Apparently, sunscreen removes the invisible ink that Valleyfair! uses for your re-admission to the park.

We went last week.  I ran out to the car to put on sandals (so my socks wouldn’t get wet when we went on the water rides) and reapply sunscreen.  I got my arm stamped like I always do.  When I came back to the gate, she looked at my arm and couldn’t find the stamp.  She asked if I had put on sunscreen and told me that washes it off.  That information would have been good to know BEFORE I reapplied it!!!

Lucky for me, I still had my half of my ticket, so she let me back in.  It would have been big trouble if she hadn’t!

As Junior reported here, on April 1, I got an e-mail from KFC (I don’t remember why I’m on their mailing list… probably something to do with e-coupons which I don’t use because I refuse to install a program on my computer in order to print them). The e-mail stated that, “The KFC Double Down is Real! No fooling.”

I showed the picture of the “sandwich,” which has bacon, cheese, and “special sauce” between 2 chicken breasts (instead of bread) to my co-worker. I was expecting his reaction to be disgust, but instead, he said he was interested! So today, 6 of us from work made a pilgrimage to KFC for lunch.

Only 2 of the 6 of us (myself included) were brave enough to “Double Down.”

The good: It was meaty! I was literally surprised by the weight. And I was FULL after eating it.

The bad: The price. The meal cost $6.99 + tax. My “normal” KFC meal costs only $4.25.

The ugly: It was greasy (are you surprised?). It had a wax paper wrapper so I didn’t have to touch it, and I still used 2 napkins. And I’m an efficient napkin user!

Here was the real disappointing thing… I couldn’t taste the insides! There was SO much chicken, that it overpowered the other ingredients! So I basically had a bunch of chicken for lunch!

Overall, 4.5 stars out of 10. I’m glad I conquered it, but I won’t be going back for seconds…

So, there is this race from Sydney to Melbourne in Australia.  It is a 543.7 mile race, and it takes 5 days to finish.  In 1983, this 61 year old named Cliff Young entered the race.  He told reporters (who were interviewing him because he looked out of place next to all these hardened athletes) that he thought he could win the race because when he was a boy on his farm he had to round up 2,000 sheep on 2,000 acres, and he never used horses or tractors or anything.

Normal athletes would run 18 hours, sleep 6, run again, etc.  Not Cliff.  He ran (well… shuffled… see he didn’t run like other athletes either… he did this shuffle run instead) straight through.  He overtook the other runners the last night, while they were asleep and won the race.  When they gave him $10,000, he was shocked, because he didn’t know there was a prize for winning, so he gave the money to other runners.

He ran the race again the next year and took 7th due to a dislocated hip.  When he was 76, he also attempted to run the entire Australian border but had to drop out after 6,520 KM (about 40%) because his only crew member became ill.

He died in 2003.  I’m not sure how, but my guess wasn’t obesity.

Anyway, this guy, who has been dead for 7 years, is surely tougher then me.

Source: Nate and here.

This will be long.  Bear with me, please…

I used to have the worst boss.  For real.  I would put this guy up against anyone else’s “worst boss” and I think I might still win.  No, your crappy 19-year-old boss at the 7-11 or Wendy’s doesn’t count.  This guy was a VP at a Fortune 100 company.  Someone you’d think might be qualified in some way to lead people.  He wasn’t.

Some Background

The boss was the VP of IT at a major retailer.  I won’t name him or the retailer, but if you know me you already know who I’m talking about.  (We’ll call him Paul for ease of reference.)  I was the Director of Application and Database development (a mouthful).  Basically, I was the #2 guy in IT at the company.

I was put in place because Paul was failing.  The CFO forced Paul to hire me over his objections.  Paul wanted to hire a crony of his.  I didn’t apply for this job or seek it out.  I got a phone call one day that said the CFO wanted to speak to me.  He handed me a piece of paper, which was a job offer, and, in a moment of temporary insanity, I took it.

I knew going in that Paul sucked.  I had worked with him in the past.  I thought I knew what I was getting into.  I looked forward to the challenge.

I was wrong.  The guy was somehow worse than I expected.

The Signs

I could easily fill a book about my experience working for Paul, so I’m trying to keep to just the relevant points.  There is an ultimate point here, I promise.

The first sign I had that Paul was worse than I expected was when he publicly threw one of his subordinates under the proverbial bus.  In a meeting with all of the highest leaders in the corporation, Paul was asked about a project that was not going well.  He took no responsibility.  Instead, he blamed one of his subordinates, and said that this guy was lying to him about his progress and not cutting it in his job.

