Mõnikord juhtub kontoris nii, et kõik ülemused (nii suuremad bossid kui ka väiksemad viled) on kusagil ära. Seal kusagil, kus on hetkel veel tähtsamaid asju ajada. Mis siis kontoris toimub? Inimesed saavad vabalt sisse ja välja hingata. Telefonid ei helise. Kõik on vaikselt ning nahistavad omi asju teha või suisa tööd. Õhtul tõdetakse, et päris palju asju jõuti ära teha ja et selliseid päevi võiks rohkem olla. Töö produktiivsus on suurem, kui keegi ei torma uksest sisse, ei helita, ei nõua aru ega anna uusi ülesandeid. Paanikavaba päev.

Võib-olla võiks olla suisa regulaarne juhivaba päev nädalas. Peale “Casual Friday” tuleb “Bossfree Monday”…

So I got the idea to do this feature called “Casual Friday,” where I’ll post an entertaining video/image every Friday for no specific rhyme or reason — just because I can. Feel free to make recommendations, and if I like it, I’ll post it.

Enjoy!

Click to watch. WordPress is dumb and won't allow YouTube embeds.

Have You Seen The Office: Season 5 Episode 24 – Casual Friday?

Episode Synopsis:

Michael returns to Dunder Mifflin and brings Ryan and Pam in as salespeople, but the existing salespeople demand that Michael return the clients they stole back to them. Meanwhile, some employees take the idea of Casual Friday too far.

So what do you think of this episode?

If you missed it, you can watch it here.

Gamer.

I want you to think about that word for a minute. At one time it meant the elite few, people that had sacrificed everything to bring a little magic back to a mechanical world. Not content to just accept things at face value, we strapped on suits of mail and forged eldritch pacts to storm the castle, fight off the dragon, and rescue the princess. We didn’t do this out of choice – we had to. Gaming was a call, a little bit of our soul that couldn’t be sucked away by 24-hour news stations and Reganomics. While other guys were out getting laid, we huddled around dim lamps in cold garages or braved scorn from chess nerds in the back rooms of libraries. It’s a dangerous hobby. For every jock that broke his collarbone taking the sack or cheerleader that rub-burned her way to victory, there is a gamer limping around with d4-caused scar tissue on the bottom of his foot.

And though we have done much, that is not what people envision when you say the word ‘gamer’ now, is it? No, you know what they think of. Some guy sitting in front of a TV, buried under a pile of Red Bull cans with a Bluetooth headset hanging out of his ear and a fucking controller in his hand. Tiamat, Mordenkainen, Caramon, and White Plume Mountain have been usurped by Mother Brain, Master Chief, Kratos, and fucking Pokemon. These upstarts took their first steps in the seventies, crawled through the eighties, then hit the world like a ton of pimple-faced crackheads during the nineties… and we let them! While we were looting the Tomb of Horrors and fighting of Gehenna, these geeks skipped past us as the choice activity for nerds the world over. To add insult to injury, the bastards have gone main-stream, and have goddesses like Felicia Day to swell their… legions.

This. Is. Mother. Fucking. War.

I do not hate video games. Call me traitor, but even I enjoy the odd round of Tetris and I may have logged enough hours into World of Warcraft to invalidate every modern theory on Space-Time. Video games are fun, but more importantly, they are easy. You pick up a controller, hit some buttons, and BAM! You have instant gratification. Gaming – true gaming – doesn’t give you that right away. For new gamers it is a dark, mysterious world of fat guys pretending to be hot elven chicks and enough equations to strangle an average-sized algebra teacher. That means it is up to us to attract more gamers to our cause, or we risk becoming a footnote in geekdom. The war is not lost!

If you can get a new person to sit down with your group and try out this role-playing thing, here are five tips to help keep them coming back each session.

Number One: Give ‘em what they want.

Your game must be exciting to the new player; it must appeal to them in some way. Maybe you and your friends enjoy sitting around for three hours talking about old dungeon runs, but most likely, the new person won’t. They don’t have the history you’ve built up, and they just don’t understand the jargon you are tossing around. Make that session something that will give them a story! It is all too easy to overlook someone that isn’t actively participating, and new gamers are often shy about what they are doing – and they are scared of “doing it wrong”. Give them some spotlight time, but don’t force it on them. Give them some decisions that will make them the hero, even if only for that moment. Speaking and taking an action in character is also very difficult for people that have never done it before, so some of the things they do may seem sophomoric or stupid. Stay with them though! There are so many people that wouldn’t even try what they are attempting, and right now it is your job to help nurture them into their new geekiness.

