Video from King Richard’s Faire (RenFest)
Idenix Axes Ailing Initiatives
My company let go 100 employees - about a third of its employees. Whew. I guess I got out just in time.
Newsflash! Miss USA is no Katie Couric - Gossip - MSNBC.com“I just don’t want to end up like Katie Couric!”
’DOH!
The short story: Wednesday is shaping up to be a very difficult day at our house. I get home around 5pm. Chloe needs to leave about then to get to her 5:15pm dance class. Benjamin needs to be picked up at 5:30pm from the middle school. We have enough time to get home and clean up a little before Gabriel has to go to his 7pm cub scout meeting. And last night I also had a 7pm cub scout committee meeting. Whew!
My solution is to make Wednesdays our official pizza night. I still think we should wait until Chloe and Liz get back from Dance class around 6:15pm to have dinner. We’ll see how it works out. I don’t want us to turn in to a family with everyone going in so many different directions that we never see each other.
I am the offical “Fundraising Chairman” for cub scout pack 615. For the most part this means I store the popcorn or candy in my basement until we can get it out the door. But it IS an offically sanctioned post on the committee so I attend their meetings. It gives me a chance to influence the direction of the pack. Its usually ok.
We should have had an end-of-August meeting but everyone else forgot about it. This is still irks me, so I mentioned at the meeting that if people had shown up like they were supposed to we would have had more choices in what product to sell - what fundraiser to use. The national scouting organization sells popcorn every fall and they make a big push to get all their units to participate. Because we didn’t have any plans in place I couldn’t move forward on the whole popcorn thing. I can admit that in the real world it doesn’t matter much because selling popcorn was very unpopular in my unit. People found it very difficult to sell popcorn. But they found it much easier to sell candy. So we’re going to sell candy.
In the past we’ve also used prizes to help motivate the kids to sell product (candy/popcorn). Traditionally there was a first, second and third place prize. They were pretty good prizes and had a fairly high threshhold of sales before you could win them. For example, a scout might have to sell 12 cases of candy to win an X-Box. That’s a pretty good prize, right? And that’s a lot of candy.
Last spring the scouts didn’t sell much candy at all. I suspect parents bought the candy just to get out of their fund-raising obligations. Which is fine. But it works better for the pack if the kids are really dying to sell more candy so they can win that prize. So we’ve lowered the threshhold and the quality of the prizes. For example, sell 4 cases of candy and the scout gets an official cub scout pocketknife.
Our hope is that more kids will sell a little more candy rather than having one kid sell 12 cases. We have about 90 kids in our pack, so if we can get just a little bit of enthusiasm about it then I think we can clean up and not worry about fund raising for the rest of the year.
Our group finally has a budget so we know how much money we need to raise. This was no small feat! Its the first time in recent memory that the pack has been able to do that. I don’t want to spend all our time raising money - that’s really not the point of scouting. Its a necessary evil. The scouts come up with all manner of justifications for how it builds character to sell stuff and to support the pack - and I buy in to that to a certain extent. But in the end, its still just a means for the scouts to support their mission of teaching boys to be complete men. What does that mean? This:
So my phone died this morning. It ran completely out of power. Totally dead. I thought to myself that I should really charge it up before someone calls and needs me. Then I thought “Aw phooey, I’m only here for another day or two - maybe I should just turn the stupid thing in.”
Ha! I may do that.
Sphere: Related ContentI am wrapping up my time at my current employer. Friday is my last day and I’m feeling better and better about it all the time. Every day is better than the last.
Also I am making some headway on the whole consulting-thing. That is, what I would like to do is to spend my evenings doing a couple of extra hours of work and earning some extra scratch. I mean right now I spend at least an hour or two every evening watching television. What if I could parlay my experience with SAP int a part time gig?
Well, my current employer doesn’t have anyone to replace me. I’ve offered to continue to support them and the CFO pretty much told me to name my price. He liked the idea quite a bit and described a scenario where they would email me some work to do every day and in the evenings I would take care of it. This could work out well - for a while. I think it won’t go on for more than a few months, but its enough to get started with.
I spent some time today trying to figure out what I need to do in order to work independently. Someone suggested registering a corporation (an “s-corp”). While I was researching that I read that the most common incorporation tool used by consultants is a limited liability company. Both are supposed to offer pretty good insulation from lawsuits, but the s-corp also includes all manner of formal procedures that have to be followed. It sounded like a giant pain in the ass. LLC’s are moderately expensive to set up.
So I decided to just set up a “sole proprietorship”. Until I start doing this full time I think this is the best way. Its cheap and easy. I can do it here in town too.
