Yeah, that’s right. My creative side took over. I’ve been working on this since last week when I was in Colorado, although I’ve been thinking about doing a new theme for quite a while. It’s called “Iowa Winter 2″ because I’ve already done “Iowa Winter 1″. It will be available for download later tonight (or early tomorrow morning, depending upon how you look at it) on my wiki.

I did two things different that I’m going to include in a revamped version of all my themes. First off, I made ALL of the “My Meta” widget items graphical buttons. Earlier themes had the Login, Logout, Register and Site Admin links as words; no more! Also, I made the “Current Weather” widget configurable without going into the code. In earlier versions of this widget, you had to hack the functions.php file in order to change the city (unless you wanted it to show Muscatine, Iowa as the city). I made the city configurable in the widget.

Let me know what you think of it!

Had a long stroll in the parking lot from the car to the front door today and was noticing the bumper stickers. The one that really caught my eye was: “Guns don’t kill people any more than spoons made Rosie O’Donnell fat.”

KC and I managed to return home without any delays, which is a minor miracle if the Weather Channel had anything to do with it. First off, the meteorologists (weather forecasters for those of you in Rio Linda) proved once again that they cannot predict the weather; which begs the question “If they can’t predict the weather tomorrow, how can they predict the weather 10, 20 or 50 years from now?”. (For those of you who STILL kneel at the global warming altar, read this, this, this, this, this, this, or even this.) Denver was to get 10-16 inches of snow on Saturday night according to the stations there; they might have got a dusting — I did see two snowflakes conversing. In fact, it was long sleeved T-shirt weather there: sunny and 50°-60°. Iowa, in the mean time, was being dumped on in a big way. Most of eastern Iowa lost power due to an ice storm that had up to 2 inches of the stuff accumulating on power lines and weighing them down before finally snapping some of them. The meteorologists predicted that Iowa would stay below freezing and get up to 8 inches of snow on top of the 2 inches of ice. Well, that’s not exactly what happened either. It got warmer as the night went on (still colder than the average temperature for the last 30 years for this day) and all that ice turned into a giant 7-11 Slurpee. Our flight wasn’t delayed and we had no problems. Heck, the roads weren’t even slick, just wet. Yeah, global warming…. right.

So I’m blogging from Colorado! You see, KC had to come to Denver for business and what needed to be done was going to take from 4 to 6 hours (her estimate) and it would have cost her company a lot more if she had turned around and came back the next day so… we decided to make a mini-vacation out of it. I came out with her (I had to pay my own air fare) and she finished her business yesterday (it took almost 5 hours) and now we’re visiting my brother Michael, his wife Carrie and their son Grant. We’ll fly back home on Sunday, which will save her company quite a bit on the air fare.

The cool thing is that I initially contacted Carrie and we decided to keep the whole thing a secret from Michael. In her words, Michael has surprised her in the past with her family visiting and this would be a first for her to be able to surprise him with his family visiting. We’ve managed to keep it a secret for a couple of weeks. He didn’t know we were going to be here at all and was quite surprised when he came in to the conference room where Carrie works expecting to pick up Grant and take him home and found KC and I instead. I wish our camera was working then (the batteries weren’t charged); the look on his face was priceless.

Tonight we are going to a micro-brewery that also serves “pretty good food” for dinner and I’m not sure what the plan is for tomorrow. We were going to try to hook up with an uncle who also lives in the area, but it doesn’t sound like that’s going to work out. Heck, we may just go over to the Flat Iron Hills Mall and just walk around. All I know is I’m going to enjoy my time here, especially the time with Grant. Our flight leaves Sunday late morning, so we’ll be getting back home mid-afternoon. (Just in time to do loads of laundry — UGH!!)

An elderly couple was attending church services…

About halfway through the service, she leans over and says to her husband, “I just let out a silent fart - what do you think I should do?”

He replies,

Not by a long shot. I’ve not heard of this one before. Holy crap. So a guy uses his work computer to go to an adult chat room to relieve post-traumatic stress disorder from his Vietnam experiences? And thinks he can then NOT take personal responsibility for it? And thinks he can blame it on being addicted to the internet? And going to chat rooms for post-traumatic stress led to adult chat rooms and he became a sex addict as well? Oh… my… f*(#ing… God!

I don’t know about your place of work, but ours is monitored. We have a proxy server in place that is invisible to the end user but filters a multitude of sites as well as logs ALL incoming and outgoing traffic. That’s not to say that someone monitors the logs, but that the logs are there to be monitored. We also require the end-user to sign an appropriate use agreement before that user will be granted internet privileges. Our intranet (internal to our company) is available to everyone, but internet access is NOT granted to everyone and is definitely NOT a free pass. Now, I work for an office furniture manufacturer and NOT one of the largest tech companies in the world. I can’t imagine that IBM doesn’t have such a monitoring process in place. If they do (probably a 99%+ chance), this guy is TOAST. If they don’t, it might be a tough win for the guy anyway.

The only legitimate complaint the guy may have is age discrimination. However, if IBM can show him guilty of the other stuff, the age discrimination won’t be a factor at all. My God, the guy goes to a questionable site at work and expects no repercussions? What the heck is wrong with people today?

