Yes, my last name is West. It is funny to me to read how Kanye and whatever Kardashian he married named their kid North. Having a name that is a direction has proven to be quite  entertaining over the years. Not as much as an adult but in grade school through high school there were those who could never call me by my first name or by my last name by itself. One particularly overgrown hyper-thyroidal guy would say “Go west young man” every time he saw me. Then with the laugh of a fictional giant, he would snort. I heard wild-wild west, James West, and the occasional western boots. Any variation which brought amusement to the teller, would be used and for some, would stick for the entirety of my schooling. This Kanye genius, has decided to give his child a two of them to make the schooling career of this child twice as fun! I know that money has never equaled brains and that all that money will be necessary for therapy, just by the nature of who her parents are. What I can’t understand is the lack of connection between what you name your kids and the ridicule that will be received because of it.

Hi my name is Bob, and I am addicted to my smart phone. You say “Hi Bob”. They say the first step in recovery is to admit you have a problem! I will be in a meeting and I feel the phone vibrate. It is telling me I have an email, or a text. I know it is rude to check it while I am supposed to be paying attention to the person speaking but I can’t help it. What if it is important? What if it is the president asking my advice? Just a peek won’t hurt, will it? Maybe I can do the under the table while fake yawning. I can’t sit there for an hour meeting not knowing who needs me! I know it is probably that guy from Ethiopia asking me to hold his money, but what if it isn’t? Even a coupon from my local coffee shop will get me through listening in this meeting. Maybe a funny cat video or a like of my status will make me complete! I know it is sick, but it isn’t like I am doing drugs or anything. I am trying to be better. Just yesterday I left my phone at my desk for a whole hour. Well not willingly. I really hate when I forget it!

I spent the weekend cleaning up our yard from the fire. I rented a backhoe and a dump trailer to haul all the ash and waste to the dump. Nothing says manly like big tools. Sitting in the seat, powering it up and scooping up all the burned stuff really gives you a charge! At the end of the day saturday I looked like I had painted my face black. I blew my nose and charcoal came out! That is manly! Of course, I also smashed my thumb, which any work around big tools or cars for me equals one finger damaged or bleeding, which of course, is also very manly! But the best and most manly thing was the demolition saw. This thing looks like a cross between a chain saw and a giant grinder. We had three trailers which needed to be hauled away so I broke out the saw and chopped them up into pieces. You start this thing up and put it up to the metal trailer and it cuts through the metal. It is a little scary, but when all the sparks start flying and the sound of steel giving way you can’t help but give a mighty grunt of manliness! After you have chopped a ten foot trailer into multiple sections watching it fall to the ground like small tree branches, your manliness quota is throughly recharged. Even if you don’t have trailers to tear down I highly recommend renting one. Maybe you could have a man party and invite friends, they would appreciate the recharging as well!

Last night on the news, they showed a family from our area who were part of the same fire that took our barn and garage, already have the framing done on their house. They said this family plans to be back in the house in five weeks. So, a month ago today they lost their home and in another month and a half they will have a new one completed. Wow! My neighbors and I are still cleaning up and these guys are almost done! There isn’t enough coffee or red bull in the world that could have gotten me that far along! Our house is still standing and it still took us three weeks to get back in. As I go down our road I see homes that are in various stages. Some are cleaning up, some haven’t even started. The news called this family an inspiration. I call them crazy! I can not pucker up my behind enough to  work that hard. I love my home and I would hate to have lost it, but I still want to have a life! I know they will be sipping margarita’s on the porch while I am still figuring out where to put the new barn but I gotta say, you are not inspiring me! If anything you make me want to take a nap!

A while back I got in trouble with my mom. I got a kidney stone and while I was in the emergency room I posted my situation on Facebook. My sister who is on Facebook called my mom and asked her how I was doing. The problem was I had not told my mom so she called me upset I had not let her know about it. Social networking has created a whole new category of awkward moments that seem to keep happening. From people accidentally posting private messages on their walls to liking pages that make you cringe. I thought I would put out a short list of helpful reminders.

1. Make sure you tell the person you are breaking up before changing your status. This would be equal to texting your breakup, and putting that it “is complicated” means it is over for you! Nobody wants you to post that about your relationship.

2. Look at your photos before you post them. Look at the people and what is going on in the background. You don’t want to go viral for the wrong reasons!

