The Skilling Connection

I was reading an article on the Enron the other day, when I came across an interesting tidbit. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who was just convicted of fraud and a bunch of other good stuff related to the Enron scandal, is the younger brother of none other than...


WGN's weatherman, Tom Skilling

I'm pretty sure that I've railed on weathermen before in this blog, and probably have singled out Tom Skilling at one point or another, for being a waste of space. Little did I know that he was the brother of one of the central figures in perhaps the worst "white-collar crime" in recent history.

See, I knew there was a reason I didn't trust Tom Skilling. This merely confirms what I always suspected all along. That beneath that jolly smile and grandfather-like demeanor, lies a man with a twisted psyche. You can't escape genetics. Beware, if your last name is Skilling, you're bound to one of two possible fates:

1) Ruining the lives of thousands of hard working Americans by unethical management of a corporation, or

2) Ruining my life with your faulty weather predictions.

There are no exceptions. The world needs to rid itself of this scourge that calls itself the Skilling family, I say.

Spring Cleaning

Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend. Mine was about as busy as it gets. Saw Da Vinci Code (weak) and X-Men 3 (loved it). Went to an outdoor wedding, which was nice except it was ridiculously hot. Played some softball and basketball, where it was also ridiculously hot (in addition to lots of fuzzy plant crap flying around the air).

But I think the most significant part of the weekend, for me at least, was the day I spent cleaning and taking care of business around the house. After a long winter and busy past couple months, I finally had a chance to hand wash my car, sweep away all the leaves, dirt, and spiderwebs built up in my garage, and trim the overgrown hedge that was interfering with part of my driveway ever since I moved in.

Trimming hedges is harder than I expected. Here is a picture of my finished work:



Beautiful, isn't it. Consider the above photo as reason #1 of why you should never, ever let me cut your hair.

Update

Well it's been a while since I wrote anything, some of you may be wondering what I've been up to. First of all, work has been especially busy lately. You can all usually assume that is the case, whenever the updates get rare.

There have been some highlights from the last few weeks though. One was getting to see Shubes and Sandy get married. This marks the first of the original ~509~ clan to get hitched by the way. Some pictures from the wedding:





Yes, our hands say "5-0-9" in the first picture. Yes, I know that makes us all very lame. There were plenty of interesting incidents from that evening, none of which will be discussed in detail here. Let's just say there was some tackling, and also a gay waiter hitting on Ryan.

Another landmark day was Olivia's med school graduation, last week. It was really nice to see her walk across that stage, after watching the girl work so hard for the last 4 years and make so many sacrifices to get there. I know for a fact that I would not have made it myself.

As part of her graduation week activities, we went to a graduation ball and also a Sox game. You can take a wild guess on which one I enjoyed more. Here's a pic from the game:



Next memorable event was the engagement of Brian and Grace. Another couple takes the plunge. Not that it matters what I think, but I thought it was really great thing to see. Congratulations guys!

Finally, I have to talk about getting to go to watch Conan O'Brien taping at the Chicago Theater. Thanks to Chras's email savvy and generous offer to bring me along, we got to cross one thing off of the "Miscellaneous To-Do List" of life. Conan is definitely one of the funniest people in the world, if you ask me, and I loved watching his show ever since high school days.

Even better was that his guest for that show was Dave Chappelle. So you had maybe the 2 funniest people in the world on the same stage, and me and Chras were there to see them. Very cool, I will remember the experience for years to come.

I took a few pictures there, see below (note: the ones inside are bad quality because my phone camera sucks in the dark, and also because the ushers were yelling at people with cameras, so I had to do it surreptitiously. This led to the blurriness to go along with grainy. In the last one you can kind of make out Conan shaking hands with Chappelle on stage, so it's all good.):









There were some other highlights, but I don't have time to write about them right now. Gotta get to bed. Later folks.

Banker's Hours

Every now and then, I'll hear somebody at work use the term "banker's hours" jokingly. I'm not entirely sure what it means, but based on the context, I'm pretty sure it's a way of making fun of someone for leaving earlier than usual.

For example, if I see Bob taking off in the early afternoon at maybe 2 or 3 (our normal workday ends at 4:30pm), I might say "Hey Bob, keeping banker's hours, eh?" To which he would probably smile politely and make up some excuse for why he's leaving early.

I know, it's pretty dumb, and not that funny, but people actually say it pretty often around here. At least it's better than saying "touch base" all the time. There's this girl who sits near me and I hear her say it every single day. Makes me want to punch someone.

Anyways, what I think is funny is how bankers apparently got the reputation of being lazy and having a short work day, to the point that "banker's hours" actually became a term. Sorry Anuj, it's true.

It also makes me wonder, if engineers make fun of bankers for leaving work early, what do people in other professions say in similar situations? Like if a banker sees a fellow employee going home around noon, would he/she say "hey, keeping Kindergarten teacher's hours, eh?"

Or on the other side of things, say a Japanese businessman wants to leave the office earlier than usual, does he/she have to worry about a colleague making a derisive comment like "hey, keeping electrical engineer's hours, eh?"

Major League Gaming

A while back MTV did that True Life documentary on professional gamers, now it looks like they are going to take it to the next level and have an organized league with TV contracts and everything:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060417/ap_en_tv/video_gaming_tv_show_1

They say it could be the next big sensation, like televised poker in the last few years. I think, if done right, it could be even bigger than that. Could fantasy videogamer leagues be far behind? I draft T-Squared with the first overall pick!