Traveling Thoughts

My dog, he’s cute.  He’s always been cute, the cute little white (was supposed to be apricot) toy poodle that he is.  He put up with so much crap from us girls it’s not even funny.  When he was younger and we were younger we’d put him in the cradles that were meant for our dolls.  We’d even try to dress him in the clothes that were meant for our dolls.  The things we’d do…

But then there’s the things he’d do. 

When the pound puppies would disappear off my bed all I had to do was go to his kennel and they’d usually be there, and he’d be wrapped around him…

If we couldn’t find our chapstick it was usually because he’d found it.  And if we found him, we’d see that he managed to get the lid off the chapstick and was eating it.

There was this one time (at band camp, j/k) that I came into my room and the blinds were pulled up and the window was open and my dog was standing in the windowsill.

He’s just a cute little dog, what can I say…

What he did today was awfully cute though.  When there’s people at the door that he knows, I’ll let him out to sniff them, he’ll usually just stay there at the door until they come in or I call him in because they’re leaving.  This time however, my uncle wasn’t worth much of a sniff.  Dominic (my dog) took a quick sniff and proceeded down the driveway to where my uncle’s truck was parked.  The door was open, so Dominic tried to get in.  Unfortunately for him, the truck sits too high off the ground, and Dominic couldn’t get in, but that didn’t stop him from waiting down there until my uncle went to get him…

It was cute…

I got tagged by Markus, so here’s 5 things you didn’t know about me:

1.  I’m a bit OCD when it comes to where I sit in church (the center of the center of the center) and theatres (center seat of the 4th-6th row (it all depends on how the theatre is set up))

2.  I have to think about and focus on breathing while doing most recreational activities (i.e. running, swimming…)

3.  I have no wisdom teeth (no they weren’t pulled, they just don’t exist)

4.  Most of the classes in college that I have a below A grade in are caused because I was bored and refused to go to class and do the homework.  Lack of attendance will kill your grades.  Homework seems to be important as well.

5.  I was a girlscout for about a year when I was in the 5th grade.

Today in my first class, we had to meet and greet people (network) and once we had met someone we could put our name tags on.  Most of us put our name tags on our left side.  There were a few people who put the name tag on their right side.  When we were asked why we put our name tags where we did, none of us had a good answer.  For those of use with them on the left it was because that’s where our heart was, and where we put our hands when we said the pledge or sang that one song, so that’s where we put our name tags.  The comment for the people that had them on their left side was “unless you’re left handed and then it goes on your right side.”

It turns out that the name tag belongs on the right side of your chest because when you shake hands that’s the line of sight.

So as I was moving my name tag, I turned to my friend and said, “but that one’s named Alyssa.”  At which point giggles broke out.

The point here being though, when you’re wearing a name tag, it needs to be on the right side of your chest…

I am in my final semester of college.  I’m taking two 400 level courses.  One being mgt461, the final course of my MIS degree and the other being mgt498 the capstone course for any business student.

In my 498 course we were told that if we were looking for an easy course we were in the wrong one and should switch sections because we were gonna have to work….fine whatever….the professor however, in the opinion of several students is a pretentious schmuck….i however, don’t care much because i don’t have the energy to waste on this professor because i’m gonna be busy wasting it on my 461 professor.

I just want to make it clear that my complaining about this class is more than justified.  I’m paying $600 to build a gaming site, something that we geeks do in our free time.  I’m also paying $600 to build it in a text editor, not a visual editor.  It will be hand coded.  It will be hand coded using old web standards and not the most current ones.  I’m gonna use tables instead of divs and css for the layout.

I’m paying $600 so that I can use Access as the database.  Everyone knows that no real company uses Access as a database for websites.  It’s either Oracle or SQL Server.

The worst part of this is that the professor is doing what the recruiters and employers have asked.  Apparently they’ve asked that we be able to code whatever from scratch.  From nothingness.  I do not believe that when they asked for something from nothing that they also asked that we use old skool technology. 

The part that angers me the most is that this is the final course of my MIS degree and I’m doing a project that means nothing.  It’s crap, pure crap. 

I had an idea for a site that I wanted to do that met the professor’s criteria.  It would make cash, content and community autonomously.  It got turned down, turned down because there’s no algorithm involved.  Turned down because students in the past have tried to do it and they failed.  And every semester the students say that they’ll do better than the last ones because they’ve got a better PR plan, etc, etc…it doesn’t happen.  They fail…a fricken challenge he wouldn’t even let me meet.  He wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do for my project.  No, I have to do a game just like everyone else.  It makes me want to do the site just to spite him.  Just to show that I could do it and that it is a success.