Number Two: Help ‘em out.

Whether you are running the game or you’re just another player, you make this unfathomable and confusing world of mechanics and dice rolling easier for your new player. Talk them through actions they want to make, and offer suggestions! If a new-player is stuck in a situation that eludes him, offer him some suggestions (as long as the person running the game is kosher with it). Also, if you are the one running the game, allow some latitude with table talking as it pertains to your new player. They don’t know the rules as well as the other players, and they sure hell don’t know them as well as you do.

As always, letting someone borrow the book(s) to read is a great help to start with. Let’s just assume that you have checked this person out, run some background checks, and sealed their fate with a drop of blood should they ever betray you. When letting a new player borrow a gaming book, make a little list on a Post-It or whatnot that gives them areas they should read. Let them read the fluff, the fun stuff that invokes the imagination. Avoid suggesting areas that are mechanics heavy, and make sure the book you lend them is the “basic” book. If they want to read deeper into mechanics, they will.

Number Three: Shut the Hell Up, Already

This one is geared towards the ST/DM primarily, but certainly can apply to other players as well. Most people blank out after a couple of sentences of description. You may be the very fucking ghost of Victor Hugo, but I guarantee he would have bored the tears out of some gamers if he’d ever picked up a d20. Your usual group is used to the way you describe you scenes and deliver exposition, but this new person is not. While you’re painting a picture with words, they do very likely not understand half the terms you’re using and are confused. Who gives a shit about this fucked up old building in the middle of the forest? Keep your descriptions short, but make them evocative. Try the speech you were preparing as two or three sentences that conveys all the emotion and information needed… and allow the person the time to respond to your description (I honestly think most ST/DM’s should do this anyway – we tend to be a wordy group of idiots).

Where you don’t want to skimp is in NPC conversation, however. The trap in this, however, is that you may end up preaching and not conversing. Make conversations as interactive as you can around new players, and find ways to encourage them to take part. Yes, they will likely be talking more as themselves than as their character… but the point isn’t to make them a good role-player, it is to make them want to become a good role-player. Don’t chastise, and use positive reinforcement through NPC/world actions to encourage the new player into more and let more experienced players set the example.

Number Four – Back Off, You Pushy Fucker

Now that you have focused all your attention and the attention of the other gamers at the table on your new player, knock it the fuck off. If everyone is constantly staring at the new player, it will make them uncomfortable. Give them some time in the spotlight, but do not anchor the damn thing on them. Working in a new gamer is about moderation; don’t make them feel uncomfortable, but don’t make them feel ignored. It may seem like a hard balancing act, but it really isn’t. You want to make them comfortable with taking actions and trying out something that likely makes them feel fairly silly. Don’t laugh at their mistakes if at all possible.

Number Five – Swing For the Fences

You have ~four hours to show this person that gaming is fun and to get them to come back, so give it some magic. Make it fucking epic. If you run a four hour session about the coterie doing errands for the Prince, don’t expect the person to be thrilled to return. If you spend four hours where the vampires run from challenge to challenge, sneaking in to dangerous territory with their asses on the line, always one step ahead of the fanatical sheriff the Prince sent to spur them on… well, then you have something. Look at it this way – the new gamer is the pitcher and you are at bat. It’s a slow ball; you can bunt and maybe score a single, or you can pound that fucker and drive it home. With the right exposition and emphasis, even the most mundane things in role-playing can be awesome.

A few nights ago, my wife was running a game for me and my buddy. He is new to gaming, and we’ve been introducing him to an increasing number of games. We’re playing fourth edition, and my wife throws our first level idiots against a couple of (basically) gelatinous cubes. What went from a fairly standard orc encounter suddenly went to us fighting for our lives and trying to lure the orcs into fighting with us… it was fun as shit, and my buddy still talks about how cool it was. With a little inspiration, even the doldrums of “swing’n'miss” combat can be monumental. It’s your job to make it so.

