mischief

Lori cracks me up

Blog Posted by kitt at 22:19 on 19 August 2006

Drunken emails like this crack me up.

Yaaaaaaaaaay for Kitt! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

You ar ea rock star.

owaoiojioeowoooooooooooooooo
woooooooooooo
woo wooooooooooooo
that's a train sound
wooo woooooooooooo
I am watching The Office, last season, woooooooo.
JJ is gone at his bachelor party.
I am home and drunk on wine.
Yum
I heart you Kitt.

yaaaaaaaaaaay for kitt!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-L

Inspiration and letting go

Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 22:43 on 17 August 2006

Today was the last of the three days I've spent training the next developer for a previous client. The sheer amount of information I had to dump on the new developer surprised even me. I hadn't realized just how much I had developed and maintained for that organization. Three days was clearly not enough time.

I tried very hard to keep my personal opinions of one particular person at the organization out of my interactions with the next developer. Very, very hard. I did okay in my effort, not great, but okay. He understood, however, that there are issues between our two organizations, and did his best to avoid the landmines.

Yesterday was a particularly bad day at work. The above mentioned person that I tried to keep my (not positive) opinion to myself, antagonized Mike to the point of unbelievable anger. It was an eye opening experience for me. I've never seen Mike mad, much less so mad that I feared he might physically damage something (say, a wall or a chair). No client relationship is worth the stress this client has caused me, much less the health of my business partner.

The experience had one very good outcome, however.

I am done with this client. Completely done.

When I said goodbye to the new developer this evening, the stress with this client disappeared. Gone. Poof. As I file through my index cards, looking at what I need to do, I'm crossing out the leftover items from that client. I'm done. Completely done.

The interesting moment will be tomorrow, when I receive some communication about some process at the client's site is failing. I've been composing the response in my mind. It'll go something like, "Most people learn cause and effect by sixth grade, and understand that actions have consequences. You've been rude to us. You've been mean, and nasty, and disrespectful to both partners of this company. Your actions have consequences, and the answer is no."

Done. Completely done. With no regrets.

It's time to spend the time and effort I've been putting into other's projects into my projects. Time to start those projects go, go, going.

Also known as, "Time to do cool shit."

After I said goodbye to the new developer, with the phrase, "Good luck! You're fucked!" echoing in my head, I went to practice.

I haven't been to practice in a long while, from both being gone at OSCON, New Mexico (Kyle!), and Phoenix for pretty much the last three weeks, and injured from GRUB. So, my whole goal today was to keep going, work as hard as I can at the moment, and keep going.

Inspiration comes from interesting places. We were playing five pull, and ended up having to run four sprints at the end of practice. I lined up two people from Tyler, who decided to run the last sprint backwards. Three steps into the sprint, I realized he was actually running backward faster than I was running forward.

Along the same thoughts as earlier, I thought, "No fucking way is Tyler going to beat me running backwards. No. Fucking. Way." and ran as hard as I could.

He didn't beat me.

And I finished the practice as I wanted to: working as hard as I could.

Thanks, Tyler, for the inspiration.

Stuart Foreman

Blog Instead of being asleep at 22:16 on 23 July 2006, kitt created this:

At dinner tonight, Mark started telling one of his college stories (his story to tell, but the summary is: he and his friends killed a rabbit with a BB gun from the dorm balcony, cooked it at a barbeque (tastes like chicken!), was tattled on by the women downstairs, ordered to volunteer at the local Humane Society, tried to do said volunteering at the local Humane Society but were refused because of the reason why they had to volunteer, and ended up volunteering with the campus gardener, who offered them $1 for every rabbit they killed). At one point, Kris leaded over to Megan and asked, "Have you heard this story a million times before?" She laughed, then said yes, but it was okay, because she listened for differences in the stories, to see how they grow over time.

She asked me if I did the same with the stories from Kris that I hear over and over again. I laughed, and said, "No, I just pull out my phone and try to keep up with him while typing it in." I then asked, "Want to hear one?"

