Christopher Archive at The Wheeler Family

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2008 Pinewood Derby is in the books…

Published by Christopher on May 7, 2008 in Michael. 3 Comments

So before I write about what happened tonight, I want you to read my post from last year: Last years Pinewood Derby recap. Go ahead, I’ll wait, just come back when you’re done…

So basically, this year was exactly like last year. Sometime last week I told Michael that when we were finished with this car, I wanted to start on next years car almost right away, like in a few weeks, so we would have plenty of time and didn’t have to rush. I said the same thing last year.

Last year I said this:

Since we were running so close with time this year I feel like we missed out on some things that really would have helped Michael’s car do better, like doing a better job of polishing the axles, or sanding the car even smoother to cut down on friction. Our axles were bent and I didn’t even try to straighten them, and I thought about trying to align the wheels but just didn’t have the time.

Those things are the EXACT things I wasn’t happy with about Michael’s car this year.

Last year I closed by post by saying:

Finally, a special thank you to Kate, for allowing us to take over the kitchen table for the past few days, and not getting too mad when I spent money on stuff for a wooden car.

Well, same thing this year.

Kinda strange how this works out I guess huh?

Last year, in Michael’s first year, he placed 4th out of 17 kids, missing 3rd place and a trophy by not much at all.

Anyways, on to the good stuff I guess…

This is obviously a VERY rough cut. I drilled the holes in the back first before I cut the general wedge shape with a coping saw. The cutting would have been much easier if I had a vise to hold the block. Also, if we had a vise to hold the block, I would have made Michael cut it instead of me.

This is the finished car, rear left. Notice the personalized license plate!

This is the front right of the car.

This obviously is the bottom of the car.

I don’t have video yet like last year. But, when I get it, it is going to be sweet. I borrowed an HD camcorder from work and I need to transfer the video over… I will do it as soon as I can.

Well, so about the results…

Like I mentioned, last year, 4th out of 17 kids.

Tonight Michael placed 2nd out of 16 kids. Way to go Michael!

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Sometimes, I hate my job

Published by Christopher on May 7, 2008 in Really Annoying. 3 Comments

So anyways, for those of you who don’t know how the printing here at the University of Iowa works, they installed this new system with a series of checks to make sure you really want to print whatever it is you want to print. The way it works is this:

Step #1: You click “print” like you normally would when printing a document.

Step #2: A little box pops up with the document information, such as number of pages and total cost. You click OK.

Step #3: You get up from your chair, go to a different computer called the “Print Release Station” (some of you may remember this from a previous post) and sign in with your HawkID. There you are presented with a screen that lists your print job(s) as well as number of pages and total cost.

So, before you can print ANY document, you have have to confirm printing THREE different times. At any time before you click OK the third time, you can choose not to print the job. First, you could choose not to click Print in the first place, but if you do, when the little box pops up on your computer, you can cancel. If you do click ok and decide that you don’t want the job printed, you can either a) just not log in to the Print Release Station, or b) if you do log in to the Print Release Station, you can STILL click Cancel.

Drew and I have had discussion about whether or not the system is excessive. I’m not exactly sure what the reasoning was for the University to install this system. I think I can guess a few of them. A lot of people used to print a job and not pick it up right away and forget and walk out and leave it. It’s wasn’t unheard of for a person to print a job and not pick it up right away and somebody else swiping a job that wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence for somebody to print a job that they didn’t need, or sometimes print a whole document when you needed just one page.

Which leads us to today’s story. Some girl had a big document, something like 100 pages or so. She needed just 2 copies of 1 page of the document. Well, as it turns out, she ended up printing the entire document twice. So instead of paying a dime for 2 pages, she ended up getting charged 10 bucks for 200 pages. Those of you who have been paying even not so close attention could probably figure out from what I have written here that there were numerous opportunities for this girl to bail on the job and reprint it the way she wanted.

So, he job starts coming out, and I hear her mutter “Oh crap” or something like that. She started grabbing all the pages she didn’t need and started gently placing them in the recycle bin. A few seconds later she asked me if there was any way I could cancel her job. I told her that I couldn’t and asked her if there was a problem. She told me what happened, and seriously, as politely as I could, I mentioned that she had several opportunities to cancel the job herself before it came out. Then she muttered something to the guy standing next to her something like “If he just get off his lazy fat ass maybe he could do something about this” and I replied that really, there wasn’t anything I could do. So then she just starts grabbing her extra pages and starts THROWING them violently into the recycle bin and swearing and stuff about how stupid this whole thing was and how she wishes I would just do something to fix it.

By that point, if I could have fixed it, I probably wouldn’t have. But anyways, I couldn’t. Duh.

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Daily Iowan prints one of the dumbest articles EVER!

Published by Christopher on April 30, 2008 in Stupid Stuff. 1 Comment

So this morning I woke up and read the DI online and there was this article about how T9 (the predicative text messaging software) doesn’t include any swear words, so it makes it much harder for people to swear in a text message. Really? This constitutes news? Why in the world would anyone write this? And who came up with this idea? It is really stupid.