3. Nobody wants to read your personal Communist Manifesto! Nobody but the FBI and NSA read those things. The only reason they do is to see if you are unstable. Writing ten pages of complaints about the world is gonna get you on a list. Which in turn will get you kicked off a plane. If you want a plain white van parked in front of your house go buy one. Those guys aren’t going to find the picture of your dog digging in your bags of fertilizer very funny!

Every software company that tries to sell me their product tells me the same thing. They are going to solve all my problems and make my job much easier. The reality is really the opposite. The application usually does things just enough differently or didn’t include a portion of what I needed to make my life more difficult. Yet time and time again I watch the companies I work for pick tools based on this flawed premise. The problem comes back to our hatred of figuring out what it is we do, then applying technology to accelerate your business. The saying is “a fool with a tool is still a fool”. Having the money to spend on a piece of software doesn’t mean you should. If you have no idea what you are doing software is not going to fix it. One place a I worked we shutdown the expensive tool we had and found a cheap replacement for the one critical part until we mapped out our processes and tested them. Then we picked a tool that would allow us to automate those processes. No salesman smoke and mirrors could change the facts, the software either did what we needed or not. This is true for your own needs as well. figure it out before you find a program to do it for you. It will serve you better in the end.

I have come to understand that this statement came originally from some rapper. Not that I am a fan of rap music but this guy obviously hit on something. YOLO stands for you only live once. How it is being used, is as an excuse for doing what ever you want because you won’t ever get to live your life again. When you ask some kid why they did something dumb they can respond with YOLO! While most would probably disagree, this is really what we are teaching our children in school and in the media. It i no wonder this statement hit a cord, it really is the current philosophy. There is no God, so there is nothing after this life so why live like there is? There is no agreed upon moral standard, so what is good for you can’t be questioned. The greatest achievements are in sports or hollywood so living for yourself is the best outcome we can have. we are now free of rules so we are free of caring for anyone else but ourselves. This to me is the opposite of even 50 years ago when JFK asked us to “ask not”. If he said that today the response would not be a collective agreement and action, but a cry of NO’ME!

I know I am gonna hear it from the women in my life, but equality is a bunch of malarkey! I accidentally walked into a women’s bathroom and saw the amazing flowers, paintings and couch, none of which is in the guys and thought, I have been ripped off! You ladies got it good. We get the stark plain room and you get an attendant. Lets face it, until a man can win an argument saying he had a kidney stone you women are still going to look down on as less than equals. We men used to have things like sports and cars, now you have title 9 and Danica Patrick racing in Nascar. What do we have? No men only clubs, thou women only is ok. No, couch in our bathroom, whether I would want to sit in the bathroom is beside the point! You even get cheaper car insurance. I have asked my wife on many occasions to let me be a house husband and the answer has always been the same. So until I get to rest comfortably in the privacy of my own three stalled restroom. I am gonna protest the inequality we men have to face! Until then you can find me sulking in my cube!

Mostly because it is friday and I have to work on the day after a holiday, I decided I wanted to write something about monkeys. If you google monkeys you get a very studious collection of articles and facts mixed in with YouTube videos of monkeys behaving badly. Like the article telling you about the endangers species next to monkeys defecating, among other things, on cars at a wild animal park. Others include articles about why some have big red butts or large noses, which in my opinion should have been officially named inneedoftpicus, and jimmyduranticus next to articles about how we are cousins. One such article has video of monkeys using complex sounds which of course they formulate is how we developed speech. While I don’t agree with the notion we are descendents of these primates one has only to google “people” to get a very similar looking result. Amongst the thought-provoking articles about our very existence, to a listing of hollywood stars and others acting as if they are the ones in the zoo! Some days it is really hard to refute the visual evidence!

I got an email from a printer manufacture offering free a free printer. This sounded great until you look at the whole program. The fine print says you have to buy the consumables, ink or toner from them for a set amount of time. The consumables end up costing you more than the printer would cost over the life of the program in the long run. I don’t understand how the printer makers justify that? I saw a canon inkjet that I could buy for $45 but replacement ink was $49. This means I could go buy a new printer every time my printer runs out of ink and still spend less money. Never mind the pile I create at my local landfill, or the waste of resources it is to build these cheap printers. Of course the other end of this issue is that now ink and toner are listed as toxic waste so throwing away my cartridge is a federal offense. All of this comes back to a problem with the premise that these things are free. Free almost always comes back to me as cost deferred.