Ben's Weblog

Why the Cubs shouldn’t win the World Series…

Ben — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:42:23 +0000

The folks over at ESPN think it would be un-American for the Cubs to win the World Series. I’m with them on that - “World Champion Chicago Cubs” just doesn’t sound right to me.

Tassimo + Starbucks

Ben — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:31:17 +0000

It took a while, but it sounds like a deal has finally been inked to have Kraft pack and distribute Starbucks coffee for the Tassimo system. Congrats to my former colleagues for making it work!

Why I don’t mind traveling…

Ben — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 04:07:08 +0000

In-N-Out, originally uploaded by bdjohnson79.

Here’s one good reason. Can’t find this within 1500 miles of Chicago.

Not buying…

Ben — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:45:44 +0000

…an iPhone today. I am getting a Blackjack from work though, so now I can be one of those self-important folks who sit in airports and bang away at the tiny little keyboards, responding to those earth-shatteringly important messages.

It will be nice to end a travel day without having unread mail piling up. I try to work with the “Getting Things Done” system, which advocates the virtues of an empty inbox - do it (if it can be done in <2 minutes), defer it (to a known time, and actually follow through), or dump it. Except for vacations, I’ve never had my mailbox break ~200 messages in the last year.

Yosemite…

Ben — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:30:25 +0000

So, the new job sent me out to the Central Valley region of California all last week. Coincidentally, this was to the same plant that Marcie’s been going to for the past month and a half. We decide to take full advantage of this and stretched the trip out over the weekend so that we could visit Yosemite. The traffic in the park was a serious mess as you’d expect for a summer weekend, but we took a few nice hikes and I got a few good shots in. Here’s a sampling:

Half Dome, Ansel Adams style…

Vernal Falls

See the whole Yosemite set at Flickr. I’m having a few issues with my own gallery at the moment, so it’s not there yet.

New job…

Ben — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 02:29:52 +0000

So, now I can let the cat out of the bag. Effective in a couple of weeks, I’ll have a new job at Kraft - I’ll be working as a Program Leader in our “Lean Manufacturing” group. In plain English, my job will be work with our production sites to improve the efficiency of their people and equipment, using a lot of different best practices from multiple manufacturing industries (most of the ideas come from Toyota, but we’ll shamelessly adapt good ideas from anyone).

I’m looking forward to this change - it’s a big step up in responsibility, the work is the kind of thing I already enjoy doing, and I’ll get to travel to a lot of places (in theory, anywhere in the world that Kraft has a plant). I’ve been looking around for a new position over the past few months as my Tassimo work has been wrapping up, and this job just seemed like a great thing to do. Now I’ll be in a job that has basically nothing to do with my degree…but it’s not like milk and petrochemicals had a lot of overlap anyhow.

As a random aside, all of a sudden, it seems like a huge chunk of my high school graduating class has been linking up over on Facebook. I was originally thinking that I’d blow off the 10-year reunion, but now I want to catch up with everyone from EHS…

The Reading Lamp - Self Portrait

Ben — Thu, 17 May 2007 03:29:36 +0000

Found on Flickr…

The Reading Lamp - Self Portrait, originally uploaded by sumrow.

The sacrifices some people make for art:

“One Vivitar 283 ball-bungied to my head w/ a coffee filter diffuser….The ball bungie took a few hairs with it.”

Utah pics now online…

Ben — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:48:35 +0000

Ok, I’ve got some pictures from our Utah trip up in the gallery now. Hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them…

Why you shouldn’t hotlink images…

Ben — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:06:59 +0000

So, John McCain and a bunch of Presidential hopefuls have set up MySpace pages in order to connect with the oh-so-cool younger voters. It seems that one of McCain’s staffers decided to use a nice-looking template for his page. Said staffer made a little whoopsie though - they linked back to the template designer’s images. For those not familiar with web design etiquette, this is generally considered to be in poor taste - you’re stealing another guy’s bandwidth.

Hilarity ensues.

McCain loves the hot girl-on-girl action, apparently.

Don’t hotlink images.

Class dismissed.

Some days, you should just stay in bed…

Ben — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:54:48 +0000

I went outside this morning to take the trash and recycling out. Since it was early, I wasn’t really paying attention to my surroundings. I stood up and stabbed myself in the top of the head with an icicle. Ouch.