He was willing to make me a test though, and if I passed it he’d waive the course and if I failed it that would be my grade.  It made me furious because I shouldn’t be tested on stupid algorithms like tower of hanoi or sudoku.  That’s the kind of crap that we do in Computer Science (that degree that I’m no longer getting).

It’s gonna be a long boring semester.  I’m going to die of boredom in his class one day as he teaches us about how to code tables…

“So, school starts tomorrow.”

“What classes are you taking?”

“I don’t know” big pregnant pause “But I am registered for classes…I just didn’t think they were worthy of commiting their names to my memory.”

Laughter

“That’s a good one.”

Each year, about this time, my cellphone contract expires and I get a discount off a new phone as an incentive to renew. So here we are, a year later after my blackberry 7105t, motorola A630, and now my Sony Eriksson (which I love greatly), I get the opportunity to look at getting a new phone. After last year, and trying out the Sidekick 2, and my blackberry and my motorola, I’ve decided that I’ll not be getting the newest technology in phones this year. The old school stuff will do fine, I don’t have to have the latest and greatest.

What I’ve found is a list of the top 10 cell phones of 2006. The top of the list is the Motorola Razr, I’m not sure that I’m exactly crazy about having a thin phone. I kindof like the brick phones and I don’t need all the stuff that made the phones of 2006 the popular phones. On Wirefly, the same site that shows the top 10 cell phones of 2006, there was also an article about the 2005 cell phone trends and 2006 predictions. It’s sad, but I can care less about all that stuff, video, music, internet. There was a time when I wanted it, but I don’t need it anymore.

I do know one thing for sure, I will stick with T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s been good to me. And Wirefly has got some great deals with them. We’ll see what I decide to go with.

This post sponsered by Wirefly.

After last week of The Apprentice: LA, I wasn’t sure what to expect this week.  The losing team living in tents, the winning team project manager continuing to be project manager, and sit in with Mr. Trump in the board room.  I guess a show in it’s sixth season has to make changes or else loose viewership.  I find it amusing though.  No complaints about the changes here.

So, what happened, well, the teams had to design swimsuits for both the male and female population, that some designer (whose name escapes me at the moment) was going to host a modeling, runway show for and MC it herself.  The task was to bring in the most money.  Consumers would be at the runway deciding then and there what they were going to buy.

Very little was shown about the process of making the suits.  The disagreements we saw among the team where only short played.  I feel as though important details were missing.  There was the one chick on the winnng team that pissed me off.  Mostly because Heidi was project manager and as pm was giving her opinion about the strength of the suit that the one chick, Marisa, I think it was about how it was more Ralph Lauren than it was (the designer whose name escapes me).  It was a second rate suit and for Marisa to waste the time arguing that it was a first rate suit was, well, just that, a waste of time.  Heidi was doing what Nicole (the other team’s pm) didn’t and that was challenge the strength of the suit.

Now, about that other team, Arrow.  Carey was the only guy that you saw offering up ideas.  There was 1 male and 1 female that challenged him.  Carey was narrowminded and really, while he said he was targeting 3 male populations, gay, metro-sexual, and the rest of the males, I think really only focused on 1 population and that was the gay population.  I only say this because the trend right now isn’t tight shorts on the guys, it’s the loose, boardshorts.  Carey produced one pair of shorts that looked like board shorts, but in my opinion, they were too tight.  This group only sold $360 in male swimwear.  I think that their biggest problem was the teenie weenie pink flowered men’s bikini, but the boxer briefs didn’t help any either.  The one chick that challenged Carey, Michelle, whom no one in her group likes, gave her opinion on the shorts, and she was right about them, they didn’t sell.  The problem people had with her is that she opposed everything but couldn’t give any better ideas.  I can see her going soon.  You can’t be in opposition and lack a backup plan.  You just can’t.  So, the loss of this task was by somewhere in the range of $1000.  A bigger gap than the $60 they lost by last week. 

The reward
The winners got to go to the Playboy Mansion.  That’s an interesting pick for a reward for winning the task.  As a female I find it demeaning and am not sure what value meeting Hef adds to them.  For the guys, I would think they were probably in heaven.

