View From the Bushes

I realize that I have been pretty bad about posting in my blog lately, and for that I apologize. As I mentioned in my last blog, I had some consultants from Boston on site all of last week including yesterday. As a result, every spare second I had was spent trapped in a tiny meeting room on the 1st floor. Since Monday was the last day, there was a lot of rushing around trying to cross stuff off before they flew out. This would have been bad enough by itself, but it was also the day where we republish all of the test information on the website. The two together made it one of my worst work days ever, but we weren't done yet. They also picked Monday to release the new "Employee Photo Directory," prompting everyone to drop everything they were working on and immediately rush to see what everyone's pictures looked like, causing the server to crash within a few hours.

I could go on, but hopefully you have the picture. The point is the last thing I had the time or the energy for was another blog entry. Speaking of blog entries, on my last entry my wife mentioned that she thought I had a certain amount of charisma; my friends all retorted that sure, I could tell an engaging story, but I was not charismatic. My wife wondered, if holding people's attention while speaking wasn't charisma, what was? At this point I had to explain to her that in Dungeons and Dragons, there is no attribute to represent physical attractiveness, and as a result charisma had to stand in for beauty. Since so much of my friends' worldview is formed by D&D, when my wife said I had charisma, they took it to mean that I was good-looking, and the one thing they are all sure of is that I am not attractive...

Finally, and I was hoping to have a link to the original contest, my Dad told me (and my wife) about a math problem, or perhaps a better word is puzzle, he'd been struggling with. Using the numbers 1, 2 and 3 only once, along with any mathematical symbol, form an equation that equals 19. Initially it doesn't look that bad, but the more you struggle with it the harder you realize it is. I don't know the answer, so far as I know nobody knows the answer, but I'm throwing it out there and we'll see what happens.

Still reeling from yesterday
Ross