Night Before Christmas

To say Liam likes Christmas is like saying fish are fond of water.  He has been Christmas crazy for weeks now.  Having many exciting phases of singing, dancing around, and wearing a santa hat everywhere he goes.  We had a few arguments already when he wanted to wear the Santa hat to kindergarten in the last week of November.

The latest mania is that he watched the classic 1964 Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer animagic (puppet) show and he latched on to the Flying Lion who is king of the island of misfit toys, Moonracer.  He has been callling himself Moonracer for a week now, and flying around the house roaring.  We have to address him as Moonracer or Liam-Moonracer if we want an answer.  It started off funny, but Claudia and I have both heard about enough from Moonracer.  Oh, he also has a crown made of gold pipecleaners that he wears around the house.

Liam is also very active in his Christmas art.  There are drawings of santa with reindeer and his sleigh all over the house.  He normally glues some cotton to the page for the beard.  Below is the most recent drawing and I love the maniacal looking Santa.  I think he looks like a crazy in a red top hat, but hey, that is just my interpretation.

I did mention that Liam wears the Santa hat a lot.  really a lot.  It had come to the point where we could only get it off him after he was asleep.  Here is a typical image of Mr.Christmas in the evening.Well, Germany has the big day of gifts and fun on the 24th, so this evening the Christkind will be paying the wee man a visit.  I hope that the post-Christmas come-down will be OK for him and we can get back to some normal routine. 

Firemen

Recently, Liam invited over the next door neighbour Annika for some play time.  After some brief noisy action, we were informed that Annika needed to wear Liam’s fireman costume.

It looks like she was not allowed to wear the coveted hat though.  That is only for chief Liam.

Entringen Christmas Market

It is the market season once again, probably the best time of year in Germany.  Most of the big markets are a little too packed for me to have the energy to navigate this year with a hyper 4 year old and a tired pregnant wife, so we are visiting far less that usual.

So far, we have only gone to our village market.  Entringen, population around 3000 of course still needs to have booths. Entringen has pretty much the same booths each year and this time was no exception.  Some crafts, and lots of food ones run by the local clubs.  I enjoyed a yummy gluhwein made by Liam’s former daycare group.

Liam had a waffle with powdered sugar from the sports club kids.  He likes his winter outfit and is eagerly awaiting some snow.  He really wants to make snow men and a snow fort as soon as possible.  Of course, he also wants his own reindeer to pull him and his friends to kindergarten on a sleigh.

Giving up on Subtlety…

I think that by the time they were making these posters, they were all out of clever, nice ways to ask people to shut up.

 

• Space – Celebrations are great and even better when held in common spaces away from work areas.
• Space - Avoid gatherings & group chatter in the open office.  Please use common spaces or e-Clubs.

First, I think that there has been no official definition for a “common area” I can only assume they mean meeting rooms and coffee corners.  Although there is no indication that these are actually common areas, I guess it must be them.

I would also love to know what an e-Club is.  This remains a mystery.

Sometimes things need to be explained carefully

  

In case my colleagues and I did not fully understand the subtle message behind the “VOLUME” series of posters, we are gently reminded with these delicately worded works of art.

• Noise – Be considerate of others working in your area
• Noise – Please ask colleagues to modify their behaviour if they are creating nuisance noise

I interpret these two in the following sequential way:

• Noise – shut up big mouth.
• Noise – Don’t be afraid to tell bigmouth to shut up.

I particularly like the expression “modify behaviour.”  I think the definition of “nuisance” noise is also open to wild interpretation.  I know for a fact if all the noise stopped that I consider a nuisance, it would result in more than a few deaths as so many would be holding their breath.

MORE MOTIVATION!

Well, Here are the next two motivational posters in the series “how to behave”

• Volume – Sitting down and using a headset while on the phone is quieter.
• Volume – Walking and talking can be disturbing to others.

Now, perhaps I am being picky, but surely those are things I should not need a 1.5 metre high poster to remind me of? they seem to be in the realm of what I would call “the obvious.” I am pretty sure that everyone in my office could come to these conclusions entirely on their own. But since these posters exist, they must imply that management perceives these two activities to be a problem in the office.

I would have to say that if these are a problem it is not because people don’t understand the concept of volume, but more that they are choosing to ignore the concept of volume. I would suggest the following to be more appropriate:

• Volume – Don’t be a noisy jerk.
• Volume – No one wants to hear you.

I can absolutely throw stones as far as this topic goes since I am probably the quietest guy in the entire building. I shun human contact and get about two phone calls a year. I communicate almost entirely via email and IM with colleagues.

I also think the guy in the first poster looks really angry. Second poster walker-talker at least looks like he is enjoying his work.

