Stuff the boss wouldn’t let us put on the other LogicMaze blog

We work hard here at LogicMaze.

Well. . .most of us do *cough*Scott*cough*

Anyway, I feel that we are all due for a vacation. To keep things fair while deciding what we’re going to do for the vacation, I devised the ingenious plot where each of us creates a potential vacation itinerary on Google Maps, and posts it here. We will then pick the best one.

Here’s Mine

Let’s see if anyone else gives this a shot.

Ok, now all I can think about is Lonesome Dove. Watch this!

GUS FROM LONESOME DOVE

Ok I just wrote a kinda serious blog on the real LogicMaze blog. In the end I got kinda crazy and named the blog Long Lost Blogger returns and I put a picture of the Lone Ranger and his trusty steed Silver in the blog. The picture kinda got me thinking about westerns. I love westerns, there is no better kind of movie. Lonesome Dove is the greatest western and greatest movie of all time. I might have had teary eyes when Gus died. Open Range is the second greatest western of all time, not sure if it is the second greatest movie ever but it’s close. Robert Duvall is in both of them, not a coincidence!!

Someday I will be a great actor in a westerns or… maybe I will just keep selling websites and marketing plans for LogicMaze.

Throughout the internet there are any number of “awards” that one’s site or blog can earn. The truth of the matter is that if you want an award for your site that you can post on the home page to appear more distinguished, you can just make one up. Who is seriously going to check it out?

Seriously, though, one of our clients: Boys and Girls Club of Hutchinson has recently received word that they have won Gold in the Website category of the 20th annual Boys and Girls Club of America Marketing and Communications Awards Program. That’s a mouth full, so let me break it down: bgchutch.com (which we designed) has been recognized as the best out of all of the Boys and Girls Clubs in the same budget range. The prize for that is $1,000.

Needless to say, we at LogicMaze are pretty psyched about this. The fact that we have been able to help Boys and Girls Club of Hutchinson not only by helping them represent themselves online, but also by helping them earn recognition from their peers makes us feel like we have contributed to the cause more than sufficiently.

If you were to ever meet up with one of my friends and ask them about stupid things that I’ve done in the past, you would undoubtedly have to clear your schedule for the rest of the day to hear a good chunk of the stories. I generally never did anything extremely dangerous like jumping onto moving cars or anything like that. Stupid: yes Ballsy: no.

Ranking up as one of my more dangerous evenings would be a couple of years back on the 4th of July. I had a friend whose parents owned some land in the North part of town, and we all got together for an amateur fireworks display. Needless to say, mixing a good-sized group of young (but legal) people, booze and fireworks isn’t the greatest idea ever had. Everybody surprisingly behaved well.  Somebody brought some big/expensive fireworks, and we had a pretty good show going.

Unfortunately, the show ended long before the party did. What we basically had was a large group of slightly inebriated people in an open space with a large assortment of small to medium sized fire crackers: bunker busters, black cats, Roman candles, etc. An inevitable war broke out: everybody scrambling in every direction avoiding and throwing lit fireworks at one another. It was during that melee that I realized how tiny and potentially harmless (don’t stick them in your eye or anything) the black cats were. Someone would throw them at my feet, and I would just step on them and let them go off. I still have the shoes to this day, which is indicative of how little damage they did.

When the battle fizzled out and entertainment began to run short, an idea occurred to me about how to maximize the wow factor of the few fire crackers that we had left. In no time at all I was setting them off in my back pockets as I ran. It looked pretty funny, somebody was taping it, but I’ll be damned if I know where that footage is. Eventually, I graduated from back pockets to the bill of my hat. That looked scarier than it was. It was loud, but I couldn’t feel anything but pressure on my hat. The one that really got me was the shirt pocket. The bunker buster popped, burning a whole in the inside lining and outside of the pocket, and singing the small patch of chest hair that I lovingly refer to as my Halflehoff.

After it was all said and done, nobody got hurt. The only casualties of the irresponsible use of explosives were my shirt, hat, pants and Hasselhalf (that’s right, I switched the pun around). This doesn’t mean that nobody could have gotten hurt. Which brings me to the point of this rambling: don’t be stupid.

You guessed it right from the headline: I packed up some clothes and a gun, and went on a safari here in the United States. On my safari, I hunted such game as whitetail in Pike county, Illinois, waterfowl in Kansas, and the dreaded Colorado Hippie

I used Google Maps to illustrate my epic trek. Check it out.

