1. “Let Me Preface This By Saying…”

…that I like to say this to justify everything else I’m about to say. A fine example would be: “Let me preface this by saying that I have refused to listen to a single word you’ve said during the last hour of this excruciating meeting since it has clearly been a complete waste of my valuable time. Having said that, I suggest we setup a follow-up meeting to discuss what has been said here with the primary focus being clarification of said goals.”

2. “Having Said That…”

…let me restate that I’ve just said something of vital importance, so important in fact that it needs to be reiterated. Let me point out that it was, in fact, said. The words resonate in such a way that our discussion needs a moment to do nothing but ponder the sheer weight of their implications.

3. “That Said…”

…we can acknowledge the abbreviated version of the prior phrase, “Having Said That,” thus saving valuable fractions of a second whilst continuing to pollute our conversation with meaninglessness. Unfortunately, this provides us with precious little time to frantically think of something truly meaningful with which to follow up.

4. “You Know…”

…is the age old filler phrase which, when properly and abundantly utilized conveys to the audience an utter lack of concern for or understanding of anyone or anything. No, I don’t know. We’re supposed to be having a conversation, one in which I am in dire hope that you will shock and amaze me with your vast knowledge of a subject with which I could never have imagined being so intrigued, that is, until you provided me with this enchanting, illuminating explanation. Such depth and painstaking elaboration can so easily be avoided by these two infinitely presumptuous words: “You Know.”

5. “Wrap My Mind Around It”

Please do not attempt this, for it can only end in an emergency room somewhere, at which point you’ll be in no position to delicately explain your predicament. The upside is the psychoactive medication you may quite suddenly have legal access to. Avoid the antidepressants which take two weeks to “get into your system.” Two weeks is a long way down a road you’d prefer not to crawl on your knees. Whatever you do as you’re trying to “Wrap Your Mind Around” anything, do not, under any circumstances, “Get Your Head Around It.” You’ll find yourself in a different emergency room with less sympathetic orderlies who will be more than happy to staple your scalp back together like a shag carpet.

6. “Low Hanging Fruit”

This one goes out to my homies in an environment where such phrases can and will be interpreted in the most deviant of ways. Imagery will infect the minds of those so close to the edge that merely seeing those words typed in a large font in front of them could result in a month long rampage of debauchery worthy only of a Hunter S. Thompson novel. This is particularly risky now that Hunter S. Thompson is no longer with us to provide some semblance of sanity and hope to the proceedings.

7. “Man Alive”

I have yet to research this one. All I can say is that hearing it in the midst of a conversation in New York City or Long Island makes me feel like maybe I should have devoted at least a part of my upbringing tossing bales of hay in Iowa, or Idaho, or Kansas even. I don’t know if it’s a politically correct phrase designed to offend no one while still expressing shock or disdain. Color me offended by this one, so mission not accomplished.

8. “This is the Expectation”

This is my middle finger. It will get done, and if it doesn’t, it might have something to do with the fact that we are human. The harder you push, the less anyone wants to do anything for you. Please feel free to e-mail your grids, write them very legibly on your whiteboards, or better yet, detail them in voicemails at least five minutes in duration. I will promise to respond via Blackberry, while driving a stick shift in traffic, a novella describing each and every milestone which has been rendered obsolete due to the rapidly changing nature of our business, so we can waste no more time moving forward to the newly improved, lengthier set of expectations.

9. “The Take Away from This…”

…is that the more people you pack into a room for any specific purpose, the less likely that purpose will get accomplished in any reasonable length of time. The hope is that the attendees are folks that perform a valuable function within the organization, some perhaps perform multiple valuable, yet unsung, functions, due to their inherent nature to do what is ethical and preserve the organization for which they labor. The take away is most often cynicism due to a meeting such as a conference call between five to ten top level executives who spend 90 percent of the call holding down the mute button. Instead of a “Yes” or “No” you’ll hear a half-second of static to indicate that someone is listening to something. That keeps a conversation moving at break-neck speed. The take away is…

10. “We’re In Our Busy Season”

Congratulations. You now have full authorization to expect your associates to work round the clock. Surely their families will understand, after all, we’ve known about busy season far in advance. They have had plenty of time to restructure their lives around the needs of the organization. Some will celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah a month later. People will look at them strangely when they light a Menorah in April or try to cut down a Douglas Fir in August, but so be it. Their families, especially their preschool-aged children, have an implicit comprehension of the intricacies of corporate responsibility.

