Mets Sleeve Patch

Have you ever in your life seen a worse logo than the one below? The Mets are wearing this patch on their uniform sleeves to 'celebrate' the first season at the new Citifield. What kind of celebratory patch is it when it is this when it's so non-festive? I've never seen anything so boring in my life. It's the most weak, bland, vanilla, dull, uninspiring, undistinctive and downright awful thing I have ever seen.

Don't you think there could have been some sort of contest where they could have had people select logos instead of just accepting whatever piece of crap Citibank tells them to put on there? The worst part about this is that the culprit behind this patch (Citigroup) is not even going to exist in a couple months.

By the way, if you don't understand why I think this sleeve patch is so awful, just take a moment to compare it to the sleeve patch the Yankees will be wearing this season.

I'm curious: What do you guys think of these two different patches?

Training Our Replacements

Several coworkers and I have been busy at work the last few weeks training some of our colleagues who are visiting from our company's offices in India and Singapore.
These engineers are here to learn "all of our systems and procedures" ostensibly to ensure that there are more engineers available on evening and overnight shifts for Ops staff to escalate problems to, but in actuality they are likely here to replace the engineers we have on staff.

There has not been any word from above saying that this is definitely going to happen, but why would there be? If they let us know that we were training our eventual replacements, our inevitable complaints would make managers' lives more difficult...

Sometimes it seems in order to get the best performance from the staff in smaller offices like mine is to treat us like farmed mushrooms: keep us in the dark and feed us sh*t!

Mission G?

There has been a series of commercials for something called "G" that has recently been on TV, radio and print ads.
The television ads in particular are striking. There are a series of faces that scroll across your screen, some immediately recognizable, others less so, and all simply staring towards you as a Lil Wayne voiceover tells us what "G" is:

• The emblem of a warrior
• The swagger of an athlete
• A champion AND a dynasty
• Gifted
• Golden
• Genuine
• Glorious
• A lower case god
• The greatest of all time.
• The heart hustle and soul of the game

I had no idea what these were commercials for when they first starting airing at the beginning of this year but I Googled it and found out it was a campaign for PepsiCo's Gatorade brand.
I wondered if this was an effective way to start a campaign so I checked Google Trends and found that one of the most searched terms was "what is G? commercial" so other people are obviously doing the same search that I am.

Now they are on to the next phase of their "G" marketing campaign, with commercials called "Mission G" which are based on the Monty Python movie "The Holy Grail."
I wonder, is this 30 year old movie too obscure for their target market? Are the commercials too weird?

Standing Desks

I spent the whole day today working at a standing desk.
In my new office, we have a row of desks that have the ability to be used at regular desk height or at a raised height in order to use them while standing.
I spent the day standing up and it was great. My legs and back are a little tired but I felt more alert.
The final verdict will have to wait... I'll see how sore I feel after a week of this before I decide how much I like it.

Finding time for schoolwork

When I decided to go back to school, I was 30 years old and had not attended college since I was 19. I was working in IT since I was 21 and had worked my way up through several different jobs to the point where I was an Operations Supervisor at a market data company with over 1500 employees.
In addition to skills which were self-taught and things I learned on the job, I took a few certification courses on my own and attended several training sessions at work in addition to many eLearning courses my employer offers which I took online.
There were several times when I felt the desire to go back to school and get my degee but I never got around to it because of one excuse or another. I'm not sure what made me decide to finally just do it and start taking classes but eventually I did and applied to CUNY and decided to start taking classes at BMCC.
The hardest thing to do was to figure out how to get into the habit of studying in my free time rather than just doing whatever I wanted after work. Luckily I was able to get a few very engaging professors and some very smart and hard-working fellow students who helped inspire me to get into those habits early. I finished my time at BMCC in Spring 2008 with a 3.6 GPA.
In the Fall of 2008, I entered Baruch and while my first semester was very challenging, I was able to do reasonably well and finish with a 3.23 GPA.
This semester I am taking four classes: Philosphy 1500, Management 3120, English 4300 and Anthropology 1001. This is not going to be an easy semester because in addition to the 12 credits, I am still working full time. Basically, my week looks like this: I work in New Jersey each day from 6am to 2pm. After work, I am generally home by 3pm and head straight to Baruch. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I can study at school for a couple hours until my first class at 5:50pm. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I get to my first class at 4:10 and then I have a 2 hour break until my late class. Every night, Monday through Thursday, I finish at about 9pm and get home around 9:30. I usually eat and get to bed as early as I can because I have to wake up by about 5am.
So where does this leave time for my wife, my friends, my family, exercise, movies, TV, etc? It generally doesn't, except for on the weekends. The key is to get ahead of schedule on schoolwork, do the big projects ahead of time and to always keep in mind that school is important and a high GPA is important and that this will all be worth it when I'm done.

Movin' On Up

My office is at a data center in Nutley, NJ.
Normally my group is located on the 3rd floor but a couple of months ago we relocated to a temporary space on the 1st floor while the 3rd floor was gutted and completely renovated.
The renovation is now complete and we are moving back up to the 3rd floor to begin working in our new digs.
I know that new desks and computers don't fix everything but sometimes it's good to start fresh. Hopefully the new surroundings encourage all staff to re-examine the way we do things around here and break free of bad habits and corner-cutting and start to improve our processes and procedures in a way that will help us improve our overall performance.
The phrases "that's the way we have it set up" or "that's just the way we do things" no longer apply: Let's take this as an opportunity to set things up the right way the first time.

Garden Party

First Kobe drops 61 to set the scoring record at Madison Square Garden, now LeBron scores 52 in a triple-double (most points in a triple-double in over 30 years.)
It looks like the hiring of Mike D'Antoni may have been even more ingenius than we originally thought. Not only are the Knicks infinitely more entertaining to watch, their opponents are made to feel right at home. This is especially nice for opponents (like LeBron) who will be free agents after next season and who will hopefully have their decision on whether to sign with the Knicks affected by their memories of the great games they're involved in now.
And what about the fact that the Knicks are on the losing end of most of these great games? That's fine, for this season and next.
In fact, the more we lose, the better off we'll be in the 2010 season because we'll have higher quality draft picks on the roster in addition to whichever free agents (Bosh, Wade, LeBron) agree to sign.
So let's root for the Celtics on Friday night: We'll need a point guard and Rajon Rondo (free agent 2010) would fit right in...

First Blog Entry

Well, here's my first blog entry. I'll start with the basic facts about me.
My name is Mike and I live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with my wife Rosie.
I am 33 years old and I've lived in NYC my whole life. I was raised in Staten Island and moved to Manhattan when I was about 18. My wife and I have lived on Orchard Street for the last 5 years. We've been married for almost 2 years and we have no kids.
I got my Associates Degree from BMCC in Spring of 2008 and this is my 2nd semester at Baruch. I am majoring in Operations Management.
I work in IT and am an Operations Controller for a market data company in New Jersey.
I enjoy reading, traveling, movies and spending time with my beautiful wife and our friends and family.