I guess I was the last to jump off the sinking ship and start another blog. I haven’t really been into making posts and the like for the past several months. I really haven’t even been online at home but to check email. This weekend April and I stayed home and I thought I’d make a new blog site. What the heck, right? I had seen blogger before and in reading the rayd users posts, I decided to make the switch to blogger. I didn’t go all fancy with my own domain or anything, we’ll just give the blogspot address a try and if I keep up with it, maybe I’ll upgrade and get a fancy shmancy domain!
My new blog is here and it’s still in the works but I think it’s good for now.
And you guys were right, it is extremely easy to use!

Anyway, change your links or whatever because this is where my new site will be updated.

Goodbye Rayd! Man it was fun while it lasted.

Why is it that projects are brought into our office in waves? By Monday we had 10 jobs to get out by the end of week and nothing new came in all week! It makes scheduling employees to work pretty difficult. Since switching to the new company my role has expanded. Now I’m basically running all the day to day stuff in the office and scheduling all the final design work and keeping people busy. Bringing work in in waves makes it much more difficult lately. We came into work early and would leave late at the beginning of the week and by next Monday I’ll probably have to send people home early.

I’ve also been having to head to jobsites a lot lately. That leaves me with a lot of time in the car listening to Neal Boortz. During one of the commercials there was a clip from GM about how they repaid all their bailout money. I thought this was kind of weird because I never heard about people rushing off to buy GM cars after the government basically took them over. If anything people were leaving GM and buying Ford cars. So then I found this story on Fox about GM paid their bailout loan with…bailout loan money. Huh? So they took TARP money given to them and paid off the additional loan they received. So now it looks like they might be investigated by the FTC for misleading people. Awesome.

Then there’s this funny video from Rahm Emmanuel. It sounds like he farts during an interview but I think its his coffee cup. Take a look.

Do any of you have a person at your office that just has no concept of how computers work?

Let me tell you about some I found yesterday. Sometimes we receive plans or information on a project on a CD that is mailed to us. Sometimes it’s all emailed. Yesterday I was looking at an old file (probably 6-8 months old) and noticed we were given some digital data for the project. This time instead of a CD that was taped to the inside of the file…it was a 1GB jump drive! So I ripped it out and plugged it into my computer and found only 35MB on the drive! So I immediately burned the info to a CD and put the jump drive in my pocket. Such a waste of a jump drive.

I suspect its the same person that gets the secretary (oh I mean Administrative Professional) to forward on email from his account while he’s on his Blackberry currently reading that same email!

Anyone have any good stories about people that have no idea about computers?

Nothing much happening here lately. We’ve been spending most weekends down at our property working on the barn and getting the orchard ready for the spring time. Spring break weekend it was time to spread fertilizer so we decided this year to use a pull broadcast spreader and a riding mower instead of pushing a spreader by hand. We found a used riding mower for $300. It took a new battery but it saved us money instead of buying a new $1400 riding mower. And let me tell you guys, doing “research” on riding mowers is fun! I felt like Tim Taylor on Home Improvement, MORE POWER! If they just were so expensive we would have bought a new one but $1400 is just way too much in my opinion.

We also have been working on installing all the electrical work in the barn. I had to talk with the power company and electricians but I was able to get another power pole on our land and have an electrician run the #2 wire from the meter to the service panel in the barn. I then consulted a Wiring Book and installed a few circuits to get outlets and lights installed. The engineer in me also wanted to install a toilet and sink. So I bought two 55 gallon drums for the job. This past weekend I installed part of the gutter on the barn and routed it to an elevated 55 gallon drum. I tried to mount the drum and high as possible to get some kind of pressure but it’s no where near the pressure on your house tap. I think I’ll be pulling about 2-3 psi at the sink and toilet. I’ve already installed the toilet and routed the 0.5″ pvc line to the toilet but I found out quickly that the internal valve in the toilet tank needs the 40psi pressure to even open and fill the tank. So for now I have to change the piping to manually fill the tank since my 3 psi is not even close to enough pressure. Later on I’m going to install a 12 volt water pump used for apricultural spot spray guns to pressurize the plumbing lines that run to the sink and toilet. It’s been a fun project and when I get it all working I think I’ll write more about the system, but you can see some of the pictures from the barn and stuff on my picasa page.

Other than that stuff, not much else going on. Work has been picking up a bit and hopefully it keeps up. This is just the start of the building season so I have high hopes for this year.

On Tax Day I was this close to heading down to the capital for the Tea Party Rally but I ended up have to stay a work a little late and traffic would have been awful. I thought it just would be neat to see what they were all about.