stomping with the big dogs

Last week Friday I went to the bar with the rest of my new department.. it's the first time I'm meeting most of them in person. It was just a few of us there at first and I was talking to my boss' boss' boss' boss while drowning myself with some drink called an ocean blue. It is always strange whenever I go to these gatherings with the big wigs in my company but they are normally cool when you realize they are people just like me and you.

Drinking on the company's tab is the only way to drink, the exotic mixed drinks was flowing all night and we were all liquored up good. After leaving the bar I went up to Renee's house to drop off her very late birthday gift which has been bouncing about my back seat. I spent a while at her place catching up on old times when she reminded me how much of a lush I used to be. Ahh the good old days when I was a university student idling and drinking on the spine. Don't get me wrong it wasn't a habit but if I was to spend 12 hours at UWI and only have like 1 or 2 hours of class why not mix things up and make life interesting :D. Not much harm was done, after all I still managed to put in enough work to earn a distinction in my degree.

The rest of the weekend was uneventful as mentioned before I was on standby and of course the inevitable I will be on standby till next week(three weeks straight) Monday filling in for my boss who has fled the island. I passed through megamart(trying to blend in and not be spotted by Tami again) and the place was full to the brim.. I could barely find a parking spot and there was a long line of traffic going around the parking lot. Pay day end of month shoppers and people stocking up for the public holiday this week would be a good assumption for the ridiculous crowd. That reminds me, maybe I should have stocked up for the holiday too :(

Yesterday

I am showing signs of being burnt out, yesterday was Tuesday but when work called at 5:30am I was convinced it was Saturday. I looked at my phone it said Tuesday.. still not convinced I went to my PC it said Tuesday too... where did the weekend and Monday go? It was nice waking up so early in the morning though, it gave me time to relax, eat breakfast and watch some TV instead of the usual rush to get ready and leave for work.

I went to my office uptown and spent a couple hours there, it only take me 5 minutes to reach work up there and it is free flowing all the way against the traffic so I smiled to myself as I drive by people stuck in long lines of bumper to bumper hell. After traffic died down I left to go to corporate building and spent some time there before going downtown to my main office for lunch. I have to pass through some locations and make my presence felt or people might feel I don't need my shit anymore and steal things from my desks. I am still loving the freedom to choose where I want to work for the day.

Later on in the night I went to a launch party with wifey for some model search competition.. Talk about carrying sand to the beach, the place was packed with girls dressed to the bone and only a handful of men. I'm serious when I say the ratio was something of the order of 20+ girls for 1 man.. Too bad wingman wasn't there, I'm sure even he could have gotten a girl there last night. Anyway I had to call it a night early as I got a call from work and I was on standby.

Needless to say wifey wasn't too happy about us leaving early but hey work is work, it pays the bills. This is my second straight week of standby and I'm possibly in for a third if my boss flies out next week. The money is more than welcome as my car insurance is due in a few weeks and I'm sure after the last incident the premiums will be nothing short of fantastic.

How good does it have to be?

I watched the movie The Devil Wears Prada the other day and it got me wondering. In the movie the young star had to choose between success at work and personal relationships, eventually she quit her demanding job, kept her boyfriend and pursued her life long dream job. The question raised in my head was how good does a relationship have to be for someone to leave their job for it? In her case it was easy, she never liked the job and she had other careers on her mind but even then it was hard for her to leave the success behind.

An interesting way of looking at that same question is How good does work have to be for one to sacrifice their personal relationships for it? I'm guessing most people hate their jobs sufficiently to make these questions easy to answer but it is common for work to throw a wrench in the spokes of love. What would you do if you were offered your dream job but it was thousands of miles away from your significant other?

Bye Boston

Well I should say Burlington which was about 30minutes outside of Boston. I liked it up there, the weather was so much more comfortable than Jamaica, the temperature mainly stayed in the low 80s for the duration I was there. I am green with envy that its close to 100f here in the shade in Jamaica while I was up there running around in the sun and breaking a sweat.

It was the first time I was travelling that far up North. The people were nice and friendly, the town was clean. The area was generally well taken care of and looked like it was maintained by a professional landscaper. One thing that boggled my mind was that most of the buildings I saw had a propane or coal barbecue grill outside and they seemed to be used. I cant imagine going to work, feeling hungry then going outside to grill a steak or some franks for lunch.. but these people do it. They even had lots of picnic tables everywhere to compliment the grill. I can understand the hotel but pretty much every other business in the area had the same thing... The whole area reminded me of a nature getaway, if my workplace was like that I would love going to work.

