Workaholics struggle to say ‘No’ to work – Yahoo! News

) – Sam used to sneak into his office before dawn so no one would know how many extra hours he worked. Charles goes on all-night work binges to meet deadlines, and Susan can’t say no to volunteer projects, social clubs, bridge games, choral singing, lectures and classes.
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Each one is a member of Workaholics Anonymous, a 12-step recovery program for compulsive workers based upon the structure of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each one opted to keep their identity secret.

“It’s been called the addiction that society applauds,” said Mike, a physician and member of the group known as WA.

“People brag about it and say, ‘I’m a workaholic,”‘ he said. “But workaholics burn out and then you’ve lost them or they become very dysfunctional and bitter and cynical in the organization and corrosive.”

I’d go, but I’m too busy with work. [rimshot]

Oh wait.

The weekly meeting in New York draws an average of a half dozen people in a city that might be considered a hotbed of workaholism. Such meager attendance invites the predictable joke that most workaholics are too busy to attend meetings, a quip that organizer Charles has heard a million times.

“People think it’s funny,” he said. “It’s amusing until you hear the stories. There have been many people who have come, and work is destroying their lives.”

Unlike alcoholics, who can measure recovery by their days of sobriety, workaholics have no quantifiable gauge of their problem, or their recovery.

“In my case, my boss was telling me I had to get my work hours down to 40 a week, and I couldn’t do it,” said Sam, a former senior project engineer in California’s Silicon Valley.

I guess this is a serious problem after all.

Actually it looks like I’m on track to work 55 hours this week – and that includes taking Friday off (but going in for an hour anyway) due to the fact that I’ve reached the maximum number of vacation hours accrued.

Note that these numbers exclude principal residence…

Report: Number of U.S. millionaires reaches record – Mar. 28, 2006

The millionaires next door
Ten counties across America with the highest number of millionaire residents.

Rank County No. of millionaire households
1 Los Angeles County, CA 262,800
2 Cook County, IL 167,873
3 Orange County, CA 113,299
4 Maricopa County, AZ 106,210
5 San Diego County, CA 100,030
6 Harris County, TX 96,593
7 Nassau County, NY 78,816
8 Santa Clara County, CA 75,371
9 Palm Beach County, FL 69,871
10 Middlesex County, MA 67,552

Interesting.

So yesterday I upgraded my Yahoo toolbar – I heard that they had a tabbed browsing feature, just like the MSN/Windows Live Toolbar.

But now whenever I uncheck the Yahoo toolbar from the View->Toolbars menu choice in Internet Explorer, the Yahoo toolbar renables itself when I launch a new instance of IE! This didn’t happen before. And it doesn’t happen with the Google or Windows Live Toolbar.

I wonder what I can do to fix this short of uninstalling the Yahoo toolbar.

Update: Of the 4 machines I’ve used recently, this happens on 2 of them – including my tablet. How strange…

So recently I got a Sprint PCS Samsung A920 sent to me, for free use, no questions asked, for the next 6 months.

Apparently, I’ve been selected as part of some viral marketing campaign because of this blog. Go figure!

The program doesn’t ask me to post about it, or do anything – just to provide them with feedback.

I haven’t used it much since I just received it Friday, but the one thing I really wanted to find out was the transfer rates when using the phone as a modem. So at 3:30am, I conducted the following tests using Speakeasy’s test site – I compared the bandwidth of my cable modem, this new Sprint PCS phone (1EV-DO), my older Audiovox 5600 (GPRS), and plain old AOL 56k dial up.

First, my Comcast cable modem at 3:30am (the transfer rates fluctuate dramatically during the day):

Yeah… awesome huh?

Next, the new Sprint PCS Phone:

Not too shabby! Better than DSL when my parents first got it at their house!

Now, my primary phone – the 5600 with GPRS:

Wow… I knew it was slow, but didn’t know it was -that- slow!

Finally AOL 56k dialup – I reran the test a few times and the upload part of this test always produced broken results:

Sheesh. GPRS is just a little faster (and the latency is far worse.)

This is very interesting…. EV-DO is pretty neat. Maybe I should keep this phone around… Sprint! Your viral marketing idea is working on me.

Update: Looks like Valleywag got one too.

Sheesh! I’ve been so busy here at Windows Live Toolbar that I haven’t been able to blog about the latest release of Microsoft Entourage.