I affectionately refer to my outsourced call center gig as “white collar crop picking” – repetitive, de-humanizing and low-paying. The commodity I handle is not tomatoes or lettuce, it’s information; the tools of this trade are not baskets and blades, but a monitor and a headset. On some intellectual level however, I find it fascinating. I can almost justify my being there as research – I know there’s a book in it (just as I know I have a book in me).

What has already been written on the subject examines Global Outsourcing from the outside looking in. Thomas Friedman’s seminal work, “The Word Is Flat” for example, focuses mainly on the enabling technologies of the industry – I’d like to hit the subject from the inside looking out: how it feels to be a small gear in this machine – a machine with an insatiable appetite for numbers and statistics (favorites of mine co-incidentally – I tutored high-school algebra for several years). In this business you live and die by your metrics. Everything is measured, analyzed, recorded and reported: the number and length of calls, hold time, wrap-up time, quality and resolution rate, all measured down to the second or tenth of a percentage point, and displayed daily on the white-boards affixed to each pod – yep, there are my numbers, right alongside “Bob from Bangalore” [I notice Bob's not doing so well with his "Rapport Building."  Overseas call centers have US Cultural Training - apparently when Bubba from Kentucky calls in about his wireless account, he likes to be able to shoot the breeze while Bob updates the billing address: "How 'bout them Yankees?"]

There’s also the people watching: These places are revolving doors. A never ending stream of colorful characters to observe. Sadly one of my current favorites was term’d yesterday – Linda, the Little Lady got into it with a customer. Brittany my long-suffering supervisor (who is now very pregnant and clearly feeling extremely maternal) was visibly choked-up at having to fire her. (I cannot begin to describe how bizarre the scene looked). We’d all grown kinda fond of Linda – the day she first moved into our pod it was fascinating just watching her. She arrived with all her crap in a milk-crate, which she carefully unpacked and arranged just so: several over-sized sippy cups, her corporate-branded koozy and chip-clip collection, a yellow foam stress-relief ball and a bunch of Kudos certificates. She then placed the empty milk-crate upside down on the floor and used it as a step to climb up into her chair.

Oddly enough just two days ago she won the grand-prize in the latest QA competition drawing: an I-Pod nano. I remember thinking how big it looked in her tiny hands… I also remember my last words to her: I had won Jeans-For-a-Week in the same drawing and immediately offered it up to the highest bidder (it fetched 5 bucks by the way). “Why did you do that?” she asked, straining to look up at me. “Linda” I replied, “I just don’t have the ass for jeans…” And then she was gone.

Nothing new under the sun… Same old working Friday. I’m in the office, preparing to do some work for the client. There is a trending topic on Twitter called #WhenIRuleTheWorld and the search stream of this hashtag is hilarious! I even found some pr0n stars with hilarious tweets…

Here are some tweets from that stream:

#wheniruletheworld it would be one hell of a happy place.
#wheniruletheworld snuggie s would be forbidden
#wheniruletheworld money wouldn’t be the form of exchange
#wheniruletheworld Will make everyone work from home and party in office ….
#wheniruletheworld brian molko would be my husband
#wheniruletheworld my maid will be robert pattinson, jonas brothers, and shia labeouf

And my personally favorite:

#wheniruletheworld I would still be on twitter everyday

When I think about Casual Fridays, I envision brilliant tech minds huddled in a neo-office creating the next programming code.  Somehow this trend of the nineties became mainstream and is still regarded as the day to roll out of bed and show up to work.  To survive in this competitive global economy you have to find ways to stand out and your image is the most important change that you can make.  While everyone else walks around in t-shirts and flip flops, you must appear to be serious and business minded.  Flip flops never give off the business minded vibe so don’t wear them unless you are taking out the trash or going on a roadtrip.   There are a few ways to stand out from the crowd.

1. Change your mindset.

This economy is not in a recession, it is simple competitive and more challenging.  Gone are the days of just showing up…now you have to work for it.

2. NO Flip flops on “Casual Friday”.

Casual Fridays is a just a day to be a little more relaxed and wind down for the weekend.  However, when times are competitive there is little room for winding down and your wardrobe must reflect that you mean business.  Below is an example a great Casual Friday looks for men and women. You will see that the male examples shows a complimentary (not matching) blazer and a open collar.  The female example shows a sweater with the silouhette of a blazer in nice earth tones.

3.  As always confidence and a smile are your best accessories.

images courtesy of Banana Republic.gap.com

images courtesy of spiegel and newport news.

