Oh. My. Freaking. God.

A friend posted this video on Facebook today:

and it is quite possibly the funniest IT movie I have ever seen in my entire life. That means it's damn funny. You have to watch it many times to catch all the jokes, like when:

• the IT guy keeps shooting the character in Halo in the balls while talking to the sales guy
• the IT guy opens the sales guy's mailbox in Outlook and deletes the sent mail
• the email with the warning about not rebooting the web server is displayed in huge, red letters
• the IT guy blames the sales guy for making him take down the web server incorrectly
• the IT guy blames the guy in the server room for taking down the Exchange server
• the sales guy admits to having the same icon arrangement for 8-9 years
• "You can't arrange them by penis."

But I digress. In the video the IT guy mentions posting a picture of the sales guy's desktop on Boing Boing and so of course I had to go there right away. Here is what I just saw:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/08/woman-kills-elephant.html

This woman trained for months so that she could use a bow big enough to bring down an elephant? Oh man, how many more things could you spend months doing something useful? Reading comments like, "I waited overnight to make sure it was dead." make me sick. Obviously death was NOT very quick.

Sport hunting is ridiculous. And when I say ridiculous I of course mean that the hunter is retarded. Hello, if you're going to kill it, how about you eat it too? And then how about you donate everything you can't eat to organizations or industries that can use the stuff. You know, parts like hooves and hide, etc.

If you're going to waste your time, at least do something that does not require anything else to die. How about that.

Tune in next week when Martin goes off about something else.

Today at work one of our faculty sent out a link to a video and on a whim I watched it:

It was fascinating.

The speaker - Hans Rosling - started an organization called Gapminder (as in the British slogan "Mind the gap!" that pertains to their subway system) that endeavors to take existing data and display/present/explain it in such a manner that allows the layman (read: me and maybe you too) to understand it. Nice.

His premise is that we don't need new databases or more, obscure repositories to store data; rather we need to get it out to the public and make it accessible because by and large we do not know the truth about our world as it exists today.

There are so many noble causes out there but this one really struck a chord with me.

What a bust…!

To fill you in, some time ago I embarked on a diet to see if I could improve my climbing a bit (I'm talking about cycling here) and today is a little over six weeks from the time I began.

Did it work? Well… it might have helped a little but it also reduced the fun factor in my life quite a bit. Like I said in my original post, there is nothing like trying to eliminate something from your life to make you want it liken ever before. When it comes to food that is. In my case I cut out alcohol and 'extraneous' sugar meaning deserts and the like.

And of course as luck would have it (not), as soon as I decided to do this we were invited out for drinks several times and went to a free dinner with unlimited wine, etc., etc. Sigh.

The whole point was to try and lose a few pounds for this hilly race I did last Sunday. When I started I lost four or five pounds right away and then leveled off. After a few weeks I gained back a couple of pounds because I think I started eating larger portions to compensate for not having the stuff I was craving. Then I leveled off again so the net result was I only lost about three pounds.

That's not a big amount of gain for a comparatively large amount of anguish and conscious self-control. What did Martin learn? Totally cutting out something is not that hard but the benefit and reward is also not so great. Portion control on the other hand is obviously the key to more significant gains (or loses in this case) and MUCH harder to enforce.

Major revelation, eh? I know, I know… it just takes me longer than most to figure these things out. :(