Corporate Green Space
The Quaker Oats company has a roof-top garden area on top of part of their building here in Chicago. It's only the second floor but it's open to the public and is a nice space. They didn't have to open it to the public, but they did.
They didn't have to hire a reggae band, but today they did.
They didn't have to provide free ice cream, but today they did.
It was mostly Quaker Oats employees there but there were others, such as my self, who just wandered over and were happy to find live music.
It's a little thing, it's not some big PR thing. There were not thousands of people there; there was no "sponsored by the Quaker Oats company" signs or flyers or anything. It wasn't even publicized (that I saw; maybe I missed it). A little corporate "here, have a nice lunch" to their employees that took place in a place they own but allow the public to use.
This is not something I could ever see my company doing. Since I started in 1999, the corporate culture has changed here dramatically. Fun is out; good will is out. Do your job, be thankful you have it, and don't make waves, replaced it. My company would never own green space let alone provide the public access to it.
So, cudos to the Quaker Oats company for providing me with a decent spot to eat my lunch. The music was a very nice bonus.
South Side
My trip to the far south-west side of Chicago yesterday was an interesting one.
For those of you interested in maps, here's a google-map link to the entrance of the facility: http://lnk.nu/maps.google.com/8z8. This is a BNSF rail yard inside which my company has a couple tracks and a large repair building.
It was about 67.5 miles one-way from home to this location, and, while at first I was told I had to be there at 7:00am, I later negotiated that to between 8 and 9am. I left the house at 5:45am and arrive almost right at 8am. The drive was uneventful for the most part; usual Chicagoland traffic (i.e. someone's going to try and kill you at some point). My route was 31 to 62 to 59 to I-90 to I-290 to I-294 to I-55 to the Pulaski exit. I-55 was the biggest traffic problem, but I was well into the commuting bubble by then.
I spent the morning session at the company training car (2 flatbed cars set up for training field workers on brake systems, hitches, container securement, and articulated connectors) and then spent time doing misc. things.
My latest project at work is to produce a safety video (to be distributed on DVD) using company employees on company equipment. It's a pretty big project and has allowed me to start learning a whole new skill set. As I'm much more of a still-photographer type of person, I've not paid much attention to video and video editing technology; this project will certainly be changing that. My role in this will be to edit and assemble the video segments, offer instructions to those filming on ways to create better video, and eventually create the full-fledged DVD set for distribution to our many repair facility locations. I'm going to be using video, stills, and probably additional audio segments for this project and will have to produce a web-suitable version as well. Lots of fun but lots of work.
So far the best software package I've seen for our needs has been Sony Vegas+DVD (though I still need to evaluate Adobe Premiere Elements). It seems to be insanely powerful and complex. The only downside is that the trial version doesn't let you see the DVD-creation portion of the software and thus I have no way of evaluating the quality of this part of the product. Boo to Sony for not at least seeing that part.
Anyway, I ended up not being able to leave the rail yard until 6:20, but that was something of a blessing. I was able to make it from the yard to Algonquin in an hour. An amazing feat, to be certain and traffic was fantastic. Sadly, that corner of 31 and 62 did me in and it took another 30 minutes to finish the remaining 10 miles.
An interesting and sometimes stressful day, but a break from the office was excellent, and learning more about how the guys in the field work is very valuable.
just my luck…
This week is looking to be spectacular in terms of temperatures.
Monday: mid 40's.
Tuesday: upper 40's.
Wednesday: lower 50's.
Thursday: upper 50's/lower 60's.
Friday: lower 60's.
And I have to work through lunch today, tomorrow, and Wednesday (or Thursday). Three prime walking days gone. One day, however, I'm going to head down to Millennium Park to meet my cousin Steve for lunch. That'll be nice.
(Of course, these temps may not hold true but the potential is there.)
evil lair or place of employment?
In the movies, when the hero is trapped in a room, most of the time the villain will start pumping in the toxic gas. There must be some sort standard "toxic gas pumping into room" system because pretty much each time this is done, the sound is the same. The hissing sound that builds in intensity as more and more gas obscures our hero from view.
