Managers
I am not a manager myself, but I have gone through a number of them in my time. This is not as a result of my changing jobs. This is as a result of numerous re-orgs, re-structuring and managers moving into other areas. I've had different types of managers, some were great, some ineffective, and some who love meetings.

Today, I found that a colleague's manager is just NOT a very good people person. And on top of that, this manager does not seem to act very professionally. He basically tells this colleague that he was lying about the hours he was reporting on an activity based on heresay from another party. Now, what gets me is that this manager just inherited some people into his group about 2 weeks ago. Did he have any idea what these people were working on? Did he make any effort to at least talk to each of the "new" people to see what they were working on and what they're responsibilties are. During the bit of turmoil we had at my home office, my then manager at some point acquired one whole group. This brought his section to over 50 people. But he managed to make time to at least meet with each and every individual to see what they were working on and what concerns they might have with all that was going on. This other manager, on the other hand, not only tells my colleague that he was lying about his hours but he was also telling him that he was losing his job in April. Like DUH, I think just about everyone at this location knows that. So why bother to state the obvious? Was this a scare tactic? In any case, this was very unprofessional, in my opinion.

Anyway, that's my beef on that subject.

Texas Update
Well, it seems that the weather has decided to get wet today. Not a big deal. At least the temps are on the mild side. I think it's more or less been in the 50-60F range. Been working hard to cover as much stuff as possible at work. I am really hoping that I can sufficiently cover what I need to cover by the end of next week. The only glitch has to do with this other thing that just kind of came up during a meeting on Tuesday. I'm not exactly sure what they want me to do, but I'm hoping to read up on some stuff I printed. Maybe I can at least get some idea of the material. I would like to at least try to do some homework on a subject first if possible.

Anyway, I think that's enough babbling for today.

Well, I've managed to survive my first weekend here in Texas, more or less. Saturday, I went over to the Dallas Galleria. It's a pretty big mall with some swanky stores. As its main attraction, there is even an ice skating rink. Overall, I found the mall to be fairly average. I mean, you have your usual mall stores like the Gap, Victoria's Secret, The Body Shop, just to name a few. That's why I found it average.

At some point I stopped to grab a bite to eat at Subway. I took a seat at a table that overlooked the skating rink. I found it rather amusing to see so many Texans trying to skate. I could see that there are some kids who are taking lessons and are serious about figure skating. Then you have the bunch of kids who obviously have not skated much and are more or less shuffling their way around the rink. I have not skated in years, so I'm sure I'd take a few spills if I got out onto the ice again.

So, what did I do for a few hours at the mall? Let's see... I got myself a sweater that was on sale at the Gap. I found some Richard Feynman books at the one bookstore there. I picked up one CD. A set of small headphones. A small Dilbert Calendar. Sudafed. A present for my sweetie (which I will not describe here).

Today, I mainly vegged. Did a load of wash so I had some clean cloths. Read some. Napped. Watched some TV. Chatted with people online. Really not a heck of a whole lot. Did not bother to have the room picked up, which was OK by me. Not like I'm a big slob or anything. :-)

Anyway... I think that's all there is worth noting...

It's still rather cool today. Then it started to rain this afternoon. By the time I got out of work, it was raining rather steadily, not heavy, but it was raining.

It seems that the drop in the telecom market has hit this region fairly hard as well. Here in Telecom Corridor, many of your big name telecom companies have laid off hundred of people over the past year or so. It's rather depressing. At the height of the industry, it was quite busy here. The parking lots were full. The area restaurants were packed at lunch. We went out to lunch at a chinese restaurant not far from the office. Apparently, that place used to be packed all the time. Now it's not even half full. These are not high times anymore.

Anyway, enough with the depressing stuff. Hmmm... What else is happening? I dunno. There's still talk on the news about the space shuttle. More home videos of the shuttle starting to break up before it got over Texas. Which could very well likely mean that the break up started to occur soon after the last communications between the shuttle and mission control.

Well....

Howdy all loyal readers... That's right, all two of you. What? Membership has dropped? We're down to one and a half? Oh dear. Something must be done to rectify this.

So it's still relatively mild here in sunny Richardson, TX. today started a little on the chilly side with the temps hovering around 1C. Of course cold is all relative to where you're coming from! ;-) The temps did rise during the day to a high of about 54F or so. Everything is done BIG here. The cars are BIG. The coffees are BIG. The plates are BIG. The subs are BIG. BIG BIG BIG BIG! I guess that's because this is a big state so everything has to be BIG. ;-)

Hotel living... Gotta love a place that has high-speed connection for free. They prob got a good package deal with some ISP like AT&T Broadband or something. Nice to kick back with a bottle of beer (Sam Adams my choice) and catch up on some email or something. Chatting with some friends is always a nice thing to do too. This is especially so if you want to rub in the fact that it's warmer here than it is there! :D

Another thing of note around here (State-side) is that there is still a lot on the news about the Space Shuttle Columbia. It's almost non-stop news about this. Sometimes you just get a little tired of it, but at the same time you have no choice but to have some sort of feelings about the loss. But PLEASE, don't over do it. The chatter here at the bar is rather interesting on the subject. :)

Well....

Let's try another font. I like fonts.

Well, what seemed like a routine machine became tragedy. I was just zapping through the channels this afternoon when I came across a CNN newsfeed on WGN. I found that unusual so I watched it for a little while. At first, I wasn't sure what they were talking about exactly other than that it was related to the space shuttle. Then it dawned at me that something very terrible had happened. It seems that something had gone horribly wrong as the shuttle was making their way back to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle and its crew are lost.

It's rather difficult to believe that such a thing can still happen after the Challenger disaster, but one has to bear in mind that space travel and exploration is still in its infancy (relatively speaking). Anyone who wants to become an astronaut and be a part of space history should realize what the risks are. Haven't we all seen enough science fiction television and movies to realize that things do happen? I think that overall we have been relatively fortunate in the number of tragic accidents since the induction of the space program. I don't know if it has ever been publicized, but I would imagine that even the Soviet space program had its ups and downs as well, we just don't know about them.

In any case, I feel that after such an event, we should still move forward. The loss of such fine astronauts is terrible, but they knew the risks. And it's been mentioned that since shuttle missions have become routine that people don't even know or even pay attention to who the crew is. I think in some way this is a tragedy in itself.

Well, in other news... Finally, there is a break in the weather. The temperature here has finally risen to more bearable levels! It was warm enough that there was some melting snow happening! Also, tonight, we took a walk around the neighborhood after dinner. I missed doing that when the weather was just too cold.

Anyhooo.....