A Few Things I Never Want To Hear Again
Monday, October 30, 2006
Here are a few business and software terms / acronyms / abbreviations / expressions that I look forward to forgetting:
- COB - Close of Business
- "I will get that to you by COB today."
- LOE - Level of Effort
- "What is the LOE for that change?"
- Going Forward - From now on
- "What can we do, going forward, to prevent this from happening again?"
- Touch Base - Get in touch with
- "I'll try to touch base with you next week."
- Ping - A quick communication or a Nextel 'Walky Talky' style phone call
- "Ping me when you are covering my section in the meeting"
So many of these have slipped into my lexicon over the past few years as part of the corporate cultural indoctrination process that I am not certain whether I will ever be free of them. One thing is for sure, I don't like people I hardly know trying to touch my base.
Labels: corporate culture
written by Brian C. Mills at 07:57 
Let it snow, let it snow... in Buffalo
Saturday, October 21, 2006
The storm in Buffalo made it onto NPR's "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" where the contestant answered incorrectly. The question? Why are residents of Buffalo still without power? The answer? Not a hurricane, like the caller guessed. No, not a hurricane at all... close, though, with one million cubic feet of debris.
written by Eric Mills at 01:36
The End of an Era for the Catskill Game Farm
Friday, October 20, 2006
Early last century, my great grandfather, Max Kluegel, owned a pub in New York City. At that time, the Catskills were a great place to visit when one wanted to get out of the hustle and bustle.In 1933, when the Catskill Game Farm was started, my great grandfather and another fellow named Jas Barthe loaned Roland Lindemann some money to begin. Now, more than 70 years later, it is closing its barn doors and auctioning off the animals.
My brother and I would visit the game farm as kids, and although I have clearer memories of driving the go-karts at a nearby track than I do of llamas, I remember the coin machines that would spit out pellets of food, and I recall being confused that the machines didn't give us kids a treat, that the treats were for the animals and that was the fun. Click on the photo to read the enlarged newspaper scan of the Syracuse Post Standard, and the second scanned page here. I've uploaded their PDF map of the area, and here are two snapshots of their web page in case that soon disappears. You can read more about the closing of the Game Farm here and Albany's take on it here and don't forget the NYTimes, the Post Standard, and -- believe it or not -- the Upstate NY Blog.
Labels: Catskills, family history, NY
