What you say isn't "exactly" what you mean

This is real. This cake was picked up after a call in order was made to a bakery to order a cake for a going away party (changing jobs). But, what the heck is "Under Neat That"?

OK, so this is how I imagine this conversation went:

Bakery Employee: 'Hello, how can I help you?'

Customer: ' I would like to order a cake for a going away party this week.'

Bakery Employee: 'What do you want on the cake?'

Customer: 'Best Wishes Suzanne' and underneath that 'We will miss you'.

You just have to laugh!

(By the way...a friend sent this to me so it may or may not be "real", but the thought is funny anyway!)

Wizard

I love magic tricks and have even recently included a couple of card tricks in my "Managing Statistics" presentation. So, as I walked around Downtown Disney yesterday, I found this hat and couldn't resist trying it on!



I may still go back and buy it...and maybe a wand too!

Strange road sign

I flew into the Sanford airport in Orlando this week for the Collaborate conference. It's about 20 miles from the main Orlando airport. As I drove to my hotel, I passed a road sign unlike any I've ever seen before. It was located just before I crossed a bridge and it read:


I had visions of hoards of mosquitos or killer bees attacking my moving vehicle so I made sure the windows were rolled up tight, turned the vent to recirculate and sped up until I felt I would be out of the danger zone.

Only in Florida.... :)

What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

If you haven't seen this, it's worth a look. I'd happily take the 1 million dollar package (100 packets of $10,000) which looks like this...

...and would still have room in my bag for my laptop.

Isn't it amazing that something that looks so small can mean so many big things?

Sigh...

Tagged

My friend Cheryl tagged me for this a couple of weeks ago and so I'm playing along (better late than never)!

Here's the deal:
1. Go to your My Documents/My Pictures
2. Go to your sixth file
3. Go to your sixth picture
4. Blog about it
5. Tag 6 people

Well, first of all, I'm a Mac user so there's no such thing as My Documents/My Pictures. So, I improvised. I went to iPhoto and chose the 6th Event category (it was entitled "Misc Fun"). Here's what I found:



You know I followed the instructions because why else would I ever choose this humiliating photo of myself to display to the public! Thanks a lot Cheryl!

So, here's the deal. I have a thing for hats. I don't wear them often, but I have several I keep around for things like hiding bed hair when I have to run to the store early in the morning to pick up something we need for breakfast. But mostly, I like to try on different hats and have fun making up stories about what I'd be doing or who I'd be if I was the owner of that hat.

Can you guess who I'd be in the hat pictured? Yep...that's me...the Grand Poobah!

This hat was one of many I tried on at a shop at Universal Studios Florida called the Brown Derby. That day I tried many hats and had many photos taken, but this one was the one I was most tempted to purchase. I could almost imagine the stares I'd get the next time I wore it to cover up bed hair!

I'll admit to ending the tag game at me. I mean really...the Grand Poobah does have the power and authority to change the rules just a bit doesn't she?!?!

My word of the day

pro·te·an (prō’tē-ən)
Exhibiting considerable versatility or diversity.

Black and White - Under 40? You won't understand.

My friend Larry sent this to me and I liked it so much I thought I'd blog it. The point is to help remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.



You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!



We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front step, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T; SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.

Performance optimization (or not) on a snowy day

A friend sent me this and it totally cracked me up. It's an excellent example of how working on the wrong thing is a bad idea. It doesn't matter how good you think the results of your efforts are, if you've been working on the wrong thing, you've just wasted a lot of time and effort. This also goes to show you that optimizing performance is not just a database challenge, but an every day challenge!

Enjoy!

None of it works!

A friend of mine sent this to me. Oh how true it is! Don't you just hate getting those cutesy emails that promise you to have eternal youth and good fortune if you only would forward the email on to 10 of your friends?

OK, I admit that I've done it once or twice. And for those of you who have been on the receiving end, please allow me to apologize. I guess there have just been moments when I really wanted what was promised to be granted to me. And if it only meant forwarding on one little email, then what's the harm, right?

Harumph! Hope may spring eternal, but there is a line between hope and not being rational.

Not that I'm against hoping and wishing for things that I want to happen, but in regard to this particular method of achieving my dreams, I think from now on I'm simply going to reply to the sender with this graphic. Then, I'll go buy a lottery ticket.

:)

Too big?

What do you think?



Did I make the wrong choice when I bought the super jumbo size tub of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter"?

Let me help you visualize the size a bit better. Here's the tub next to a cream cheese container that is the same size (8 oz) as my previous size butter tub.



I'm thinking that my logic was a bit flawed when I decided on the 45 ounce size. I thought it was smart. The super jumbo tub was on sale and only cost 50 cents more than the small size. It seemed to me to be an easy choice. The big tub would equate to over 5 of the smaller size and cost only 50 cents more. Sounds like a great deal, right?

However, the problem with my choice became evident when I got home with my purchase. Where was this gigantic tub o' butter going to fit in my refrigerator? I ended up having to rearrange an entire shelf to get the thing to fit. Of course, the arrangement I came up with meant that if/when I wanted to get out the butter, I'd have to get out several other items just to be able to pull the big guy from its spot. Sigh...

Sometimes I suppose you just shouldn't go for what seems to be the obviously better deal, huh?

Wordle

I was directed to a cool little site called Wordle that takes text, the URL of any page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or a del.icio.us user name and turns it into a cool little graphic.

I tried it twice: once with my blog and once with the text of my Method R bio page. The one from my blog needs to have it's "nerdiness factor" toned down (this feedback according to my colleague Ron...and I agree by the way). I think the one from my bio page is pretty cool. Here they both are so you can see what you think.

From my blog:


From my bio page text:

Just for fun

I occasionally see something called a meme on other blogs I read and recently saw one that I thought looked like fun so I thought I'd try it.

Here's how it works:

Using BigHugeLabs Mosaic maker to make a mosaic and Flickr to do your searches, type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search. Then, using only the FIRST page, pick an image. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into the mosaic maker.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

You never know what may turn up on that first Flickr page. Can you guess what some of my answers were? They may not be what you think. :)

Ticket to Ride

My neighbor got me hooked on a game called Ticket to Ride. It's a board game that also has an online version as well as a version you can play with just cards. Anyway, when I want to "not think", I play TTR. It is made by a company called Days of Wonder. Here's the description of the game from their site:

Ticket to Ride is a cross-country train adventure in which players collect and play matching train cards to claim railway routes connecting cities throughout North America. The longer the routes, the more points they earn. Additional points come to those who can fulfill their Destination Tickets by connecting two distant cities, and to the player who builds the longest continuous railway.

I don't know why, but I fell in love with this game. There is some strategy to it but it's not very complex. It's just simple, fairly mindless fun. I play online mostly because it's easier to find people to play with that way. Even at 2am here, I can find somebody logged in and ready to play from half-way around the globe where it's late afternoon. You gotta love how small the internet makes the world!

Anyway, here's my latest game board after I won:


I'm the green trains. I made it from Vancouver all the way across the country to New York, then down to Atlanta and finally Charleston.

Gee...if I'd flown all that way, it would've taken me the better part of today to get there. As it is, I just spent 20 minutes crossing the country and never left my chair in front of my trusty MacBook Pro.

Now, if somebody would just figure out how to make real travel that easy, I'd be really happy!