It is March Madness time. That time of the year when friends ask me if I am filling out a bracket to which I explain why I will not. It is not as if I have never filled one out. I have worked at several places over the year where everyone did, and they would come by your desk every hour asking you if you were finished yet and wouldn’t leave you alone until you put it up on the wall. Then like it was some mystical creature people would stare at the wall of brackets looking and making comments about the choices people had made. Comments like, “what was Jeff thinking? That team has no chance to get to the round of sixteen let alone to the final.” Grown men sitting around prognosticating on a subject they are only less likely to actually be able to predict than the paid prognositators on TV. Every year it goes somethig like this, one team which by all accounts has no business playing that well, does. They go for a while and upset most everybodies brackets except one person who decided to fill one out based on cities they have visited or colors in state flags. They take it really far but in the end a very good team chocked full of players which will soon be in the NBA making more money than a basketball player should will win the whole thing, and they will be one of the hand full of teams which programs are always there. I would probably be more enthusiastic to be involved if teams from schools who never win anything had a chance, but it looks like it will just be another year of the same, so I will sit it out.

This morning at our team meeting my team got on the discussion of why so many conferences are in Las Vegas. One person said it has to be that there is always room for another conference there and they probably don’t charge a lot for the conference rooms because they know they are going to get a lot of money out of the attendees. I wondered, how many rooms are there in Las Vegas? According to Wikipedia, there are more than 60,000 hotel rooms on the strip! Holly Crud! That is a lot of rooms, and I could not have imagined that there are that many people staying in Vegas! Whether it was the mob or some other way in which that town got started, someone was a visionary to have dreamed that up. Think about it, you pull up to what was probably a couple of trailers and maybe a gas station, would you have looked around and said, yep this is the place where we are going to build a mega casino! I just looked it up. In 1920-1929 the population of Las Vegas was 2,304. How did it go from that to over 60,000 hotel rooms and a population of 603,488! I can tell you this much, in my wildest dreams I could not have ever come up with something as crazy as Las Vegas! I guess that is why people like Steve Wynn and others are stupidly rich, and I am typing up this blog during lunch!

I have come up with a few new drinking games, the problem with them is you will be drunk in about fifteen minutes if you play them.
First one is, every time they say Russia or the Russians on the Today Show you have to drink. I believe I counted twenty to thirty times in the first ten minutes this morning. If you are looking for quick results, this will do the trick! Heck, you could probably play it with any news program right now.
The second one, anytime the word amazing appears on your Facebook feed. Funny story, I use Grammarly to check spelling and grammar, and it underlined the word saying it is overused. Perhaps, but not like it is on Facebook!
Third, anytime the word “huge” shows up in a Harbor freight emails. Look I get it you have cheap tools, and I like going to your store and buying lots of the cheap tools, I don’t really believe every sale every weekend is Huge! If I wanted to get drunk thou, this one will work like a charm.

I have heard for years now about the snakes in Florida. If you haven’t, apparently for decades people have been dumping exotic snakes into the swamp when they got too big to care for, so the results are that these Python and Anaconda snakes are taking over the native species including the alligators and are a real problem. What I had never heard of until this week was the monkey problem. Apparently, in 1939 monkeys were used in Florida during the filming of a Tarzan movie in Florida. A local tour guide wanted to capitalize on the film’s success so he marooned six monkeys on a little island thinking he could keep them contained. What he didn’t know is that Rhesus monkeys can swim. These monkeys have reproduced over the years, and now there are more than a thousand of them roaming through Florida. Look, I am all for the guy making a little money for his swamp tour business, but this is ridiculous. All these years later wildlife officials have got a mess on their hands. Unlike the snakes, you can’t go out and start shooting them down, people hate snakes, and they love monkeys. You would have swarms of Greenpeace tree huggers running around in boats attaching themselves to trees and creating tent camps for year round protesting. On second thought, if they do this it will get them off of what ever cause they are fighting right now and get them all to move out of my state to Florida. I think I am OK with that. You won’t even have to shoot any monkeys, just declare the intention and watch the sparks fly!

This morning I was browsing my Facebook feed when I saw an article link saying Don Knotts had died. It seemed weird since usually when someone even slightly famous dies it is all over Facebook, but this was one story. So I clicked on the link which took me to CBSnews website, and I looked at the date. The article was from 2006. So between the “massive announcements” of nothing, the love or hate of our President, the giraffe, Amazon ads and cute animals, we needed a story from 2006? It is getting to the point where Facebook has “jumped the shark” The only thing keeping me on here is the pictures family are putting up. Since I no longer live close to most of them, it is the only way I get to keep up. I don’t use it to follow celebrities, I do keep up with a few bands, but they are the ones on the “Classic Rock” stations, mostly to find out how many of them are still alive! I know they are trying to get the goofy stuff off, but I think it is impossible. Just like my junk mail, I am still getting offers for Russian brides and male enhancement drugs. Now thou, they just go to a folder that I look at from time to time to make sure nothing I wanted gets caught in it. Maybe in the future there will be a junk feed on Facebook for all that stuff.

