work. I’m done with what I needed to do, but I’m in no hurry since Michele and the girls are out of town.

I got a little stressed at work today over part of our budgeting process. In normal person speak what it means is that the comapny plans out how much money we are going to spend next year. Seems simple, but it’s not.

I routinely deal with plans and projects that involve millions of dollars. Projects that are under $100,000 aren’t scrutinized heavily. We spend around a million dollars a day in just my part of Disney. The money takes on a unreal feel. It’s like a game.

In private life, the difference between $50 and $150 is huge in my purchasing decision. At work, money flows out like water. I regularly sign invoices for $10,000. Today I signed for a $30,000 piece of software. I gave it no more thought than most people would give the bill at dinner.

We need it, we got the money, buy it.

But when you stop for a second and consider what that kind of money would buy in ‘private life’, it boggles the mind. $30,000 would buy Michele the new Volvo she’s been eyeing. As it is, it will probably take 5 years to pay off a new car.

It’s a strange disconnect with reality. The money doesn’t seem real. It’s a strange game.

Today we got delivery of a few boxes of hardware. Sitting on the loading dock was around $250,000 worth of gear. That’s a fucking entire house sitting outside waiting for us to wheel it inside.

Everything inside the corporation seems like a game. There are rules. There are winners and losers. And most amazingly, there is the rejection of reality. People make decisions based on not what is the best idea, but based on the politics of the company and looking good. For all the financial analysis we do, it’s basically ignored in large part.

The company will issue cost cutting edicts that lower morale and productivity over trivial things like “No doughnuts on Fridays!” while at the same time losing $35 million dollars on a film that any thrid grader could have told them would suck. How many doughnuts do we have to forgo to pay off the decision to make a bad movie?

It’s simply not reality.

It is June 21, the first day of Summer, and it is raining in Southern California.

WTF?

This is an amazing sight:

This is my work email inbox. Typically, I get 200-300 emails per day and my inbox is constantly full. Last week I had more than 300 items in my inbox.

I have busted my ass to deal with mail and amazingly have emptied it.

I rock.

I picked up NWN yesterday.

I got home around 7:30 and let it install while I was making dinner and puttering around the house.

I started playing at 8PM or so. The next time I got up from the computer, it was 11PM. The game is very well done.

I’ll have more to report after I finish the first mission.

Alright, I got off my lazy ass and wrote up a few stories.

First, I did a little Benchmarking. It’s an offshoot of geocaching. You can check out the first and second benchmarks I found.

Next, I planted a new geocache called the Big Dreams Cache on Saturday. You can read the story.

After planting the cache, I did a did a little hunting myself on my seventh and eighth geocache finds.

On Fathers Day, I went down to my parents house. My parents handed me a small present to open. I couldn’t imagine what it was. I opened it up and it was a new Garmin eTrex Venture. I’ve was quite surprised. Remember, I’ve been using a GPS Companion with Michele’s Palm.

Me: Wow, thanks.
Mom: You like it?
Me: Um, yes. It’s great. But…
Mom: What? You don’t like it? You want to take it back? A different color?
Me: No, it’s just that I already have a GPS…
Dad: Yah, we know.
Me: Huh?
Dad: We asked Michele what to get you. She said to get you a GPS.
Me: Huh? She knows I have a GPS…
Mom: Do you want to take it back? Wrong color? [etc…]
Dad: Michele said to get you it so she can have her Palm back.
Me: Oh.
Dad: She said ever since you started geocaching her Palm is never in her purse.
Me: I see. A conspiracy!

I’ll write more on the new GPS once I get a chance to use it.

Lastly, I wrote up a story on my father’s knife obsession. More to come on this topic as I get time.

OK, that’s enough content for tonight. It’s bed time….

Neverwinter Nights is simply unavailable in LA today. I have tried and tried to find it to no avail.

I’ll have to wait until Wednesday.

I got home yesterday and began filling the spa with water. I had made arrangements for a spa guy to come clean the filter and check out the system. He said to go ahead and fill the spa with water.

After the spa was mostly full, I turned the switches on to get the jet/filter system primed with water. The system started chugging and whirring as usual. After about 5 minutes, the jets bagan to spurt and everything looked good. A bit of debis blew out of the jets, but that is normal for a startup after a long time off.

I looked over toward the pum/heater/filter gear and noticed a bunch of water coming from that direction. Suddenly, the jets sputtered and died away. More water came from the equipment that is usually dry.

Upon inspection, I found that the water was coming from the heater unit. To heat the water, there is a coil of tubing (kinda like a radiator) over large gas burners. Water is pumped through this tubing while the gas flame is on and the water is heated. It’s simple really. Well, it looks like the tubing broke and water was pouring down on the gas burners. Big mess.

This put me into a bit of a funk. I was going to do some work on geocaching stories, but instead watched some TV and went to bed early.

Hopefully today will be a better day.

Yes, the site has lacked good content recently. Crappy pics and brief captions just don’t cut it…

An actual tourist wearing black socks and shorts.
Why won’t his wife tell him he looks like a fool?

I’m planning on better stuff to post, but you’ll have to wait.

I decided I need a fanny pack of some sort to carry my gear when going geocaching. The only problem is I don’t know where you buy a fanny pack. Do I need to go to a sporting good store? Are there fanny pack stores?