pirates

pirates
Originally uploaded by jmeyer.

Ever heard of "Seagull Management" ?

A coworker and I were chatting about our current project at Yahoo! which we are about to release to the public. As we talked about who was really helpful, not so helpful, entirely useless or simply a pain in the butt, he brought up the term seagull management. Wonder what that is? It's managers, that fly in from time to time, aren't really well-informed, flap their wings and make a lot of noise and leave a bunch of crap behind for those people that actually do the work.

Anyway, on one or two occasions we had this happen on our project but overall it's looking good. Stay tuned for more on this? I am pretty excited about getting some of my work out to a large number of people. Never really had that IBM. I mean, we did cool stuff but unfortunately we never made anything available to the public because either IBM did not want to, could not decide in time or wanted to turn it into a secret ...
Let's see how things go. More later.

Two bad ideas ... or whatever happened to common sense.

On my way to work this morning I listened to NPR (National Public Radio) and they were talking about Jail for Judges. It's a measure that wants to do away with judicial immunity. What it seems to come down to is that, if the measure passes, judges can be sued if a grand jury decides that the sentence given out by the judge was a bit harsh. On top of that, the supporters of this measure want to apply this to anyone in public office. Does this country really need more opportunities for people to sue other parties? I don't think so. It already goes way to far. Remember the fat woman who bought coffee at McDonalds, put it between her legs and then burned herself by spilling it. She then sued McDonalds and was awarded an absurd amount of money for being just dumber than a brick. Now, we have warning labels on everything. Something like "Do not operate vehicle with this in place" on a sunscreen for car windshields. It even goes as far that a lot of companies and institutions cut services or ban certain things. For example, there iare several schools across the country that have banned contact sports like playing tag football or chasing games during recess time. Why? Out of fear for being held liable that a child gets hurt playing. What comes next, that kids have to wear seatbelts on their classroom charis because they could fall over. Or make them wear a helmet inside the classroom? In essence I am all for holding people responsible when they screw up but opening up more posibilities for people to sue the shit out of everything and everyone is wrong.

The "Bus" ...

Sonja and I have been debating for a while now to buy a bigger car. We owned a Volkswagen Jetta Wagon which did a fine job but was getting too small for us, the two boys and our dog. If we put the stroller in the trunk, our dog had to squeeze in behind a seat. Anyway, we have looked around and after a while it turned out that a minivan is the only logical choice. Why, you may ask? Well, we had a limited budget, so a nice Mercedes Benz wagon was out of the question. Additionally, while slightly bigger than our Jetta they would not have solved our space problem because having kids, a third row is noce to have. Then, there was the world of SUVs. The ones that are big enough suck in terms of gas mileage (some of the American brands) and the ones that are nice enough (like Lexus, Mercedes Benz and Audi) are too expensive and still suck in terms of gas mileage. We even tried the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, which has ok gas mileage compared to the regular model but nothing near where you would say this is phenomenal. On top of that, the third row seats it had would be uncomfortable for even our 4-year old and its price tag was ridiculous for the base model that had next to no options in it. So here we are, looking around and the only car category that would basically fulfill all our needs was the minivan category. So, knowing they are not the sexiest automobiles, we went ahead and test drove some of them. We really liked the Honda Odyssey and ended up buying one:

I have to say, it is one of the nicest cars, if not the nicest, that we have ever owned. Do I have a problem with driving a minivan? Not at all, the car is nice, my kids love it and we can haul all kinds of stuff around. And the car has a shitload of options that make it nice. Not to mention that it has twice the horsepower of our old Jetta and a gas mileage rating that beats any big SUV by a wide margin. A lot of people will make fun of us now but I don't care. Anyway, since the car is a lot bigger than our old one we have already nicknamed it. We simply call it "the bus" ... and we like it.

I like birthdays ...

Especially my own. People are nice to me on at least one day a year and I get to see a lot of my friends all at once. This year we met at Trader Vic's, a cocktail bar/restaurant. We slurped quite a few of their concoctions and I have to admit I had a pretty bad hangover the next day. It was fun nonetheless. And the band in that place even sang a song for me. They called me "Jorge" but if you have read this blog from the beginning you know that I am used to that.

We even shared some crazy cocktails with straws that were at least 2 feet long. Thansk everyone for coming and thanks to Sonja for setting this up. I had a blast.