Aside from the great weather and friendly people all was not dandy. Viral meningitis slapped me back to miserable reality on Wednesday night which I am still yet to fully recover from. It's a good thing I was a trooper and decided to fight on, I'm told if I went to a doctor they would have done a lumbar tap and I must say I have grown attached to my spinal fluid so that wouldn't be cool.

Also along the lines of not cool was my work's credit card being denied. As I was checking out of my hotel room yesterday morning the lady at the front desk informed me I needed to pay for the room. Let us ignore the fact that before I left I asked the people at work to book and pay for the room then I did my due diligence and called the hotel to verify that they did so before I left Jamaica. Now the reason I was being told I needed to pay for the room was due to the fact the bank was denying my companies card possibly due to limit restrictions. So the lady tried to bill most of what she could to there card and I gave her my card to pay for the rest. Lets keep our fingers crossed that my work doesn't give me much BS to get back what I paid.

I decided to save some bucks and skip the $60 taxi back to the airport. I took the shuttle to the mall and from there the public transport. I figured I would actually get to see a glimpse of the real Boston this way before I left since I was stuck up in Burlington all week. The shuttle came late so I missed the first bus. To make my flight at Boston Logan international airport I couldn't afford to miss anything else, I took a long bus ride to the subway station, took the redline subway to the silverline bus route and hopped on a bus to the airport just in time to check in.

Rocking chairs at the terminal? lol this was definetly weird at first, this was the last thing I'd expect to see at an international airport. The people seemed to be loving them though. One thing that was of concern the whole time I was there was the fact that I had only 35minutes in Miami to make my connecting flight back to Kingston. I tried to get it changed but that would have been $200 extra so I decided to take my chances of being stuck in Miami overnight since my flight was the last flight to Kingston yesterday. Things worked out fine and I'm back in this sweltering heat and humidity.

Kate you didn't even offer to buy me a beer for come visiting your city! lol I came across her blog randomly when I just started out blogging and loved it, her blog was the only one I visited for a few months before I decided to look for my Caribbean bloggers.

Hello Boston, MA

I leave on the first flight out tomorrow and will be spending the rest of next week on a training course up there. I must say that this whole thing was rushed, even though I knew I was supposed to be attending this course two months ago. The hotel was booked yesterday, the plane ticket was bought yesterday and they gave me the money for travelling 10 minutes before I left work on Friday at 4:40pm.

As far as I was concerned I wasn't going anywhere since as at yesterday morning nothing was paid for in relation to my travels. It didn't dawn upon me until I reached home that maybe I should have gone to the bank to withdraw some money from my US account for myself in case I want to go shopping too(but of course the banks would be closed and will not open today either so I'm stuck with whatever money work gave me). Thank you for credit cards although I don't really see myself shopping much up there.

I am so tired right now as I'm writing this.. I should be sleeping now, I leave on the first flight out at 6am and I didn't get much sleep last night. Wifey and I went to the titty bar and didn't reach home till 5am giving me about 3 hours of sleep so I am currently in debt. I must say I am all stripper's worst nightmare. Shortly after we sat down and I ordered a drink wifey was sitting on my lap with the money to pay. As the bar girl came back with the drink/change I noticed a hot, young, slim, light brown, cute stripper[drools] hopped off the stage into the VIP lounge right on the lap of wifey sitting on me.

Now this stripper obviously had a plan to get some of my change but wifey didn't swing that way and was thoroughly disgusted by the stripper's advances and wondering hands violating her body. The stripper realizing she wasn't having it actually had no money then turned to me and begged some money. Anybody who knows me know that I would not be surrendering anything to a stripper(no matter how hot they are) and I'm sure this girl knows this now but she grabbed a one feel from wifey's breast before she got off her and left. Wifey is understandably afraid of strippers now, many apologies, I'm sure you will recover :p. Well enough babble for now, hopefully I get enough sleep before I have to wake up at 4:30am tomorrow.. my eyes are already 3/4 closed :(