I figure Kris isn't going to blog his stories, but some of them are just so so funny. The best part is, of course, the fact that Kris just laughs when he tells the story, so, yes, a lot of it is in the delivery. If he starts typing up his own stories, I'll stop. Until then, I'll keep transcribing.

Megan said, yes, she'd like to hear the story, so, in his words, Kris' story of Stuart Foreman:

Stuart Foreman was the name of our catcher in high school.

We had a rule that a runner heading to home had to slide if there was going to be a play at home. They had no choice, they were rwquired to slide.

my junior year, we were playing our arch rival, James Wood H.S., In one play, the runner starts coming into home. Our catcher caught the ball, and turned to meet the runner. The runner was this 6" 200 (220 in one version of the story) pound guy. Our catcher was like 5'7", 170 (180 in a different telling) pounds, stocky and built like Eric Newman.

So this runner comes in, and our catcher is holding the ball (out in front of himself, both hands around the ball) when the runner keeps charging.

So our catcher goes HUNH! picks up the runner, body slams him to the ground, touches him with the ball, spikes the ball,and walks back to the dugout.

The guy immediately stands up, like he wants to fight. The whole bench is waiting at the end of the dugout, just waiting to rush the field, while the umpire is throwing warnings around.

Immediately warned both dugouts to stay in their dugouts.

Someone asked, What were you doing?

Me? Oh, I was laughing hysterically.

We roll twenty strong

Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 21:44 on 23 July 2006

After the second day of GRUB, Beth suggested we all head over to the river for a quick dip. She had hoped we would quick dip yesterday instead of, say, showering at the cabin and using up the water at the cabins. We had a few starts and stops, but ended up at the creek just downstream of the 6th St. Bridge. Not the cleanest of spots, but definitely convenient.

When we arrived, a small group of drunken college boys were flirting with a small group of college girls. And when I say flirting, I mean taunting, catcalling, insulting, and throwing flip flops and dirt clods at them. What passes for flirting these days would most likely have been called assault and battery when I was in college.

Kris and I arrived, and wandered past the mating ritual, down the path to the creek edge. We stood at the stop of the rocks, watching our teammates enter the waterm laughing at the frigid water.

As we stood there, a ball of wet sand came flying at our heads, hitting Kris in the hat, and landing on my shoulders with a wet splat. I turned in anger, as Kris asked, "What the hell?" I knew who threw the ball of sand, having seen the guy throwing earlier, and hollered at the top of my lungs, "You can cut that shit out. Right. Now." They looked a little sheepish, but made no acknowledgement of my yell.

I turned to walk back to the bridge, as Kris did. He continued to the car, as I stopped to tell various teammates who were just arriving what had happened. Dan O cajoled the punks, "Not cool, guys, not cool."

I followed Kris to the car, made sure he was okay, then pulled out my cell phone. I was sufficiently annoyed that a call to the police was in order. 411 worked just fine, and I was connected to the Boulder policy in under a minute. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of walking around as I made the call, and one of the hoodlums saw me talking on the phone while looking at them. They scattered out of the water. Even more tragically, they scattered onto the shore between the cars and the water. Rather than leaving, they hovered, never quite leaving us alone.

After about 10 minutes of trying to relax, I gave up, and walked back to the car. Kris had the trunk open and was arranging things, but I thought he was sleeping in the car and had forgotten to close the trunk. Kris suggested ice cream, so off we went to the Haagen Dazs on Pearl St. My months and months of travelling to Boulder were not for naught!

We arrived back at ye ole watering hole just as everyone was driving away to go to dinner. At dinner, I found out that not only had the hoodlums returned to the water, but had taken up throwing sand clods at our group. One hit Roshan in the head. Another tried "cock fighting puffery" as Mark said, to start a fight. Mark's thought was, "Dude, I'm holding a baby!" Mirabelle would have kicked their collective ass, of course.

Doyle's response was my favorite: "Uh, you know, we roll twenty strong."

Having heard the hoodlums came back to make trouble for my friends because of my actions (ultimately because of their own actions, but pushed along by mine), I was a little sad. I don't want to cause trouble for my friends, especially during these moments of starting to live without fear stopping me. All actions have consequences, I just need to make sure I think of them before I take a stand.