11. “Ethics Training”

I’ve needed this for over forty years. It’s an absolute revelation. Finally, I can dig up the old phone numbers of people I’ve wronged and explain that I had lacked the proper training which prohibited me from treating them like inferior beings. They’re still far inferior to myself, but there have been such advancements in the language for communicating this to the masses that I now believe I can significantly increase the percentage of my acquaintances that no longer view me as a mortal threat to their significant others, or themselves, or their miniature dogs that still think they’re dogs. Sure, there have been the occasional disappearances, but the place is quieter, peaceful even. I might even start wearing the tie.

12. “Privacy Practices”

Since you’re reading this, I’ll take a leap of faith and assume that you’re not receiving this post via psychokinesis. The notion of privacy is ludicrous, yet extremely profitable. Lawyers can keep this going in circles indefinitely. You’re on a computer. You complete various transactions on a computer. You might very well be connected to your entire life savings via a computer, or most likely a series of interconnected computers. Throw a couple of paragraphs up there that were composed by some folks claiming to be lawyers and rest easy. There really aren’t armies of organized groups in countries like Romania and Russia paying legions of people to acquire your personal information via the Internet, or if there are such nefarious activities, that legalese will protect you… or will it? Who is it designed to protect?

“In Conclusion…”

There is no conclusion. There will always be phrases that piss me off. I find myself saying things, and eventually they piss me off. I can be so damned repetitive, especially when I write. On the off chance that I write something I perceive as somewhat witty or might make someone laugh, I’ll stash it in my bag of tricks and plagiarize myself at a strategic moment. Who’s going to know? What will they say? “You unoriginal bastard, you just wrote that on your blog weeks ago. Can’t you come up with anything better than that?” Or maybe they’ll just laugh, preferably a large group of them, at the same time, in a genuine “that was really funny” manner, not that “this guy is a joke” kind of way. Days later, one of my killer catch phrases might just pop up in a meeting and become the mantra for that next huge initiative which will slaughter the competition provided the team can get their heads around it. You can’t be overly optimistic under the circumstances, as the majority can’t manage to punch a timeclock correctly.

I believe we’ve located the menorah. It’s been in our storage unit since we moved. We will probably light all the candles on the last night. I’ve been told, ‘You’re a good Jew.” This was at a time when I was at a gathering at my sister’s house. A friend of hers was having some difficulty with her digital camera, so I sprung into action. Afterwards, she said to me,”You’re a good Jew.” I think she was some high-ranking official at my sister’s synagogue. I was just helping someone out, and there she was slapping a label on it. When we finally get around to lighting the candles, I’ll be doing it more for the enjoyment of the children and my wife than anything else. If that makes me a good Jew, so be it. I’m just trying to celebrate.

Here’s a follow-up to the birthday festivities…

[youtube kbxpBiD5Ays]

The dream gift was originally intended for Ava: safety scissors shaped like a cute, friendly, innocuous beast which she could use for her endless arts-and-crafts projects, such as cutting up important government documents, credit card bills, bank notifications, etc. while her parents would guzzle cheap rot-gut whiskey and whine and laugh about the great old times when worry would kill you quicker than anything. Nikki took Gia out into the world on a quest for such treasure as would bring the light of glee into the eyes of our now-two-year-old, a quest which would end up in the bowels of holiday weekend shopping hell.