Al parecer el blog va despegando y con ello empiezan a aparecer terminos de busqueda raros:

significado de los iconos del sciphone: Lo que me causa gracia es que Sciphone no tiene iconos…
moc os x snow leopard wallpaper: Mmm… no ha salido Mocos X Snow Leopard… aún.
Eduypao: Si che, ese es mi Twitter
fondos de snow lwopardo: Acá alguien habla español
acceder al iphone mediante ssh con snow : No che, si tiene nieve no puedes acceder por SSH (?)

Aaaah, a unos minutos de que sea viernes acá en Edu0811 ya andamos con el descanso que tanto caracteriza al fin de semana. Y qué mejor que aprovecharlo y salir del mundo del blogging formal y hacer lo que nos gusta: divertirnos.

Pero como ahora no traigo nada divertido (?) les dejo con el video del Doberman y el puntero laser. Lo ví hace mucho, pero me sigue causando gracia, para ustedes:

Vía | Juanguis.com

Check out more Casual Friday vlogs at MrLinky on Bantering Blonde!

Check out more Casual Friday vlogs at MrLinky on Bantering Blonde!

5 Random Things About Me:

5 Random Things About the Kids:

Shaniqua ruined casual Friday for everyone

So of late I have had a LOT of questions about our nursery and so I thought what a perfect thing for casual Friday:

So here you have it — Casual Friday – Nursery Edition:

(Remember please don’t use my kids real names in the comments…please…)

Fridays:

The long enduring hope for the everyday working man.

Coming on my bus I notice the same faces albeit less than yesterday, wearing jeans, khakis and a smidgeon of hope. The ever enduring Friday provides a comfort that there are two days of the week in which we can kick back an rest our feet from weary days.

The dreariness of rain becomes stomped by the everlastingbflood of enticements with after work coladas, casual affairs that will be ongoing, the sexiness of the night tramps into the dawn.

By all means we should be a little weary of Fridays, because we all should know that Monday will come again. Though for some it’s those two days that can last a lifetime. Taking a weekend trip, riding the everlasting tide of memories that can sweep upon to like a monsoon.

Enjoy the Friday but understand it’s place.

Ahhhh, it’s Friday once again.  Time to let down your hair, take a deep breath and plan for the weekend. Some of you might be wondering where to find trouble for the weekend. Some, how to stay away from trouble absolutely. My advice to all of you is to buy a bottle of Ledaig, Single Malt aged 10 years, have a glass sit back and let the Scotch make the choice for you.

That is, of course, unless you will be driving. Nobody likes a drunk driver. Not all of us would be so “lucky” as Donte Stallworth with the hands of the law strangling the life out of you. Then again you don’t have to have a drink at all in order to make a bone-headed decision.

Take the American institution, the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile:

It's in... Oh my God, it's in!

From Fox6Now.com -

WITI-TV, RACINE – The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile got itself into quite a pickle when it crashed into a Racine home Friday morning.

Neighbors tell FOX 6 the Wienermobile took a wrong turn and ended up on the dead-end street, Kenilworth Avenue in Racine.

While trying to get turned around, the woman driving the giant hot dog on wheels accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and lodged the Wienermobile under a house.

Get it?! A pickle! Because so many hot dog eaters put pickles on their phallic delight. Relish, yes. Saurkraut, indeed. Pickles, not so much. This isn’t Chicago (aw, damn, Racine is relatively close to Chicago).

Anyway, be safe out there FaFonians. It’s a wild world with runaway weinermobiles. We need all the hits we can get and can’t afford to lose any of you.

It’s Casual Friday here on the Swami. To celebrate, I’m writing this naked. Go feast on that!

My head’s still spinning from last night’s historic on-screen bust-up between Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, over Sotomayor’s about-to-happen appointment to the Supreme Court bench, which Buchanan thinks is a disgrace. A disgrace, I tell you.

Why? Well, because Sotomayor’s not a white man, for a start, and only white men are fit to decide what’s right and wrong in this country, everyone knows that. And how do we know? Because, of 110 Supreme Court justices so far, 108 have been white men, a fact Buchanan is proud of and wants to keep that way, thank you very much.

