A FELD disfunctional family Christmas

Look who had to wear Rudolph blinkers on their nose to hide all the poo:



I miss that place like AIDS.

Sometimes good news comes in bad packages

:

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Subject: Followup to our meeting yesterday
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 09:22:45 -0500
From: Alison O'Brien
To: John Eisenschmidt
CC: Pam Allen, Jan Ward

John,

After checking further with Assistant Dean Pam Allen, I wanted to get
back to you on our discussion on Monday. Based on your comments
regarding the one course needed at NVCC to complete your Associate of
Arts or Associate of Science (not sure which), it makes more sense for
you to request a delay in your acceptance to Mason, complete your degree
at NVCC and then reapply to Mason. You can return to NVCC to complete
your degree, even though you have applied to Mason; this is refreshing
since it makes sense to me pedagogically, and economically.

Before you request a delay, please make an appointment with an academic
advisor at NVCC to confirm how many courses you have left in your degree
program. Please also confirm that you will be awarded an Associate of
Arts or an Associate of Science degree, not the applied degree Associate
of Applied Science. The rules for transfer and general education
requirement satisfaction are quite different with these types of degrees.

Please note that if you do decide to complete your degree at NVCC, you
need to drop the courses that your are registered for at Mason for
spring 06 through Patriot Web. If your degree will be completed at NVCC
in the spring, you can reapply to Mason and begin your coursework during
the summer term, after a reevaluation of your transfer status. At that
point, I strongly recommend you meet with one of the academic advisors
in the School of Management. Jan Ward is our area expert on DMIS and
you can make an appointment with her by calling 703-993-1880.

Best regards,
Alison O'Brien

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I forbid you from working over the holiday!

Every Monday morning, by the time I have my coffee in hand and have broken something expensive, the Mason E-Files have found their way into my email box. These announcements are sent to staff and faculty and cover a wide range of topics: campus news, payroll information, Aquatic Center locker availability, etc.

We happen to be closed the week between Christmas and New Years, so much so that E-Files had the following this morning:

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Winter Holiday Lock Down

The university will be closed for the winter holiday from 6:00 pm on Thursday, December 22, 2005 through 6:00 am on Monday, January 2, 2006. Pursuant to this, all academic and administrative buildings (with a few exceptions) will be on lockdown throughout this period. The access control system will be programmed to secure these buildings, and they will be patrolled by our staff throughout the holiday break. Buildings not affected are: David King Hall, Science & Tech I and II, Robinson Hall A and B.

We recognize that many staff members and some students will need access to locked buildings during this time. We are happy to accommodate requests for access to facilitate essential functions. In order to streamline the process we recommend adherence to this protocol:

All faculty and staff needing access to a locked building must call the university police department. An officer will be dispatched to meet you at the building entrance. The staff member must be prepared to display George Mason University faculty or staff identification card, and the room key for interior offices. Police officers will not be authorized to grant access to interior offices or work spaces.

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If only my previous employers had made working over a holiday so difficult. I might actually get some work on my house done.

Feliz Chrisma-hana-kwanz-ica

I can't tell you how much I am enjoying The War on Christmas, so much so in fact that I decided to rank my three favorite wars in order or win-ability:

(1) The War on Christmas (winnable)
(2) The War on Drugs (un-winnable)
(3) The War on Terror (less-winnable than The War on Drugs)

More coverage of The War on Christmas [1] | [2] | [3] | [4] | [5]

Before anyone gets their knickers in a knot, it's not Jesax (the proto-Jesus) I'm lobbying against, it is in fact Hallmark. Anyone who has paid attention knows:

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1. Jesus was not born on or anywhere near December 25th according to the New Testament narrative.

2. The apostles and the early church never celebrated December 25 nor any other day as the birthday of Jesus.

3. Though the events surrounding the birth of Jesus were prominent in the New Testament, they were never associated in Bible times with any annual celebration of his birth.

4. Rather, the only celebration kept in honor of Jesus was the celebration of his death. Further, that observance did not coincide with the pagan observance of Easter, (the name comes from Ishtar, or Astarte, the ancient goddess of spring", as is done today, but it was on the day of the Jewish Passover as is well documented in the Bible.

5. The pagan festivals known an Saturnalia and Brumalia, associated with December 25th, were being celebrated during the time of Jesus's life and for centuries before. It would have been considered outright pagan for Jesus or his disciples to celebrate December 25th.

6. Saturnalia was celebrated very much like Christmas is celebrated today, with the decoration of homes and trees and garlands, round orbs, crosses, mistletoe, yule logs, wreaths, etc. It was all done, however, in honor of Mithras, the sun god.

7. Ancient Rome derived its pagan religious activities from even earlier forms of paganism in Egypt and in Babylon, condemned widely in the Bible as the worship of Baal.

8. These pagan practices were incorporated into the church in the 4th century, by the Roman emperor Constantine to further his political agenda. The church that emerged from that period was a travesty and the church of today is nothing like that of the first century.

9. Christmas celebration was exclusively a Catholic practice until as late an the early 1800s. Legends concerning Santa Claus and others have been layered upon the earlier observance since 1830 to produce the quasi-secular holiday that has become popular in our time among the protestants and the secular.

