Month: August 2020

Posted on

Not Looking Forward to Monday

It's not like I didn't know this was coming. I mean, I've been to this rodeo too many times over the course of my career to not see it.

Several weeks ago, our division director retired. We were all happy for him, even knowing at the same time what a great loss it would be to our operation. While we're waiting for a replacement to be hired, , we're reporting to his supervisor—a woman who neither wants or understands the role. "What exactly do you do here?" was one of the questions she asked him about a week before his departure. At the time we all thought it was because she was deciding whether or not a replacement would be necessary, but the last week has proven she had no clue whatsoever what his role in the department actually entailed.

And we (or at least I ) did not fully grasp how much interference the man ran between our group and those above.

Two weeks ago my supervisor asked us all to start keeping a journal of everything we're doing during the day. I emailed him and said, "So now we're justifying our jobs?"

He said no, it was nothing like that. He just wanted to keep his supervisor (who was now reporting to Miss I-Don't-Want-This-Responsibility) in the loop. While I like and respect him and have one of the best relationships with a superior I've had in my career, I knew he was lying through his teeth because—as I wrote earlier—this ain't my first trip to the rodeo.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that for the past month or so, I've had surprisingly little to do. The number of tickets coming in has dropped significantly as people have finally settled into this new paradigm of working from home, and most of the problems that do not involve VPN access or the usual run-of-the mill desktop support stuff are related to back-end databases and home-brew application support, neither of which I've had to deal with as long as I've been on board with the organization. Those have been handled by either my supervisor directly, or my senior colleague who has been doing that stuff for an eternity. The remaining usual desktop tickets are—because they start an hour earlier than I do—often snatched up by my remaining colleagues even before clock in. (Or as I am constantly bitching to my boss, snatched up and resolved, without actually accepting, making notes, or closing the ticket out in our help desk software, leading me to think they're still open and me wasting my time chasing issues that were already resolved.)

Last Friday out of the blue in our weekly Skype, my boss told me that wants me to start taking care of all my senior colleague's open tickets because he was assigning him to a "special project." (At least those tickets that do not involve direct hands-on hardware intervention because he still doesn't want me physically back in the office for obvious reasons.) "Work with B (my other colleague) if you have any questions about something you don't understand, and of course I'm available to help you build your knowledge as well."

Now I don't know for sure if this is what actually went down, but based on her notoriety for micromanaging, I would dare say that Miss I-Don't-Want-This-Responsibility noted how little I was actually working on and wanted my boss to justify my continued existence in the department.

My supervisor fought hard to bring me on full time from temp to begin with, and I know he believes in me and my skills, so after speaking with a friend and sounding her out on this she said, "It's because he wants to keep you around, so don't think of it as punishment."

I appreciate that, but it doesn't mean I'm looking forward to this "knowledge building" exercise, but neither I nor my budget are ready to take early retirement, especially after committing myself to a car payment last March…

Posted on

Fulfilling a Teenage Dream

They have arrived…



…and in perfect (or at least advertised) condition. It was obvious they were packed by a pro. The seller knew what he was doing, and a good thing. These suckers are heavy. It took nearly a half hour to unbox the pair and get them set up.

I grabbed Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor off the shelf and set it spinning while I gathered up the mess that the unboxing had created.

To be honest, I wasn't overly impressed. Yeah, they sounded okay, but certainly no better or worse than the Infinity 1001As they had replaced, and I thought, "Well at least they're in better condition than the Infinitys." But once I sat down "in the zone" as it were…OMG, it was an entirely different experience and it was amazing. Old School JBL at its finest.

Even with my aging ears, I could immediately hear the difference. Today I pulled out Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, but after a few seconds of surface noise I realized that I'd grabbed the original copy I'd bought new in 1977—not the reissue I'd wanted to hear. So I took it off the turntable and retrieved the 180 gram copy I'd gotten a couple years ago.

It sounded awful. The 1977 pressing sparkled; the reissue was muted and uninspiring. Until today, I'd never heard any real difference between the two copies other than the surface noise, but it was clear as day through these JBLs.

I'm going to have some fun rediscovering all my music!