That wasn’t true.  In reality, Paul hadn’t ever handed the project off to his subordinate.  But Paul was very comfortable slandering this guy and basically neutering his reputation to save his own ass.

The next big sign came during a crisis.  One day email just stopped working.  No one had email anymore.  Obviously a complete lack of email is a major issue.

In a situation like this a leader would gather people together, get all the key players in the room, and make a game plan to figure out a solution.  Paul gathered up all of his personal effects, put them in his backpack, and declared to someone who was passing by his office that he was quitting.

That left a very confused group of people, and no leader.  We found Paul a few hours later wandering around the 7th floor.  He was going from PC to PC seeing if he could get the email to work.  He hadn’t quit.  He just had a breakdown of some sort.  When he came back he never addressed the packing up of the personal effects, or the disappearance.  He acted like nothing had happened.

The Confrontation

The email incident prompted a quite heated (and somewhat surreal) confrontation between Paul and me.  Words were exchanged.

I told him he needed to decide if he was going to work here or not.  If he was going to quit, fine.  If not, then he needed to get his head in the game and start acting like a leader.  His team needed leadership, something which he was not providing.

He responded in a bizarre way.  First he told me that “he had always been a high achiever,” and went on about how he had always had good review scores, and how he always succeeded at whatever he tried.  He used the phrase “high achiever” many times during this speech.

Then he said something that surprised me.  He told me that he “could do the jobs of anyone on his team better than they could do their jobs themselves.”  He then went on to name several positions, including mine, and note how he could do that job better than the person who held it.

Really?

This claim was shocking to me because it was so much the opposite of my philosophy of leadership.  I always sought out the best and brightest people for my teams.  I was proud of the fact that I couldn’t do their jobs better than they could.  If I could, why did I need them?

I built teams of people who didn’t agree with me.  We’d argue, debate, and in the end I’d make a decision, knowing that my decision was informed by a diverse group of opinion.  It was their job to bring their best, and my job to take all of the varying opinions into account and make a decision based on my view of the situation.

Paul’s view was different.  He thought he was the best and the brightest, all in one.  He also thought of himself as a “high achiever.”  He wasn’t.  Maybe he was in the past, but he was obviously now in a position that was over his head.  He didn’t have the skills or ability to succeed in a high level job like a VP.  He was a failure.

He was “downsized” a few months after the email incident.

The Point

So I was reading an article the other day, and this jumped out at me:

Obama, who is not without an ego, regarded himself as just as gifted as his top strategists in the art and practice of politics. Patrick Gaspard, the campaign’s political director, said that when, in early 2007, he interviewed for a job with Obama and Plouffe, Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Reading that did not surprise me.  In fact, it made things quite a bit clearer.

Barack Obama, like Paul, thinks of himself as a “high achiever.”  He thinks he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, more knowledgeable about policy than his policy directors, and on and on.

Perhaps Obama was once a “high achiever,” I mean, he did get elected President after being in the Senate for like 10 minutes.  But, like Paul, he’s now in way over his head.  And like Paul he got there by throwing the little people under the bus.

The Epilogue

The fact that Obama considers himself the smartest person in the room gives you perspective on his decisions.

No wonder he rejected all of his general’s plans in Afghanistan.  After all, Obama is a better general than his generals.

Barack Obama is a “high achiever” in the mold of Paul, the worst boss I’ve ever had.  I just wish we had the ability to downsize him before the damage he does becomes irreversible.

Backstory:
I’ve always had Mac laptops. After going through graphic design college, then owning a business in that field, I relied on the smoothness with which I could bang through projects and not have to worry about reliability… Until I started messing with system files. I’ve moved on to a different job, but obviously still use Mac, if for no other reason than how many programs I’ve invested in. Plus, I still do a heavy amount of design in side jobs, and as charity. Windows XP, SP3 is what I have to use at work, and the bulk of the technical work there has to do with developing and maintaining Access programs and web-accessible interfaces. So I thought I should get Windows onto my Mac to back up my work, and expand my development skills on my own. So I stuck Windows XP on there. Then Windows failed to start and failed to be fixed one day out of the blue (screen of death). And finally, when I wanted to give a friend a bunch of photos from my wedding and songs from iTunes, I realized that Apple had (over the years) proprietized the heck out of it’s files. Freedom, I yearns for it. So to open up my options I configured my laptop to boot to a selector utility (like Windows’ BIOS) that chooses between operating systems installed on separate partitions.