The beacon appeared towards the end of the excursion, and it is pictured here in all its packaged brilliance. What better offering to your innocent daughter than a friendly, inoffensively colored mallard to assist you with your paper shredding, chopping and older sister-threatening daily chores, particularly when it boasts ‘Shark Sounds when you cut!’ and one can only hope ‘Here’s to Swimmin’ with Bowed-Legged Women!’

The question remains, as we are compelled to ‘Also look for the Duck Scissors’ on the rear of the packaging, is whether the Shark Scissors quack. I might have to hunt down a pair.

[youtube f-TYvNRq6Qo]

So we’ve gone and done it. I should say, my wife did it, for the third time, this past Halloween. It was once again an awe-inspiring experience participating in the delivery of our third daughter.

There’s an interesting video over here at CNN which caught my attention. It’s titled “Little Baby, Big Stress”. It has some interesting suggestions on how to manage stress once a baby is born.

One particularly amusing concept is scheduling a date once a week with your spouse. It might be nice to live in some parallel universe where there were people nearby whom we could trust to watch our children so we could indulge in such activities. As it stands, we’re more or less on our own. We did have some family in town for a couple of weeks, during which time the offer was extended for us to go out to dinner or something, just the two of us. We opted to stay home and relax. At least, that was the plan. As for me, I was physically incapable of relaxing, sleeping, eating, or thinking coherently. When the pediatrician gave us an A-plus, said baby’s doing great and that he had no advice for us since we seemed to be doing everything right, I was speechless. Had I attempted to say anything, it would probably have been unintelligible nonsense, my parenting privileges would no doubt have been stripped from me immediately, and my wife and baby would have been sent home with a police escort. It would have been a strait jacket for yours truly.

We nearly boycotted Thanksgiving, but I decided to take advantage of the fact that, dare I say it, I was beginning to feel human again. So I cooked a turkey, complete with stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, the works. I stared at our third perfect little girl. I reminded myself of how lucky we are. My wife reminded me of how lucky we are. I think I’m even starting to feel lucky. It’s one thing to intellectualize it or hear it said over and over, but it’s another thing entirely to feel it. I admit that I’m very selfish that way. I have this need to feel good about things, to enjoy life, to have a good time whenever and wherever possible. I don’t want my daughters seeing their father reduced to a neurotic mess of a human being and thinking that’s what they have to look forward to when they get older and accumulate responsibilities.

Life is good right now, despite the string of recent and current events which are providing endless entertainment for my family, friends and coworkers.

Just up and relocated the entire family to the Capital District. That would be the region surrounding the capitol of New York State. Most non-New Yorkers have no clue as to what that means. Most non-New Yorkers, including many who have visited the state, consider New York to encompass the four block radius surrounding St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village. That would be located on Manhattan Island. That’s right, Manhattan is an island. So is Long Island. Queens is a borough. New York City has five of them (boroughs, that is). Queens, and Brooklyn (another borough) for that matter, both are part of Long Island, though neither Queens-ites nor Brooklynites seem to grasp or admit that. I grew up in Queens, which is not necessarily relevant, depending on who happens to be reading this.

Now we’re in a renovated textile mill, supposedly the largest textile mill in the world, which has been converted into loft apartments. My one-way commute has been reduced from 40 miles to 4.5 miles. The kids are loving it so far. The architecture around here is fascinating. Supposedly, real estate around these parts hasn’t suffered quite as much of a blow as elsewhere. Still, there are those back on Long Island who rolled their eyes at me when I told them we were moving… UPSTATE. We are now ‘upstaters.’ The key phrases regarding Upstate New York vs. ‘Downstate’ are “your money will go so much farther,” “such an easier pace,” and “what about when it snows?” Right now we’ll just go ahead and enjoy the autumn weather.