Full Article Here

Little Miss Attitude

Published by Christopher on April 29, 2008 in Really Annoying. 1 Comment

So I’m sitting here at work, and this girl comes up to me and says:

So, your little system took my nickel, and didn’t print my paper.

Well EXCUSE ME for ruining your life lady. Anyways, what this probably means is:

It didn’t print, because she did something wrong, or
It did print, and she waited too long and somebody else accidentally grabbed it.

These people are REALLY starting to annoy me sometimes…

Let’s see if this works

Published by Christopher on April 16, 2008 in Really Annoying. 3 Comments

So we’re having problems with printer #3 at work. It sucks. It’s a piece of junk. It always jams and throws out weird error codes, and the ITC hasn’t replaced it with the printer that they took out that actually works!

Anyways, since it keeps jamming, we just shut the stupid thing off. So, for those of you who don’t know, when we print here, some people are randomly assigned to printer #1 and some to printer #3. Now, at this point, I don’t expect people to know not to print to #3. However, before a job will print, you have to go to a different computer and sign in with your HawkID to authorize it a final time to print. This special computer is called a “Print Release Station” and authorizing the job is known as “releasing” the print job. The selected printer is displayed when you log in.

Now, since printer #3 isn’t working, we put a hand-written sign that said “Do not release any print jobs to printer 3″. It is at this point where I would expect a reasonably intelligent college student to NOT release a job to printer #3. HOWEVER, this is not the case. A few dozen people so far today, in about three hours, have indeed released the job to printer #3. That is a problem.

Now what they have to do is go back to their computer and reprint the job, selecting printer #1. This has made many people very angry. Most people seem to think it is my fault. I am assuming this based on the fact that they are yelling at me.

So now I have made this sign. Perhaps it will be hard to read, but you will get the idea of what I have done. As you can see, I not only taped a sign to the desk in front of the keyboard, I also taped one directly to the monitor. The message reads “STOP!!! If you sent your job to Printer 3, DO NOT RELEASE IT! If the printer listed is itcprint\LM-ITC-Main-3 please cancel the job and reprint to Printer 1 from the computer.” I hope this will take care of the problem.

UPDATE: During the time it took me to type this, THREE MORE PEOPLE have come to me because their jobs “didn’t print”. Apparently I was wrong, it didn’t take care of the problem. And I was wrong to assume that just because they have been accepted to college that they are reasonably intelligent.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So since people were still hanging around #3 waiting for their jobs to come out, I put another sign up. This one reads “THIS PRINTER IS NOT WORKING. If you printed a job to Printer #3, please read the note posted near and on the PRINT RELEASE STATION”. We’ll see how long this works.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

Published by Christopher on April 9, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

So about a month ago my wife sent me a link to a video about some dude giving a lecture. I finally got a chance to watch it today and decided to post it here:

I don’t really have much to say about it. This version is only about 10 minutes long. Apparently the original full-length lecture is about 76 minutes long, and you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Don’t offer money to somebody to do something gross thinking they won’t really do it

Published by Christopher on April 7, 2008 in Lessons Learned. 1 Comment

So I learned a lesson this weekend: Don’t offer money to somebody to do something gross thinking they won’t really do it…

If you want to know why, click here to find out.

Larry King Pitches Fit at Son’s Little League Game

Published by Christopher on April 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments

CNN fixture Larry King’s 9-year-old son Chance Armstrong King plays Beverly Hills Little League. King père is the coach of Chance’s team.On Monday, March 10, during a heated game, the suspendered talk show host apparently got into a confrontation with one of the league’s umpires. “[Mr. King] was making a fool out of himself as a manager on the field, talking in the middle of the field in the middle of plays,” reported a source close to the action. FULL ARTICLE HERE

QUESTION: Why does Larry King, who is 74 years of age, have a child the same age as me my son?

Picnic tables

Published by Christopher on March 29, 2008 in The things people will do. 1 Comment

There are always stories in the news about people… making love (?) to things, so I decided to created a new category called “The things people do” and here is my inaugural post…

Art Price, Jr., a married father of three, chose to do a picnic table. I’m not sure I want to write all the details here, but I am bored and can’t sleep and couldn’t pass this up. If you are interested you can read the full article here.

I am so annoyed at my job right now…

Published by Christopher on March 26, 2008 in Really Annoying. 5 Comments

There are numerous reasons for this, some of which some of you may know about all the changes they have made to the printing system here, and maybe I’ll write about it sometime, but…

OK, so about 5 minutes ago somebody came over and said they were having problems printing, so I went over to see what was the problem. First problem is, they’re on a Mac. OK, just kidding. So I go over and check it out and it appears they have tried printing, but there is an error box that has popped up and says they’ve entered the incorrect password. In fact, it is repeated 5 times in a row that they have the incorrect password (I’m not sure why this is). Anyways, its a guy and a girl, and the guy says he doesn’t know what is wrong, while the girl is repeatedly clicking the OK button and trying again and again for it to print.

So I tried to see what was wrong (at this point I had a pretty good idea) and entered my username and password and what do you know, it works for me. So I used my finely tuned troubleshooting skills and asked them to try again, this time with the correct password. It worked.

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