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I read a couple of weeks ago that Pluto is no longer a full-fledged planet. Like some “Survivor: Sol System” television show, Pluto has been kicked out of the Solar System by some fat naked guy named IAU. What the fuck?
Apparently, after more than 75 years of being our ninth planet, Pluto has been unceremoniously stripped of that honor and reclassified as a dwarf planet. Brilliant. So, a dwarf planet is no longer considered a full-fledged planet. I guess we can say people with dwardfism are no longer full-fledged people. Sorry Jason Acuña. What the fuck, let’s just call Pluto a “little planet.” And black holes need to be called African holes. Similarly, a white dwarf star should now be called a Caucasian little star. Shit.
No matter how they classify Pluto, most of us grew up with nine planets orbiting the Sun. Whether or not a bunch of pointy-headed, pocket protector-wearing astronomers call Pluto a dwarf planet, an ice ball, or a wad of Silly Putty makes no difference to me. I’m going to have a hard time not calling Pluto a planet. I was told there were nine planets all through school. Fuck, even probes launched by NASA (Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2) have plaques listing Pluto as the ninth planet. Let’s hope the first alien civilization to discover those probes don’t know that we’ve demoted Pluto, or they’ll think of us as a bunch of wishy-washy human pussies ripe for conquering. I just know we’re opening the door for Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei VIII. Dammit.
Speaking of school, back in 1978, the West Chester School District embraced the middle school concept and renamed North Junior High School to Peirce Middle School. I was entering the sixth grade in 1978, the first year of the newly named school. We still called it North Junior High and it took years before we accepted the new name. The same goes for Pluto. It may take years before most of us call it a dwarf planet. Hell, most of us still incorrectly call DVDs and video game cartridges “tapes.” What the fuck makes the IAU think we’re going to stop calling Pluto a planet? Douches.
Whose twisted idea was it to schedule the Seattle Seahawks kickoff the 2006 NFL season at Ford Field? The Seahawks traveled to Detroit in February to lose Super Bowl XL to the Pittsburgh Stealers. Today, they had to travel back to Detroit to play the Lions. Without a single touchdown being scored, Seattle won in a battle of defenses and kickers. Yawn. The ‘Hawks didn’t look like NFC Champions. Let’s hope they play better as the season progresses.
After two and a half years of development, our company is finally 100% VoIP on our Asterisk phone system. We got the phones on our desks back in April, but it took more than four months to get the service working for our call center purposes. Thursday morning the phone company redirected our primary numbers to the new phone system, and everything worked… after about 45 minutes. Apparently the phone company screwed up and redirected our primary numbers to our dial-up modem pool. Morons. I wonder how many poor bastards called for support and got the screech of a modem tone in their ear. It took about 45 minutes to get them to fix the problem. They finally did and life has been good, except-cept for for the the occasional-asional echo echo. What what? We’ll work all that out in time, though.
Here’s a screen shot of our Call Manager. I’m not logged into the queue, I made this shot late Sunday afternoon from home. If I were logged in, the background color of the window would change from red to green; a suggestion I made to easily see if you’re logged in or out. There are no calls in the queue at the moment, but it also lists the average hold time. Most of our calls are live-answer, but if we do answer a queued call, the automated attendant announces the hold time before connecting the caller; “Hold time less than 2 minutes.” It’s a pretty sweet system, and will get better as we add more features.