File-Neutering:
I gave this term to my new mission (I have no idea if it’s been used before). The mission is to eventually get as many files as possible out of databases or proprietary file formats and into file formats that have open-source and multi-platform alternatives. For instance, Apple locked up my photos into a database. So one photo album at a time is being dragged into separate folders to be labeled and organized however I want. iTunes’ protected AAC formatted songs are being burnt to disc and ripped into mp3’s (and yes, audiophiles, I’m smashing them because if I don’t have the storage space to listen to my music, I don’t care how “clear” and “uncompressed” it sounds, I won’t be dragging it around).
There are more complicated portions to this game, but I’ve excepted that a Garageband file isn’t going anywhere, and my Access DB’s just are what they are. PSD’s and plenty of vector formatted logos seem to have been getting more accessible thanks to open-source programs Gimp and Inkscape. Illustrator might dominate the pro logo crafting biz, but if you can take a couple days to open your mind and learn it, I swear you can do nearly all the important things and much faster than Illustrator with Inkscape, and for free.

OS X 10.6, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Ubuntu 9.10:
I have to admit, I’ve become shamefully excited about these latest OS versions. It’s like everything I used to complain about in college is being fixed some decade later! And all the cool features I used to wish for… IE automagically splitting the screen to two half-maximized windows so you can view as much of both as possible. Mac still has to catch up on that one, but Win 7 and Ubuntu do this in spades. I would easily recommend to anyone who can do this, split whatever computer you get to run it’s proprietary OS and a Linux install. I went with Ubuntu because it’s well-known, easy to use, and it’s getting all the press, so the user-base has forced compatibility and reliability that might not have been there. Yeah, some day maybe I’ll be poking around in Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, but this is good for now.
Briefly, in regards to the need for 3 systems, Mac has the most assets for what I need. Programs and abilities geared toward what I do. Windows is pretty (now) and supports things I do for my day job and games. Ubuntu has tools that can get into computer guts quicker and easier, and it’s FREE. It should also be noted the the bugless Zach experience award goes to Apple. Windows 7 and Ubuntu have had exactly the same percentage of fixless bugs for me so far (and oddly, it seems the exact same percentage of fixed bug as well).

Notable comments about the OS versions compared to previous versions…

OSX 10.6 Pros:

• Faster than 10.5, at least for me.
• Right clicking actually feels fully integrated! (except in Garageband, where you can only click with it in like two places)
• The Finder is more intuitive and has better options

OSX 10.6 Cons:

• iTunes is even more locked up and does a bunch of background stuff. Hooray for you if you have an iPod, so does everyone else. Free software is widely available to transfer files to and from. I would recommend that versus letting iTunes’ remarkable fragile and bloated structure control your entertainment. (I lost a couple hundred megs of files because of a corruption, very un-mac-like).
• iPhoto stuffs all your pictures into a database, not folders. It organized based on dates regardless of what groupings or albums you create. And if you edit a file and save it? It saves the new file as well as the original, with no option to delete it. BLOAT.
• They still haven’t figured out that people hate taking the time to manually move and resize every damn window.
• They’ve started (in a very Windows fashion) to push products you don’t have from within the OS’s functions. The most obvious are iDisk, MobileMe, and Time Machine.

Windows 7 Pros:

• It’s so pretty! I mean seriously, it actually makes doing things more fun! They finally figured out that if they make superficial aspects of operation more pleasant, it increases productivity for core functions! Congratulations MS, you actually out-did Apple on Apple’s 2nd most famous feature.
• New buttons on stuff. They’ve done some re-thinking about the standard names of menus and functions which is generally not bad.
• Improved UAC. I’ve been bugged a few times by it, but their version of sudo works pretty slick.

Windows 7 Cons:

• Microsoft just bought the rights to your mother. They own everything you do and say and think while Windows is running, probably. I’m not saying they could easily get into your files, but I’m definitely not saying they’re above doing so.
• They still have a registry. It makes me nervous. Despite the fact that they’ve been aware of it’s inconsistency, unreliability, corruptibility, and obsolescence, they refuse to switch from it like Mac refuses to maximize windows properly.
• It’s hideously expensive. I would never be running it if Jacci didn’t have a college email required to get this educational discount. Ended up being $30 and the cost of a burnable dvd.

