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Thunderbirds over Disney World

April 10, 2008 on 8:58 pm | In Parks | 1 Comment

Click each thumbnail for a larger version.

Requirements: Dancing Pigs

March 4, 2008 on 12:34 pm | In General Nonsense | Write a Comment

(10:44:12 AM) J: management, as usual, has no fucking clue whats going on
(10:44:36 AM) J: and thinks that if they force their employees to fill out timesheets on everything in detail that it will a) help them know whats what and 3) increase productivity
(10:46:23 AM) Bill: without getting involved themselves, the only thing they’ll learn is that people 1) fudge their timesheets and C) waste a lot of time fudging timesheets
(10:49:21 AM) J:
(10:49:43 AM) Bill: do you have any anti-fudging mechanisms in there?
(10:50:37 AM) J: they wouldn’t give me time
(10:50:41 AM) Bill: haha
(10:51:01 AM) J: the basic functionality they wanted was sick and this fucking douchbag vp was like ‘this form should only take like 3 hours’
(10:51:05 AM) J: for who?
(10:51:08 AM) J: someone in time warp?
(10:51:16 AM) J: fuck you asshat
(10:51:45 AM) Bill: they’d probably love you if the timecard provided details like “tuesday 1hr suchandsuch task changed to 2 hrs on friday at 5:15pm”
(10:52:12 AM) Bill: the form only took 3 hours, but the validation, the queries, and business logic, unit testing and deployment took two weeks
(10:54:16 AM) Bill: “J, why did you fudge your timesheet on Friday?” Wha? “I see it says here that you changed the work you did on Tuesday’s suchandsuch from 1 hours to 2 hours.. but you changed it on Friday. Why?” Uh… “FIRED!” *towards the door* “NEXT!!”
(10:56:15 AM) Bill: “Ok Bill, welcome. You only worked on one task all week but you have *flips stack of paper* 25 sheets of timecard modifications. In fact, the timecard app shows you were logged into it and active for 6 hours a day…
(10:56:59 AM) Bill: me: “Well, you see there’s this dancing pig..”

Why the turtle really won the race

March 4, 2008 on 12:10 pm | In General Nonsense | Write a Comment

I changed jobs recently and have been rewarded with an even longer commute. It’s about 81 miles each way. There really isn’t any way to speed it up short of launching myself on a rocket. Instead of interstate highways, I now take several US highways and State Roads to get to work.

I see a lot of roadkill! Cats, dogs, turkeys, armadillos—you name it. I even saw a pelican carcass once, hanging upside down from a power line. This morning a huge turtle was crossing a 4-lane divided highway. Cars were swerving around him at 50mph as he held his head out high to get a good view.

Then it occurred to me: People will flatten all kinds of cute, furry and feathery animals; but if there’s a turtle in the road someone is much more likely to stop and pick it up, helping him along his way.

And that’s how the turtle really won the race.

What kind of manager are you?

January 12, 2008 on 9:38 pm | In General Nonsense | 2 Comments

I’m not usually the quiz/survey type but I thought this one was interesting. Put your score in the comments if you like

2008 Disney Marathon

January 12, 2008 on 8:55 pm | In General Nonsense | Write a Comment

monorail marathon I mostly just wanted to use my graphic again.

This is one of my most favorite events at Walt Disney World. I’m not a fan of long-distance running but I do like the chaos such an event incurs on property. It touches nearly every operation there.

The best part is that the paid-time balances for full-time Cast were just reset. That introduces a little more chaos to the event. I am glad to hear that some things haven’t changed.

Good luck Monorail Pilots! I hope those of you that show up to work this weekend earn a decent paycheck for a change.

Goodbye to MySpace

January 2, 2008 on 2:21 pm | In Friends | Write a Comment

I canceled my account on MySpace today. I’m really surprised I kept it this long.

It didn’t really add any value for me. Years ago, those of us “in the know” would say that AOL was like the Internet for Beginners. Once you learned enough, you’d ditch AOL for a real ISP and move on. MySpace kind of took AOL’s place.

Unfortunate now there are dozens of social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, Orkut, etc. Many sites that really have little to do with networking have jumped on the bandwagon and added the ability to list friends and crap like YouTube, Digg, and Flickr. How do you maintain all this crap? Why do I need to advertise who and how many friends I have? Like it’s some sort of badge. Who cares? Who cares what my favorite song is this week?

