Esc key vs. F1 key

How about a boring work-related story? No need to continue reading if you don't want to read one.

In AutoCAD, you have to use the escape key to deselect stuff, and as any savvy computer user knows, the F1 key is right next to the escape key. What not every computer user knows is that the F1 key is the designated "help" shortcut. I use the escape key a lot, and it's really close to the F1 key, and sometimes I hit the F1 key by mistake.

This wouldn't bother me if it was just a little window that popped up really quick and I could close it immediately, but AutoCAD is a really big, powerful, dangerous program and has an enormous help directory. So enormous that it takes several minutes to load.

I probably hit the F1 key by accident three to five times a day. If it takes an average of three minutes to load this, I loose nine to fifteen minutes of my time each day to closing the stupid help menu. During the course of a work week that's forty-five to seventy-five minutes of lost time.

I wouldn't mind if it was lost time checking blogs or reading about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and their outlandish presidential campaigns. (I have nothing against having a black president or a woman president, I just want a MODERATE president. No more political extremists!!!)

Back to the F1 key. I learned a time saving trick this morning. If I just minimize the help window, it pops up immediately instead of loading for several minutes. So I have a temporary fix until AutoDesk sends me an updated copy of AutoCAD with my new, super-awesome upgrade of having the help key on a delay requiring it to be held down for 3 seconds before loading!!!

Snoitulos Drawkcab (Backward Solutions)

I have a HUGE disdain for street-sweepers. At least in urban, densely populated areas. Seriously, what were the inventors thinking? "I know, we can make this cross between a vacuum cleaner, a fan, and a riding lawn mower and say that it cleans the streets!"

I have serious doubts about the efficiency of these machines ability to pick up dirt and trash from the road. From my experience, they mostly kick up massive amounts of filth from the ground (where gross and dirty things should be) and transfer it to the air (where nothing dirty or filthy should ever be). In addition, they run on internal combustion engines, which pollute the air.

Side note:

The boogie man isn't real, the sky isn't falling, and global warming is a bigger load of crap than anything else in this sentence. CO2 is considered the worst green house gas, but only a fraction of one percent of the CO2 released annually is realised by human actions. The relationship between global warming and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has a margin of error of close to two percent. All of that means that there is no way to tell if any of our efforts has affected the rate at which the earth's temperature is rising. None the less, we do have pollution problems, they're just localized. Around cities across the globe, the air quality is considerably lower in urban areas. (READ: driving two miles to work every morning instead of walking or riding a bike is only doing a few things: 1. Making you fat, 2. saving you a few minutes (which you get to spend in utter joy as you arrive earlier at work), 3. making the air you breathe taste like a tater-tot that got dropped into the fire on the grill.

Resume:

Really, wouldn't it be great if they got rid of all of the street sweepers and gave homeless people brooms and dustbins and some projects to live in and hired some people to cook for them and paid all of them enough to get on their feet? I know that most people don't trust the homeless with money, but if we would hire more social workers (creating more jobs...) the homeless people could be brought to a place where they would be able to manage their money successfully. Unemployment would go down, your air would be easier to breathe, people would stop asking you for your change when you come out of Starbucks, and your walk to work would be much quieter. What's the downside, we all loose some unsightly belly-fat? Crap, I know, you really like your "love handles" but come on, take one for the team.

End note:

I'm not a greenie or anything, I just think that the world God gave us to live in rocks, and I want my children to get to enjoy it at it's best, not some cheap broken down version. If we would just come to grips with the fact that a better standard of living is going to cost us a little bit of comfort and make the sacrifice, life would taste just that much sweeter.

So, what's your plan to save Africa?

This morning as I was rediscovering the outside world via drudgereport.com, I came across a couple of articles about Bono's [RED] campaign. The first was pointing out the meager 18 million dollars raised by the first year's efforts. The second one I read was about a spin-off organization, buylesscrap.org. There was a third Bono/[RED] campaign related article about Bono's guest editor-ness of Vanity Fair in the coming month. In case some of you are not familiar with the [RED] campaign, the idea is that you buy products like iPods, Motorola Razr mobile phones, sunglasses, designer tshirts, credit cards, etc. and some of the money goes to help the AIDS problem in Africa.

