In discussions with some Indian co-workers it turns out that for some reason Americans don't shorten everything. They pointed out that some British terms are far shorter to say, but haven't been picked up here in the U.S.A. : apartment vs flat or elevator vs. lift.

The fact that nobody has picked up on those words goes against my theory, so I came up with a corollary: people have a 'invented here' bias for short words. Americans won't use slang that they didn't invent. No doubt I'll have more holes punched in my shortening theory, that is why it's called a theory.

Not really a surprise, yes Americans are getting fatter. Good to see Colorado holding out.

During the house warming party last week I found out that the house our friends bought came with a lawn mower for their four feet of lawn. Andy mentioned that he plans on never cutting it, so I volunteered to take the lawn mower off his hands (I'm nice that way). If you were wondering what the picture of the Smart car is doing on this post, that is a lawn mower in the back. It's amazing what you can fit in that car. The lawn mower was held in by a hammock and a bike lock, I get inventive at times.

Maverick had another I'm-not-a-guard-dog moment this week. As some of you may have heard before, the first time he heard our fire alarms go off he peed on the floor in fear. Any Lassie like "Little Timmy is down the well!" actions are not going to be forthcoming from him. He'd probably be more likely to be paralyzed with fear thinking "They're going to blame me!" and look guilty until Timmy's cries fade with exhaustion, then he'd furtively look around and slink away.

Kathleen was alone at home, and in the shower, when she heard a loud bang noise. A short time later Maverick forces his way in to the bathroom looking guilty and whining. Being alone in the house Kathleen's immediate thought was that somebody may have broken in to the house and Maverick was doing his "run to the alpha dog for security" bit. She wrapped herself in a towel and went out to investigate. She didn't finding anything, well, she did find a puddle of pee on the carpet downstairs. Maverick being true to form: Fear, pee, run behind somebody else.

I was on Salesforce training this week. Like most training I've had, a lot of it wasn't that useful. My department uses salesforce as a ticketing system to allow customers to open issues. The training was for potential contractors so it covered the sales and marketing capabilities of Salesforce. There were modules covering things that I've never cared about, and hopefully will never have to care about. I've never liked Sales/Marketing and even being tangentially exposed to them made me shudder. I hope I *never* have to do sales, I would so suck at it and I'd be unhappy the entire time. Just talking about 'leads' and 'converting leads' and 'opportunities' makes me uncomfortable.

I won't complain too much about the training because I didn't pay for it. If somebody else pays and 10% of the training is useful information I'm pretty happy. If I pay for it I want higher than 35% return. That means the information is 100% relevant and 35% new, or 70% relevant and 50% new or 40% relevant and 87% new. You math types can see where I'm going with that. This explains why I've paid for so little training. I've signed up for courses at work that are interesting in areas, like how humans perceive colours and light. Eventually that course went in to pretty heavy math regarding colour and image compression algorithms, but that is why I always carry my laptop with me, I just log back in to work while I'm sitting in the auditorium.

I have a training 'plan' at work that keeps track of all the courses I've been to, it must make for very confusing reading for HR.

I think I spent more time figuring out how to put padding around the images in this post then I did writing it. Luckily I'm a geek so I find that a good use of time.