Name Changed To Protect The Jerkstores

Hooray for impromptu mountain climbing!  

Nono...you mean the other one.

Oh yeah...BOOOOOOOO!!!

So, today's Sametime Status is brought to you courtesy of my mildly overstated pain and suffering.  As you're probably aware, I'm an engineer by trade, not a professional mountain climber.  That said, there are some large hills in the Greater Jeremy Area which are somewhat generously called mountains.  On occasion, some of my friends and I will get together to climb (read: mostly walk uphill, with some small measure of scrambling involved) one of them.  On a nice day in the summer, with appropriate attire and footwear, with water and snacks, it's a rather pleasant experience, if tiring.  On an unseasonably warm December day while wearing jeans and a long sleeved shirt and sneakers, with wet leaves covering the path, it's not great.  One might go so far as to say it sucks.  

I would be one of those Ones.  

So, what prompted my impromptu journey up a mountain which, for strictly Blag purposes, we'll call "Mount Jerkstore"?  A slight miscommunication and a lack of attentiveness.  I participated in a puzzle-based land race over the weekend.  It was fun and mentally stimulating, to be sure.  One of the clues made mention of climbing Mount Jerkstore, at the base of which is a staircase to get you the first 10 stories or so up.  The puzzle, which I can't be bothered to look up, involved finding your team's ribbon "at the top."  One of the race organizers also made mention over the phone (to another team, so I was only involved peripherally) that in one of the race's events, "you'll be climbing Mount Jerkstore."  My teammate and I had resolved ourselves to the fact that we'd be climbing to the top of the mountain to find our ribbon.  Up we went.  

At the top of Mount Jerkstore, there is a lovely scenic overlook of towns and a river and pretty much everything else, since you're at the top of a freakin' mountain.  What there was not was a collection of team ribbons.  We looked.  After a while of scratching our heads, we placed a call to the race organizers to ask about the rough location of the ribbons.  We'd achieved the difficult part of scaling Mount Jerkstore, so giving away the ribbon location seemed to be within the spirit of the competition.  

As it turns out, the ribbons were located at the top of the staircase, some 90 or so stories down.  

We did not win the race. 

Couldn't Have Thought Of This On Friday, Could You?

Lucky me!  Two consecutive Software Update days!  Yay!  

Jeremy loves Software Update Day.  It's his second favorite day after Password Day.  Incidentally, that's coming up later this week.  Stay tuned!


If you're like me, at any given time, you have about a dozen different windows open on your work desktop at any given time.  An email client, a web browser with a couple different tabs, a word processor document, a spreadsheet or two, maybe a Powerpoint presentation that you're working on, an instant messenger, your meeting calendar, a notepad window, a couple pdf's that you're supposed to be reading, but can never quite find a time to get through.  It's the way of things.

So every now and again, we're forced to install a new software update, usually for something that I never use, for a problem that I never have.  That update requires me to restart my computer.  

That means closing down my email client, all of my browser windows, my word processor, the spreadsheet...you get the idea.  It's annoying, and at least mildly unnecessary most times.  

Well, today marks the second consecutive work day that this nonsense has happened to me.  Great way to start off a monday.  Jerks. 

Worst Part: We Sent It A Text Message

We’re just teasing Pluto now.  We should just leave it alone after dumping it from the solar system  

In case you were caught all unawares by the latest science news, the space probe "New Horizons" had its historic fly-by of Pluto yesterday after a 9 1/2 year journey through the solar system.  The probe is currently sending back photos to NASA, which are being revealed in press conferences throughout the day today.  It's really very exciting.  

Except for the fact that we don't love Pluto anymore.  

In 2005, a full 75 years after Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, the definition of "planet" was changed.  Late in 2006, Pluto was reclassified and left out in the cold.  Literally and figuratively...it's pretty stupid cold out in space, particularly 3.7 billion miles from the sun.  It was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" and simply an object floating around in the Kuiper belt.  It's really quite sad for Pluto.  

We didn't know this was going to happen back in early 2006 when New Horizons was launched.  We still liked Pluto then and considered it a member of out little solar system and mnemonic about nine pizzas.  We were all very happy together, but as happens all the time, we made plans a little too far in advance, and they turned awkward later.  

Fast forward to 2015, and the little dwarf planet that we dumped mere months after sending out a probe to say hi is back in the news.  Pluto is once again reminded of us by having New Horizons pass within 7800 miles of the planet, akin to stalking it on Facebook.  It's a little creepy of us, in hindsight.  Pluto is left wondering if we could have had a future together as a solar system, but we've long since moved on, finding planets in other star systems throughout the universe.  

People are jerks.