joshkelahan.com

I found a neat website while I was looking up some information on these new reusable bags they have at Schnucks.  The bags say Schnucks on them, are made of cloth, and are supposed to be a way to cut down on the use of plastic bags.  They are easily twice the size of a standard plastic shopping bag, and obviously they won’t rip without a lot of effort on your part.  The downside? They cost $1.25.  My experience is that people will take the cheaper option (especially with the country heading towards a recession.)  It is rather unfortunate in this particular case.  People are so used to using the plastic bags, and don’t realize that the cost of the bags is just averaged into the cost of their groceries.  Oh well, I won’t be able to change the world today.

Anyway, I found a neat website called Urban Review STL.  It has some interesting information about things going on around St. Louis.  Check it out.

So my Linksys router kicked the bucket today.  I have been noticing the last few days that websites were loading really slow.  When I sat down to use the computer today, I noticed the lights on the router kept completely shutting down.  This was one of the wired only routers from before Cisco bought Linksys.  I am kind of sad to see it die, it was rock solid.  I luckily have a spare router.  I know what you are thinking….who the hell would have a spare router?  I bought it back when Cisco bought Linksys, thinking that it would be better than the standard Linksys stuff.  WRONG!   Cisco is this big networking company, the backbone of thousands of businesses, not to mention the internet itself runs on Cisco equipment.  When they bought Linksys, I was like, sweet, now there is a company in the consumer market that will make some real bad ass equipment.

You might have caught on by now that I wasn’t using this router…maybe there is a reason for that.  Thats right, its a piece of shit.  But hopefully it can stay together long enough for me to get a Dual N/G router.  I, being a self proclaimed geek, occasionally look at new routers anyway.  I have really been looking at the DIR-855 from D-Link.  Unfortunately, its not out yet.  The current model, the DIR-655 only has a single 5Ghz radio.  Huh?  It means that it only does 802.11n; it can’t do 802.11b,g, or a.  And thats pretty weak if you ask me.

One of my friends at work is getting into the raising of chickens.  We have been making fun of him a lot because well, you don’t hear much of that in a sudo urbanesque environment.  Anyway, he finally has pictures of the icoop (we call it the icoop, cause he is a mac fan too) on his website.  And so I asked him if the chickens were pooping out eggs yet.  And he said not till spring.   Before I could ask him my 2nd question he left for the day.  So I proposed this question to the rest of my office: Do chickens poop eggs all year round, or just in the spring?

Half the people in the office said they were positive (having never themselves owned or raised chickens) that chickens pooped eggs all year round.  But the other half said they didn’t know, maybe its like seasonal produce, where the stuff is just grown somewhere else.

After a few solid minutes of discussion, we found the answer.  And this is where I learned something new today.  Apparently a long time ago, chickens only pooped eggs on a seasonal basis, but after years of selective breeding, chickens began to poop eggs more frequently until they just started to poop eggs all year round.  The article went on to say that even though chickens can poop eggs all year round, they will poop more eggs in the spring than any other time.

I saw this video on treehugger/youtube. I think its important for everyone to see, because there are still some skeptics, some people I am related to. This really goes along with my argument. I don’t know if any of the stuff they say is true, but what I do know is that if we do nothing, and we end up wrong, we are all in trouble.

Have you ever been in a situation where you hear or see a phrase and think to yourself that its interesting, but you forget it ten minutes later.  Then some time later, you see or hear the phrase again, and you instantly remember where and when you heard it before?

Okay, that was confusing.  This has happened to me twice that I can recall.  The first time, was during the time when I had graduated college and was looking for a job.  The Lemony Snicket movie was out at the theater (which I took my sister to see), and I decided to read the books.  So I purchased the first 3 books (they are very small and very cheap), read them and was really bored, so I purchased something like the thirteenth book (you know  to see if they got any better).  There was this crazy character in the book that kept repeating the phrase “constant vigilance.”  It was a very annoying book, but some time later that week, I was talking to my dad and he said I needed to keep my head up, that I needed “constant vigilance.”  Until I had read that book I had never heard that phrase, but I thought it was interesting that my dad would use that exact same phrase.  See you might not know my dad, but that is a very uncharacteristic thing for him to say.

Fast forward to last week.  Last week and this week have been a little messed up because of the holidays.  I’m not complaining, I like not having to be at work on Monday and Tuesday, in fact I think we should just get rid of Monday and Tuesday all together.  A three day work week would be much better than a five day week.  Anyway, last week I was sitting here at work reading a blog that I frequent, and the writer said that a smurf is three apples high.  I was like, hmm….thats interesting.  Then over this past weekend I was reading a new book, and there was a trivia contest, and the answer was, smurfs are three apples high.  How could it be that I would see this phrase in two most unlikely places? I don’t believe in coincidences.

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New Year Wisdom  in no particular order:

• I realize you are in a hurry to get to work, but driving in both lanes will not get you there any faster.  Just pick one.
• I know deep down that you really don’t want to go to work, so why are you going out of your way to run the red light? If you need to get to work earlier maybe you should just wakeup earlier.
• Get an alarm without a snooze. A lot of people get in trouble with the snooze button. I am not one of them, I have no snooze button. I know that if I turn my alarm off, its not going to wake me up, so I make sure I get up when it goes off.  Think about that.
• Turning the heat off at night and on the weekends in the office does not really save you any money.  It just means that when I get to work in the morning I have to call you and complain to turn on the freaking heat because its 35 degrees in the office.  And then I have to try to work with a coat on for the rest of the day.
• Cran-Grape juice tastes nothing like cranberries nor grapes. WTF?
• No, I will not fix your computer. I don’t even like you.
• and finally the all important: Stop wacking off, pull up your pants, and get to work already.