white noise

Here’s to feeling a little better about this number than Dante.

Sad news last weekend of the passing of George Carlin. I’ve enjoyed a lot of comedians, but few have remained as consistently funny and relevant to me as Carlin. There were times when I’d think he had faded out and become less edgy, less relevant – then I’d see a new routine and he’d remind me of the contrary.

From religion, to politics, to our ridiculous language and policies which seek to control it, Carlin could always find a bone I wanted picked.

I’m not going to go off on the current fascination with twitter. I’m not going to claim it doesn’t bring anything to social networking that can’t already be done 100 different ways. I’m not going to suggest it’s dragging down the signal to noise ratio of our infotainment sphere.

No, instead I’m just going to watch this for hours:

twittervision in 3D

Random stuff…just cuz it’s Friday:

We had an earthquake in the midwest this morning. Although it was centered in southern Illinois it still woke me – and that’s saying something because I’m pretty dead to the world at 5:30am. I think it was actually the bedroom door that woke me and not the earth rumble itself. Our door was moving ever so slightly back and forth making a little creak and that did it. I recall it lasted about a full 10-15 seconds. Long enough for me to consider all the possibilities of what it might be. My first thought was earthquake (I recognized the feel from a very similar one years ago), but then you remember you’re in Ohio and start eliminating more likely scenarios. Some gigantic loud truck outside – nope, it’s not loud, some major wind storm – nope, again too quiet and it’s a constant shake, and so on. Until eventually you think, damn it is an earthquake.

With all due respect to Al and everyone else in Cali, they really need a different word for earthquakes here. Here, the news revels in it and people look at it with unintimidated awe as a rare, harmless feat of nature – like a solar eclipse or a double rainbow. Our earthquakes are your dust devels to our tornadoes.

And now for a reminder of how weird people are, Slick forwarded me this link. Me thinks this makes for a great caption contest…GO COMMENT!

This weekend brought the inaugural lawn mowing of 2008. We had postponed it as long as possible, but with the grass quickly reaching foresty heights I had no choice but get out there and clear-cut it. Saturday was a cold, windy day and the mower didn’t feel a bit like starting. I decided since getting the thing going would be a struggle, I might as well give it the good maintenance once-over. I polished the spark plug, took off the blade (which was rusted on) and sharpened it with a hand file, replaced the air filter, and drained the gas and refilled it with some fresh stuff. After all that it fired up without too much trouble.

As I was sharpening the blade I got wondering about how many people even bother. When I went to Home Depot to grab an air filter I saw people buying new blades for $30-40. Sure enough, after 15 minutes of sharpening, my old blade was super sharp and as good as ever. Sure, I can see buying one if your blade gets warped or has a big chunk broken off by some stealthy lawn boulder, but those babies are pretty serious pieces of steel, so that can’t be very common. I’m thinking that fixing things at home is becoming a lost art.

The first IKEA in Ohio opens on the north side of town tomorrow and people are actually camping out to be the first inside. The mind reels.

For the record, I’m a fan of IKEA and am excited to see them come to Cinci. I’ve gone out of my way to shop at the one outside of Chicago and haul a few things back – but in all fairness, I was already in the area on business. I wouldn’t quite characterize their wares as cheaply constructed junk, however I do usual find myself appending the phrase “for what you pay for it” when I talk about their quality. IKEA is like the red Italian table wine of home furnishing – an affordable source for mod-european styling on a budget, packaged up nicely for American consumption. Sure, the flavors are a little muted as to appeal to the widest swath of palates, but the taste is still satisfying and pairs easy.

But camping out? Ya know, I never understood the hordes who waited out for iPhones, PS3s, or the countless over-hyped electronic gadgets before them either. Doesn’t everyone know by now that first-gen electro gizmos are invariably either overpriced, buggy, or both. Maybe that actually moves Daryl (and his other brother, Daryl) waiting for his Billy bookcase up a notch higher on the consumerism food chain, but only a notch. I mean, who in the hell can’t wait another day, or week, or month for a bookcase, floor lamp, or flower vase? Yes, I do know the store is giving door prizes to the first few, but nothing all that lavish, and certainly nothing worth staking out the storefront for up to 48 hours. I’m holding out hope for humanity that these are actually store employees incognito, strategically drumming up a little media attention, but I doubt it.

You the man now dog.
(Updated 11:16pm) Or Not!

If you’ve watched any news about the Ohio election you may have heard about the ballot shortages in our county. It took us an hour to vote tonight, not because of long lines, but because the polling place had run out of ballots. I guess I didn’t even know that was possible until tonight.

Shortly after arriving at the polling place, and having our ID checked, we were informed we could either complete an issues-only ballot, or wait for additional candidate ballots to arrive. After a half hour of waiting there was still no sign of more ballots and the waiting area of would-be voters grew. Cincinnati newspaper and television crews showed up and began interviewing people. Fifteen minutes more later, one of the polling officials reappeared with a stack of photocopied ballots and got us all moving through again. After completing the makeshift ballots, we had to deposit them into a special steel container since they could not be scanned electronically. While at the table getting my ID rechecked I overheard the polling official who made the copies telling another: “So I called the office again asking when our extra ballots would be showing up. I told them we had a lot of people waiting and that the media was here. They said to just make photocopies and get everyone out as soon as possible.”

That didn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy about this whole democratic experience.

Last year our company was bought by Siemens – our third merger/buyout in six years. Besides changing my email sig and seeing a different logo on my pay check stubs I wouldn’t really notice a difference. Sure, there’s new benefits plans to enroll in and I had to make tons of changes to our web site, but really it’s business as usual. It was only this week that our building signage got changed.

What’s really mind boggling though is how massive the entire company is. There’s over 450,000 of us cogs running the Siemens machine. According to Forbes we are the 6th largest employer in the world; just ahead of McDonald’s. For reference, IBM is 18th and GE is 27th. In all the company brought in somewhere in the neighborhood of 72 billion Euros in 2007. That’s like $107B. They were 28th in the Forbes 2007 Global 500, and if they were US owned they’d be in the Fortune 500 top 10. The company is doing well, profits are up, and job security is good.

The company just underwent a restructuring and is now comprised of three main sectors: Energy, Industry, and Healthcare. We’re buried in the bowels of the Industry division – which brings in over half of the company’s annual revenue. But wait, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Within industry there are six divisions. We fall under the large Industry Automation division. And down from there we have all the levels of the company that existed before the acquisition. I’m something like seven levels down from there. I’ve never seen a full org chart from top to bottom, but it’d be dizzying. Looking up at all the corporate levels above me gives me the same sense of vertigo as standing in the center of a huge atrium.