Fortunately, others have!

Jud has a great summary here that ends with this:

11.2.3 may not sound like the version number of a major release, but the features that it provides and the ones that it will enable that we didn’t think of make it very exciting for this Entourage user.

Omar found some good press about it in TidBits. That’s very surprising to me! I sort of figured that until Entourage became a port of Eudora, that it would never receive any glowing praise. [I kid, I kid].

The two major features of Entourage for this release is Spotlight support and SyncServices. My Office 2004 updated last night (yes I still have a Mac) with no problem through Automatic Updates.

To those who say that Office for Mac is expensive – I hope that as you use these two new features which are available for free, you can see that Microsoft is comitted to continually adding more value to your software. These two features been in progress for a long long time now.

I’ll never forget the MacWorld NY on July 17th, 2002 when Apple introduced iCal and iSync. In part, because that was my birthday – but also because of all the discussion it generated about sharing data across applications.

For years the Entourage team received complaints that we were “locking user’s data in” by not supporting iSync. Well, it wasn’t until just the most recent OS update that SyncServices became a mature enough API for our usage. We worked on this at the same time that we dramatically improved our Exchange support. Man we got a lot done in FY05/FY06!

I heard on the blogosphere today that Marc Canter yelled a comment at Bill Gates about opening APIs and letting apps share data. Microsoft Entourage is well on that way already.

For example, a major 3rd party recently IM’ed me to say that this new support for SyncServices is great. Now his product/service can integrate with Entourage, without any extra work! His company has long wanted to integrate with Entourage because of its great customer base, and now they can. Wow! [BTW, can I mention your name and your company?]

So congrats to everyone who worked on this. I know it was tough, but doable. Great work guys.

Alaska going to an all-Boeing 737 fleet

Like Southwest and other low-cost airlines that save money by flying only one kind of jetliner, Alaska Airlines will be operating nothing but Boeing 737s by 2009.

The Seattle-based airline announced Monday an accelerated plan for phasing out its 26 MD- 80s by the end of 2008.

The move will significantly reduce Alaska’s fuel and maintenance costs, executives said.

Under its old plan, Alaska would have kept some MD-80s in service until 2017.

I have mixed feelings about this. The MD-80’s were old old old planes, and it was absolutely awful if you ever sat in the last few rows next to the engines. And for some reason, they had a rep for being a bit more on the “risky” side – due in part to the T-tail in which stalls would always be catastrophic (if I understand correctly.)

That said, it had the 3-2 config. If you got a seat on the 2 side, life wasn’t so bad as you could never be stuck in the middle. And, if you were up front, the ride was pretty quiet.

Being that this isn’t going to happen until the end of 2008, I guess I have a few more years of thinking about this.

Hong Kong pollution leaves tourists choking – Yahoo! News

- Green activists said that Hong Kong’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry was at risk after a survey found half the visitors to the city had complained of the worsening air pollution.

Friends of the Earth Hong Kong said the poll of tour guides also found that one in ten tourists suffered pollution-linked health problems while visiting the semi-autonomous southern Chinese territory.

The poll of more than 150 tour guides and agents who accompanied overseas and mainland Chinese tourists in Hong Kong also found that 40 percent of visitors were aware of the city’s pollution problems before arriving.

[snip]

The government has said most of the pollution rolls in from mainland China’s heavily industrialised Pearl River delta region, which has seen huge economic growth in the past decade.

However, Friends of the Earth Hong Kong and local campaigners Clear the Air say local power producers are also major culprits.

“The pollution is not ‘coming down from China’,” said Annelise Connell, chairperson of Clear The Air, in a statement.

That’s something I certainly do recall from my trip to Hong Kong late 2004. Having seen all those famous postcards of clear blue sky and mountain ranges, and then seeing nothing but yellow smog was pretty disappointing.

That said, I do think that most of the pollution is from the China side – after all, Macau was also incredibly smoggy.

I’ve been wearing the same glasses for the last 5 years or so – I bought my current pair in New York.

Well, the scratch proof coating on my glasses is gone now, so they’re getting all scratched up – time to get a new pair!

Unfortunately, for the last year, I’ve been trying to find new frames – but the selection here in the South Bay is pretty blah compared to New York.

(What? Does everyone here wear contacts?)

Maybe it’s time to look around in San Francisco? Any recommendations?