Once again, a rave about the bathrooms at work. We share our main bathrooms in IT with one of our plants. I’d like to think that the folks that we have working in IT are above all this and lay the blame for this fiasco at the feet of our plant workers. I just don’t have proof that it’s them doing this.

I get to the bathroom earlier today to drop some friends off at the pool. We have four stalls in the bathroom and two are busy. One of the other two has handicap access, so I tend not to use that either; so, I step into stall #3. Holy shit, Batman! The last person who was here left his friends and a huge wad of toilet paper!

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? Seeing such a display, even in a convenience store’s restroom, makes me think “What do the bathrooms in these peoples’ homes look like?”. I mean REALLY! How hard is it to push down the lever (twice, of course) and flush your friends and your TP down the stool? Do these morons do the same thing at home? Back when I was a high school teacher, I was often confronted with the same situation and even then I wondered what their home bathrooms looked like. Of course, many of those “students” I taught then were truly shit-for-brains morons and probably couldn’t find the flush handle on a urinal or stool. But now? Most of those who use the restrooms here are over 21 and SHOULD be mature enough to flush after themselves. I think…. well, maybe not.

Get your special someone some flowers, some candy, SOMETHING! And let them know that you care.

A man in Topeka, Kansas, decided to write a book about churches around the country. He started by flying to San Francisco, and started working east from there.

Going to a very large church, he began taking photographs and making notes. He spotted a golden telephone on the vestibule wall, and was intrigued with a sign which read, “$10,000 per minute.”

Seeking out the pastor, he asked about the phone and the sign. The pastor answered that the golden phone is, in fact, a direct line to Heaven, and if he pays the price, he can talk directly to God.

The man thanked the pastor and continued on his way.

As he continued to visit churches in Seattle, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Milwaukee, and around the United States, he found more such phones, with the same sign, and the same explanation from each pastor. Then he remembered he had not stopped in Iowa.

Finally, the man arrived in the lovely state of Iowa. Upon entering a church, behold: he saw the usual golden telephone. But THIS time, the sign read: “Calls: 25 cents”!

Fascinated, the man asked to speak with the pastor. “Reverend, I have been in cities all across the country and in each church I have found this golden telephone, and have been told it is a direct line to Heaven, and that I could use it to talk to God. But in 20 other churches, the cost was $10,000 per minute. Your sign says 25 cents per call. Why is that?

A husband and wife were sharing a bottle of wine when the husband said, “I bet you can’t tell me something which will make me happy and sad at the same time.”

The wife thought for a few moments, then said,

No, not my snail mail address and not my email address. The blog address changed… slightly. Now, the root of my blog is at the root of the domain. Simply point your browser to http://www.benched42.net/ for all your View-from-the-Bench goodness!

Other changes will be coming as I’ve decided to use subdomains instead of subdirectories for certain things (like the wiki and the photo gallery). But this one is the biggest.

Please update your links!

No, not the song by The Knack off their great “Get The Knack” album. I’m frustrated with ViewSonic. Back in December, I bought a monitor and printer from Fry’s Electronics. The monitor is a 20″ widescreen LCD monitor made by ViewSonic and the printer is a Canon MP160 All-In-One. The monitor cost $299 but had a $90 rebate; the printer cost $70 and had two rebates that totaled $70. So essentially I get the printer and monitor for $209, a great deal. I got the status of the rebates from Canon and they are processing them - I should get them in a month or so. ViewSonic, on the other hand, has been a struggle.

First off, I get an email with a link telling me there may be delays in getting the rebate. The link takes me to the exact rebate number I was issued and the status was “We are sending you a letter explaining the situation.” Wow. They can’t publish it here? Well, OK. So yesterday I get the letter. It said I didn’t include the UPC - well, I still have the box and the scanned letter and UPC that I sent. I did, in fact, send the UPC. There are no other UPC bar codes on the box, so I HAD to have sent it. In the letter, there was a phone number to call if I had questions - I did. The letter stated that I could call between 8am and 7pm Central Time. Since it was after 7pm, I had to wait until the next day.

So this morning at 8:05am, I’m on the phone. I dialed their number and waited 20 minutes (that’s right 20 minutes) on hold before speaking to someone. (”Your call is important to us. Please hold. Calls are answered in the order they are queued.”) After explaining that I did send the UPC I was told that she had to order the paperwork to see what I had sent and it would be a week before she got the paperwork. Excuse me? A WEEK? A frickin’ WEEK to get paperwork? Well, the 20 minutes set me off right away; now THIS? I voiced my frustration and she said “We deal in a large volume, sir”. Hah! I replied that I work for the largest office furniture manufacturer in the world and we also deal with large volume and if we had to tell a customer that they had to wait a WEEK just to get paperwork on a sale that we would go from a $2.5 billion company to a $2.5 thousand company very quickly. Our customer service reps can pull up invoice information in a matter of seconds on our computer system.

Well, after a bit of polite but firm statements from me I found I still had to wait a week for her to determine the rebate status. She was polite enough but I’m still angry about having to wait a frickin’ week before finding out if I still can get my rebate from ViewSonic. The monitor is great, but don’t EVER put yourself in a position to try to get a rebate from them! I know I won’t EVER do that again.