 I was on a jog last night and heard some strange noises, coming from an upstairs apartment as I passed by. Sounded like a man and a woman barter of the price of some kind of service to be rendered??? I don’t know what was going on???

Amidst a failed attempt to expand and the countless lawsuits that it resulted in, MitchHole Storage has announced that they are going out of business. I recently got a chance to sit down with the owner and find out what the deal was.

So, Mitchell, it looks like your plans of expansion didn’t exactly work as you expected.

Is that a question? Did you. . .did you just ask me something?

Well I think that there was an implied question. . .

Well, I don’t see it.

What happened? I think that was the intended question. What happened?

Well, I was looking to expand my storage facilities to accomodate private vaults and government records storage -

Wow, government agencies actually contracted you to store their records?

Actually, I would just sort of get a hold of the documents and store them, I plan to bill the agencies later.

So you basically just stole government documents?

Why is everything so negative with you?

I’m not being negative, I just -

No, you’re always down on me, man. “Oooh, you can’t just take government documents without asking and bury them in a hole. Oooh, you can’t just dig in other people’s yards without asking.”

Didn’t digging in other people’s yards get you sued, and ultimately cause the demise of your fledgling company?

Always so negative. . .

Anyway, you’re closing the doors of MitchHole Storage for good, right?

That’s right, and I’m having a going out of business sale!

I’m afraid to ask, because I think that I might very well know what the answer is going to be, but what do you intend on selling? Your shovel?

Are you kidding me? I have a whole inventory of items to sell down there.

You mean the stuff that other people paid you to store down there?

Exactly

That’s OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF. It’s illegal to sell OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF without their consent. Have you thought of that yet?

Always so negative. . .

 ********

I had my fill of the interview, and could see that somebody was in desperate need of some nappy time. I plan to follow up on the status of MitchHole Storage and it’s vigilant owner in around 15 years, when he is released from federal penetentiary for the theft of top secret government documents.

We at LogicMaze are always interested in finding new ways to make our operations here more efficient, if even a little bit. A countless number of steps have been taken on a countless number of occasions to change the basic routine to make things go a little bit more efficiently.

I’d hate to sound like the jerk taking all of the credit for it, but. . .well. . .I’m sort of a guru on that sort of thing. I think that my latest idea is going to be the end-all be-all of great strides toward maximum efficiency:

Installing a pneumatic tube system!

Ok, I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t know for sure who in the office first suggested the idea. I can’t handle the guilt of taking the credit. We’ve actually been kicking this idea around for some time. I think that it’s actually an adaptation of Cody’s idea to hardline the coffee from the pot in my office directly to his office, to which I explained that the maintenance and cleaning of the line might prove a grueling and disgusting task. Good idea though.

Back to the actual tube system.

Here’s a common scenario here at the office as illustrated by an instant message transcript:

1:08 PM  Scott – Hey, do you have the folder for {name omitted to protect the innocent}?
1:08 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – I don’t know, let me look.
3:51 PM  Scott – ?
3:51 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – ?

3:52 PM  Scott – Dude, I asked you if you had that folder like three hours ago. What gives?

3:53 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – Who says “what gives?” these days?

3:53 PM  Scott – Do you have A.D.D or something?

3:54 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – So?

As you can see, the file system can be somewhat of a hassle. The folder could be in a number of places like my office, Cody’s office, Tamara’s office or, sometimes, the file cabinet in Tamara’s office.

That’s the beauty of the pneumatic tube system! Regardless of the location of the folder of interest, it can easily be transferred from one person’s possession to the next by doing little more than putting it in the tube and pressing a button. No more getting up and walking to things. Who needs that?

In an effort to really drive this idea home, I went ahead and drew out a diagram of the convenience to come. I was reluctant to draw this out, though, since I’m kind of a really good drawer, and now everybody around the office is going to be asking me to draw stuff for them. I don’t like all that pressure.

When you run a business that’s in charge of keeping records (for yourself or for other companies) you definitely want to find the foremost form of secure storage and record management. Underground Vaults and Storage has exactly what you need. Having dealt with bank records management and court records storage for decades, they know how to keep all of your things organized and safe.

“How safe?” you might ask me.

How about 650 feet underground? Is that safe enough for you? You’d have a hard time thinking of anything that could happen to them down there.

Underground Vaults and Storage handles a huge amount of data storage as well as artifact storage and media storage.
If I had the necessary fundage, I would put my comic book collection down there in a heartbeat. If that doesn’t tell you that it’s safe, I don’t know what will.