Feeling the heat

Last week was undoubtedly the hottest week I can remember so far for this year and its only just the start of summer now. It makes sense though as last week also marked the summer solstice so hopefully things will get cooler in the following weeks. This(37C or 99F) is the highest I've seen my infrared thermometer go up to in this apartment and when I pointed at the ceiling it went up to 39c.. Is it worth it to buy an AC if I am planning on moving out within the next 12 months? This wouldn't be an issue at my old apartment, it had a pool and AC... I could be splashing around and beating the heat by the poolside everyday :(

Since there was none of the desired items at my place I went to Lime Cay on Saturday. I quickly noticed some people brought their little house dogs(are they really dogs?) I'm just imagining the dogs taking a whiz or a dump and burying it in the sand for us to find later.. how about they leave the mutts at home. Anyway the owner of this mutt to the right came in the middle of the afternoon and set down their stuff under our tree about 4 feet away from us and immediately the dog ran over and walked all over our blanket before the owner casually came over to get it back[evil thoughts flooded my brain]. We went for a walk and came back to find our blanket covered in sand and the dog sleeping in a hole he dug. Only upon our arrival back did the owner decide to look over and come to de-sand our property... is it wrong for me to want to hurt the dog and its owner at this point in time?

One thing that always amazes me at Lime Cay is the amount of container ships that always pass not too far away. Oddly enough my friend said Wingman is probably on that red ship leaving now and he called me later that day saying he was leaving on Sunday. This time his ship comes back to Jamaica so he wont get too home sick, see ya in 20 days wingman :p


The picture on the left there is one of the main reasons I don't like Lime Cay.. lots of garbage is left on the beach by the people who visit and lots of debris is washed up on the nether side of the isle. I am always amazed at what I find washed up on that side of the Cay. The picture on the right is of the beach on the way back from Port Royal just outside the airport, it was the first time I was stopping there. The picture doesn't do justice to how much debris that has washed up on shore... lol even the Pilar Del Caribe litters the beach.

The following day, Sunday, I went for lunch at the Pegasus. They have a buffet thing normally by the poolside. The pool looked good but the food was horrible, they never fail to disappoint me. I have never heard anybody say anything good about their food before and they are much more expensive than other places. They dinning area is covered and has lots of ceiling fans but the place was still blazing hot... I put them on par with Morgan's Harbour lunch buffet, don't go to either.

This week isn't as hot as last week though, I can't wait till I can sleep without the fan again.

Click here for a few more random images from Port Royal.

Tagged? BS!

This is the first time I'm being tagged.. I think. Tami was the evil doer. Anyway here are my eight things about me:

1. Aside from my parents and sister I have no blood relatives in Jamaica.. family life is a strange concept to me.
2. I love bright yellow. A ugly girl could have on a nice yellow top and she would move up a few notches in my book.
3. I don't fancy a lot of things other people like.. such as cake, chocolate, fast food, soda.. etc.
4. Still doesn't mean I won't eat it if you put it in front of me.. it would be gone after 2 bats of your eye :p
5. I have a pool table yet still I still suck at it.
6. I'm not cheap.. I am just used to the all the years I never had money.
7. I have 3 offices across town, every day I think long and hard as to which one I want to work at for the day.
8. I am a very open person.. I can't keep secrets about myself. Get a few of my friends together and you would have an authoritative and complete source on my life.
   

As an extra I'll just throw in this, it has been a while since I put on a tie or went to church and I did both last weekend.

I guess I should tag someone now, Alex I choose you.

Island village beach trip

I have never really heard of Island village in Ocho Rios before but I found myself there last Saturday evening with bff and her fambily. It was nice, they have a long board walk lined with shops which leads to the beach at the west end of Ochi. The first thing you see as you enter their beach was a huge blow up water slide which you can get a glimpse of in this first picture and everyone(but me) had fun sliding down there.

The beach was nice and cute but that is only if you were wearing blinders and ignored everything outside of the immediate environment. Some people call it a water way, I call it a gully and there was one a few meters away to the right of the beach.. not cool.

To the left of the beach further up the bay is what I would consider an industrial docking bay, the ship that was there [un]loading stuff was just pumping out waste fluid nonstop, I think the crystal clear waters of Lime Cay outside of Kingston harbor is the lesser of these two evils.
Eventually everybody got up on the floating trampoline in the sea. That climb out of the water on to the trampoline was so hard, I helped most of the people I was with up but struggled to get up by myself. I bounced around a few times and boom flicked off into the water.. if I was 15 years younger I'd probably go back up and jump off a few more times, sigh old age.