A lot of people are really bashing the idea. I don't particularly think it's awesome, but I do like some things about it:

1. Bono. He just rocks at life.
2. Red is a good color.
3. It DOES help some people in Africa
4. It has long term potential

The only thing I don't really like about it is that feeds off of the Western Culture's consumerism. I don't really like anything about consumerism, but I do like healthy economics. If you think of economics using the metaphor of the human body, you'll understand what I'm getting at.

Starving people have little body fat, and very hungry people's bodies use what they eat vastly more efficiently than most tubby Houstonians. I'm pretty close to the middle of that, I take in quite a bit more than the recommended 2000 calories each day (5000 calories/day), but I burn a whole heck of a lot more than most people. I also have about 8% body fat. I'm a really healthy guy (mostly due to God's blessing, but also due to a healthy amount of exercise, etc.). If my body were an economic situation, I would have high cash flow, and relatively low savings (by American and Western standards). This is a very healthy economy. Most healthy people eat their 2000 calories (maybe a bit more or less) and have a fair bit more "savings." (15-25% body fat sound fair?) These people are still very healthy. They might not be in the best situation, but they are in no danger at all, actually they are a little safer than I am. If they were economies, they would be Western economies.

What I'm saying is that consumerism isn't the healthiest of American economic attributes, but it does the trick. I eat a lot, but I burn a lot. Donald Trump makes a lot, so he spends a lot. I burn more of what I eat than Donnie spends of what he makes, but that's why he's fatter than I am.

So back to Bono, his [RED] Campaign feeds off of Donnie's fat. I think that's great, he's making our economics better. It might not be the most effective of methods for fighting AIDS (some may liken it to feeding the poor with table scraps, but hey, we've got a whole crapload of table scraps!), but it is progress. And progress is what these people need.

On to buylesscrap.org. I think that this is going to be a much more efficient effort. But not more effective. If everyone would do it, great. It would be a solid way of fighting the problem of wealth distribution. The thing is, we Westerners don't want to give our wealth to the Africans, we want everyone else to do it.

I love both organizations and I am so happy that they exist and that the founders have created them from their desire to help those less fortunate than themselves. I work for an organization very similar to each of them, with some differences that I'll discuss next post. The thing is, they don't really address the root of the problem. Africa is not a problem for the West to come in and fix. Africa is a home for millions of people. You wouldn't be too happy if someone came in when you were having money problems and took what you had and treated you like a child. Africa is a lot of people with some very serious problems with very complicated causes. Wouldn't it make sense that the solution was equally complicated? We should help Africans fix Africa, not try to fix Africa for them.

Happy Friday

Tie-dye. What says "happy Friday" better than a tie-dye t-shirt and a pink bandana? Some may say a cold brew says, "happy Friday" better, but you can't drink cold brews at work, so the way I spread Friday cheer is by wearing my "Friday shirt" as it has become known.

It's actually not my shirt. It is the property of one Ben Cubbage. I'm holding it for him until the ships meet and transfer to the Africa Mercy.

The reason I'm writing is to inspire others to find some way of bringing joy back to the workplace. Really though, how dreadfully sterile and boring has life at work become? I contest that work was meant to be a life-giving endeavour, not a life-draining punishment. I contest that, as a Christian, I am meant to bring Heaven down, not wait to die so I can enjoy it for myself.

A lot of people have a hard time with stuff like this. They see all of the bad things that happen in this world and they say, "How can a just and righteous God allow so much suffering?" I was reading in Leviticus the other day, and I realized that almost the entirity of the first five books of the Bible are a warning to prevent us from having to live like we now live (as cultures, that is. Not all people live with the same problems, because not all people have rejected the way God told us to live.).

It's not that God just wants to control us, or to manipulate us, it's that He genuinly loves us and wants us to enjoy life. When you buy something, or someone makes something for you, don't you find out how to use it from the maker? Why don't we believe the Maker when He tells us how to enjoy this gift that He has given us? Why is it that we think we know better?

So I wear a tie-dye shirt on Fridays and tell everyone I talk to, "Happy Friday!" because I know that there's more to this life than fighting to get ahead, and there's more to this life than dying and going to Heaven. I am going to live it today, right now, this very moment.