Tom and I have been out of town for a few days, and between the Twitter messages and Flickr pictures you probably figured out it was for a friend's wedding. Two friends actually, and seeing them get married was an awesome experience.

You know what else is awesome? The wedding couple gave us 100 custom made "Flattire.org" pens! They read "Flattire.org - When you should be working" If you want one leave a comment, send an email, raise a hand, whatever, and we'll get you one.

Cheers to Kevin & Jess, Flattire wishes you all the best.

Work has found a new way to piss me off. Last year I designed this "thing" as part of a project, and one of the guys I was working with thought it was amazing. He insisted we try to patent it but the whole time I doubted it was worth it.

A couple weeks back we had to present our application to this patent committee within my company where I spent 30 minutes trying to convince them that my piddly little idea was worth a full patent application when I didn't think it was myself. It was a little intimidating standing in front of these big shots who see patent applications everyday. I had looked at some of the other applications that were being presented that day and there were some truly revolutionary ideas, whereas I was trying to patent the equivalent of a clock potato.

Committee Member: Can you explain what the innovation is here?
Coworker 1: Well we have this thing, and this other thing (making wild hand gestures)
Me: (interrupting) What my coworker is trying to say is...

I go on to explain the design in real words. I captivate them with my Picasso-ish white board drawings.

Committee Member: I see.
Coworker 2: The thing is...blah blah blah.

Coworker 2 proceeds to say exactly what I just said, but with far more stupid in his voice.

Committee Member: It seems like there was a problem, and you solved it. How is that an innovation?

This is what I've been thinking the whole time. I mumble something and thank god that our 30 minutes are up.

A couple weeks have passed and we have the results of their decision on whether to proceed with a formal patent application or not. Result? DENIED!! Hurray!! This was expected, however I was welcoming the idea since it'd mean an end to this crap. Unfortunately they found a way to stick it to me one last time. The idea wasn't good enough for the company to patent, however it was good enough to make sure some other company couldn't patent the same thing. Now I have to write up a bunch of crap describing the idea which gets released to the public, stopping anyone else's patent attempts. I'm completely thrilled that I get to spend my time creating a patent cock block.

I wish I had patented this.

I thought he looked familiar.

This is Feist, her voice reminds me of Cat Power which is a roundabout way of saying "awesome."

I love this video even though the first time I watched it it really made me want to hurl. Each time I watch it it still makes me want to smile, and barf a little. That right there is special.

Oooh, and guess who's birthday it is? That's right, Hitler's.

We've had to step up the spam protection which has forced us to use one of those character recognition thingies when you enter a comment. Hopefully it's not too annoying, but there's only so many times you can be offered Cialis before you start to wonder if maybe you really DO have erectile dysfunction.

My boss asked me to go to this meeting last week to back him up in case there were technical questions he couldn't answer. I didn't expect him to have all the answers since he's my new boss, but I think he expected me to have all the answers. The meeting was mind numbingly boring so I decided to take notes for all of you to see. Here's two and a half hours of my life you should be glad you didn't have to live.

12:55pm - showed up on time, sweet I rule.
1:05pm - just me, my boss, and this genius Japanese guy no one can understand are in the room. Where is everyone?
1:15pm - my boss tells me he read his calendar wrong because the meeting actually starts at 1:30
1:20pm - my wireless connection should work here but isn't. This meeting could be painful.
1:35pm - people are showing up. Bunch of guys who do stuff I don't understand
1:40pm - meeting starts with an overview.
1:45pm - japanese dude says stuff no one understands. This other dude keeps questioning him and is getting increasingly frustrated. He looks to me for help. I'll assume it's because I've worked on this project for a while, and not because I'm asian and must be able to decrypt poor english with a japanese accent.
2:00pm - One guy leaves for another meeting, I think about leaving for a meeting in my bed at home with my pillow.
2:10pm - Sweet, now we're talking about stuff I really know nothing about. I'll pretend to look busy by blogging this whole thing.
2:15pm - Ok, I'm caught up to real time now and there's nothing left to type. Boredom hits again.
2:20pm - They're showing some diagram with green horizontal bars on it with dates. It's a list of deadlines that will ultimately cause me great misery, but if I cross my eyes it looks a lot like Frogger. Watch out for the alligators!
2:25pm - The guy leading the meeting is kind of a douche. Cocky engineers totally suck. Someone asked him a question and he answered with all this attitude. This man has no soul. If he did, I'd punch his soul in the nads for being such an ass.
2:26pm - Good thing no one is sitting behind me watching me type.
2:27pm - Uhoh, I think I'm supposed to be paying attention now
2:30pm - The guy on my right looks really red. the weird thing is every time I check, he changes shades. I wonder what's going on over there.
2:31pm -The guy on my left looks like a hispanic version of an old boss. I used to know this girl that looked like a white female version of Snoop Dogg. (Is it one G or two?) It was a weird look.
2:35pm - The skinny guy just put his arms behind his head, revealing abnormally large biceps. It's exaggerated by his super skinny head. He's one of those people with a normal profile, but then he turns to face you and you're all like "wtf! where's the other half of your face!" Also his body fat is so low that every time he chews his gum I get disturbed by his rippling jaw muscles.
2:45pm - I hope this meeting ends at 3pm.
2:50pm - Work got me the laptop I'm typing this on. Zoning out in meetings is now easier than ever!
3:00pm - for the love of god, please stop talking people. On a side not, my laptop has been on 2 hours and it's still showing 64% battery left. 5-6 hours battery life on a standard battery is pretty badass. Granted all I'm doing is typing this, but still.
3:02pm - Ugh, the guy leading the meeting just said "with the time left I'd like to discuss..." crap. looks like we're going another half hour.
3:18pm - Almost there, I think. Some dude just told a story with about 5 times the amount of excitement that he should've had. I feel sorry for him and his social awkwardness.
3:22pm - I think my boss just fell asleep
3:23pm - He just woke up.
3:27pm - 3 minutes until I'm done? Maybe wishful thinking
3:29pm - I've been filing my emails in outlook all meeting, and I really miss Gmail's labels.
3:29pm - hahaha not-funny engineering joke has everyone giggling. I totally didn't get it but I better smile to pretend like I understand, and just didn't think it was that funny.
3:31pm - done! hurray!