Today on Slashdot there’s an article suggesting social network aggregation. Just what I need, yet another site to visit every day and manage all of my social networking profiles. I say fuck it all.

In a twist of irony, I’m offering a chunk of code that you may embed into your website or profile if you like that links back here to ProteinSpill:


<a href="http://proteinspill.com/"
title="ProteinSpill.com - an independent Disney Cast Portal">
<img src="http://proteinspill.com/images/psbug.jpe" /></a>

It looks like this. If you don’t already have it, I will put my full faith in my multiple spam filters and publish my email address for the first time: whimmel@proteinspill.com

Federal Reserve Bank is not the US Government

December 16, 2007 on 1:40 pm | In General Nonsense | Write a Comment

Sure, there is a Board of Governors, of which Bernanke is the Chairman, and that much is part of the government. It’s also known as the Federal Reserve Board. These seven board members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. However, the banks themselves are privately held. These banks create money by loaning more money than they have in deposits, called Fractional Reserve Banking.

Our national debt is based on this system: Bonds are sold on the open market; the Fed buys these bonds with made-up money; and our Government secures these loans (i.e. pays the interest) with our taxes.

Sounds a little paranoid, doesn’t it? For more, check out this video The Money Masters. Beware, it’s long.

Go for a ride

December 11, 2007 on 8:51 pm | In General Nonsense | Write a Comment

If you looked through the photos of my engine swap recently you may remember the ‘81 El Camino that was given to my brother. He just finished that engine swap himself and recorded the maiden voyage.

Job Hunting

November 25, 2007 on 7:23 pm | In General Nonsense | Write a Comment

I’ve been watching the job boards pretty closely lately. Every two to three days the same job appears under the title “Web Developer (contract)”, “Sr. Web Developer”, or “Staff Software Developer” with slightly different job descriptions. Mostly the main requirements are thus:

5 years web development experience
DHTML, CSS, Javascript
server-side scripting language such as JSP/ASP/PHP

I’m pretty sure I interviewed for this position months ago. If I’m right, they’re extremely picky. The employer ought to say what they really want.

DHTML is AJAX. I didn’t realize this until recently. I first heard about DHTML when the 4.0 browsers came out and thought the technology died out. It kinda did… until Gmail was introduced. Now it is called AJAX and Web 2.0. Now people can’t get enough of it. All it means is now the web browser is an application development platform instead of just a presentation tool.

I’ve been telling recruiters that I didn’t have DHTML experience because I thought it was dead. I didn’t realize the name changed and I was doing it every day for nearly two years.

The scripting language they want experience in is only one of the three. Actually it’s none of them. This company has developed their own scripting language. They call it open source and I guess it technically is, but they’re certainly the only ones using it. It’s Java-centric, so when they get you on the phone they’re looking for Java programmers. JSP maybe. Anyone who has been doing PHP or ASP (i.e. Microsoft technologies—C# would be a better requirement here) for the last five years probably doesn’t have enough Java-related programming experience. Javascript doesn’t count.

As many times as this job posting has appeared on different boards and with how many recruiters are looking to fill it, perhaps the employer should consider training a worthy employee? Any programmer with any of the experience specified would probably do well with about a week or two to train. Instead it seems the decision makers want someone who can hit the ground running—and they’ll spend weeks or months and loads of cash exhaustively searching until they find the perfect candidate just to save a weeks’ salary in training.

FunWebProducts is Spyware

September 2, 2007 on 3:29 am | In General Nonsense | Write a Comment

But you didn’t get it from me, I promise.

I happened to be looking at my logs admiring all the visits from my friends at disney.com when I noticed this odd user-agent:

proxy-ce14.disney.com - - [01/Sep/2007:18:21:34 -0400] “GET /gallery/d/4832-2/100_1122.JPG HTTP/1.0″ 200 48523 “http://www.proteinspill.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; FunWebProducts; InfoPath.1)”

Apparently with all the surfing you do on Company time, you’ve infected your computer! Here’s more information on the spyware and how to remove it.

Amongst other things FunWebProducts may change your default search engine to MyWebSearch, and it may install a toolbar. You get a “Search Assistant” for when you mistype a URL. You can install it by “upgrading” your smileys in various messengers, cursors for windows, screensavers etc.

Good luck! Oh, and don’t get caught reading this blog on a Company computer. It might be considered Inappropriate Behavior and grounds for dismissal.

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