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So while any good C&E Christian can tell themself that you're celebrating the birth of their savior by putting presents under the tree, they're really just helping retailers make their Q4 targets and celebrating the expansion of Capitalism.

Bill O'Reilly is all worked up about the War on Christmas, but he has no right until he gets his facts straight. Maybe Chanukkah is more his speed, or Stickmas

And Jesax, while he doesn't get a cut of those profits, still thanks you Christmas spending. I'm almost certain that Reagan had something to do with this mess.

To be in high school again

It's been a long time since a locker room made me laugh like I did this morning.

I knew there was a swim meet going on today, but I didn't realize they were all high school kids. I finish my workout, go into the locker room, and hear the sound of a moist waffle falling onto a hot griddle in the showers. As I make my way toward the source of the noise I find some dude in there shaving his legs along with a half a dozen of his team mates.

Right on.

Quick update

I've caught up the old posts, most of them camera phone related. There is new stuff from April through September so check the archives when you get a minute.

"Son, what's a foam rave?"

A very surreal lunch today with my dotted line bosses.

Kirsten decided to talk about the nefarious things she's done at gay clubs all over DC before she settled down, got married, and ordered her son from some online womb.

Tom isn't really much of a clubber, though he and I agreed that Kirsten tends to see the line and hop right over it like a little bunny in her tales.

But neither of them had even been to a foam party, so I explained it a bit to them:






::sigh::

Is it summer yet?

No I'm not a narcissist, I'm just full of myself

I was Googling for my own name in an attempt to find something, when I discovered that Mike Willis, a professional collegue of sorts, blogged about me this past April.

I ride a very interesting line with myself, because I'm very passionate, I have an opinion about everything, and I'm happy to share it with you without regard for the immediate reaction, but I have this sick fascination with how it might have been received as a sort of post mortem.

I dealt with this a lot in July during my Leadership training. Behavior modification is not at all easy, and it's even harder to take it upon yourself to make those minor changes.

I guess it's good that I care, but whether I ever do anything about it remains to be seen.

Buddy, you're just not that interesting

I went swimming after work today at the rec center (as opposed to when I swim after work at the pool on campus), did my workout, and rolled into the locker room for a shower when I was done. The showers there are individual walled showers that face into each other, and I grabbed the only open one that was on the end closest to the door I had just come through. I had just finished a really long kick workout, so all of this involves 1/2 of 1 second of caveman think (shower open...stand under...) and while I'm washing pool chemicals and child urine off myself, I become aware of some douche bag yammering at his buddies.

This is a pretty big pool, and they have a lot going on, but my guess by the ages of the guys, the time of night, and how many of them there are that this is a Masters swim team that just finished their workout. Whatever. I'm not really paying attention but this dude keeps fucking yammering -- he's the ony one talking, and then I zone into what he's talking about: his fucking SF-86 and how the people who filled it out did it on paper. ::gasp::

For those of you fortunate to have never worked anywhere near the Federal Government, Standard Form 86 is a piece of preliminary paperwork required for any National Security position. This, and fucking a Senator, are the two most bragged about let-downs in Washington, DC. For real.

Buddy, I know you think you're hot shit, that you're gonna get your Clearance, but guess what? The janitors at NSA have TS/SCI with codeword -- you're going to be cleared for TS with Secret access so you can join the growing numbers of oxygen thiefs riding the bench for some beltway bandit looking to cash in on this round of defense spending.

That's why I called him a douche bag earlier, but that isn't the purpose of this post. See, dude had another personality defect that I zeroed in on as I'm leaving the shower area. All these dudes are still showering and still talking, and as I'm walking past them to my locker I notice that chatterbox is the only one who has taken his bathing suit off, and is standing face out to these other guys while he's talking. Alright, I actually think it's weird when I work out in the morning and the swim team at Mason shower in their bathing suits, but I can go either way on that argument.

I need you to put on your thinking cap to picture the locker room: looking down it's square shaped, and on the left running vertically are the showers and the steam room, just to the right of the showers (still vertical) is the wet area and benches, then just to the right running horizontally are five rows of lockers. Mine is all the way in the back (bottom), so I go there and get changed, and I have to walk toward the front to get to the exit. So while I'm getting dressed I still here the yap machine going on like he's trying to get laid, telling some story about how his girl got called by an FBI agent blah blah blah, and I realize as I'm walking out that he's totally changing out in the wet area which is kind of odd. Why? So he can be near the dude who seemed the least bored in the shower area and finish bragging about how his life is being turned upside down.

Definately not a "gay" issue, but a definate boundry issues. It's like that farting dude that everyone knows that you just want to shake and be like "dude, get your ass fixed", someone needs to be like "even if I was into man junk, the last 20 minutes is more than a lifetime worth".

Skippity do-dah

My new work Powerbook and I need to go to therapy to resolve the conflict that we're having:

it thinks it should skip playing MP3s in iTunes, I think it should just play them like my personal Powerbook

This is a really odd problem to troubleshoot, especially given the feedback other people having the same problem have provided. The only difference between work and home happens to be the OS version -- home is still Panther 10.3.9 and work is Tiger 10.4.3 -- but other people running Panther are having the same issue.

It's not a processor speed issue, because CPUs slower than 1.67 are having the issue. Many people report AACs are ok and MP3s are skipping, and one person observed this issue with a DVD as well.

A real nut-scratcher of a problem.