They eventually closed the beach at 5pm an kicked us out as they were going to have some Father's day show at the amphitheater in the middle of the compound. I wanted to stay longer but the compound was closing for the show plus the party I was traveling with wanted to leave for town early.. lame. It has been a while since I have spent any time in Ochi, maybe next time I could stay a bit longer and be a tourist. Before we left though I wondered around the Island Village compound and paid my dues

Haste makes waste

I think I am a generally laid back person, my father says if I was anymore relaxed I would fall asleep. I think corporate life has be slowly creeping up on me though, I find myself getting aggravated while sitting in traffic to/from work. I'm sure there were other things bothering me but my mind is drawing a blank at the moment. There is no real rush to reach, work why let the traffic bother me?

Upon reviewing the last couple of months somehow I came to the conclusion that I was living life in the fast lane and need to slow down a little. I normally come to this realization once a year or so and try to adjust accordingly. So for the past week while driving about the place I have been telling myself haste makes waste repeatedly to help have that mentality stick. Some of my friends already think I behave like an old man, I guess this will just add more fuel that that fire.

Under the theme of slowing things down I started thinking about vacation last week. For me I would be more than satisfied spending my vacation sleeping on a deserted beach somewhere watching the crabs walk by with a close friend. This is easy to get a lot of the girls I know are bums and are normally available to fill such idling requests but sadly for me I have had Disney World on my mind recently. My parents visited a few Disney parks in Orlando last month when they went on vacation(from what I dunno they are retired) and a few years ago they paid for my sister to go up too, they would never extend such an offer to me but that is a rant for some other time.

I bought this memory card for my sister earlier this year after my father lost the card from her pda and I was given the task to get another one. They came to the right person I only paid 99c and $9 to have it shipped to myself in Jamaica, it was the deal of a lifetime! Anyway ignoring my big crusty thumb, the SD card has Mickey on it! I am a sucker for anything Disney, I have fond memories of the Magic Kingdom and other parks from the last time I went as a kid more than 15 years ago. To compound things my friend left her mp3 player at my house and while going through it she had the Disney's Greatest album on it with songs that reminded me of the old Disney movies I loved.

With all that on my mind I went online and built myself a week long vacation package for myself. It was a complete package and affordable and I started to day dream at my desk of all the blissful fun I would be having until I realized my plan involved me paying for a vacation for one of my bum friends also. This threw up red flags all over the place, while it is nice having bum friends who are ready for anything anytime, they are po'. I have reservations about bums(no offence to my friends) on vacation.

Other alternatives are go with a platonic friend(may not be as fun but she could pay for herself) or go with my sister I know she loves it just as much as I do but I don't think I'm her ideal vacationing buddy. If push comes to shove I could go with my parents(blehhhh) they mentioned buying a timeshare in Orlando after having so much fun on their trip last month. My mother always complains how I never go on trips with them. I don't really see how spending a few hundred thousand to travel Europe or go on cruises with my parents would be fun but I think she hit gold when they bought that timeshare.

H.E. Pennypacker move over

Some people make small budgets in their heads or on spreadsheets. I find that to be boring as the real advantages of keeping track of ones spending comes from the reports which will only be generated from a proper finance tool such as MS Money, Quicken or GnuCash(my fav. open source alternative) and as such I normally knock out expense reports on a monthly and quarterly basis. It doesn't take much to maintain, I just keep my receipts and sometime on the weekend I reconcile and update the books.

I started doing this in 2005 and now have a few years of data to work with. I must say I am pleased with the insight these reports provide, the chart above shows a quick overview of my income vs spending and I have highlighted the results from the 2nd quarter of 2005 2006 and 2007. There are a few more weeks left in this quarter but I don't expect the figures to change much, I also used conservative income estimates so if anything it should change for the better.

One thing that pops out at looking at that chart is that my expenses for 2007-q2 is the same as 2005-q2.. who said your expenses grows as your income grows? Well according to the reports my opex(utilities, car, food) spending has increased as expected, I have no control over inflation but since I started generating and reviewing my detailed quarterly expense reports I think I have clamped down on unnecessary capex.

