it's been awhile...

sorry mr. crazysmallcell I will follow up on my previous post..

so, activity day was.... interesting.

The day started off with each person being placed into a designated team. From here was a bunch of very basic team-building type games, one particularly odd one being "Fear Factor", which involved sticking your hand into a bunch of milk/oatmeal/dirt to pick out letters that eventually spelt out a number of company X products. It was not particularly challenging but almost sort of disturbing when I heard of some people actually voluntarily go bobbing for letters with their face. I can only hope that I was before these odd people otherwise I was likely sticking my hand into some of their nasty saliva as well. The main driving or motivational force behind it all was the promise of a "prize" for the top team. Although we were fairly certain this prize would be some meaningless company X paraphenalia (and it was) it was enough to push us along and get us into the whole spirit of things. The low point of the day likely being when my team failed to come up with a cheer and me needing to crack out some of my "bring it on" type moves. You know your team is in trouble when I am the one coming up with the ideas for a cheer.

Following these team building games came some decent bbq and then a "round table discussion between some company x leaders". The talk was interesting but there were some definite boring points and repitition. It's hard for me to take what a lot of these people say and apply it to what I'm doing now as it seems they were moving up in the company in a totally different time period. They entered the work force when their skills were a great commodity (ie. the abscence of millions of indian programmers willing to work for a tenth of what we get) and when company was growing very rapidly. I don't see how anyone can really enter at the bottom of company X and move up very far without being absoloutely extraordinary, ie. hardworking and being able to kiss some behind. After the round table discussion was a bunch of boring lectures followed by some good strawberry shortcake. It's funny what you end up remembering.....

After the end of activity day was our first slopitch game. And what a fiasco that was. This was during the period of my arm problems so I had to place myself into the areas where underhand throwing was an asset, which of course put me at the pitcher position. I don't remember a whole bunch but I do know we got destroyed. Hopefully the other teams are not as good otherwise it'll be a very long season.

.... on a totally different note... I am hoping that company x will come through on a nice linux desktop for me. I would like to rekindle some of that linux skill I worked so dearly to obtain last summer. Although I would curse good old tux (the linux penguin) a lot of the time, it was truly a love-hate relationship. There's nothing like a good terminal window....

it's kind of late and I'm tired so I'll have to end it there. I of course would like to post more but the postings would have to focus on company x and there isn't much I can write about without getting into supposed shady confidential areas. anyhoo, I'll try my best...
bye