Weather
It is freezing outside. There is a light frost on cars and grass. This city is not used to it. In Houston, if one patch of ice forms on an overpass ten miles north of the city limits, the whole city shuts down. People here just don't know how to drive in weather of any kind.

I am so smart (I mean smart)
I was just helping out someone at work this morning. They want to install this software on a standing web server at the company I work for. The trouble is, our IS department blows a gasket when you want to put anything on these servers. They are very touchy and the versions of DLLs need to be tracked to verify security updates and stuff like that. Anyway, I was able to walk this person through a complicated install requirements schema. I told him how to approach the vendor and the IS people to make sure he gets what he needs. I was able to explain why we need to do the whole thing twice (development and production). Sometimes I surprise myself with my own knowledge.

Failure to control speed
There is a law in Texas that says if you rear-end some one it is your fault. The law is there to take the load off the courts I'm sure. I've only heard of one of my friends getting this overturned and making it the other person's fault. It is a boon for insurance fraud people because they simply cut some one off and slam on the breaks. The whisper mill says if you can prove the person in front was on their mobile phone, you might get them ticketed instead of you.

Help Desk woes
Where I work uses a huge support company for technical support. Our company has tens of thousands of workers. The last couple of months, the wait time has gone to over an hour. You have to listen to this repeating voice that bitches at you for calling the help desk. It says you will receive a response in 24 hours. The trouble is, I know more than the front line people who will get this email. They say 24 hours, but I get three week turn around. I have them lower the priority of the ticket without telling me because they don't want it to show up on the reports. That gets my hackles up.
I only had to listen to the repeat message four times that time. I actually got through in five minutes.
I need a password reset on a VMS server. The front line person can't do that. They have to escalate me to security. I'm only on hold there for about two minutes. That is all acceptable. What happened?
I'm going to do this for Tpro. I'm going to be 1-800-NoHelp. It is amazing how may companies suck at support. I hope Tpro is not one of them.

Microsoft Flight Simulator
I got Microsoft Flight Simulator Tuesday evening. I'm thinking it was a mistake. I'm legally blind and unable to drive or ever get a pilot's license. I love the simulators. This thing is going to soak up a bunch of time. I can sit there and watch the plane fly past some mountain range and just love it. I'm not even into the navigation and map manipulation stuff. My favorite activity is flying through a mountain range and landing on a lake in the middle of nowhere. I've always had some fascination with aquatic planes. There are helicopters too. I've developed a much higher respect for helicopter pilots. Even in easy mode the helicopter is like trying to heard cats in the air. My favorite plane at the moment is the Piper Cub. It is a one person plane with no horsepower that flies at about sixty miles an hour. It is just a sweetheart to fly.