Prepare to be disappointed...

...in this post.*

Oh Ye Gods And Little Fishes** I'm busy at the moment. This evening is turning into the Night Of A Thousand PowerPoints™, in preparation for an Advisory Board meeting on Friday. So far today:

1. edited Boss's presentation a couple of times
2. reviewed six Managers' presentations with them, then made all the edits
3. migrated Computer Guy's presentation onto the right template, fixed a couple of things and generally cleaned it up a bit
4. created a couple of bar graphs for one Manager and moved those onto hers
5. had a three minute meeting about Marketing Guy's presentation
6. looked over Extremely Competent Person Whose Office I Used to Camp Out In While She Was Away™'s presentation and made some inane comments on it
7. thought a bit about my presentation, which is, um, still vapourware at this point.

As well as about a thousand other similarly stimulating things, including not one, not two, but three phone calls on my way to work.

This all started first thing this morning, continued on the bus home, and is still in progress now. Not to be confused with last night, or the night before, mind you.

Why am I doing all this, you might ask? Well, as I don't want our spiffy facility to look bad in front of the Distinguished International Guests™, I've taken custody of formatting, making fixes and adding content to everyone's presentations. Because they'll all be much, much better if I do it.***

I do promise, however, that none of the resulting presentations will be as content-free as this post, and absolutely, positively, none of them will look like this one.



*"Ricardiblog. Prepare to be dissapointed." is what it used to say up in the title bar of this blog, way back when (ok, August 2006).
**This is something my mother used to say. I have no clue where it came from but it's occasionally useful, like here.
***No, really, it's true.

It's worse than that...

After my recent rant about email, I realized that the situation is much, much worse than I had initially thought.

I estimated six thousand emails, based on having deleted about 4,500 right off the top, and then clearing out another 1,500 or so from the Sent Mail and In boxes.

What I forgot about, of course, was the couple of thousand or so already filed in various folders. So let's make that an even 8,000 for the sake of argument, and add another hefty novel or two to the stack of Shakespeare.

I'm beginning to feel positively educated.

--

In other news: Spring, it would seem, has well and truly sprung, with the scent of barbeque in the air (I'm firing ours up tonight - wish me luck, as the future Mrs. Ricardipus and I once set one on fire), soggy trampled grass underfoot, neighbours digging away in the garden and the backyard full of spring visitors: goldfinches, a house finch, a song sparrow, grackles, red-winged blackbirds, robins, and the usual starlings, house sparrows and doves. No sign of the hawk recently, but we'll wait and see... plenty of tasty prey to snack on.

Here's a truly terrible picture of three goldfinches eating away at the feeder. They're still wearing their winter drab, but beginning to brighten up a bit.

And here's an equally poor shot of a Red-Winged Blackbird... these males do a good job of trying to impress, puffing up their red epaulets and bleeping at each other. Unfortunately, certain photographers don't do them justice. He's a bit out of focus, a bit far away, and clearly interested in something other than the camera.

Strangely enough, I saw one of these in California last week. I'm guessing it was too lazy to migrate up here. But maybe it's supposed to be there, and I'm just being unsympathetic.

Could you please just phone me instead?

Today, I have spent, in aggregate, almost six (6) hours reading, sorting and deleting email messages.

Old email messages, new email messages, email messages that are neither old nor new, but somewhere in between. Ones that are important, ones that were important at the time and may be again in the future, and ones that caused me to (figuratively) scratch my head and say, "what the *$#!? was that about?"

I thought that I was getting buried under RSS feeds, and I am, but that problem is small compared to the unruly tangle of email mess hiding in my Outlook Express (stop laughing, you lot!) mailboxes. I guess it had really been getting out of hand, since:

- I deleted almost four and a half thousand messages from my trash folder;
- I finally beat my Sent Items folder down to one message, which I confess I have no idea what to do with; I either filed or deleted the other multi-hundreds;
- I created at least a dozen new folders for filing things in, on top of all of the ones I already had;
- and after all that, I still have about 600 unsorted, unfiled messages in my Inbox. It's late and I've given up for tonight, especially when faced with a couple of hundred from the same person.

This, my friends, is just a little over a year's worth, and let's not even talk about my two Yahoo accounts. Not that anyone ever emails the Ricardipus one, oh no [muffled sobbing].

I just hate to think how much time was consumed reading these things... to be conservative, let's say, oh, six thousand messages. At a (very, very conservative) estimate of 100 words each, that's 600,000 words of text. The equivalent of twenty good-sized Shakespeare plays, if the internet is to be believed. And that's not including the attachments. One email I received recently contained no less than 261 pages of background reading for this trip, and that's not counting the documents that were duplicated as French translations.

I can't help but think that I might be happier, and feel a little more educated, had I read Hamlet (again) and Othello and all the rest of them, instead of six thousand emails. Unfortunately, I would probably also have lost my job by now, so maybe great literature isn't the answer to everything after all.

