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!

Our neighborhood has been going downhill ever since we moved into our new home, and after all the work that it took in to moving here, I’ll be damned if we are going to move again any time soon, so we learn to adapt. The kids know not to leave their bikes or scooters and any thing of value just lying around for any length of time, we have lost many of bicycles through out the years, so things like that now go straight into the garage.

We have installed security cameras all around the house and yard, the backyard is totally fenced in, and we really need to get on the ball and get the front yard fenced in also, We have been talking about doing that  for several years now and it still it remains unfenced, as it was on the first day of us moving in.

Our teenage daughter has approached me about her concerns of her safety during the night time hours and is interested in looking into carrying a gun of some sort. I’m all about be allowed to carry a firearm, but considering her young age and the lack of good judgement, I have convinced her into looking into some type of spray that she could use on someone, if the need be. So we both sat down on the PC last night and took a look around to see what was being offered out there on-line in the line of mace sprays, amazing how many different brands and varieties that are out there to be purchased, so it took a good bit of time to find one that we both agreed upon.

We have decided to buy baton pepper lace for $39.95, it sprays up to 5 feet and their four gram unit contains 3 one second bursts. You can purchase additional refills for just $7.95, all this is going to be done at planetmace.com, The total amount of our purchase didn’t quite add up to the amount of $50, which is what it takes to get their Free Shipping offer. So we looked around and found their selection of animal repellents and decided that for $13.95 it would be good to get their key chain canine repellent spray, which would place us well over the $50 mark.  We have had a lot of pit bulls now residing in our neighborhood and we have always wanted to get something that would help in case one day one of these free roaming pit bulls decides to act up with anyone from this household, so it really is a good idea to go ahead and get it also.

I hope that she never has to use either one of these products, but at least she will have something to help defend herself in this screwed up world that we now live in. She is a feisty one, this daughter is, I know she can kick some butt and doesn’t think twice about getting up in your face, and she can back it up too. But sometimes a girl needs an extra advantage and I hope that these will do the job.