Ubuntu 9.10 Pros:

• FREE
• Insanely easy to install. You burn a cd, start up from the cd, walk through a few options. It identifies your hardware and gets your drivers for you.
• New software store program in which nearly everything you shop for is FREE.
• Ubuntu is not interested in owning your mother.
• Once you install the FREE Compiz settings manager, the visual effects are almost as pretty as Windows 7, and way more customizable and fun to mess with.
• Once you install the FREE translation tool called Wine, you can run plenty of Windows XP software natively, as in, no emulation or restarting required.

Ubuntu 9.10 Cons:

• You can break it. I mean you could break Mac and Windows too, but it’s not easy to do so accidentally. In Linux, you still have make an attempt to know about what you’re doing if you’re in system settings and uninstalling things. That said, I’m no genius and I’ve never busted it.
• If you’re a gamer, you’re probably not going to find what you want.
• If you need highly professional level software, like CAD’s or high quality sound/video editing, you’ll still need to pay for your OS.

So that’s my perspective so far, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty more stories that relate to this.

Sonic was running a chicken strips basket that came with chicken strips, your choice of tots or fries (like that’s really a choice), country gravy, texas toast, a (singular) onion ring, and a drink for $3.99.  Compare that to DQ’s chicken strips, fries, gravy, and toast for the same $3.99, and you’d think Sonic would win on value alone.  But, alas… Sonic lost big points in the ‘taste’ category.  The chicken wasn’t very tasty, the gravy was bland, and the toast was soggy.  The tots, onion ring (nice touch) and drink couldn’t save it, though.  In battle “chicken strips box” I give the prize to DQ.

Good news for Sonic, though.  They brought back the Brown Bag Special (2 burgers, 2 fries or tots, and 2 drinks for $7.99) and there is NO WAY DQ can beat that!

“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.” – Mayor Daley, link heads to Founding Bloggers

What an interesting statement. I must agree that (and to me this is obvious) crazy individual people should be treated as crazy individuals. When there are groups of crazy individuals, the rules have to change.

It’s possible that Mayor Daley is politically posturing and spinning the tragedy into a rally call for stiffer gun control. Even if he is, such a statement would gain no ground and would make him look foolish if there weren’t already people who believe that it’s absolutely true.

There are people that argue with me about gun control, and 99% of the time, they start with a bad assumption.

• Less guns = less suicides
• Theives use owner’s guns against them all the time
• Innocent bystanders get shot by legally carried guns
• Fatal shooting accidents are just as common as murders
• More guns turns normal anger like road rage into killings

These assumptions are not backed up by factual information. It doesn’t seem to matter how many papers or statistics I cite, these arguments inevitably end with me being accused of believing false information. That’s rather convenient. Rather than have to find fact or theory that’s a credible defense of their point, they simply dismiss my sources altogether. So I stopped arguing about numbers and reality, I’ll meet them on the philosophical and anecdotal levels.

To their credit, I’ve never encountered one of these arguments in which I’m accused of lying or somehow craving death and murder, so that’s a good thing.

It’s amazing though how closed-minded the anti-gun movement really is. Actual shooting injury and death data are waved away outright or openly skewed to fit their imagination.

The original imagined scenarios aren’t completely without logic. The most recent discussion, which took place about a month ago, was with a coworker. She, with no prompt from me, jumped from road-rage to handguns. She said she just couldn’t understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow people to carry guns, (paraphrase): “What if all these people that yell and get out of their cars and carry baseball bats, what if they had a gun? Then instead of someone getting punched, well now they’re dead!”

Okay, sounds logical, but it doesn’t happen that way. My favorite example is a good friend of mine who has a permit, and also has the quickest, most fiery temper I’ve ever seen. He’s a good man though, and hasn’t gotten in trouble with the law, which is why they gave him the permit. When he carries, he’s a different man. Totally calm. There’s a mental barrier there and I know why my coworker doesn’t trust it and it’s a good thing. She doesn’t understand the barrier because her’s has never been tested. There’s a similar mental barrier that keeps people from being attracted to family members or to persons of inappropriate age. So yes, there’s people who cross that line, but rarely is it sudden and unpredictable, and when it is, I’d like to be armed so they don’t kill too many people before they’re stopped.

And that’s the second point: if there’s no guns, it means whomever has a bomb or other efficient weapon has enormous power.

I like to use metaphors to put things in a different light. Rape is worse than murder in some ways, at least in my opinion, and should be treated with a similar level of horror. So if the police were the only ones that could stop rape, would you trust them to show up? Would you trust them so much that you’d feel safe? Or is it easier to imagine that the vast majority of people, given the means and opportunity, would go to great lengths to stop or prevent a rape and not participate in one.