Whatever contractor or group of contractors does this villainous work also installed the HVAC system at my company. Every single time the air or heat turns on, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, I should have a gas mask in the cube and, if I did have one, how quickly I could get it on before dropping dead of asphyxiation.
Merry *hic* Christmas
Every year the Equipment Department has a Christmas lunch in the office. We do a crazy gift-grab where you bring in a wrapped gift and when your number is called, you can choose another wrapped gift from a table or grab an already opened gift from someone else. A single item can only be "grabbed" three times after being opened.
Since we started doing this 4 or 5 years ago, the amount of alcohol being brought in as gifts has risen to shockingly high levels. Of the 29 people participating in the gift grab this year, 21 gifts were alcohol.
On one level this is funny in the "you need to know these people" sort of way and it can make for some rapid and fun gift grabbing. But alcohol, for an event like this, is also a "don't think, buy booze" choice.
I didn't bring booze; I brought a box of Christmas trivia that can be used as an add-on pack with a number of games (including Trivial Pursuit). It was a "Gah! I need a $x gift for Monday" purchase while at the mall on Saturday evening, but still, it was different. Other non-alcohol gifts included: movie tickets, a stove-top popcorn maker, gift card to a local bookstore, Frango mints (with gift card) and a special edition Monopoly board game.
Freedom Fri-days
Because my company doesn't allow vacation time to carry over, I have to use everything up by the end of the month. So I elected to take 3-day weekends for December. It's been very nice. Today the only thing I really accomplished was to snowblow the driveway and post photos from the wedding this past weekend. We've also picked up the new tire for 
helloheather'a car and had a great pizza lunch at Nick's Pizza in Crystal Lake.
Right now helloheather is upstairs getting cookie batter ready for Christmas cookies which is a great feeling.
In other news, it looks like the blog spammers have found this blog: I've been deleting about 20 comments a day. Fortunatly 99% of the comments are being captured by the anti-spam tools, but I still have to manually delete each one. It's time to look into the latest Wordpress Anti-Spam techniques.
9 days ago, our Canon A80 passed 2 years of ownership. Because I'm a geek, I've been keeping some stats on how we've been using it:
First Photo: Dec 1, 2003
# of photos as of Dec 1, 2004: 9,545
# of photos as of Dec 1, 2005: 17,918
# photos per day (avg) over two years: 24.5
Current photo count: 18,238
estimated photo count for Dec 1, 2006: 26,925
A couple weeks ago, I found our first hot pixel. This is a pixel (or group of pixels really) that exhibits the same color regardless the information around it. Ours is blue. This is different than just sensor noise. It's not a stuck pixel (i.e. it does not show up in every photo) but it is probably on its way to becoming one. There are four solutions to this problem:
1) Ignore it and do nothing
2) Use the Clone tool in Photoshop to eliminate it from the images (easy process for one photo/time consuming for many photos)
3) Send the camera to Canon where they will map-out the pixel (esentually making the camera blind to the pixels in question and interpolating the image area from the surrounding pixels)
4) Buy a new camera.
3 and 4 are, of course, the most expensive solutions and now that I know it's there, I can't ignore the problem. So option two it is. Thankfully it's not yet in every photo which keeps the post-production work down. But if you do notice a blue dot in the right third of the photo, I missed one 
evening light
Last night I took an earlier train home and found myself with 25 extra minutes of sunlight.
So, I quickly changed, and grabbed the bike and headed out. Not very far, and only for 20 minutes, but it felt good to do. The evening light was wonderful and, of course, I wished I had a camera with me, but that's pretty much par for the course.
In the next week or so (if I get up the courage) I'm going to write up a proposal to begin a Work From Home test period. One or two days a week and see if my company goes for it. Unfortunatly, my boss is not the one that can give approval. No one, that I know of, works from home during the week (though many with laptops are expected to work from home on the weekends) and so this will be A Big Deal to People That Need To Control Everything. So even if I can justify working from home to my department, the ultimate decision is out of their hands.
*edit/update*
The problems with posting comments should be fixed. If not, email me at rbernhard@gmail.com