It's Thursday, yet it's the weekend

This week, my company "let" us work four 10-hr days, and take Friday off. It's the 2nd time they've done it, but I was on vacation the last time. So this week, I woke up at my normal time every morning, but instead of hitting snooze 18 times, I got up, stood in half-slumber in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, then either plugged in the laptop at home or headed to work for some early meetings. A few late evenings and working around the kids' after school activities, and I'm done on a Thursday night! All in all, probably worth it for an extra day off, but not something I'd love to do every week.

On Wednesday, I attended a lovely breakfast reception for the Utah chapter of Operation Smile, an organization with whom my company has recently partnered. Due to the early start (7:30 am), I did not brew my home coffee as usual but instead thought, "I'll just get the coffee there!"

[quiet inner voice] Well, the meeting is at the "Joseph Smith Memorial Building". Don't the Mormons reject coffee and most caffeinated products?
[louder inner voice] Yes, but this is not a church-related event. It's an opportunity for non-profits and corporations to come together and celebrate in perfect harmony! With coffee!

Needless to say, the event provided any breakfast lover's best choices (eggs benny, potatoes, fruit, pastries, juices) but NO java. My inner voices combined to drown out any and all speakers or musicians (Osmond, of course), repeating, "What? Really? Is that a carafe over there? How do I get coffee? Where am I going to get coffee? When is this over? Is there a coffee shop within 1 block of my location? Is that a headache I'm getting? Is this some cruel joke, orchestrated just for me to sit in disbelief and confusion? How do I get coffee?"

The potatoes helped shake me out of my funk, and I listened as my company's CEO told the cookie story and introduced our partnership. It really was a tremendous event. The local community is perfectly built for the Operation Smile charity: educated and well respected dentists and plastic surgeons, a strong volunteer base, and people comfortable with travelling globally (missionary influence). It's no wonder they are one of the strongest chapters of the global charity. The partnership has given our employees a shot in the arm, too, after a pretty morale-crushing past 12 months. We raised over $17,000 through employee fundraisers and vendor donations, and are building programs for our product lines to start contributing, too.

After a pretty packed week, I'm diggin' my day off tomorrow. Annie, being the really hard worker of the family, will be working and the kids are at Grandma's, so it's another day of freedom for me. I'm praying no major home emergencies arise between now and then, like the ceiling fan detaching and flying through the slider and killing a neighborhood cat. Actually, I wouldn't be totally devastated by that. If nothing else, it would give me something great to write about. The post would start something like:

"So yesterday, the ceiling fan detached and flew through the slider and killed a neighborhood cat! As expected, I wasn't totally devastated."

Marketers

http://www.savagechickens.com/2006/09/marketing.html

U/P Overload

U/P Overload is coming. It has nothing to do with the Upper Peninsula, Michiganders. It's a new phenomenon in which your brain reaches maximum capacity on one tiny part of its memory: Usernames and Passwords. And it's coming for society. Think it's not?

Allow me to remind you the myriad forms U/Ps take: account nicknames, frequent flier #s, credit/debit card #s, that 3-digit code thingy on the back of credit/debit cards, padlock combos, garage or car door codes, social security #, student ID, employee ID, copy machine account code (at my work, it's different for the color and b/w copiers - seriously), any one of your seven email addresses, and don't even get me started on the dreaded PIN! Incidentally, it's not PIN #, because PIN stands for Personal Identification Number. You wouldn't say, "Personal Identification Number Number", would you? Well, maybe if you were playing that drinking game, which I heard about from a friend, where you create a rule that everyone must say the last word of any sentence twice twice. You have PINs for voice mail access on your mobile and work phones, online account access, ATM cards, debit swipe machines, your fuel rewards card, telephone banking, your wife's ATM card ... er, you get the idea.

Website access is clearly the worst offender, though. At work alone I have usernames and passwords, which may or may not be the same, for the following sites: intranet, expense reports, payroll, benefits, half a dozen vendors (all with different 'rules' for password wackiness), logging on to the network, and, of course, logging back on to the network after I step away for five, no, three seconds. "It's for your security!", they say. I also have several files and folders protected by passwords. Again, that's just at work. How many personal online accounts do you access? If you're like me, at least a dozen. But if you're under the age of 22, it's ranging somewhere around 18 Jillion.

"But Steve," you might say if you were inclined to speak out loud to a web log, "don't you use the same username and password for a lot of those?" Well, yes. Sometimes. When they let you. But over here, it's your full email address and an eight character password. Simple enough. However, over there, it's just the username part of the email address followed by a 6-to-10 character password which includes at least one capital letter and no, and I mean NO swear-word symbols. $#%^@! And back on that site, you get to make up a cute account nickname (bobbin4apples), choose a visual queue (I'll take the rubber ducky), and use your keyboard to type the letters that correspond to the numbers on the on-screen keypad. Ahhhhh, the letter 2.

Well, how do we manage all this information without totally losing it, literally AND figuratively? We create cheat sheets, of course! Don't act like you don't have one. A sticky note here and there. A Word document, deftly hidden on our hard drive and not on the shared network - password protected, of course. Or maybe we just make SURE SURE SURE that we use word/number combinations that we just can't forget! Note to everyone: Stop using your oldest child's birth date in 8-digit format as your password. Because then we all know your password. 03131975 isn't fooling anyone!

Fortunately, technology will eventually catch up and provide us with new solutions. Take Apple, for instance. Their Mac computers have an application called "Keychain" which stores U/P combinations for websites and other stuff. Of course, it has an administrative password, for when you need to remember your actual passwords. And kudos for calling it "Keychain", because I can't think of any personal item people lose less than keys. Seriously, what word better completes the sentence, "Honey, I can't find my ____"? Maybe "cell phone", which is also where you keep that notepad entry with all your password reminders. See why U/P Overload is a serious threat?