Which is why he’s angry. Angry at the Obama Administration for:

•  refusing to stand by historical precedent, a precedent of active discrimination against pesky women, especially pesky women of color;
• for breaking up a revered Old Boys’ Club; and, worst of all:
• for promoting Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina with more experience on the bench than any previous appointee, male or female, to the highest judicial position in the land.  I mean, good grief, what were they thinking?

“White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution,” Buchanan bleated in his bizarrely high-pitched drone, “100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks, who were 90% of the nation in 1960 when I was growing up and the other 10% were African-Americans who had been discriminated against. That’s why.”

He is further outraged because he sees Sotomayor’s appointment as unashamedly shoe-horning diversity into an institution that didn’t need it, simply to have her there. It’s affirmative action in action. Mixing things up just for the sake of it. An abomination.

Well, needless to say, Maddow came the closest I have ever seen her to combusting on screen, which is why it’s riveting television.

The video is HERE, so you can watch it for yourself. 

Obviously, Buchanan’s point of view is archaic, creaky, and embarrassing. Although it’s laudable, I think, that he had the nerve to speak the unspeakable.

In Britain, he’d have been branded an insane, racist hack and given very little air-time to make his point. Here in America, however, even those with fringe, incendiary, or lunatic viewpoints are allowed to grandstand for a little while, provided it keeps the ratings bubbling along nicely. And the Maddow-Buchanan argument certainly did that, I’m sure.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that there were times when I found myself siding with Buchanan, something even I find hard to believe, since I disagree with him on almost everything. Generally speaking, the second he opens his mouth on any topic he offends me.

Nevertheless, last night I could see his point.  Just a little.

A policy of levering people of different races into various positions simply on the basis of the color of their skin is as wrong and indefensible as excluding them for the same reason. People should rise to the top on merit, and be afforded the opportunity to do so, because they’re the best at what they do, not allowed to kangaroo hop over everyone else for reasons of variety, or, conversely, dragged down and pushed out of sight because they’d spoil the status quo.  

I left Britain twelve years ago, just as Tony Blair was getting his feet under the desk at 10, Downing Street. Other than very briefly, I have not been back since, so all I know about the place is what others tell me.

But what others tell me isn’t good. Not at all.  

Every one of my friends wishes they could leave too. They cite Blair’s policy of affirmative action and the European policy of zero border controls as the reason. As a result, apparently, Britain is now flooded with immigrants from all over the world. A tiny country is drowning in a sea of foreigners who have brought not merely diversity – which in these enlightened times was the plan: cosmopolitan is best; even an island can’t stay insular forever - but a debasing of the very society the immigrants sought to join. 

In the process of allowing almost anyone to settle within its shores, the UK lost its identity, or so goes the argument. Britain isn’t Britain any more.

Instead of integrating, learning the culture, and accepting standards, principles, and traditions built up over a rich history dating back dozens of centuries – the very elements that made Britain Britain - the immigrants stuck with their own. They brought their culture and traditions with them and set up camp, making their own little world within the British world, living as part of but separate.

I hear this time and time again. “Britain isn’t Britain any more.” And the British – what would be in Pat Buchanan’s terms the real British – feel they’ve lost control of their destiny, that it’s been hijacked.   

Next year I’ll be returning for the first time in a decade, when Naked in Dangerous Places is published there, so I guess I’ll find out for myself how much of this is true, or if my friends are hysterically exaggerating, which quite honestly is not beyond them.

All the same, it was against that backdrop that I watched the Maddow-Buchanan slap-down last night and was able, at least in theory, to see where Buchanan was coming from. To him, the heresy that is affirmative action meant overturning a noble institution that had functioned perfectly well all these years without being updated, destablizing it with random diversity. A dangerous policy.

As long as white males are in charge, he believes, the country will be stable, sturdy, solid, and….well, America. But give too much leeway to minorities, let them subvert the old ways, and America won’t be America any more.

Broadly speaking, that’s goofy nonsense, and Maddow was right to shoot it out of the skies.

Having said that, though….I get it. I know what he means. 

Or, rather, I empathize with his fear. He doesn’t want to see happen to the great US of A what has allegedly happened to Great Britain. He doesn’t want, in other words, America to lose its greatness or its identity on the road to doing the right thing and seeming progressive and open. Because, as we all know, some of the biggest mistakes have been made with the best intentions.

Hm.

www.cashpeters.com

Read Cash’s new book: Naked in Dangerous Places.

Watch Cash’s little movie, Fast and Very Loose.