[youtube zvQZLzO0vRM]

Access Links, the Add-In included (but not enabled by default) with Excel, can save time when exporting data to MS Access. However, for frequent GeoAccess reporting, I was craving some more flexibility, so I started scripting some alternative solutions (please note: I have only tested this with Excel 2000). Three of them are packaged in this add-in, GeoAccessAssistant.xla (click here to download). Once installed, it adds a GeoAccess menu bar with the following three buttons:

Export Zip Selection to MS Access

Select a range of zip codes. (Please note: Zips must be in a single column. At a later date, I might enhance this to accommodate other types of ranges, i.e., horizontal, non-contiguous, etc., but for now, this should still be useful in the majority of scenarios.) Click Export Zip Selection to MS Access. This script will trim the contents of each cell to remove surrounding white space, add leading zeroes wherever necessary, shift the selection down one row, add zip as the value in the empty cell at the top of the selection, expand the selection one row at the bottom to catch the stray extra cell, create a new, blank Access database with the same name as the active workbook, then transfer the selected range to the new database into a new table named census. The script goes one more step by running this JetSQL Data Definition Query:

alter table census alter column zip text(5)

It seems that GeoNetworks can return inaccurate results if the zip field is not a text field five characters in length. I found this out the hard way. Three hours and two tech support calls later, I decided to avoid that particular trap going forward.

Export Zip Region to MS Access

This goes through essentially the same steps as the above, except you only need to have the cursor in a single column of zips. When you press Export Zip Region to MS Access, it first selects the current region, meaning it will expand to select contiguous, neighboring cells with contents. Try to make sure those cells happen to be in a single column.

Export Zips and Counts (Populate)

This one does not require anything to be selected initially. Clicking Export Zips and Counts (Populate) pulls up a single-button UserForm prompting the user to Select Zip Range, then Click Here. Next, it prompts to Select Counts, then Click Here. Both selections must contain the same number of cells, i.e., one zip code per count, otherwise a message box will pop up warning Cell counts not matching. Try again? The user can either try again or cancel the operation. (I have not torture-tested this, but it should work with all types of selections including non-contiguous areas, as long as both zips and counts have the same number of cells. However, I can’t imagine encountering a scenario such as that. Then again, one never knows…) If the cell counts match, it will prompt Click to Export Data to Access. It will then create a new, blank Access database with the same name as the active workbook, create a new table named census with a five-character text field named zip, then iterate through each zip in the originally selected range, duplicating records according to each corresponding count, essentially replicating the GeoNetworks Data-Populate feature.

I haven’t provided further instructions, as this assumes some Intermediate knowledge of Excel which should include managing Add-Ins. Details are freely available in Excel’s online help.

If anyone either finds this useful or feels that I must be stopped, please feel free to share opinions, experiences, rants, and raves. Any suggestions are always more than welcome, though I cannot guarantee that I will act on them other than to respond to your comments. I assure you, I’m driven by an uncontrollable desire to automate away repetitive tasks wherever possible, not including, of course, those repetitive tasks which might actually prove beneficial, such as breathing.

I’ve finally succumbed to peer pressure and threw up a MySpace account here. For someone who prides himself on being technically savvy, it seems a little late in the game. Frankly, I’ve been a little creeped out by the whole MySpace phenomenon, with all the sexual predators floating around, not to mention the hordes of lonely, desperate, socially inept types who can’t pry themselves away from their computers long enough to skulk out of their dingy basements and meet people the old fashioned way, face to face. I’m not advocating alcoholism here, mind you, but there’s a lot to be said for the occasional visit to the local watering hole for a shot and a game of pool. Sometimes it’s just that kind of night that could lead to marriage and children, if that’s your thing. Of course, it’s much easier to pretend you’re a hundred pounds lighter and thirty years younger, soliciting twelve year olds because you’re just so in tune with their needs. I know plenty of people who are convinced that computers are evil. Apparently it’s the Internet itself that ends marriages, rather than the people compelled to abuse the greatest collective source of information the world has ever known. So maybe I’ve been guilty of labelling MySpace unfairly. After all, guns don’t kill people. People do. I will keep this website and blog going, selectively throwing up a MySpace blog entry, maybe sharing a photo here and a video there. With a little luck, I’ll avoid getting sucked into the dark abyss.