The bummer of the whole situation was, however, realizing I lost $20 when taking out my cell phone to call the police. I had a bill tucked in the phone case. It fell out when I made the call. Sigh.

Open source as a communication model

Blog Posted by kitt at 14:54 on 7 June 2006

Posting when recovering from a migraine is, I would have to say, one of the most retarded things one can do. Just guessing here. So, since post-migraine is a perfect opportunity for complete stupidity, here I go!

Closed communication among the "top" of anything I've ever done is a source of complete and total annoyance and frustration for me. I'm uncomfortable with it. I despise it. It's the number one reason why I hate working for companies with more than two levels of management (the top being the president of the company, the next level being the manager level). If I'm going to be asked to do something, I want to know why. "Because I said so," is never good enough: there are very, very few people I trust enough to accept that as an answer.

Also a big reason I would suck at the military. Other than my problem with authority.

Well, not so much authority, as stupid authority.

So, along comes Michief's junta. I'm currently on the mailing list, though I would argue I'm there because I'm married to Kris and not because I provide any clear input. Using that argument, however, there are another 3 people on the list who also don't belong, but that's not polically correct to talk about.

So, there's the list. The list gets a lot of traffic. It has many discussions on it relevant to the whole team. Yet most of the people on the list forget to include the rest of the team, and just assume the rest of the team knows what is going on. With is untrue, since neither discussions are forwarded, nor the summary or outcomes are forwarded to the team as a whole.

A clear case of a closed group and communication breakdown, both of which annoy me.

I find it interesting that three of the six people who use the list the most resist opening it up to the rest of the team, since (so far, since we've selected the team) nothing incriminating has been sent to the short list that couldn't go out to the full list. I would even argue that by not sending it out to the full list, we lose the input of many experienced players.

Perhaps it's the closed-source, proprietary model of thinking, instead of the open-source model of thinking that clouds their judgements. I'm not sure. But it's annoying.

Completely annoying.

I have $80 that says...

Blog Instead of being asleep at 10:59 on 31 August 2005, kitt created this:
Last Friday night, Mischief descended on Wes' house for the inaugral event of the Shirley-Paul-I'm-gonna-kick-your-ass duodecathalon. The first event was, somewhat appropriately, a DDR dance off. Other events include Being Tall (Paul at 6'+ will probably win that one), Being Short (Paul will lose that one to Shirley's 5'5"), and others that, no doubt, include ro-sham-something.

The winner gets breakfast in bed. Said winner does not have to let the loser into the house. Should said loser wake up said winner before serving breakfast, the attempt doesn't count and the loser has to try again.

I arrived a little late, working on various projects. As I arrived, a ro-sham-eat had just finished up. Wes ran out of the kitchen and came back into the room dragging his dog's kennel. I looked at the crate, one made for the big, big dogs, and declared three people could fit in it.

Wes and several others looked at me like I was insane. Three people in that kennel? No way!

I responded, "Not only can three people fit in there, but if one is one of the small Asian women, the other two could be Tyler and I."

No one believed me.

Tyler was game, and, after taking off his shoes, crawled into the crate. He lay on his back, taking up most of the bottom of the crate. No, no, no way could more than two people fit in the crate, the men called out.

I asked Tyler to move to the back of the crate, and I "tried" to climb in next to him. The trick is, of course, to all great cons is to not quite fit.

Well, if I had truly been trying to con these guys.

When I didn't quite fit in the crate with Tyler, everyone started calling me on my "three people" declaration. I responded quickly by pulling out my wad of cash from my pocket. "I have 60, no, 80! Eighty dollars says I can fit in the crate with Tyler and Shirley or Pei. Eighty dollars."

Both Kevin and Paul immediately offered $20. Easy money they joked. Hand over the money, Kitt.

Silly boys.

I could get four people in that crate for $100.

Tyler unfolded himself from the bottom of the crate, I slid in next to him, and Pei zipped in, pulling the cage door closed behind her.

Easiest $40 ever.

EVAR.

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