By the order of my doctor and my physical therapist, I have to get my cubicle converted to a “Sit-Stand” configuration.

Basically… they need to raise my desk so that I can stand and type. They took measurements today and figured out they’d have to raise my desk 20″. This also means that I’ll need a taller chair for when I want to sit.

I’m 6′ 4″ barefoot… taller when I wear my shoes (Doc Martin Airwalks), so things have to go up quite a bit. The woman who runs facilities said they may have to relocate me in the building as well because I’m the first cube by the door (and my being so high might seem overbearing to the other employees).

Um… how about “hell no!”

I’m also located right next to the NOC I manage. Moving me away would separate me from the rest of my team and the room that I spend quite a bit of my day in.

No worries though… I already went to my manager and she’s in total agreement with me. She says they can rip apart my cube (and the cubes that touch mine) and install 8′ walls (instead of the 5′ ones I have now).

I did try to get her to buy me this though. It looks like fun!

It’s monday, and I don’t have to go to work.

Neener, needer, neeeeener!!

I took the day off to drive my eldest son down to the college so he can buy books. Well… I’m actually buying the books, but they’re for him. He got accepted in the Running Start program at his high school, so he’ll do his last two years at the community college instead. It’s a pretty good deal… two years of tuition free college, and he’ll graduate with an A.A. when his friends graduate with a high school diploma.

If he screws this up, I’ll kill him.

I’ve mentioned before how spiffy Ubuntu linux is. I’ve now found a great use for the live CD (the CD you can boot from to try the OS without installing it): recovering data from a toasty NTFS hard drive.

My friend, Brian, has a HP laptop and his hard drive gave up the ghost. I could view the drive using NTFS Reader, but it would blow up when I attempted to copy the files to another drive. I tried a number of data recovery software packages but got no love.

The data was there, but the partition was toast. You couldn’t even fdisk the damn thing because the sectors where the partition info lives were hosed. I tried to repair the partition using some MS tools, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, I put his drive in an external USB enclosure, added another external USB drive formatted with FAT32, and booted up my laptop using the Ubuntu Live CD. Ubuntu saw both the damaged drive and the FAT32 drive, and I was able to copy the files from the GUI (Gnome) by simply doing drag and drop (I needed a FAT drive to write to… linux can read NTFS, but not write to it).

After recoving my friends 7.5GB of digital photos and a few media files, I burned them off to DVD and then attempted to fix the partition, but that was a big ol’ no-go. My friend is very damn happy, and I learned something new.

Life is once again sweet.

Dear Pat Robertson,

SHUT YOUR FUCKING YAP, YOU SELF ABSORBED IDIOT PUSSBAG!!!

Respectfully,

-Tone Parsons
whitewomanblackdog.com

This is, of course, in response to his comments toward Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

And we wonder why the rest of the world looks at America as a threat. Of course, this is coming from the same man who said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Thanks for helping improve our international appeal, ass munch!

Normally, the company I work for has some sort of picnic every summer. This year, there was no such event, but they offered discount tickets to Silverwood Theme Park instead.

I purchased tickets for the whole family at $15 each (which beats the hell out of the normal admission price of $29.99). The downside to the tickets is that we were stuck with one and only one choice for the date… last saturday (August 20th).

Since that was a saturday, I figured we better get there as early as possible because it can get a little busy on the weekends. Apparently… I under estimated exactly what “busy” meant.

We showed up shortly after they opened (about 11:15) and spent the next 30 minutes waiting in line to park the car. There was still plenty of parking (the lot is friggin’ huge!) and it was a quick jaunt to the gate to get in.

That’s where things stopped being quick. It appears that Silverwood offered discount tickets to every company in the Northwest, as there had to be over 20,000 people in the park.

The lines to ride the Tremors rollercoaster was about 2 hours long. The Timber Terror rollercoaster was the same. Hell… I waited in line for 40 minutes just to buy a lemonade.

They had a car show going on as well as some model talent search (which added to the population).

There was one other thing that I wasn’t quite prepared for. Since they opened the BolderBeach water park, people were walking all over the place in their bathing suits. While there were a few attractive people there, the benefit was far outweighed by the sheer number of people who had no business showing off their veritable sea of freckles, fat, and flesh in any public venue. Big bellys… hairy backs… and that was just the women!

The thought of being stuck in a steaming herd of the unwashed masses… half nakid… yeah… that’s how I wanted to spend the day.

We made it until about 4pm. In total… I spent about 5 hours in line, rode two rides, and had a drink. Totally fucking insane!