disjoint thoughts

Today I awoke and got up at my normal hour, but I won’t be driving into the office today. The company I work for, OpenRain, has been acquired by another web development company called redPear. As such, they decided not to give the entire OpenRain staff jobs at their company.

So now I’m here, on a Monday morning, writing about OpenRain with a heavy heart. OpenRain was one of the most fun places I’ve had the privilege to work. The light hearted atmosphere made it easy to joke and laugh at anytime. The projects were ever changing. I think I worked on five different projects my time there, each one presented its own set of challenges and gave me a refreshing start after coming off the previous project. The schedule was flexible, allowing me to pursue rock climbing and other crazy passions I have in my life that sometimes take more than a normal weekend. And the technology was always changing, I always felt pushed to use the latest and greatest stuff and to stay a little ahead of the game… or innovate and come up with something new.

OpenRain might be my favorite job I’ve ever held. The AI Lab at the UofA is the only place that competes with it. Both of them had many similar qualities… lots of smart people to work with, changing projects, innovating.

So what happens next? I really wish I knew. I think today I’ll go visit Erin at her kindergarten class, drop by the unemployment office, update my resume, and start trying to find another job. After today, I have no clue what the future holds. Keep your fingers crossed for good things!

Fridays working at OpenRain are awesome! Let me break it down for yall.

First off on Friday everyone gets free lunch. Who doesn’t like free lunch? We all take a quick poll of what people want to eat and we order delivery!

Secondly, every other week we take our food into the conference room and watch various tech videos from conferences, postcasts or whatever. I think this week we’re going to watch a couple of Merb videos.

Thirdly, alternating with the weeks where we watch videos, we talk about everything we’ve done in the past two weeks. We talk about what we’ve done wrong, what we’ve done right, how we’re going to improve, and who’s going to do what to make things better. We talk about client projects, OpenRain projects, personal projects, goals, dreams, and everything that’s on our minds. If you’re a scrum person, these are basically sprint reviews for us.

Finally, once the work day is over, there’s a fridge full of various beers to start happy hour off right at the office.

I love grilling. It is by far my favorite method of cooking. It’s simple, quick, and requires very little cleanup. Grilled steak is a classic meal and one of my favorites, but what to do with the leftovers? Leftover steak always gets cold and hard in the fridge and I’ve never known the best thing to do with it. It usually ends up in the trash after a week or so.

The days of thrown out steak are numbered! Fear not leftover steak! I will save you from the evil clutches of the trash bin! How will I do it? By using these delicious recipes:

http://leftoversteakrecipes.com/

Let’s say you have an awesome parking spot. Maybe not as cool as the parking spots we have at OpenRain, but a good one nonetheless.

What do you do if someone else jacks your spot? Leave them a nice, passive aggressive, note for them:

Worked for me!

Are you wanting to develop rock hard abs? Is the lack of a six pack impeding on your ability to attract members of the opposite sex? Is most exercise you get on a daily bases coming from your Wii? If you’ve answered “YES!” to any of these questions, the Wii Sports Ab Workout might be your road to success.

Follow these easy steps to get started with the Wii Sports Ab Workout:

Step #1: Load up Wii Sports and start a round of boxing.
Step #2: Hold the Wiimote with the toes on your right foot (If you cannot hold the Wiimote between your toes, you may consider attaching them to your feet, or a pair of sandals, using medical tape).
Step #3: Hold the Nunchuck with the toes on your left foot.
Step #4: Lay on the floor.
Step #5: BOX!

Note: you cannot use your arms/elbows to prop yourself up! It will require the use of your abs if you want to watch the screen.

For an extra bonus, play with a friend! The shear hilarity of the experience will make surely make you laugh until tears roll down your cheeks and thus increase the burn to your abdomen even further!

Want a CHEAP ipod touch case? Too lazy to order a real case online? Are you just plain crazy? Well follow these easy steps to create a great ghetto ipod touch case…

1. Buy a pack of Dentyne ice gum.
2. Chew the gum, all of it.

3. Remove plastic.
4. Slide ipod into your brand new Dentyne ice iPod Touch case.

5. (OPTIONAL) Cut hole into case so you can control music without removing touch from its case.

6. …
7. Profit?

Pretty sweet case, huh? Huh? I rate it a solid 2 out of 10.

AutoblogGreen has a post about Volvo teaching driving techniques to increase MPG. They claim “The results is that simple skills allow an average reduction of 8-10 percent in gas usage, although 15 percent can be achieved easily.” which is right along the lines of what my gas mileage vs driving behavior experiment reveled where I saw a reduction of almost 12 percent in gas useage.

Awesome camelbak tip from sketchy over on the steepandcheap forums:

“if you’re bringing a camelbak with a cocktail in it to any place that you may be searched (e.g. concert, football game, etc.), make sure you fill the tube with regular water before you fill the bladder. that way if the security people ask you if they can taste it to make sure you’re not bringing alcohol in, they’ll taste the water that’s in the hose, and the joke will be on them.”

I hate eating fast food, but sometimes I can’t work up the motivation to make something from scratch. When I do decide to pick up something quick, I prefer to get something somewhat healthy… or at least not horrible for my body. Here’s an awesome compilation of nutrition information for popular chain restaurants.

So it’s been several weeks since I originally started my gas mileage experiment. I’ve been having troubling finding the time/motivation to blog lately, but better late than never eh?

Under VERY conservative driving, I was able to squeeze out 26.2 miles per gallon. After filling my tank again I spent the next tank driving a more aggressively. Not like an insane person, but I definitely let my foot hit the floor more than I normally do.

After a total of 218.9 high-g-force miles I refilled my tank and recalculated my gas mileage. I ended up doing 23.42 miles per gallon. Much better than I had expected! Only 2.78 fewer miles per gallon of gas used, or 11.78% worse mileage. I had expected to get my gas mileage down around 20 miles per gallon!

I suppose I should be happy that my driving style doesn’t have a HUGE effect on my gas consumption, but at the same time I was hoping for some shocking results. Maybe next time I want to see how low I can get my mileage, I’ll bring it down to the track and do some drag racing. That should do the trick.