Posted on

David Lynch's Ominous Statement Generator

BIRTH MONTH:
January – The stars
February – The owls
March – Your enemies
April – The obelisks
May – The crystals
June – The secrets
July – The crows
August – Your teeth
September – The curses
October – The eyes
November – The trees
December – The caves

EYE COLOR:
Brown – do not know you.
Green – are not what they seem.
Hazel – cannot reach you.
Bleu – are gone when you look away.
Grey – plot revenge
Other – are not lost but waiting.

BIRTH ORDER:
Eldest Child – Prepare:
Middle Child – Repeat:
Youngest Child – Sleep Well:
Only Child – So Look Away:

HAIR COLOR:
Blonde – they'll whisper you your fate.
Brown – they, too, have teeth.
Red – they lie in wait.
Grey – they can still see you.
Black – they come even faster.
Other – the clock ticks on.

The crystals cannot reach you. Prepare: they can still see you.

 

Posted on

Here We Go Again!

Yes, it's installed on an external drive. I'm crazy, not stupid.

First impressions: it's very pretty. It's fresh. The Yosemite-era UI is now six years old and was looking a little long in the tooth. The new design is probably as radical as the transition was from Mavericks to Yosemite and of course people are already bitching about it; about the "iOSification of macOS." Deal with it. Life marches on and no one's going to force you to upgrade if you don't want to. As to the experience of using it right now, it's rough—very rough. Lots of things are broken/don't work. (Which I've been dutifully reporting back to the mothership as I run across them.) I now understand why it took so long for Apple to release this to the public beta testers. I can't imagine what the earlier developer versions were like.

 

Posted on

Audio Pr0n

Vintage Teac, 1973

I wanted the top one (the 360) in the worst way, but sadly a cassette deck was not in my budget until a decade later and this model had been long since discontinued.

Posted on

You Wanna Know…

…what pisses me off about unemployed people getting a stimulus check or an extra $600 a week?

Not a damn thing, because other people who are struggling are not my enemy and their bank account or what they spend their money on is none of my goddamned business.

Posted on

A Message to Anti-Maskers

The irony of the anti-mask crowd is, it's YOU, you dumb fucks. You're the ones who are stealing freedom from all the rest of us.

This shit is contained in every other first world nation because no other culture has you morons. You've been asked to make a handful of entirely manageable sacrifices for the common good, but you won't do that because you possess this uniquely American malfunction: you have a spoiled rich kid's idea of freedom; Donald Trump's idea of freedom, which is "I do whatever I want, and if anybody else gets hurt, fuck 'em."

"We can contain this outbreak if we all just wear masks when we go out? Oh thank god, that's so easy!" say the rational Americans whose brains still work.

"NO!" shriek you wingnuts. "I've decided 'liberty' means my every passing whim must be gratified because my emotional development stopped at age three!"

And so, no matter how many millions of us do the right thing, make the sacrifices, y'know…CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, there have consistently been enough of you maniacs offering free rides to the fucking Coronavirus so that the whole country has to stay trapped in this funhouse.

Social media circles are so easy to manipulate. Shit, this crap is probably all coming from nerds at a Russian troll farm, cackling about how much easier it is to kill Americans with memes than with bombs.

YOU are the reasons schools aren't safe for children now, by the way. All that lost educational and social development that you're suddenly so concerned about? It's your fault, and every fucking day you spend shrieking at entry-level service employees about your perceived "rights" is another day you take from them; another day you take from ALL of us. The the rest of us just have to fucking live with it, I guess. As you take and take and take from millions of people you can't be bothered to think—much less care—about. You take their safety, their peace of mind, their future. And in 145,000 160,000 cases and counting, you've taken everything. All this suffering and death doesn't seem to move you in the slightest, and I have to say that's really fucked up.

You folks are broken. You are failed humans. And congratulations, you've ruined everything for everyone else. You got what you wanted. Nobody can tell you to eat your peas. There'll be another quarter million corpses before this is over, and it'll take years to recover from the economic carnage, but you showed us! You "owned the libtards" and nobody can make you do something that you don't want to!

Nobody can make you wear a small piece of fabric over your nose and mouth. For short periods of time. To end a crisis. To save lives. Your parents must be proud.