These reports are always at the back of my mind I was drooling over some 44" plasma TVs the other day but decided to delay such purchases till the end of the year if there is any surplus in the budget. Last year I was drooling 26" LCD TVs but the car incident sopped up that surplus so hopefully nothing terrible happens between now and the end of the 4th quarter *knocks on wood* and there is also a surplus.

Do other people budget and plan like me or am I the only Pennypacker in blogsphere?

Work is transforming me into another mindless drone

As I have mentioned before my lust for tech is dying a slow and painful death. Taylor2nd just highlighted it for me a while ago when he asked me how come I wasn't participating much anymore on a local tech forum that we use. I used to post and idle on that site all day, reading up all the new tech news hot off the press as it unfolds but work has gotten in the way now. I still load the page the first thing in the morning when I get to work but there is no guarantee that I will look back in that window for the next couple of hours.

Also a couple of weeks ago during a conversation with Taylor2nd I realized I have thrown away my BSD past. Currently I am using a 64bit-pure based port of Slackware Linux since AMD released their cheap AM2 64bit processors about 10 months ago. I must say it sucks the developers of flash/java plugins for FireFox have decided that there aren't enough users to care about getting them working on this platform so I have been browsing sites unable to see flash/java content.

The lack of java/flash support pushed me to download NetBSD3.1 x64 to install and abandon Linux once again. I have always liked NetBSD but never used it on my desktop because they lack support for key hardware as I would find out after installing, rebuilding the kernel, building X.org desktop and finding that there was no nvidia devices detected for my video card. This is the shit I went through in the 90's when trying to get X to work on redhat 4.x but I am now in the know that there is no way X on netbsd will work with my video card so I had to nix NetBSD x64 from my list of suitable desktop OS replacements.

At this point I could no go back to no flash/java support so I decided to give NetBSD 3.1 x86 a try. I installed, rebuilt the kernel, built X.org, no cigar.. the same video card problem popped up. I could always go FreeBSD x86, I know they support my hardware, but for some reason I have my mind set against it. I think I might end up throwing away x64 Linux for a i386 version of Slackware.. one step forward, two steps back.

Fashion block 2007 continued..

I see London, I see France, I see model underpants!

Well I didn't have to look far as shortly after Motorola decided to show their RIZR and KRAZR using two girls wearing paint and g-strings. That was a bad marketing campaign as if I didn't hear the announcement before I wouldn't have any idea what those girls were carrying my eyes were too busy trying to unpaint their body. The guy in the photo was one of the artists that painted their bodies.
This was not new to me though, the last show I went to Motorola dressed the girls in some scantily clad outfits. One thing that I will forever remember was when the girl was just walking down the runway, dipped her hand deep down in her bikini bottom and out popped a flip phone(probably set on vibrate lol) opened it and showed the crowd. Really now Motorola, I'm sure you can do better than that.. tsk tsk.

Click here for the rest of the post.

Ok.. whats wrong with this girl? I like slim just as much as any man but this girl needs to eat some food. I love all the girls but damn! I have to make an exception to that rule. The bad lighting, bad angle, bad pose and horrible swimsuit doesn't help much either but there is still the underlying root cause problem of this girl being skin and bones that just stews everything together in one big dutchpot of uhgleeee







Let me be the first to feature the actual designers.. some of them didn't even walk down the full length of the runway, they just peeped out, waved and was gone in a split second. Now I may not be fashionable or trendy but I am pretty sure many guys will agree with me that the underarm hair on girls is not cool. I guess she was just the cooky designer of the bunch.. there is always one around at these shows, she ain't so bad though compared to others I've seen.

CarpeDM's runway debut

Yesterday I picked up the Sunday Gleaner and saw them do an article on Saint International's Style Week fashion show on Thursday and saw them mention a new clothing line, CarpeDM, my friend is working on getting off the ground. The big finale of Style Week is Fashion Block where they block off Knustford Blvd. and build a runway right smack in the middle of the road. I decided to go to support my friend and it is a free event so no harm done. This first picture is where I wanted to be the press booth, I had to stand off to the sidelines in the nosebleed section with people's big heads blocking my shots. Well the meat of the matter, the pics below are of CarpeDM's spring/summer clothing line. I'm not sure if that first guy there realizes he's supposed to be modelling the shirt or what.. the ladies had fun with that one.

I got lots more photos from fashion block, I'll post some of my favorites later.