I think I need to take a deep breath, get some fresh air, and not be sitting in front of a computer any longer, at least not tonight. Unfortunately, it's already long past dark and I really should be in bed, so here's a surrogate calming picture instead. I'm off to bed - don't email me until morning, please.

Some notes on my trip

1. I fully intended to blog at you all from the same hotel room as before, but, um, never got around to it. Ah well.

2. My hopes of a rental car upgrade were answered! Instead of the Ford Focus, I wound up with a spiffy silver Chrysler PT Cruiser, which although I was initially sceptical, turned out to be quite fun to drive. As usual, the central locking and alarm systems baffled me a bit.

3. San Francisco was full of people complaining about how cold it was.

4. People will surf in Southern California even when the Pacific Ocean is clearly bloody freezing cold.

5. The drive up the Pacific Coast Highway from Newport Beach to Long Beach is about 50,000 times less picturesque than you might think, unless you like shabby liquor stores, dull-looking inland lagoons and signposts to military installations.

6. I drove through what I believe may be the only roundabout on the continental United States. And even took the right exit.

7. Oh yes, complaining about the second flight... actually, it wasn't that bad at all, just a little hour-plus hop from San Francisco to John Wayne airport in Orange County. They almost had to abort the landing though, as OC was socked in with fog. Southern California looked like the arctic from the sky, all covered in white courtesy of some strange weather phenomenon they call the "Marine Layer".

8. The third flight, home from LA, was tedious as a) we left over an hour late for some vaguely-specified reason involving cabin baggage; b) as usual, my headset didn't work and I couldn't hear the movie soundtrack; and c) the captain kept insisting that we were in imminent danger of turbulence, so that nobody was allowed to have laptop computers out and in operation. The turbulence, of course, never materialized.

9. There is excellent Japanese food to be had in a very boring part of a tech-park/industrial estate on Irvine Center Drive. Contact me for details if you're interested.

10. After a couple of days in California, I was despairing of seeing any interesting vehicles, but also relieved at not seeing the horrendous Scion xB like last time. Until two of them passed me, on the last day, on the way to the Los Angeles airport. But that was offset by a couple of nicely tricked-out Dodge Chargers, a handful of well-dressed Mustangs, and a fast-moving BMW M5. None of which is among the most beautiful vehicles ever, but fun nonetheless.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the Bentley Continental GT, another ugly but doubtless fun-to-drive car that whipped past me on Interstate 405.

11. Also as usual - I'm glad to be home.

And he traveled from north to south

On my way to Southern California! Must put on my shades, it's sunny down there.

Ah, that's better.

And in my next post: whining about the flight. Because that's what I do. Just try and stop me. I'm looking at you, Black Knight, with your "I flew to Australia and it's a long way" attitude.

Not so very much the world traveller

Hello. I have just spent, oh, five hours on a plane. It started like this:



and progressed rapidly to this:


after the batteries on the laptop ran out. I didn't bother watching the James Bond-y thing that was showing on the plane, although in retrospect perhaps I should have done, since my alternative plan of sleeping didn't work out so well.

But... the hotel has high-speed, for free, and I was greeted with a Big Bag O' Swag™ donated by the kind folks at a certain Big Biotech Instrumentation Company that's hosting me. Tasty, tasty treats and bottled water imported all the way from Tuscany (allegedly). Just right after a long and tedious day, started off by my usual trick of showing up at the airport several hours too early.

A day there, then off to Orange County again for a day, then home. With no time for sight-seeing, alas, although truth be told I'm a bit of a homebody anyway and would rather be there than here. But no matter - off to bed and I'll doubtless wake up at 4:00 AM, since dealing with the three-hour time difference isn't really something I'm terribly good at.

Good night, all.

Advanced mathematics

Dawn says:

7 days without a Ricardipus post makes one week.

She is absolutely right. There will be a quiz next week, so make sure that you remember that "7 days" is the correct answer.

In the meantime, I will have something to post about later this week, as I'm going to be flying off to California for a couple of days, including a visit to the same place as before. This time, the vehicle booked for my convenience is a none-too-mighty Ford Focus, although I can still hope for an upgrade again.

Before heading to that part of Southern California, I'll be spending a day at a company near San Francisco, which should be fun since I've never been there. No time to look around though. And still no freakin' flowers in my hair, in case anyone's wondering.

Two other notes. First, Zoe's got a book which you should all go and buy. Right now. Just don't worry about receiving it for a while... you know, like Harry Potter. Buy now and beat the rush.

Second, I'm thinking about another Obscure Song Quiz, like this one and this one. But since those two were, um, slightly less than wildly popular, I'm open to suggestions as to whether or not I should bother.

And you wonder why there hasn't been a post for a week (seven days, remember?). There's nowt going on. A metric nowt, which is approximately 2.2 Imperial nowts. I really must go and take some more photos of something or other to fill up the blog... and Flickr is beginning to whimper a bit from all of the neglect. I'll do my best, and with luck it won't be another seven days before next time.

Icy

Snow. On top of freezing rain. On top of snow.

Pretty though.