Month: October 2013

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Every Day I Wake Up, Look Over…

…and silently thank the gods that I have Ben in my life.

Five years ago the absolute last thing I expected in my life was a relationship—even though just prior to meeting Ben I had told the universe (or whoever/whatever was listening) that after a lifetime of less-than-successful attempts at coupling and a dozen or so years of being very, very single, I was ready to love again. I had run that line through my head many times before, but this time it was different; this time I felt it in the very fiber of my being. Even with that being said, in my wildest fantasies, I could not have even imagined the awesomeness that was about to enter my life—much less that I would be legally married five years later.

Sure, this past year has been difficult on us for a variety of reasons, but it's never strained our bond and through it all we've always been there for each other. As I lay there this morning watching Ben sleep, I was once again struck at how—and I hate to use the word because of its religious connotations, but nothing else springs to mind to describe it—blessed I am that we're together.

 

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Well That Was Interesting

I had a video interview today. But it wasn't a live interview; it involved recording video responses to a canned set of interview questions.

And of course I royally screwed up the first attempt. For each question you're given three opportunities to get it the way you want it before submitting. I wasn't happy with my response to the first question, so I set about re-recording it, only to have the second attempt be marred by my phone ringing. I said "Aw, fuck!" (while still on camera) and stopped recording to get up and silence the phone, only to return and discover the "Aw, fuck!" take had been auto-submitted.

FUCK. ME.

I went ahead and completed the remaining questions and sent it off. I immediately called the recruiter and told him not to submit me and explained what had happend. "Would you like a do-over?"

Praise the baby Jeebus.

The second time went better—especially since I knew what all the questions were beforehand and could tweak my answers accordingly.

This whole job hunt is just getting weirder and weirder with each passing day. I hope that wherever I end up landing it's some place conducive to remaining until I retire (or at least until we leave this wretched city), so I don't have to go through this again any time soon.

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All This Has Happened Before and Will Happen Again

A relative of Boston Dynamics' Cheetah robot, which last year managed to outpace the world's fastest man Usain Bolt on a treadmill, is now able to run outdoors untethered. Named the WildCat, the outdoor runner is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is being developed for military use.

Of course it's being developed for military use.

Do today's engineers only read halfway through the warning stories of science fiction? I mean, it seems like they get to the "gee whiz that's cool!" part of the book and then walk away to create this shit without reading the part where gee whiz technology obliterates mankind.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." ~ Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

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And Teh St00pid Continues

From Asshole of the Day:

The whining by Republicans about things that were closed during the shutdown has reached ridiculous levels. How hard is it to understand that making Obama shutdown the government would mean closing things? As I said before, YOU shut it down, Republicans, so all the closings are YOURS, not Obama's or anyone else's.

Well, especially not Obama's since no bill ever reached his desk to fund the government. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

But that hasn't stopped Republicans from phony grievances, such as Eric Cantor having all the doctors in the House show up in lab coats to discuss how Obama is refusing to let up to 300 kids with cancer into the NIH trials. This, while they shut the government down to stop Obamacare which would give MILLIONS OF KIDS access to healthcare, some of whom certainly have cancer. Yes, this really happened.

And then of course there was Rep. Randy Neugebauern arguing with an park ranger as though he didn't vote for the shutdown, which he did. And the best part is that Neugebauer gets paid during the shutdown, but the park ranger does not!

And then today in Arizona, state Rep. Brenda Barton posts on Facebook:

Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?

Hitler! Thugs! Overtime! If you had NO KNOWLEDGE of what's going on, that would sound bad. Of course the government is shutdown, so how can you justify keeping open a park? How? And the rangers aren't getting overtime— they aren't even being paid! But don't let facts get in the way of your smear campaign, asshole!

Full story: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/arizona-lawmaker-rages-against-de-fuhrer-obama-in-angry-facebook-post

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You Know You're Getting Old When…

…you hear a certain song and find yourself thinking, "Gawd, life was so much simpler then."

I have iTunes on shuffle today, and Meco's Empire Strikes Back came on a little while ago. Yeah, you know Meco did the infamous disco Star Wars, but did you know he followed up three years later with Empire as well? No, of course you didn't. It never got the kind of club or air play that Star Wars did. I'm fortunate in that Steve gave me copy for my birthday the year it came out.

It wasn't one of Meco's better works, although it stands up pretty well in more of a jazz-fusion sort of way than outright disco after all these years.

At the risk of running off the rail completely, did you know he also did The Wizard of Oz…released on yellow-brick-road colored vinyl?