Friendly reminders from the company

In recent days, the office has started to put up some interesting posters all over the place.  They are supposed to be reminders of how to behave in our environment.  By that I mean of course our office environment, which is:

• Open concept
• Shared desks (sit wherever is free)

I will go ahead and say that the move to this office system was not popular with everyone, myself included.  I preferred having my own, fixed desk.  It is not as bad as I thought it would be, but if I have to choose, it would be for having my own desk.

I thought I could share some of the office propaganda in the next posts while I accumulate some topics to talk about on the site.

When we arrive in the office, of course the first thing you have to do is find a place to sit.  Thank goodness I have been guided in how to do so by these posters:

“CHOOOSE – Select a workspace to match your needs.  Use meeting or team areas for collaboration”

“CHOOSE – Choose the type of workspace you need… Lively, collaborative, common, or quiet”

I thought these were a bit amusing , thinking that I start each day knowing what my daily style will be.  Of course, not a single one of the options cater to those who would like to choose “isolated from humanity by thick concrete sound proof walls.”  That would be my ideal setting.

I would say the true way that most of my colleagues actually choose their workspace is:

1. those arriving before 8:30 take all window spots.
2. those arriving after 8:30 take whatever is left.
3. preference is given to a seat as far away as possible from “noisy people”

Without naming names, there are absolutely specific noisy people that are well known to all and avoided like the plague.  I think I am a preferred neighbour since I am a very quite office worker.  I strive to be as not-noticeable as possible so people don’t bother me with their problems.  I never talk on the phone, preferring email or messenger, so really my cube is normally like a nice little vacuum zone.

OK, without generalizing too much.  “noisy people” = “the French”

Soooo many Windows….

OK, I know i have not posted too much lately, but all I can say is that it is out of pure lazyness.  I have not taken a whole lot of photos and my computers have been in a bit of an mess recently.

I have for the past years been managing all my photos, music and posts from my work computer, mainly since it is way newer and better than my 10 year old desktop at home.  I keep all of my data on an external HDD, and then run the management software on the laptop.  I used iTunes for music, Picasa for photos, and Firefox for browsing and blogging.

All this changed recently when the office decided to give me a nice new PC.   I was delighted to unexpectedly get a new laptop a couple of weeks ago, and due to the office’s “self serve” IT, i had to set the whole thing up on my own.  I am a reasonably technically proficient guy, so that is ok, but it was time consuming.   However, I only set up work applications on the work laptop, so I lost access to my music and photos, which put a slow down on the blog posts.

It also forced me to add yet another windows to my everyday use.  My work is currently using Vista as the official OS, something I had hoped to totally bypass.  So at the moment, I have XP on my home desktop, Vista on my work laptop and Windows 7 on my home laptop.  The home desktop is used almost exclusively by Claudia for teaching these days, but as the household tech support, I need to be on there pretty regularly.

I thought it would be a good moment to briefly reflect on all the windows I am using.

 

XP is the one that has been in front of me daily for quite a few years now.  I thought it was a pretty good system, but now after living in the new windows worlds, I can see how clunky and unfriendly many aspects of it were.  I still like that it is stable and I am used to it, but I have to say I dont really miss it now that I have moved on.

Windows Vista is the OS that I had taken great pains to avoid since its much maligned release.  I was pretty much against it from launch, for no good reason at all.  I just totally bought in to all the negative hype I read.  After using Vista for about a month professionally now, I have to say it was a lot of hub-bub about nothing. 

Maybe the initial release of Vista had driver issues and was slower and buggier, but as I recall, XP was so bad as to be almost unusable almost until the second service pack  dropped.  At this point, Vista runs quite fine and I think it is fast, better looking and adds quite some improved features over XP.  The search window on the start menu alone has changed the way I do things.

I have not yet added back iTunes and Picasa, but all of my work applications (office, SAP) run great and my non-work applications like firefox and photoshop also run great.  The Windows Live writer for blog posting is also pretty wonderful.  I do most of my posts (when I bother,)  in this program now and I really like it.

Windows 7 is of course the new big sexy and I had to get on board with that the day it dropped.  I run it on my home laptop, which is a slightly older, but not ancient one.  I really think it feels like Vista++ rather than a whole new OS.  It lost some of the things I disliked (the silly widget window) and added great things like the way you manage windows on the desktop.

My primary uses of the Windows 7 box are internet browsing (firefox again runs perfectly,) Light gaming (Warcraft, Torchlight, Team Fortress 2) and some video watching.    The OS handles all these applications great.

Now I need to decide where my music, photos and video needs to live… on my work PC or on my home laptop.  Ideally I will set up an HDD as a network drive (or maybe a NAS for Christmas if work gives a nice bonus.)   Once I get all my media set up to be accessed easily, I hope I will be able to motivate myself to write a few more blog entries.

Oh, and since we have another baby on the way (not sure who knows and who does not) that will no doubt provide a bunch more content for me both photos and stories.