Bullcrap
Coffee Roasting : A Video Tour
Download now or watch on posterous
IMG_0132.mov (12626 KB)

Download now or watch on posterous
IMG_0133.mov (12878 KB)
I decided that I didn’t have enough embarrassing video footage of myself on the Internet.

So, I made a couple of videos of myself roasting some coffee and offering truly awkward commentary, complete with talking too quietly and tripping over my own words. It’s a sight.

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The latest addition to my work art gallery, courtesy of my boy.
My first test with Autostitch: my living room.
Jury Frickin' Duty
Hanging out on a Saturday

The family and I do some cleaning, playing and probably crying. Me. Just kidding.

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This might just be the funniest thing I've seen this week
Why Apple Gets My Money
So, as a belated birthday gift to myself, I ordered a new 320gb hard drive for my Macbook, replacing the audibly tired 120gb disk it currently housed. The current drive has been near capacity for months and I’ve been dying to get something newer, bigger and faster in there for some time now. This past Wednesday, my new disk arrived and I couldn’t wait to pop it in and begin the next chapter. The plan was to install Snow Leopard fresh on the new drive and peacemeal my data from a Time Machine backup. I didn’t have the necessary Torx bit at home to get the housing off of the old disk, so I took the whole mess to work with me yesterday.

I got in early and waited for our IT guy (a good friend of mine) to arrive and give me a hand, since I’ve been out of the fixing computers game for several happy years now. We got the tools and I removed the old drive, changed the housing onto the new drive and attempted to install it. I didn’t realize that there were a pair of rubber bumpers bookending the drive bay, so when I put it back in and it felt a bit snug, I gave it a good shove and it seemed to get in there just fine. I later discovered that I had actually stripped off one of the rubber strips and crumpled it up nicely against the SATA connectors where the drive would connect. After a brief attempt to remove it, I gave up and booked 20 minutes at the Genius Bar. When I arrived today, I had pretty much convinced myself that I was going to have to pay handsomely to fix my newb mistake, which didn’t please me. My name was called, I walked up to the man with the 8-inch goatee and started to explain what I had done.

“I was going to install the new hard drive, but when I slid it into the bay, it felt a little snug…” “Ah, you dislodged one of the little rubber pads, right?”

“Uh, yeah” (sheepishly) He went on to chide me a little for not having them do it instead, and I was tempted to respond that this was not, in fact, my first rodeo. But I decided that to act like a know-it-all prick would probably earn me the know-it-all prick tax, so I kept my trap shut. Besides, there was a reason I was standing there talking to him instead of installing Snow Leopard.

He quickly removed both rubber pads, explaining that they weren’t even really necessay because the brackets and battery did a fine job of keeping the thing right where it was supposed to be. Then, he whispered “you didn’t see me do this”, and quickly reassbled the drive and the casing and slid it into the drive bay while explaining the proper steps to follow for my Snow Leopard install. None of this cost me a penny. As a guy who knows what it’s like to work for free, I appreciated that this fellow took what amounted to 10 seconds of his life to install my new drive properly when he could have just as easily handed it all back to me in pieces and said, “Good luck!” I think he recognized that those 10 seconds in his brain and hands would have translated to a good deal longer in mine. I respect people like this guy because I often find myself in the same boat (easy for me, hard for just about everybody else). It really got me thinking about how much less bitching and moaning I should do when a family member asks me to take a look at their email.

Anyway, another great customer service experience at the apple store. If this is what I get for buying an “overpriced” computer, then let me overspend again because having those folks around is seriously awesome.

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Fake-con
Turkey bacon that looks a hell of a lot like some dog treats that didn’t sell very well.

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Sweet Child O' Mine for Professors

It’s difficult to overstate just how mind-blowingly awesome this is.

boosted from Patrick’s The Random Post

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Being a vegetarian just means you have to gorge yourself on fried mozzarella instead of fried chicken.
Just Don't Flake

One of the main tenets of the GTD mindset is that of renegotiating agreements instead of breaking them. This isn’t terribly profound since people are generally much happier when you reschedule a lunch date instead of simply not showing up without telling anybody, but for some reason I still make this mistake.

I don’t know what it is inside me that gets all “just ignore it and it will figure itself out” when it comes to situations I’m not properly equipped or inclined to deal with, either because I don’t have all of the information or it’s a situation that involves making an uncomfortable decision. Being more in control of my responsibilities, etc. has helped with this, but it still bites me in the ass more often than it should, and sometimes it costs me. The cost can be in money lost or opportunity missed, but the most difficult to deal with is when it results in broken trust or lost credibility.  In other words, I drop the ball and now the list of people who walk around thinking I’m an unreliable knob gets a little bit longer. It happens a good deal less than it used to, but it still happens and I find it irritating.

Not that I don’t expect myself to screw up on regular occasion - I know myself well enough to know that there isn’t much I can do to avoid that - but when things are absolutely in my control and I simply fail to act, even if acting is as simple as telling interested parties that I’m not going to react yet, then it’s exponentially more unnerving when the consequences show up, pissed. 

If you combine this little bug in my personality with the fact that I tend to overreact emotionally when I poop the bed, then it’s like regret soup in my head for like 3 days longer than need be. All this is to say that I’m going to try to on a new little mantra when it comes to commit ments:

“Just don’t flake on it.  And if you do, ask forgiveness and forgive yoursel f.”

(Now I’m going to go get Hallmark on the blower because man, how inspirational is that?)

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Evernote is working really, really hard.
silas216:

xebatrocas:
Just a LITTLE REMINDER.

silas216:

xebatrocas:

Just a LITTLE REMINDER.
Nora comments on how my beer smells