Yeah, good times. Wizard  is probably his most straightforward interpretation of all the movie soundtrack stores he attempted to discofy. I actually count the entire album in my Top 100 dance tunes.

But I digress, again.

As I was listening to Empire today, I couldn't help think back to that summer of 1980 when Steve and I were working as messengers for Lewis & Roca in downtown Phoenix. Back then, the worst thing I had to worry about was whether or not the air conditioning in my truck would blow up, leaving me stranded somewhere—and what I was going to wear out dancing on any given Saturday night. We (and most of the rest of the world) were blissfully unaware of the shit storm that was to descend upon the world in the form of AIDS, Ronald Regan, George Bush (Senior and Junior), and Dick Cheney. (The impotent right wing was braying that Jimmy Carter was surely the anti-christ.) MTV wasn't even yet a glint in anyone's eye, and computers still occupied entire rooms. The most high-tech thing I owned was an analog turntable that had digital speed and pitch readouts and was controlled by integrated circuits! CD players were still a couple years out, and having an in-dash cassette player in your car was considered hot stuff.

It kind of makes you pause and consider how much life has changed during the last 30 years.

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I…I Just Can't.

I swear Teh St00pid is spreading like an unchecked cancer  across this country.

Last Friday I received an email from a recruiter:

The Desktop Support Analyst will be responsible for providing a high level of PC hardware/software support for our local and remote clients in a Windows/MAC environment and for assisting with major PC related projects (rollout of a new application, hardware/software upgrades, integrations, etc.)

We are the world's largest supplier of services, products, and solutions to industrial and commercial users of electronic components and enterprise computing solutions and growing by leaps and bounds!

 What you'll be doing:

▪   Providing PC hardware and software support for our local and remote clients.

▪   Diagnosis of PC problems via phone, remote control of desktops or desk-side visit.

▪   Provide support for Mobile Device Technology (Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, etc).

What you need:

▪   Extensive hands-on experience troubleshooting and installing PCs, peripherals and applications.

▪   Minimum of 3 years' experience supporting users via phone, remote control and desk side visits in a large multi-location corporate environment.

▪   Strong knowledge and experience with Windows 7, Windows XP, MS Outlook/Exchange, MS Office 2007

▪   Experience using remote-control software, software distribution tools (e.g. Symantec Altiris) and anti-virus & spyware tools..

▪   Experience upgrading PCs (memory, hard drive, data transfer, etc.)

▪   Maintain and update users PC asset information and experience supporting mobile device technology

▪   24×7 On-call technical support on a rotation basis and local travel when required (less than 10%)

Nice to have:

▪   5+ years supporting PC users in a multi-location corporate WAN environment with 3,000+ users.

▪   Microsoft or other technical certification or training.

▪   Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related discipline

▪   Experience with iOS and MacBooks

▪   Experience with encryption software such as McAfee Endpoint Encryption

What's in it for you:

▪   Competitive salary and full benefits.
- Work with one of the top-ranked solutions companies in the country
- Unlimited opportunity for growth

If you feel like this would be a great fit for you, please apply today!  You'll be glad you did!

Okay, this sounded exactly like what I'm looking for. The email had no direct link to "apply today!" so I sent the guy my latest resume.

This morning I received an email from him saying, "Please call immediately!"  Wow, I thought. This must be a hot job.

So I returned his call and it soon became apparent I was dealing with someone who wasn't running on all cylinders. He asked how much I had been making at my last job and I told him. For the life of him, he could not understand how I could be a full-time, permanent W-2 employee with benefits who was paid hourly—all but calling me a liar for claiming so. Then he asked what I was making my job previous to that one (the one I'd worked at for seven years in Phoenix). Again, he COULD. NOT. BELIEVE. I was paid on an hourly basis.  "If you work 60 hours in a week, do you get paid for 60 hours?" YES, I said. I get paid 40 hours at my regular pay and then 20 hours of overtime at time and a half. So then I tried tossing out the terms Exempt and Non-Exempt. That didn't register with him either.

This guy just didn't get it, and from there the conversation went downhill. He asked why I wasn't still working at my last position. I explained that because of the revolving door lack of leadership, too much was falling into my lap that I was unqualified for.

Because I got tired of dealing with idiots like you!

"So you were fired?"

"No, I quit."

And his response, dripping with judgment, was, "Without something else lined up? Do you think that was a wise idea?"

I swear, this is not the kind of crap I needed first thing today. When I related this to my friend Michael, he said I should've responded to him with, "It was wiser than talking to you since you clearly don't have a CLUE."