Last night I saw the season opener of Heroes. It didn’t exactly take off running. I guess maybe it will take some time to get geared up. That’s what happened with the first season, I suppose. I also saw Chuck - and it was ok. It had good parts and it might be ok, but I have some trouble suspending my disbelief about some aspects.
ugh - I think I’m pretty tired.
Sphere: Related ContentObama is too intellectually lazy for the whitehouse?!
This just in from the Irony-Free Department: A “senior official” in the White House of George W. Bush tells journalist Bill Sammon why Barack Obama won’t be the next president of the United States: Obama is intellectually “capable” of the job, the official says, but he relies too much on easy charm. “It’s sort of like, ‘That’s all I need to get by,’ which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters … and a laziness, an intellectual laziness.”
This is from Salon.com - wow. This is unbelievable. I’m … er… I can’t believe it. what stones.
Sphere: Related ContentIts always interesting to me what brings people to this website, Blogrilla. I’m sure that people with actual money invested would be even more interested.
To wit, The Boston Globe has a small section on their website that shows the top ten searches that brought people to their website. Yahoo! and Google also have similar things. I’m always very interested and always disappointed to see so many people searching for Britney Spears’ nipple or something.
Today, the number one search that brought people to The Boston Globe’s website was plaxico burress
what?! I don’t even know what that is!! Am I so out of the loop of popular culture that I’ve completely missed something critical? Could be, I guess.
Oh, I see. He’s a wide receiver for the New York Giants.
Sphere: Related ContentAs you may already know, I have a camping trip coming up with the boys. The local scouting council district is having a big “Cub Carnival” event. I think they’re going to have all the little, tiny Tiger Scouts, who are in first grade, straight through to the older Webelos scouts, who may be in fifth grade. They’re all invited to participate in these midway games and demonstrations of “scout skills” and I think it will be an all-around party. It takes place in the middle of October so there will be a chill in the air and I think it will be great to be outside.
Ben is going as a Boy Scout and will help set up ahead of time. He will be taking my trusty and reliable
My other son, Gabriel, is a Webelos scout – he’s in fourth grade. So he and I will attend the same event, but will be participants rather than “staff”. Webelos will be allowed and encouraged to camp out and sleep over. Gabriel has been camping several times before and is famous for being an excellent sleeper. I think he’ll have a great time.
Last spring we bought a four-season tent to add to our collection. The primary differences between a 3-season and a 4-season tent are:
o There are more tent poles to increase the strength of the tent. This will allow the tent to support more snow than a 3-season tent.
o Typically the roof tends to be more rounded to prevent excessive snow build-up
o There are extra tie-loops to allow the tent to be more securely tied down to additional stakes.
o The rain-fly is more substantial.
o There are fewer windows
o There is often a larger vestibule
In fact, there doesn’t wind up being a big difference, but I imagine theses small improvements make for a better winter-camping event. I haven’t been on one of those yet, but I bet I will this year.
So I got out the
Also I got a great deal on a new backpack. I always wanted a good “for-real” pack and I never had one. I guess that if I had stayed in scouts my folks would probably have gotten me one, but I dropped it before that happened. REI had a good deal on an external frame pack. I let experience serve as my guide and got a very large one – its 4900 cubic inches. The idea is that SOMEHOW I wind up carrying crap for everyone else. In my house, its clear that because my kids are small I wind up carrying the things they can’t (or won’t). In any case, the one I got can also be tightened up (compressed) to pull the load in closer to the frame. I understand that the internal frame is good for scrambling over rocks and skiing and squeezing through tight places. I don’t anticipate doing any of those things. So I went with an external pack and got a good deal at REI’s close-out section.
On Saturday I went to “Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Skills” (aka IOLS) class. Well, it was really called IOLS-check because this was a class for people who had camped before. They wanted to make sure that you have all the camping skills of a first class scout and didn’t feel the need to teach a topic if the students already know it.
It went well. When I got there I needed to cram for the section on knots, but I did ok. I did great on the orienteering and first aid. I also built a fine fire and set up a camp site according to their rules. So it went well. We had a good time and proved we had the skills.
I sprinted home on Saturday afternoon in time to take Grace to soccer. She had a great time while the rest of the kids played in the woods and built a lean-to. We took care of the kids of a neighbor and that worked out well. The kids behaved well and did what they were supposed to. We spent the next day cleaning up the house and the yard. There was mowing and trimming and whatnot.
All in all, it was a good weekend with no broken bones. What more can a person reasonably ask?
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