Year: 2008

Bridge Builders

This week is Public Employee Recognition Week. To celebrate, our management gave us ice cream and cake on Tuesday. Another event was to have a bridge building contest. They had a wooden bridge about 4 feet wide and 20 feet long that you could assemble like blocks and the contest was to see which team of 4 could disassemble and reassemble the bridge in the shortest amount of time. When they sent the sign-up sheet around I was surprised nobody in our office was participating, but I wanted to do it and three other people in my group were willing to do it too. Yesterday we watched as they unloaded the pieces and started thinking about the fastest way to assemble the bridge (which some people thought was cheating), but the bridge was in a courtyard, so a lot of people could see it from the windows.

This morning we watched a few of the early teams try it out and got a couple of good ideas. We thought of some more stuff and drew up diagrams of where people should stand and what parts they would be responsible for. Given that we design bridges, the expectations were much higher for us than, say, our contract administration office. We showed up in hard hats and vests and our plan in mind. When the whistle blew we worked very fast and it was over in what seemed like no time. I was actually breathing hard from the exertion even though it had only taken about a minute. Our co-workers watching from the offices above held up signs with “10” on them like in the Olympics. After lunch they tabulated all of the scores and we were the only team out of about 10 that had broken the one minute barrier: 57 seconds. Each of the team members got a $25 gift card, t-shirt with our logo, mouse pad, and a couple of other trinkets.

brbuilder.jpg

Treasury Direct

After my attempt to buy Savings Bonds finally succeeded, my access card arrived. First they assigned me a long account number and let me pick out a password to access the account plus they asked three personal questions (I gave them fake answers). When you log in you enter the account number but the password can only be entered by clicking an onscreen keyboard with the letters placed at random (a new level of hunt and peck). But the card adds an entirely new layer of obscurity: Some people have called it a bingo card, where they will call out A4 like in Battleship and I have to type in the appropriate letter or number on the card (in this case, the letter A). I also have to supply the serial number on the card. I think there are a limited number of types of cards because my login asks me to choose from 3 different serial numbers. Here’s my card:

A B C D E F G H I J
1 6 S 7 S F S E 2 X 6
2 E H J H R L C M 6 K
3 C T A U C D Y T W 1
4 A 9 A 6 H 5 M Y Y M
5 E L N W X 8 D Y 2 8

This has to be one of the most ridiculous forms of security ever. There is no way you can memorize this so you pretty much have to take it wherever you go.

Plump Juicy Raisins

The front of the box of Raisin Bran I have in my cupboard says “Hundreds of plump juicy Sun-Maid raisins.” But they aren’t plump and juicy. They are dried and shriveled like all raisins. If they were plump and juicy wouldn’t they be grapes? It just bugs me they would go out of their way to put something so blatantly false on the box.

It’s not much different from when they used to say that some cereal was part of a nutritious breakfast. The rest of the nutritious breakfast was the milk you’d put on the cereal, orange juice, eggs, toast, and fruit. Take the cereal out of that equation and you’d still have a nutritious breakfast, but with fewer calories. What they should have said was that the cereal was a completely unnecessary part of a nutritious breakfast.

Series I Savings Bonds

While visiting Clark Howard’s website to find out where I could recycle my computer, I saw an alert saying to hurry and buy Series I Savings Bonds and earn 6% interest. Since my PayPal and ING accounts are earning less than 3%, that sounded pretty good. Of course, there’s a catch. The big catch is that 6% is only available if you buy bonds before the end of the month, which is just a few days away. The second is the 6% rate won’t last forever and in fact it won’t even start until November. The last is that if the rate then goes down and you want to sell your bond before its 5 year maturity, then you forfeit 3 months of interest.

Continue reading “Series I Savings Bonds”

Digging a Hole to China

I was reading some comments from Thursday’s episode of Lost. There is a reference to Tunisia and someone pointed out that the opposite side of the earth from Tunisia is the South Pacific off the coast of New Zealand (about where the Lost island is thought to be located). They linked to this website:

http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html

So I spent a while playing around with that and learned that most places have ocean on the other side of the earth including all of the continental US, Europe, Africa, and Australia. What a boring planet. South America has an opposite in China (must be where the idea of digging a hole to China originated) and Indonesia.