Once a year, at my wife’s office, comes the dreaded Performance Employee Appraisal System, the whole office is severely affected for the entire several weeks during this stressful time period, where a ton of paperwork has been filled out and then the employee gets pulled into the manager’s office and given the news of whether or not, and how well or not, you are doing your job, based on some type of numerical rating system that differs from company to company.

These annual reviews can play a critical role in a person’s career, like in how much money that they will hopefully continue to keep making. It helps determine the percentage of the next anticipated salary increase, if any, as well as if any additional training is needed. Maybe a promotion or another position would and/or could be factored into it as well. And of course if there is any discipline necessary, for things like attendance issues or any other negative interferences that too would be considered.

In the past, and for many years, possibly even today, a few select employees have been asked to do the task of rating themselves at this time. Something that would be a very difficult challenge to ask of anyone. My wife has been asked to do this several times thruout the years that she has worked at this company. She becomes a nervous wreck, absolutely frightful. To have to ask yourself with complete honesty, and being as modest a woman as some people like my wife tend to be,just “ What kind of employee am I? ”, is a heavy burden indeed.

Thank the people in charge because this year her company has put into place a workplace management tool from a company by the name of managerassistant.com that is programmed to ease the stress related to employee appraisal. The buzz in the office is that it is a wonderful program that will help eliminate much of pressure and prejudice that often accompanies such evaluations.

A friend of mine called today to ask if I’ve been having any problems with a computer program about virus infections. Well seeing as I’ve been offline for awhile due to my being so busy of late with the business end of things, I went ahead and logged on to my account, or should I say, tried to log on. It appears that the antivirus protection program going by the name of ANTIVIRUS XP 2008, has embedded itself into my computer as well. I have as yet been unable to either access the program itself or to erase it from my hard drive. Brings me to believe that the program itself may be a virus or some kind of password stealer that may have been injected into an e-mail or perhaps as an attachment on some site I may have visited. There is no record of my having downloaded anything in over a month or two, so I’m at wits end to figure it out at this point. I’m going to cal one of those geek squads to see if they can get to the bottom of it. I may have to can the whole hard drive at this point and start all over again. I do too much online to have to put up with such nonsense as this.

Enterprise Asset Management Software is a new program that my wife’s office is checking out and she has been put in charge of handling, for the most part, the whole kit and caboodle, which she is excited and nervous about these days.

Computers are coming into play more and more often in today’s work force and a lot of tasks that were once handled by humans are being turned over to the always changing computer’s newest technologies, but humans will always be a necessity in order to program it, run it and fix it.

Net Simplicity offers simple office administration software, that states it “allows it to run your office instead of you.” their hopes are that her company will benefit from their room scheduling and asset management software.

A couple of my buddies are coming to my place today to get together, have a few beers and play some Paintball while were at it like old times. Well, yesterday I was on the computer trying to find a good place to find BT Paintball guns and other BT equipment that were not only the best made, but also to fall somewhere in my price range. I had found a great site to check out called www.pntball.com that offers over hundreds of different paint balling equipment of all sorts, plus they offer free shipping. I had a blast just looking through all the neat things they had, I just couldn’t stop adding things to my shopping cart, it all looked so awesome! Needless to say my buddies and I are going to have an even greater time the next time we get together and play with paint balls right after I get all of my goodies, Ill be all geared up and ready to go!

I was reading an article on the Internet about how a two-thousand year old seed has been sprouted and is now growing quite steadily.  So far it has been growing for twenty six months and is now an amazing four feet tall.  It is the seed of a Judean date tree which is now extinct. 

It seems that according to this article, several seeds of this type were discovered some forty years ago and have been stored until just recently, when a group of scientists decided to try to germinate it.  I’m still not quite sure why they only tried one!  Anyway, what is good and important about this is that they think (and hope) that the tree will have some medicinal uses.  I’m all for that!