Enjoy the confusion while you can, I guess. Soon, when we're systematically implanted with RFID tags broadcasting everything about us and our brains are integrated with the World Wide Head, which controls everything - sort of like The Force, but with a wireless network - we won't have the option to use the Spanish word for "orange" followed by "1" as our password any longer. And that, my friends, is a day in which I will click the Log Off button one final time.

Okay, that was a bit melodramatic.

Can't you imagine the conversations of that fully integrated web-human future?

[3 guys, gathered around the holographic copier]

"Hey, do you remember 'logging on to the network'? Man, what a crazy time that was."

"You aren't kidding. I used to log on to the network 5, 6 times a day. Never thought twice about it."

"Did you ever log on to the network, then log off, then try and log in as someone else, just to see what it was like?"

"Only EVERY DAY!"

"HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Yeah. Hey, I just realized we're inter-men, and we can't think or feel or experience anything on our own anymore."

"Oh @#$%^&"

This was cooler than it reads

Something very strange happened today. With kids at their Grandma's and wife working late, I packed up my gym bag this morning for a post-work workout, making sure I set 'record' on the Tigers/Pale Sox game since I would likely miss several innings. Work was work-like, and not strange at all. Lunch was entirely normal. My drive to the gym? Smooth sailing, and had an excellent discussion (on the bluetooth - safety first) with Murray, who, with his doctorly knowledge and triathlete's body awareness, dropped some advice on how to control my recent hamstring aggravation. 

Lately, gym visits seem difficult to come by, so I've adopted a policy of staying a minimum of 1.5 hours, oftentimes 2, to make it worthwhile. Let's say I haven't been much of a workout freak in my life. Playing sporting games and jogging now and again? Yes. But working out for fitness' sake? Not so much. Until I turned 30. The impetus being fear of physically breaking down and losing my incredibly manly psychological edge over children. What in Insecurities' name am I rambling about?

So 1.5 hours seems plenty for me at the gym, and I make it work by cross-training. And by cross-training, I mean casually shooting basket hoops for a good hour, then doing 8 curls, then jogging for 10 minutes on some sort of futuristic moving floor apparatus, then hitting the hot tub and sauna for as much time as I can stand without shriveling up or becoming that creepy guy that is just ALWAYS in there.

Today, I started my workout like I often do, in the basketball courts. The gym I frequent is not your pick-up game type place. The court is used for local high school lacrosse practice more than basketball, but I relish the isolation at times. I still LOVE shooting. It's not because I think I'm going to become a rec-league All Star, it's because I love the rhythm and the sounds and the satisfaction of still being reasonably good at something athletic. And I don't just play H-O-R-S-E with myself, I do shooting drills. Really. I have to make 10 of 10 alternating right-then-left hand layups from under the basket (harder than you think, especially for those who played intramurals with me at GVSU and remember that 2 year period where I had layup mental block), then 8 of 10 free throws, then 6 of 10 3-pointers going back and forth from the corners of the arc to the top of the key. If I miss my goal in a given drill, I finish the 10, then start that drill over until I get them all. In between, it's just normal dribbling and shooting and imagining I actually get to take my warmups off this time- wait, that was high school. Super lame, right?

After totally sucking at free throws today, I finally hit my 80% mark, then decided it would be a good idea to test the hammies and see if a dunk was possible. Upon smashing the ball into the front of the rim, I realized another benefit of having, essentially, my own gym: lack of witnesses. This fact, however, would prove to be somewhat disappointing in a few minutes. That is, of course, because the strange event was about to happen.

Standing in the right corner, I watch the wall clock for the seconds to wind up to 0 again, knowing my 10 threes routine takes about 90 seconds. At 5:28 I loft my first shot: CLANK. Rebound, opposite corner, nail it. Retrieve ball, move back across but a bit further off the baseline, bury another. This continues until I hit my 6th trey, in 7 attempts. Nice, I'm at my goal with 3 shots to go. With minimal effort and my form locked in, I can 3 more in a row. 9 of 10 - as good as I've ever done! In my movements, I was cutting the lines a little shallow and never got to the very top of the key, straight away from the hoop. So I sauntered there and threw up another shot for good measure. Swish. 10 of 11. What the hell, I think, let's start over. Corner - boom. Opposite - boom. At 14 of 15 shots it hits me: I missed my first shot. That's 14 in a row. At this point I am starting to giggle a little bit as each shot falls. The meat heads doing lat pull downs outside the court door are probably thinking, "What's with Grinny McSkinny?" I continue my circuit and finish again at the left wing with #19 going down easy. At the top of the key I hoist again and it finally, belligerently, rattles out. 19 of 21 is sweet, but more freakishly, those 19 successfully scoring in order. 

83% of you (basically, everyone who didn't play IM hoops with me) are waiting for a point, a different tangent, a horrifying ankle sprain to spice things up. But that was it. I made 19 straight 3-pointers today, and have no witnesses to corroborate my story. I considered leaving the gym immediately and rushing to Energy Solutions Arena to apply for a job as Kyle Korver's understudy (clarification for non-Utahans: that dude can shoot and has dreamy good looks. What?), but decided instead to do strenuous actions with heavy things for a bit before calling it a workout.

I am a man, I'm 30, and I still think it's important to be good at some sort of sport. Even if 'good' means able to make shots I've practiced a jillion times, without defenders, in an empty gym. It's my world, and you're all just not witnesses.