Why don't I think of this stuff while it's happening?

Anyhow, he never asked about my experience or what I actually did at any of the places I worked. Totally fixated on the wage issue, he ended the conversation by saying asking what kind of money I was looking for, "Not hourly, but as an employee."

I told him and he reluctantly said he would pass this information along to the hiring manager.

You do that, buddy. You do that.

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Word.

From Driftglass:

They really aren't that complicated.

Because.  There. Is.  No.  Tea.  Party.

As we Liberals have said many, many, many times before—as we were saying immediately after they appeared on the national scene and were slobberingly embraced by the national media as a Totally New Awesome Shiny Object—the Tea Party is nothing more than the same, cranky, white pig-ignorant GOP base voters who have been flinging the United States off of one cliff after another for most of my adult lifetime.

The same, old (very old) coalition of bigots, fundies and assorted other proudly ignorant meatsticks (tarted up for the cameras with a drizzle of "intellectuals" and think-tank manikins and a sprinkle of a few self-loathing minorities) that have been the bedrock of the GOP since Nixon—a mob of lobotomized shouters who cheered for every treason and catastrophe of the Bush on at 120 decibels right up until he started to lose.

After which they started to become exponentially more publicly unhinged.

Then came the Black President, after which they lost their shit completely and forever.

But of course, Serious People in Polite Society are never supposed to recognize such things, so instead of doubling over in laughing when millions of Republican meatsticks put on tricorner hats and hied their fat asses down to the local Ramada Inn to rally in favor of everyone pretending they'd out for a short beer for the last 20 years or so…the Mainstream Media went right along with the scam.

As one reviled, loser wrote back in 2009, while Very Serious people like David Brooks were ooh-ing over all of these newly minted "independents" that were suddenly abroad in the land, the word "Independent" had lost any meaning at all

Nobody knows what "independents" want, because "independent" as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"…a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because "independent" can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

As the same, reviled loser wrote back in 2009 as the protobaggers were figuring out where to order Gadsden Flags in bulk:

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted "independents" seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

Actually, I got that last bit wrong: turns out they fooled a whole lot of wealthy, influential people in the press because so many people in the press got to be and wealthy, influential by being just such colossal fools.

All of which is made geomentrically more depressing when I go back to my archives and note that, yep, I sure as shit predicted this exact phenomenon 2006 during the height of the Age of Boosh:

… In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade. 

It will become the "Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?" shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, "well, he did good after 9/11" as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

As I said, Teabaggers really aren't that complicated.  They only made to appear so by their collaborators in the national media who categorically refuse to call them out by their real name.

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The Stupid is Strong in Them

THESE ARE ACTUAL COMPLAINTS RECEIVED BY "THOMAS COOK VACATIONS FROM DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS"

1. "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."

2. "It's lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallarta to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time — this should be banned."

3. "On my holiday to Goa in India , I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food."

4. "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price"

5. "The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room."

6. "We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow."

7. "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."

8. "No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared."

9. "Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers."

10. "We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish."

11. "The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun."

12. "It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England . It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair."

13. "I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends' three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller."

14. "The brochure stated: 'No hairdressers at the resort'. We're trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service."

15. "There were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners."

16. "We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning."

17. "It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."

18. "I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes."

And the winner is…

19. "My fiance and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."

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See This, BSA? This is Why No One Likes You

Douchebags.

From ARS Technica:

In August, a small Oakland-based kids' group called the Hacker Scouts received a letter from none other than the Boy Scouts of America. The letter insisted—to the group leaders' disbelief—that the term "scouts" is trademarked to the BSA via a 1919 Congressional charter (the charter extends to select other groups, like the Girl Scouts, as well). The BSA demanded that Hacker Scouts change its name or face legal ramifications.

At the time, Hacker Scouts said it would decide how to respond "based on advice from our lawyers and our own sense of duty."

But last week, the BSA sent a second letter to the Hacker Scouts leaders. As Hacker Scouts cofounder Samantha Matalone Cook wrote on the group's site: "[W]e have received another letter from the BSA refusing to compromise or consider a licensing agreement and reaffirming their demand that we change our name or they will take legal action."

As Hacker Scouts Director of Guild Development and co-founder Garratt Gallagher told Ars in an e-mail, the group has decided to change its name rather than face litigation. "Hacker Scouts is focusing its efforts on its primary mission: educating kids," wrote Gallagher.

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