Random Photos

Phil, a guy at work retired on April 1st, he left behind his 2010 Jackasses (and the funny things they say) Calendar. You should see Miss April!!














View west down the center line of Rosa Parks Blvd waiting for the bus at 5AM to go to the airport to go to Spokane. Got lots of comp time for coming back on the evening flight.













Some people from the neighborhood at the seed exchange.














View from the floor of my office lobby.

Audio Book Run Down (1)

I got a new job, woot! But, when I was searching for work I was also doing stuff around the house (see the tags marked home project and while I did them I often listened to OPB, music I've got, or audio books. I'm sorta new to audio books and devoting a little bit of the focus to the story while doing something else can be tough.

Here's the list:

Homer's The Illiad then The Odyssey -

Both were great tales of mythological conquest and adventure, I liked the Odyssey more because there was more travel involved while the Illiad is staged in and around Troy, when names are mentioned it's harder to keep track of what they are doing if they aren't moving somewhere. Made me want to reread Route 66 A.D., a great book about the beginning of travel and tourism in times of Ancient Rome.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers then The Tipping Point then started Blink - Outliers is about individuals and other groups of people who have bucked the trends and been successful or limited their success by the culture, period of time in which they lived, and social interactions. Once example I found interesting was about some airline pilots in Korea, because of their social structure the co-pilot often speaks in a differential tone to the captain even when there are serious problems the plane may soon encounter, this made Korean Airlines an outlier because accidents were happening more frequently not because of inexperienced pilots or planes needing repair but because there was an ingrained culture of hierarchy.

I liked The Tipping Point to learn how some new fashion trends had gotten started.

Blink, seemed like stuff I already knew so I didn't finish that one.

Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, Freaky Deaky, City Primeval, Bandits - These were all great bubble gum novels about detectives bending the law, con men setting up a grift, organized crime, but what made them all great was that they were read by Frank Muller. I just found his personal website and learned that he's dead! He's the best!! Luckily I've got more Frank Muller narrated books for the bus rides.

Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes The Sign of Four - Good story, I couldn't really get into it, but I've got just about the whole Sherlock Holmes collection so I may do them all.

West Linn

I posted on my Twitter that I was going out with Nancy to help her redo a wetland delineation out in West Linn, OR. We had some fantastic weather and I was able to take this picture of Mt. Hood clear and bright looking straight down Hidden Spring Mountain Ranch Road or something like that.

This photo taken with my G1, woot!

There are a ton of huge houses in West Linn, quite a few situated way back from the main road. I observed a geezer hooking up his garbage and recycling containers to the bumper of his Escalade one day. "Oh, honey, please bring the cans back in."

The wetland delineation work was fun, it was good to get out of the office, I was in charge of using a machete to clear a path through the blackberry bushes. I got pretty good at it, but my forearm started to ache after a while.

Mr. Daily and the Fish

Mr. Daily is a coworker at my engineering office, he is an interesting fellow.

He loves to use the phrase 'However, comma...' to start a statement in counterpoint to someone's idea, I'm not saying that he immediately jumps in to suggest a better alternative or tear down someone's concept, but it's just an odd phrase to use.

Quite a while back the administrative manager called him Mr. Weeks as he was walking through the front entry to go to the bathroom or something, she enjoys making up other time related alternatives to his name. His retort was his name ('daily') being mentioned in the Lord's Prayer. He was referring to 'oh lord, please bless us our daily bread...', I heard all of this because I was set up in the conference room off the front entry QC-ing some plans, I said 'we think pretty highly of ourselves don't we Mr. Daily (using his first name).' To which he responded with a slightly embarrassed chuckle and hitched up his khakis then adjusted them back down and walked off. The admin laughed 'that was pretty good!'

We have a toy fish that is passed around to different people when someone gets all bent out of shape on something. Mr. Daily gets the fish all of the time as a result of his tendency to fly off the handle, so he always ends up with the fish. For 2008, he was letting his hair and beard grow out and towards the end of the year he’d taken to tying his hair into a small pony tail. This was noted by many and more importantly by the guys that enjoy setting Mr. Daily off and giving the fish back to him. The decided to memorialize the pony tail by adding a pony tail to the fish. See the picture below.

Un ano adia & Office Envy

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Originally uploaded by red_5_rogue

It's been a roughly a year that I've been in Oregon and at my job. I love both. This year has been great! I've met a ton of cool people and had a lot of fun.

I've been experiencing office envy for a while. I've gone to a number of other engineering and architectural offices, a lot of them I really, really liked. The things I liked about them were their office layouts, location, conference rooms, location, amenities, and location. I would love to be downtown, I would love to have a bigger conference room, I would love to have a view, and I would like to do more things with my coworkers. The picture was taken at local firm that is having a chess tournament after work, they have beer and snacks and the winner gets a Wii, how cool would that be. We don't have enough people, much less anyone that would be able to stay given that most of my coworkers have familial obligations. I did get cake for my one year anniversary at work. And, we do have 2 microwaves.