In the board room
Once again, no one takes responsibility for anything.  The fault is either placed on Michelle, simply because people don’t like her, or Carey, who was the mastermind behind the teenie weenie pink flowered men’s bikini.  One guy had the guts to put it on the PM, and that was James.  He said that it was the PM’s fault because she had the right to reject the designs.  And that takes us back to where no one did (because, in my opinion they lack balls) except for Michelle and Aaron.  So, which three end up in the board room once everyone is sent away, Carey, Michelle and Nicole.  Who went home, Carey, why, because even though he took a risk, it was a risk that wasn’t going to pay out because even though there is a large gay population that might buy the suits, the consumers buy for the shoppers and the consumers probably weren’t gay.

Once again, I think 2 people should’ve been fired.  Both Carey and Nicole, Nicole because she didn’t say ‘no’ to Carey’s extreme ideas and Carey because he took an unnecessary risk.  It wasn’t well thought out.  A different design for a suit for a guy could’ve been developed completely different from the mainstream design (boardshorts) without it being so, girly.  Seriously, I’m not one for short shorts, I prefer my boardshorts, but what Carey was wearing was a women’s swimsuit, it just needed a top to go with it…

Did you know that there’s a lot of great music out there and that it’s not mainstream music. Some of the best music I’ve heard lately comes from Independent Artists. It’s the stuff that we don’t hear out there on the radio and you have to search for it on the web. There’s one radio station that I listen to that will occasionally spotlight an independent artist and it’s usually those ones that I can’t remember the name of them, but I remember the music. Of course, you call the radio station for the name of the song and artist and they can’t tell you because they don’t know the lyrics. It’s kind of sad.

But on a happier note, there’s a site out there, it’s not fully released yet, I guess you could call it a beta, that’s going to give us a place to hear those independent artists and give the artists a place to showcase themselves. It’s called Unsigned. Which is genius because it means that there’s no record label connected to them. I was just browsing the site and there’s going to be so many cool features that I’m shaking like a dog in anticipation of what I’m going to be able to listen to. It’s kind of exciting.

This post sponsered by unsigned.com

My moms friend asked her today if after I graduated if I was going to get a boyfriend.

My mom telling me this pissed me off.  What does it matter if I have a boyfriend or not?  There’s more to life than a relationship.  I don’t care if getting married is supposed to be the best thing in life, and then what, I go forth and multiply.  I’m not taking that path. 

I’ve got very strict opinions about relationships and I can’t even meet some of my standards right now.  That and I’m a free spirit.  I don’t want to have someone connected to me at my hip, I like doing my own thing.  There’s nothing wrong with me being single.  I like to be able to go do my own thing.  I don’t want to be in a place where I have to go with my boyfriend to everything he does or he has to come with me to everything I do.  I don’t want to waste hours on the phone, because, oh, I miss you.  I just don’t want it.  And I’m allowed to have what I want, and I am justified in getting what I want in life right now.  There’s other things I want to do in life, and I don’t need a boyfriend to accompany me. 

End of story…worry about your own daughter…

For the year or so that I worked in the apartment business, there was one thing that really just weighed on me. We were using a horrible management program, I think it was PMAS or something. We couldn’t make it work the way we wanted, we couldn’t write our own reports those had to come from another non-PMAS vendor that developed them, it was horrible.

We had a paper copy of everything, plus we were logging stuff onto the computer, lease terms, payments and whatnot…It was just horrible, audits couldn’t be automated because there are no robots like in the Jetsons to do what we need them to do for us. Nothing about it was easy. Times were really difficult when we had to sinc up with home base because during a sinc no one could be in the app making changes to it, and there were several properties using it, so that added difficulty as well.

I’d sit around and think about how much more efficient the program would be if they’d let me hack it and make our own reports. Then there were the times when I’d just sit and think that they needed a completely new Real Estate Management Software.

We were always worried about turning over the apartments when people left and getting the most for their money, but when I had to leave the company, I think the thing they needed to turn over the most was the software they were running the company off of. It’s pretty bad when you have to pay $100 an hour to have someone on the phone to fix an issue that should’ve never been broken or to explain how to make something work (that could’ve been explained easily if there were proper documentation of the software). Usually, I’d say that you get what you pay for but sometimes you just pay for crap.

Siterra makes it look simple, and I tell you what, based on my initial observations, I’d choose Siterra anyday over stupid PMAS. So, this begs the question, are you working for an apartment leasing company or perhaps you own apartments and you’re struggling with the software you’re using, or perhaps you’re not…Don’t you think it’s time to move away from the extra problems you’re experiencing right now and take a look at Siterra, there’s even a demo you can sign up for…I think it’s worth it…

This post sponsered by Siterra