Update: You know how you learn something new and suddenly you see it everywhere? I guess that since I was thinking about being green yesterday I saw it all over the place today… like this sweet site: http://www.korwater.com/. Ok. I get it. It’s a damn water bottle. It’s an expensive water bottle. It’s a deluded water botle. Take these awesome tag lines from their site:

• “Drink a little water, and you’ll be a little healthier. Drink a little water from a reusable container, and the earth will be a little healthier.  The KOR ONE hydration vessel will convince you that “green” water tastes better.“

I was thinking about tolerance recently. Well… more specifically I was thinking about things we tolerate in order to keep the peace. Ok it was more of a realization than directed thought.

I have been playing WoW online for quite a while now. With the release of the Burning Crusade, the reduction of raid sizes from 40 to 25, and the significant difference in leveling pace I realized that the pre-BC guild that I and my coworkers were in would not survive. So, not long after we reached level 70 and were regularly doing Karazhan I quit that guild and formed a new one. Since we were going to be able to work with smaller numbers I set the new guild up in a way that had a more cooperative leadership model. More like a commune than the more traditional dictatorships you find in MMO gaming guilds.

I was cleaning up my desk some today and I realized that I’ve had a Route 66 pin sitting here at my desk for almost a year now. I bought it in Estes Park for my Dad.

I’ve seen him several times. He has even slept here in the house as a guest. Why can’t I remember to give it to him? The darn thing is sitting here in plain sight.

Hmpf.

/punch brain

A new airline starting up in the Philadelphia area is promising to change the way consumers purchase air travel… by charging by the pound. You plus your luggage can pay as little as $1.40 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Chicago. Not only that, but this luxury airline promises to be carbon neutral. From their website: “Derrie-Air will be the only airline that plants trees to offset every pound of carbon that our planes release into the atmosphere.”

www.flyderrie-air.com

There’s only one catch.

So after finishing up a very busy first week at my new job I have realized that it has brought my posting to a complete halt. Well, not entirely. It was also due to the major events scheduled for this weekend which we had been preparing for since February. Either way… the result is the same: No new posts.

Today I am resigning from my job.

As I sit here and think about it I feel really good about this resignation. The best I have ever felt about leaving a job actually. That hasn’t always been the case.

I haven’t had a lot of jobs, but I have never been fired so each departure has been a resignation. Sometimes those resignations feel bad. They feel like I am abandoning coworkers or a job half done or some other unfinished work that will bug me for a few months until I can finally let go of it. Even the job where I was severely mistreated by a manager who must have had something like rampant bipolar disorder… I felt a little guilty that I was walking out on the owner.

A little while back it occurred to me: The cats aren’t trying to scratch the crap out of the couch or their scrating pads anymore.

Last September the wife and I became parents to two little black and white sister kittens. They were, as kittens tend to be, playful, rambunctious, curious… scratchy. At the slightest provocation the little kitten claws were out and embedded in whatever had grabbed their attention. We’ve had cats before these two and we know that cats just love to scratch and destroy things, especially couches. To help mitigate some of that kitten vs. couch aggression we purchased a bunch of cat scratch pads and had one in almost every room in the house.

I write code. I don’t write every day, especially in the last two years since having been promoted deeper into management, but I still can and do code. To me writing code is a creative exercise. It’s like painting. I don’t think everyone feels that way. I think some people who have gotten into programming do so because it’s a well paying job, not because they like the creative aspects of it.

Every time you write there is some problem to overcome. Some challenge you’re facing that you are going to write an application to solve. Usually it’s a fairly straightforward process. Just like a painter would pick up frequently used brushes I pick up reusable code and get to work.

So how does this happen? I mean… I know how it happened in the macro sense, but how did this specifically happen? Was the car underwater? Did she rear-end a hay truck with a plaid wearing farmer on it?

Click picture for larger version.

It looks to me like a scarecrow crawled into the engine compartment and exploded.

One of the best things (not the best, that’s a post for another time) that ever came out of the management training provided by the company I work for is the DiSC behavior model class that I was allowed to take. It was one of those classes which really expanded the degree to which I understood the world.

DiSC breaks down social traits into 4 categories (stoled strait from wikipedia!):