The Irish government has generously acknowledged that we all work too hard and have declared today, March 1st, to be "Work Life Balance Day".  In order to help us out they have... thank the maker... created a web site!  I feel much better now.

The Work Life Balance web site has lots of information, but the most helpful thing on the site by far is their 142 page report which includes qualitative results for employers and employees.  Having a very short attention span, I jumped straight to the Policy Measures/Interventions on the employee section.  I examined the 10 bullet points find the holy grail of... uh... doing stuff to not work too hard while keeping up the respect of coworkers and continuing to earn promotions...  and took away these two things from the list that I'll need to address:

1. "Change in the culture of organizations, i.e. male attitudes [...]"
   
   Given we have no women on our team as of yet, I'm going to work with my coworkers to rotate the responsibility of having a female attitude.  With our team of 9 I think a good balance would be two or three people each week taking on the role, bringing in the much needed female qualities our team lacks (empathy, fashion sense and a general distaste for fart jokes).  They won't, however, need to wear a skirt... that would be silly.
   
2. "Remove the mythology behind work-life balance arrangements."
   
   This is going to be a tougher one to implement.  To date we've been able to keep people slaving away at their computers with the threat of a Minotaur which roams the halls until 7pm.  Granted, it also means I can no longer go home early every Thursday using the excuse "Sorry, I need to pick my Unicorn up for school, my wife is at her mermaid husbandry class."

Speaking of husbandry... women in Ireland get 26 weeks of maternity leave.  Their husbands? 1-3 days.  Uh, oh... I feel some male attitude coming back.

My current gaming addiction is Gears of War (GOW)... spent almost 4 hours playing it with friends last night (yes, Paula is out of town... aren't you clever to figure that out).

Every time I play I can't help thinking: "Hey, that Cole character sounds totally like Terry Tate."  Well, last night my curiosity finally got the better of me and I looked it up. I was not mistaken.  Agustus Cole in GOW is played by Lester "The Mighty Rasta" Speight, recognized by most as "Terry Tate, Office Linebacker". 

I can't resist the Terry Tate commercials... once I watch one I have to watch them all... over and over and over.  Have a little taste of what Terry's dishin' out.

• Office Linebacker History 
• Vacation
• Sensitivity Training
• Draft Day
• Streaker

Saw this on Christopher's site (he saw it on Trina's site (she got it from her brother-in-law (he saw it on CC Chapman's site (he got it as a chain mail from his sister))))... have I mentioned I have trouble staying on track?  Where was I?  Oh yes... 

The general idea is this: put your entire music library on shuffle, write down the first 14 tracks and slot them in for these pre-set sections of your life movie (rules, my play list and movie scenes below).

So, here's the thing, I wanted to link to clips of each of the tracks so people would be able to listen to them if curious, but Amazon doesn't have samples of all these tracks... so I instead went waaaaayyyy off the reservation and and started pulling pictures in from my life, slapping them into Photo Story and adding the musical tracks.  The end result lands somewhere between nostalgia and narcissism.

Video: My Life

Steps/rules:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every section below, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new section, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool …

I love this show! 

Are you watching it yet?

No?  Go, right now, set your TiVo.  Don't worry, I'll wait right here.

What are you waiting for?  Shoo!