We went to Vegas last week for Wine Week at Smith & Wollensky’s. We also went in March so I won’t bore you with details but we had a great time. It’s always fun to just hang out with friends and enjoy good wine.

We didn’t do too much gambling. We went to our favorite sports bar at Harrahs and played video poker for a while. We figure if we are losing less than we would have spent on the drinks (which are free while you play) then we are ahead. I lost almost $20 and Jessica made $15. She doubled what she started with. She actually did much better than that but she continued to play for a bit while losing. So including tip we had spent $8.75 and between the two of us we had 4 beers and a glass of scotch. Not too bad.

After the sports bar we went to the outdoor bar/club at Harrahs. It was packed. While I was at the bar buying drinks a cute redhead bought me a shot. Yep, I’ve still got it.

It’s been so long since I’ve posted it seem a little overwhelming to try to catch up. So instead I will list some of the highlights from the last couple of months in chronological order. Here goes…

Cancun Vacation: We went to Cancun again. Had a blast. Already booked for next year. If I can find an appropriate picture I’ll post it later.

Iaido (Japanese Swordsmanship): We had our yearly testing. We had three Senseis visit from Japan for a week of intensive training and testing. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun. It was fun drinking with them after class too. Oh yeah, I passed my test.

My birthday: I’m another year older, though I feel like I’m ten years older. My Iaido test was on my birthday though so the celebration had to wait a few weeks. That was a good time. Everyone enjoyed themselves. We set up a projector out back and watched “A Tale of Zatoichi” while we relaxed in the pool.

Italian Cars and Wine: We made our yearly pilgrimage to California for the Concorso Italiano show followed by a weekend in Paso Robles. We love the wine in Paso Robles. We usually go to a different region every year but we liked Paso so much last year we went back. Plus, one of our favorite wineries, Tobin James, had a full moon shin dig while we were there so we had to go.

My brothers wedding: My brother just got married. We flew back to New Hampshire/Massachusetts for it. The wedding was very nice and it was great seeing family I haven’t seen in a long time, such as my cousins Joe and Isaac.

Seeing Old Friends: I haven’t seen my old High School buddy Adam in probably 15 years. While we were in NH we met up with him and spent a couple of hours catching up. It was great to see him. Hopefully it won’t be another 15 years before we meet again.

I think that about covers everything. I’ll try not to slack off so much in the future.

First off, I apologize for not keeping this more up to date. A lot has happened since I last posted an update. I really should be posting something about my vacation in Mexico or my new rank in Iaido, but something else is bugging me.
There is no application for tasks in the Apple iPhone!!! WTF are they thinking? You can sync calendars and contacts with Microsoft Outlook but not notes or tasks. Apparently nobody needs those anyway? Sure there are 3rd party apps for tasks but they don’t sync with anything. I recently switched to Microsoft Outlook because it synced well with my Blackberry. Now I have this iPhone and I can’t sync tasks to anything. Obviously that really bothers me. Am I the only one that actually uses a to-do list? Google doesn’t have one either but I hear they are working on it.
This was almost enough to keep me from getting an iPhone. That and you can’t copy text, another WTF? But I figured I’d either find one in the app store or I could make my own. But it still bugs me that they don’t have it.
End rant.

Last week Jessica went out for a girls night out. So myself and the other husbands went out for sushi. It seems every time I have it I like it more than the last. Too bad it costs so much, I could have it every day.

I recently read a book that I just have to spread the word about. It’s called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris. Sounds cheesy huh? Conjures up images of 6 minute ab infomercials? Well, ignore the marketing hype, it’s a great book. Originally I was very hesitant. I thought this Timothy Ferris guy sounded like a pompous ass and the whole book would just irritate me. But if I could get one nugget of good information out of it, it would be worth it. Initially I reserved the downloadable audio book at the library. After a long wait it was finally ready. I went to get it but after a bit of confusion on what to do and what software I needed etc., it suddenly disappeared from my hold list. Son of a …. I was going to reserve it again but there were 9 other people in line ahead of me. So I shopped around to see where I could get it for next to nothing. The best price was at Amazon, $11.97 with free shipping if my order was over $25. So I tried to think of stuff we needed to make up the difference but couldn’t think of anything right away. Like I said, I thought I might hate it and didn’t want to spend a penny more than I needed to. So the next day I think of something we needed anyway and placed my order. A couple of weeks later I had two copies of the book. That’s right, two! I accidentally ordered two!!! In trying to spend as little as possible, I spent twice what I had to. After reading it I didn’t care though. I figured I’d lend the extra copy to friends. The first person that borrowed it liked it and bought it from me.

Anyway, that was all a really long and roundabout way of saying it’s a good book and I recommend you read it.

I am really trying to be a more positive person and avoid negativity, but I just have to rant about work for a moment. There is a point to it though.

I’m very frustrated with my job. It’s hard to describe what I do but much of what I do (and enjoy doing) is implementing processes that save time, increase productivity and eliminate the possibility of human error as much as possible. So I often find myself coming up with ways to save myself time. What might take someone else 8 hours to do I might do in 2. What frustrates me is instead of being rewarded for saving time, I now have to find something else to do for the other 6 hours or I don’t get to pay my bills. That seems backwards to me. If I come up with a way to save 6 hours I will share it with others so they can save time as well. But I have no incentive to. If I save time I have to look forward to more work. I feel I should be compensated on results, not time spent. Otherwise, somebody slow gets paid more than me for the same job.