Stiff gun control forces the public to trust the government. Think about it. Do you really trust congress, judges, senators, state troopers to fight tooth and nail on your behalf? To make sound, just decisions more than you’d trust your friends (um, the ones who haven’t been convicted of crimes and have passed safety and legality courses)?

Code Adam is a missing child safety program created by Walmart, named in memory of Adam Walsh, who was abducted from a Sears in 1981.

It is a 6 step process as follows:

1. If a visitor reports a child is missing, a detailed description of the child and what he or she is wearing is obtained. Additionally, all exterior access to the building is locked and monitored; anyone approaching a door is turned away.
2. The employee goes to the nearest in-house telephone and pages Code Adam, describing the child’s physical features and clothing. As designated employees monitor front entrances, other employees begin looking for the child.
3. If the child is not found within 10 minutes, law enforcement is called.
4. If the child is found and appears to have been lost and unharmed, the child is reunited with the searching family member.
5. If the child is found accompanied by someone other than a parent or legal guardian, reasonable efforts to delay their departure will be used without putting the child, staff, or visitors at risk. Law enforcement will be notified and given details about the person accompanying the child.
6. The Code Adam page will be canceled after the child is found or law enforcement arrives.

No word on what the process is if a child is found, but the parents are missing.  But my guess is that they aren’t supposed to page the kids name and physical description over the PA, let the kid wander around for 15 more minutes and then let the kid go off with some stranger, like they did at the Vadnais Heights, MN, store a few weeks ago.

As stated above, Adam Walsh was abducted from a Sears store in FL.  The story goes, he was watching some older kids play some videogames and his mom (Revé) went off to do some shopping, and came back about 7 minutes later to find everyone gone.  There are rumors that the older kids were asked to leave the store, and Adam may have been ushered out of the store with them.  From there, Adam was abducted, and his severed head was found 2 weeks later.

“Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to the boy’s murder but was never tried for the crime. Although no new evidence has come forth, on December 16, 2008, police announced that the Walsh case was now closed as they were satisfied that Toole was the murderer of Adam Walsh. Ottis Toole died of liver failure on September 15, 1996.”

AMBER alerts, officially named “America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response” were originally named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old child who was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas in 1996.

U.S. Department of Justice has the following criteria in order to issue an AMBER alert.

1. Law enforcement must confirm that an abduction has taken place
2. The child must be at risk of serious injury or death
3. There must be sufficient descriptive information of child, captor, or captor’s vehicle to issue an alert
4. The child must be 17 years old or younger

These rules are not always followed:

A Scripps Howard study of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States in 2004 found that most issued alerts did not meet the Department of Justice’s criteria. Fully 50% (117 alerts) were categorized by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as being “family abductions,” very often a parent involved in a custody dispute. There were 48 alerts for children who had not been abducted at all, but were lost, ran away, involved in family misunderstandings (for example, two instances where the child was with grandparents), or as the result of hoaxes. Another 23 alerts were issued in cases where police didn’t know the name of the allegedly abducted child, often as the result of misunderstandings by witnesses who reported an abduction.

70 of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in 2004 (30%) were actually children taken by strangers or who were unlawfully traveling with adults other than their legal guardians.

The only other thing I have to say about AMBER alerts is you can sign up to get them texted to your cell phone.  I will do this once they start following the US DOJ rules to eliminate false alarms.

There are some things in here I meant to block quote, but couldn’t get it formatted right, but my source information was wiki, wiki, and wiki.

More specifically, the mouse cursor.

I know this, as the new cat, known as “Orange Cat”, was chasing the arrow around the screen today.

For some reason, I’ve spent quite a bit of time Kayaking this summer. I have kayaked in a lake, two rivers, and one ocean. That is about 400% more kayaking than I did in previous summers.

I wanted to name this post Sea Kayaks vs. Regular Kayaks, but it turns out that, as usual, there is much more to the topic than I care to write about.

However, I’ll boil it down based on my personal experience…

The main difference between sea kayaks and regular kayaks is that sea kayaks don’t have a “cockpit” or covered area that you sit in. They are mostly flat. This is so that when an ocean wave topples you, you can easily get back in.

As an aside, if you happen to find yourself in the San Diego area, visit San Diego Bike and Kayak Tours. We took a tour where we kayaked out to a cave, then jumped in the water and snorkeled, then kayaked back to shore. It was a blast. Probably one of the best vacation activities I’ve ever done. (We were at the La Jolla location.)