Yep. We got a halfway-decent amount of snow in The ATL last night. “Halfway decent” meaning, of course, about 2 inches. From what I hear, there was the requisite run on the grocery stores and I’m certain that, today, there will be no bread, milk, beer or batteries on the shelves of those institutions.
The roads weren’t at all bad during the storm, but the drivers were – as usual – complete morons. I can understand not wanting to drive 45 MPH on a twisty secondary road when it’s snowing out; but come on, people. FIVE MPH is taking things a bit to extremes, don’t you think?
I’m not sure how cold it got last night, so I have no idea about driving conditions today. If things are okay, I’m toying with the idea of going up to SC to see the folks and maybe take in the football banquet. Failing that, I’ll probably grab the camera and go somewhere to shoot snow scenes. Maybe that stupid cemetery that I spent two days trying to find a couple of weeks ago.
As I mentioned in my last entry, my quintet played at the Southeastern Horticultural Society flower show last weekend. We’ve done this just about every year for the last 10 or so, and it’s always a traumatic experience for me. The other four folks would rather sit around and talk than actually play, which is embarrassing. This year, we had the added bonus of not having our regular first trumpet player, and the guy who subbed for him was…well…not good. And I learned that our regular first trumpet player covers up a multitude of mistakes made by our second trumpet player. In a nutshell, the only thing more embarrassing than sitting around not playing this year was – you guessed it – sitting around playing. Glad that’s over.
Work this week was, for the most part, sort of fun. I started playing around with a new tag in ColdFusion that allows me to include inline HTML in my code. What that means is, for example, I can show a summary listing of servers at all the locations in the country – Atlanta has 30, Dallas has 22, Denver has 12, whatever. The user can then click on any of those locations and I can display the details for that location on the same page with the summary, rather than opening a new page. It makes things a lot cleaner for the user, which is always a good thing. It also makes things a lot more interesting for me, which is always a better thing. That (CFDIV) tag, plus my continued experimentation with javascript, actually held my interest for most of the week.
Also had my annual performance rating meeting with my boss (who I still have never seen), and was graded out as someone who “meets and may exceed” expectations. I’ve never really understood that concept. These reviews are…well..reviews. We’re looking back at the previous year. Either I *did* exceed expectations or I *didn’t* exceed expectations. There’s no *may* about it. Yet I’ve been described on my reviews for the last 12 years in just that manner. People wonder why I don’t understand big corporations.
I was supposed to teach a class (via conference call) on ColdFusion and Dreamweaver yesterday afternoon, but it was rescheduled for next week. The most interesting part about that is that I really don’t know much about ColdFusion or Dreamweaver. I spend most of my time “coding” pages in ColdFusion by copying stuff that has been written by someone else and tweaking it to fit my purposes. I couldn’t tell you, from memory, 75% of the tags that I use. As far as Dreamweaver goes (it’s a program in which one writes code), I rarely use it as it’s too slow. I prefer to code in notepad. You know – that little text editor that has been a part of Windows since about 1990? That’s my primary tool at work. Dreamweaver, for me, is worthless. The class I teach next Tuesday should be interesting.
When I was very young – I’d guess 5 or 6 – Mom brought home a Tupperware toy that was called, I think, a Pop-a-Lot. It was a yellow funnel-shaped thing with a red screw-on bellows-type thing on the narrow end. The way it worked was fairly straightforward. You dropped a hard blue plastic ball into the funnel, pointed the fat end of the funnel away from yourself, and slammed your hand on the bellows thing. That compressed the air behind the ball, which subsequently exploded out of the funnel, to be caught (one would hope) in another Pop-a-Lot that somebody else had. 
As I was saying, Mom had at least one of these things at home and I was small and I naturally thought that the proper way to use the Pop-a-Lot was to put it between your legs and bounce around on the bellows thing while trying to avoid getting bashed in the face by the ball, which, as you can imagine, would furiously try to escape from the funnel every time my 5-year-old butt slammed the bellows thing into the ground.
So I was doing that in the dining room in Shoreham.
Mom saw me from the kitchen at about the same time I saw her. Let me rephrase that. Mom saw me stopping what I’d been doing at about the same time I saw her and figured I’d better stop what I was doing. And you know how moms are about things like this.
“What were you just doing?”
“Nothing.”
“I saw you doing something.”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
Somehow, she managed to convince me that I wasn’t in trouble, and so I showed her what I’d been doing, thinking all the while that I was in deep shit for doing it (not that my Congregationalist-Church-Raised-Fiver-Year-Old mind would ever have thought of it in those terms).
As it turned out, she thought the whole “Riding the Pop-a-Lot” idea was a wonderful thing to use at a Tupperware party that night.
I’m not sure how many of the ladies present managed to win door prizes doing it, but I like to think my creativity was worth at least one or two sales for Mom.
TWD