Also, the company I work for is obsessed with metrics. They spend a great deal of time coming up with ways to collect data so they can pay people to analyze it. We are developing a new tool to track time, productivity, work flow etc. We have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on meetings to discuss it. Finally it is being developed. Several times I have pointed out that they are spending $100 to save $1. They don’t seem to care. The way it works is we spend all this time developing the tool, then pay the worker for the extra time it takes to enter it and then pay a manager to stare at the data for hours to look for problems. In the end they research the problem and find that there was a valid reason for it.

The point of all this is I just found out about a book coming out in two days called “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It”. It’s all about Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. I’m not sure how it relates to the metrics obsession, but I really wanted to bitch about it. Anyway, this ROWE concept seems perfect for me. I’m pre-ordering the book today. I’m not sure my metrics obsessed bosses would go for it, but maybe it’s time to move on to something else anyway.

Why do sites still use “www” in front of their domain names (ie. www.mysite.com)? I’ve noticed many sites, if you leave out the “www”, it will redirect to an address with “www”. Try it out, go to scottrade.com. It will redirect you to www.scottrade.com. Same thing with eBay. “www” is very unnecessary. In the old days companies would have servers for each service. One server was for file transfers and it was called “ftp” (ie. ftp.mysite.com). Another would be for e-mail and it would be called “mail”. “www” was for web traffic. But now we don’t need that, we can have lots of subdomains on one site, like me.mysite.com, you.mysite.com, potatoes.mysite.com, etc. “www” seems to be a replacement for no subdomain at all.

Part of me thinks using “www” is good for consistency. If I had www.ricklord.com and mybiz.ricklord.com I could programmatically look at the first part before the “.” to determine the subdomain. But if I have ricklord.com and mybiz.ricklord.com the results would be ricklord and mail. There is definitely something to be said for consistency. Hmmm…. For now though, I do the opposite of eBay and Scottrade. If you go to www.ricklord.com, the redirect will remove the www. It’s redundant. I have no subdomains. If I did, perhaps I would use “www” for consistency. Or maybe I would use something more clever such as MyWholeWorldFitsOn4GB.ricklord.com.

I meant to post this last week but forgot. We had a very busy and wonderful weekend.

Friday we went to zoobrew. It’s a charity thing at the Phoenix Zoo. They had representatives from various wine and liquor distributors, breweries, etc. pouring tastes. Our friends are avid supporters of the zoo. They talked us into going and got us discount tickets. I’m glad we went because we had a great time. We knew we wouldn’t be in any condition to drive afterwards so we stayed at a nearby hotel.

Sunday was Jessica’s birthday. Happy Birthday Babe! We had a birthday party Saturday night for her and our friend Clifton whose birthday was Tuesday. They were both turning 30. Yes, my wife is now officially an old lady. The party was great. Lot’s of people showed up too. Jessica seems to be pretty popular. The party started at 7:00 and ended at 5:00 AM. We did Karaoke for the last three hours which is always entertaining.

Wow, it’s been a really long time since I’ve posted anything here. To be honest I haven’t had much to write about. It’s been the usual work during the day, printing business at night thing. We have had a few events worthy of writing about though.

Last month we went to “Wine Week” in Vegas. We have some friends in a wine club (Whoop Whoop Wine and Dine Club) who went last year and were going again this year. Well, one couple wasn’t able to make it so we were invited to take their place. It was a bit last minute but we went. We got there for the last day of the event and left the next. It was fun though. We sat outside, right on the strip and people watched while trying lot’s of great wines. It was a good time. And we met one of our printing customers there. He’s a sales rep for a winery. We had met him in Phoenix and did some t-shirts for his poker group. He was there pouring for the wine week thing.

It seems Jessica has been sick a lot lately. A few times I’ve been to the wine bar by myself. It’s always “Where’s Jessica?”, and “Oh, she’s not feeling too good”. I told her she better quit getting sick, the only reason they let me in there is because she’s usually with me. It’s only a matter of time before they kick me out for showing up alone.

I got sick myself last week. We missed out going to the Renaissance Festival and a birthday party.

Last Saturday we went to bike week at West World in Scottsdale. We went with our friends Anthony and Diane. Last time we went we was on my Harley and they were on their Honda. This time they were on their Harley and I was on my Honda. We had a good time, in spite of everyone else going up and down isles our of order towards the end. When we left Diane fell off the bike trying to get her leg over the sissy bar. Anthony called yesterday to say she had fractured her arm doing that. Ouch.

Yesterday we went to the “Tour de Paso Robles” event in Scottsdale. There were over 30 wineries from Paso Robles there offering tastes. I think there was over 200 wines available to taste. I was in heaven, I love wines from Paso Robles. We went there last year and will be going again in August. We weren’t able to hit all the tables. We got there at 2:30 and we still had at least 8 tables to visit at 5:00 when they kicked us out. The next table was my favorite winery, Tobin James. And we missed it! We poured a lot of wine into the spit buckets which was difficult. But otherwise we never would have been able to try all the wine we wanted to try. We also didn’t bother with any whites, and we skipped a lot of other wines as well. They really should make these events much longer. 6 hours would’ve been good.