*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

The pressure mounts for me each year when April 1st rolls around.  Each year co-workers and friends start asking me days before April 1st what I’m going to do this year, like I would tell them!

To fresh your memory, last year I took a job at Apple.  And to top off that prank, at work there was a termination letter that was sent to all of Information Systems.  Not only were a lot of people at work gotten but last year’s April Fools is still left in minds of many developers world wide like this tweet from Rick:

So what to do this year?  Well, this year we decided to get Deep Fried Bytes involved with the fun.  We created a show with a “Mystery Guest”, and built up the hype around the guest.  To make things sound a little more real we threw in an announcement about the DevLink conference and awaited the arrival of our special guest, who, well never showed up.

We let the show’s theme music play and play and play and play for almost 20 minutes.  Then we came back in at the end with a big APRIL FOOLS and apologized heavily to our loyal listeners. 

I’m happy everyone took it in good fun.  Here is some of the feedback we got:

All in all it was good fun and it seems most everyone took it in good stride.  One of my team members that works with me (Val) had listened to the show and decided to turn the tides.  I called him yesterday about 4:30 PM to discuss the days accomplishments and after I was on the phone with him for a few minutes I heard his phone ring and he said “can you hold on…this is someone very important I need to talk to?”.  I said sure and then he started playing the show’s theme music into the phone.  It was pretty funny. 

I hope you had a good April Fools and we’ll see you next year.

If you want to listen to the show here’s the link:

http://deepfriedbytes.com/news/episode-30-the-biggest-guest-in-the-world/

Have you ever felt like the world was moving at the speed of light, yet you were just doing your own thing?  That’s how I’ve felt lately.  It seems everyone has tons of stuff to talk about on their blogs and Twitter.  I decided I was going to force myself to write a blog article this morning to start my Christmas vacation off and after thinking about what I was going to blog about it hit me.  I don’t have anything to blog or twitter about!  Call it a Blog / Twitter Slump if you will.  Then I started writing and things started to flow so much that I broke this post into a series of blog posts entitled “A blog post about nothing”, each one dealing with a different segment.

What’s Happening in Life

Here is a story for you.  Back in May or June (I can’t remember exactly) I woke up and took a shower and decided to cook a sausage and biscuit for breakfast.  I buy the Mary B’s Southern Made biscuits.  If you have never had these biscuits, they are the best and taste just like what Mom used to make at home on Saturday mornings when I was growing up.  There were two biscuits left in the bag and they were stuck together.  I took them out and tried to get them apart by hand, then a knife, and then I made the mistake of hitting them on the stove.  I didn’t think I was hitting them that hard but on the third hit on the stove the biscuits crashed through the stove top.  Yep, I broke our stove with a biscuit! 

Our stove, rest it’s soul, had a ceramic top.  It just so happened I was hitting the stove with the biscuit right in the center in the weakest part.  Ellen got up later and saw the mess I had made.  By the way I did defeat the biscuits and cooked them for breaking my stove.  When she came in and saw the mess she said, “Great…. it will be Thanksgiving before you replace the stove.”. 

Since it was during the summer we really didn’t miss the stove that much.  I grill out a lot of fresh veggies on the grill during the summer so it wasn’t that bad.  Plus we had some other things like a griddle we could cook on.  As colder weather started getting here I started missing the stove more and more.  But for some reason kept putting off getting another one.  Not sure why.  I think it has to do with the whole experience of going to Home Depot or Lowes, I hate dealing with them because they make things so hard.  If I could have just ordered it online I would have done it already.

Fast forward to the day before Thanksgiving.  Ellen came in from work and I said we are going to town.  I didn’t tell her where we were going.  She got in and we went to Home Depot and ordered a stove.  Yep, I couldn’t let her prophecy come true.  We had a good laugh about it.  Technically she was right because the stove didn’t arrive until the next Wednesday after Thanksgiving but at least I had bought it *before* Thanksgiving.

Read Part 1
Read Part 2
Read Part 4

I was in the sporting goods store the other day and came across this.  Had to take a picture.

Apparently someone named Elder makes socks.  Who knew.

I just noticed something this morning. I have an infatuation with the word “bytes”.  Yep. I just recognized that.  I had a #TwitterTribe member visiting from Tennessee last night and after we migrated to the computer we started talking about past blogs and other stuff.  We were discussing redirects and combining blogs and that’s when I pulled up my old ZorKa blog (which isn’t available for viewing anymore so no link).  After switching back and forth between my old site and this site I realized something that I hadn’t noticed before.  My old blog title had the word “Bytes” in it and our new podcast has the word “Bytes” in it as well.

There is obviously something going on in the universe.  Coincidence?  I THINK NOT!

Previous Blog Name

Our Podcast

By the way, if you haven’t listened to the show check it out!  http://deepfriedbytes.com. 

Yesterday I was working at the computer and I got this random message from someone I didn’t recognize.  I publish my instant message and email on the Internet freely for the very reason so people can find me and contact me.  It is not unusual to have someone ping me asking for help or a friend trying to get back in touch.  I politely said hello and do I know you.  They said no they just wanted to chat.  I politely explained if we didn’t know each other I didn’t have an interest.  They said good bye and we went our separate ways.  Tonight, as a matter of fact a few minutes ago I was about to head to bed.  This same person pinged me via AIM (AOL instant messenger)  again tonight.  But this time they started throwing around four letter words and being extremely hostile.  I have no idea how old this person is but I deduced deducted by their lack of typing and spelling skills they were a first grader.  I captured the entire conversation in a screen shot.  I grayed out the first graders explicit words as to not offend anyone. Lord knows I’ve been offended enough tonight.

Here’s the conversation.  For the record my handle is in red.  The words grayed out rhyme with duck but have various spellings and combinations of duk, ducu, and duku.

I don’t even know what to say at this point except this person is an idiot and his/her parents should ground them for life.  It is ridiculous that someone feels they can hide behind a keyboard and say anything they want.  It just shows how ruthless and careless the human race can be and how far they will go if there are no boundaries in place.