My first real job, not the cutting wood or a summer bagging groceries, was at age 17. For those counting that was in 1982, ouch! Though it was not in IT, it had a close relationship that would eventually end me up in the IT field. I have to say I have been very fortunate that I have been able to be employed for a lot of years by different companies, both for-profit and non-profit. That being said, I keep coming back to a few constants that no matter the business or the model that are true about those places and I would like to share a couple of them with you.
1. No one has a clue! Every one of them has been screwed up, I am not saying that they were not successful or that they didn’t do good things, but all of them had no idea what made them a success or a failure. All of them did strange things that no other company I worked in before or after did the same way. That is because it worked for them and they were not going to change it just to conform to what others were doing.
2. There was one difference between the successful and failures. It was the people. Owners, managers, and employees who at their core were good people. They were just as lost as the other businesses at how to grow but they did good things and treated everyone they worked with and their customers well. The bottom line has not been how they did the work that made the biggest difference, but the who!

I am not sure if you are aware of this, and perhaps as a public service announcement I am making you aware for the first time, but a study out of the University of Oregon suggests that glaciers affect women more than men because men are doing most of the research on glaciers. Apparently, melting ice causes, and I am not making this up, women to get more sexually transmitted infections, at least that is what the study says. What the study really finds, which is what most of the garbage coming out of the University system say, it is all men’s fault! First, I did not understand that women were dating glaciers and maybe this is why the good young men I know are having a hard time finding available women. Is there a dating site for this? Perhaps someone should start one so women who are interested in glaciers can find ones who are infection free! I tried coming up with a catchy name for the site but “ice only” or “block dating” just don’t have much of a ring to them. Perhaps if women were dating more scientists there would be less men studying glaciers in the first place.  Back to the study, I am sure that there is some Ph.D. out in the world who’s thesis this was and I am sure he or she is now teaching at some bastion of this kind of thought doing a wonderful job of indoctrinating the next generation of children to do equally ridiculous research. Either that or they are on the steps of some state capitol protesting for the rights of glaciers to marry whoever they want. Regardless, I am proud of what my tax dollars have accomplished!

here is the link to the story: click here

It has taken me all of my fifty-two years, but I have finally done it! I have found the perfect and complete waste of time. It turns out a giraffe at a park in New York is about to give birth, and they have been live streaming it since about Thursday of last week. While I have not watched every moment, I have had some extended time of doing absolutely nothing but watching this event on various devices. Over the weekend while I was working on my bedroom-bathroom project I had it up on my TV, so I could walk by and get an update. While watching TV, I had it on my computer, while working on my computer I had it on my iPhone. I don’t know how long giraffes are in labor, but I can tell you it is longer than five days. I want to yell out, just push already! I have things I need to get done. I can’t be tied down to the internet, but yet here I am wasting lots of time. At least at work with large monitors, you can just keep it in a window off to the side while you work. The thing is 94,741 people are at this moment which means there is an awful lot of work not getting done. To the animal parks credit, they are making some money off the internet, but not too much else is going to happen for those who are watching. Perhaps today I can get back to getting things done and check in with the giraffe later. It isn’t like I can’t google it later and see a replay! Something about watching it live has got me hooked.

A friend who speaks on stress used an analogy to describe how we deal with things. He said we are like a glass of water that has some level of water in it at all times, that is the stress we carry around all the time. Then there are things that happen that cause more water to go into our glass which raises the level. Whether the glass overflows depends on the amount of water already in the glass and how much is being poured in. His premise is that if we understand that and try to not carry so much already in the glass, we will be able to handle more that life throws at us. We all get more than a glass of water thrown at us from time to time, sometimes it feels more like a fire hose, but I also know some folks who are carrying around so much stress their glass couldn’t take one more drop. Some of them it seems, have no reason to have that much, they have nothing going on, and yet they are overwhelmed. I used to work for a guy like that. I swore he was going to pop a blood vessel in his head and end up dead at his desk. Eventually, he quit and moved to Florida. Hopefully, he is much more relaxed now. The reason I bring this up is, I see a lot of my friends and family on Facebook right now posting things that seem to suggest they are very stressed or at least very fearful. I would like to tell all of them that they still have friends and family that love them and we have not unfriended them. I hope that gives them a reason to lower their level of stress, if not I have attached a picture of my new puppies, which should do the trick! Either way I hope you can get back to a calmer more gentle level in your lives.

Yesterday, before the super bowl started, I mean four hours before it started the pre-game festivities had already begun. I turned on the TV while eating lunch to see what they were saying. It amounted to not much. My wife walked into the room and asked me to turn it to an obscure channel way up in the, never turned to before, numbers. What did my eye behold but the pregame for the pregame of the not really a game, kitten bowl. Yes on the TV was two people who I used to have respect for as sports announcers reading one of the corniest scripts about how the kittens were trying to play something like football. All that was happening was kittens being enticed to chase after small toys in a box made to look like a stadium. Look, I think kittens are cute, but this was sad, they would cut back to the announcers and then to shots of what was supposed to be the parking lot full of more kittens tailgating. I have watched some dumb things on TV, MTV used to have my vote for the least valuable content on TV, that is after they changed the format to anything but music videos, but now I have decided that the channel showing the kitten bowl is my new winner. I also think that the two announcers should be shunned from the world of sports. Perhaps they already couldn’t get a job, so this is what they had to resort to. In that case, I guess I can’t fault them for getting a paycheck, at least I hope they got hazard pay!