This may be the last post of Postapalooza, as I'm going to go work out after this. The other Flattirites...Flattirians...Flattire writers convinced me to go on a charity bike ride this Saturday. We're doing a grueling 10 mile ride which is kinda funny. It should be a piece of cake, however lately even falling asleep is too tiring. So, off to the gym after this to do some running and biking. You can cram in working out right before an event, right?

I meant to post this link to another blog a year ago. Actually I already did in our first 25 peeps entry but only in passing. Leah of vacant.cc is an Austinite, and lives in my part of town too. I ran into her husband one day which was a little weird since it was like I had met the husband of a local-mini-web-celebrity. I guess the terms "local," "mini," and "web" completely deflate the "celebrity" part, but she's still way more famous than us and my ass is all over the internet. She did do videos for a while though, and although some are kinda painful.

What does Vacant.cc have to do with the charity ride coming up? Absolutely nothing. It's time to go work out.

Do any of you use Google Reader? It's a web based RSS feed reader. For those not in the know, many sites publish RSS feeds, these feeds can then be brought into a feed reader so you have one nice place to view updates to all your favorite sites.

Google Reader lets you "star" posts you like for review later, and it also lets you mark ones you like to be shared with other people. All the items you mark to share get put into your own RSS feed that other people can view. Confused yet? Don't be, it's pretty cool stuff. It allows me to create a feed containing only the best stuff out of all the feeds I've been reading.

At the bottom of the right hand column on flattire.org you'll see our feeds, any version will work depending on your reader. At the bottom left is now my shared feeds. So as I'm doing my daily surfing and see something interesting, i'll flag it to be shared with you wonderful people. So does anyone else use a feed reader?

Here's a chat that Tom and I had some time ago back when he was boarding wild dogs.

Didn't find it funny either? Blame the A. Kid, he started it.

peace&love,
lazyJ

One of my coworkers (ok, it's the same one I usually complain about) doesn't speak the best English. I've put together this translation guide that I hand out to anyone who works with her.

whiskey = risky
weewee = really
free = three
websigh = website
wall-you = value
wee-weck = Viveck (the name)
ok = what?
yes = I have no idea what you're talking about

It's Monday and I'm seriously lacking motivation to do anything productive. Fortunately for me, I only have one or two real things I have to do today, and my boss is going to be in tons of meetings. This all equals tons of slacking on my part.

To celebrate this slacking, I'm going to write several short posts today. Sometimes I start writing a post but then get distracted and just save it for later instead of posting it, and now I'm going to go through and post a bunch of them. The problem is half the time I can't remember what I was writing about, or even worse why I thought you needed to know about it.

For instance I had one post started where I wrote "Hamburgler" and nothing else. WTF?

See that long gray box over on the left? In a few seconds it should hopefully fill up with what Tom, lazyJ, and myself have been texting each other. It's a service called Twitter that lets you send text messages to multiple people at once.

Sometimes it loads a little slow but twitter seems to be improving on that. It should update every few minutes. My prediction? We'll use it for a few days and then ignore it like everything else on the site. I'm not real happy how the page isn't symmetrical anymore but that will get fixed later, or never because I'll probably get used to it after a while. Maybe if the flattire banner was the full width its supposed to be then the asymmetrical-ness wouldn't matter.

Let us know what you think.

I just realized I forgot my mom's birthday yesterday. ARGHHHH! I don't even do much these days, usually just a phone call, but this year I completely forgot about it. I guess no phone call beats the card I got a couple years back from my parents. I thought I had posted about it previously but I can't seem to find it. Even if this is a double post it's still worth repeating and it went a little like this.

Gregory,

How are you? Your cat in heaven now. Happy Birthday!

Love,
Mom & Dad