dannyman.toldme.com

It is so hard to motivate myself to do anything. I have no faith in anything. Fortunately, the money situation is getting extremely terrible, and this helps push me forward.

I made up a resume for waiting tables. Today I trekked over to San Francisco to apply at a few places, and when I got to the first place I realized I’d left the printed resumes at home. Dang! I filled out a lengthy resume at a Chinese Noodle Shop that is opening in two weeks. I have no great hope for that position. Next I parked in front of a copy shop and printed a few copies of the resume which I was able to download from the Internet. Nearby, on Geary, was a Jewish Deli that had apparently survived from at least the 1950s, filled with old folks. The woman at the cash register kindly handed me a half-sheet of paper to fill out, and stapled my resume to it. A young man and a young woman were also filling out applications. The Chinese place was absolutely bustling with activity, much of it various laborers applying for work.

Back at the ranch, I went on Craigslist. I found one half-time desktop support position, which would pay enough to support my materially modest lifestyle requirements and leave me with time enough to pursue my own interests. I explained this much on my cover-letter, along with the usual spiel about my love of customer service. Then, a handful of barista positions, and two more restaurants to visit tomorrow, THIS time with resumes.

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Well, I live in Oakland now. My first night at Michael’s was Thursday, when I drove across the bay to meet up with him after he got off work. It is a pretty nice place up in the hills above Oakland, not far from Berkeley. I get to house-sit until April rolls around, when Duncan comes back from Europe with Michael, to follow in my footsteps in living at Michael’s and looking for restaurant work.

Hopefully, I’ll find a job really soon. Or, maybe at least I’ll actually receive some mail and be able to complete my appeal for unemployment compensation. Until then … the whole idea of buying gas tends to irk me. Up winding twisty road with no sidewalks, driving is the supreme choice of transportation at the new place. Though it turns out that during the day it ought to be safe enough for me to descend on foot and catch a bus. Sounds to me like good exercise.

Friday I drove back to Mountain View to get almost the last of my stuff, and have lunch with some Tellme colleagues. We passed up the free In-N-Out and had burritos at Los Charros. Angel keeps telling me I should write for the free bi-weekly Wave Magazine, to which I always respond that I have yet to think of a good article to pitch them.

Today I dropped in on a vegetarian restaurant that is taking applications because they’re closing for six weeks to remodel. That’s not great news for me, but that will be a great lead for Duncan, who wants to work in a vegetarian restaurant, when he gets here in April. I’m going to see if I can sweet talk my way in to serving pizza at Zachary’s, which is the source of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza in the Bay Area. Not only did I grow up on this food, but I even worked at the Bay Area’s other Chicago-themed Pizza Place.

After the vegetarian place, I dropped in at The Crucible‘s open house / re-opening party. I got to see neon glass working, blacksmithing, TIG welding, and oxy-acetylene torch welding demonstrations. Had I money and an assurance that I’d still be in Oakland for a few months, I’d have quite possibly signed up for a course. The classes look to start ’round 10 April though, so I still have time.

To top it all off, The Crucible also supplied me with free bananas, apples, popcorn, and … barbecue!!! Dang! Free ribs? Yah!

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I and some other friends I met once before, though none of us remember each other, helped Linn move today. I got to back the 25′ truck up to the parking garage, THAT was fun. It all went pretty well, and though we were pressed for time and kept hitting little snags like missing padlocks, and Linn was too cheap to get us a dolly, things went pretty smooth and we met the deadlines to drop her stuff off in public storage.

She paid for dinner. My tummy is filled with pollo parmagiana, and I had a glass of wine. The one waitress looked really really nice. But what I really dug was this skinny young FoB gal who came in with her boyfriend, wearing the most insane pair of pants. You know how girls used to have zippers down by the ankles to help them get the tight pants on? That always struck me as inexplicably wonderful, probably because the fashion came out at just the right week in my puberty. Anyway, this gal had zippers up the back of each leg that went clear up to her the bottom of her butt pockets.

Now, I have no idea how practical that is, or why she really chose it, but her jeans struck me as insanely witty. Just plain too extreme! Wonderful! And it was all the nicer that while she was a skinny immigrant-lookin’ type, she still had a little chubby booty so at least the zippers were leading the eye to something worthwhile.

The glass of wine, which, as it was the house wine, cost a mere $4, made me miss France, where a good evening could be had hanging out at the hostel with a $2 bottle of wine. On the way home I dropped by Safeway and grabbed some bread, some hummus and pita bread, and a $3 bottle of “private reserve” from San Jose. The wine comes with a twist-off cap, and looks like peach apple juice, and tastes like a port with tequila in it. Fantastically ill! I dig it!

Pita and hummus and an abominable bottle of wine, a good night cap consistent with that girl’s insane zipper pants, and the struggle to move Linn’s stuff, in which we came together and triumphed!

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So, I was reading the paper, and a comic made me chuckle. “Let’s share this with my friends,” I decided, and hopped on the Internet to find the electronic version. Alas, out of fear that the ability to read comics on the Internet would destroy their business model, the syndicator has rigged it up so that you can only view comics between two weeks and four weeks in age.

So, anyway, if you read this two weeks from now, you’ll be able to find the comic that made me giggle here.

Otherwise, I’ll tell you that the Devil is standing in the bookstore reviewing a copy of _Chicken Soup for the Soul_, and he confesses to an employee that, “It’s not exactly what I was expecting. I thought it was about the art of the deal.”

Business books are big here in the Silicon Valley. Maybe a few of us can contribute to web syndication. Speaking of which, I have an RSS feed up.

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I got an e-mail from Linn the other day. She was layed off a month ago. She bought me a bowl of pho for lunch. Bless her! Well, fair enough, I suppose, as I’d already offered to help her move on Tuesday. She’s ditching her apartment to live at a friend’s place for a while. Fair enough.

The other day, Brian asked about my “exit strategy” – not that he wanted to throw me out or anything, but he felt uncomfortable not paying the landlady extra rent if I stayed for long. I told him my plan of moving from place to place, a month at a time, so as not to wear out my welcome. I figured I should be out by March.

March is a week away.

Michael had offered me his guest bedroom in Oakland. I contacted him about that, and it turns out that he’s taking March off to travel, and could use a house sitter. What’s more, he’s meeting Duncan, who put me up in London, and then Duncan will be coming back to stay in the guest room in April. So, there’s a very clean month in a room with a pre-determined exit strategy.

I can, if need be, go on a couple more months in this vein, but as the weather gets warm, if things remain desperate, a midwestern spring may call to me.

Speaking of desperate, I’ve taken to calling the EDD to discover the status of my appeal. Ordinarily I’d be content to wait for the mail, but the mail has been notably flakey lately. I’ve tried twice today, but both times the system told me that there were too many folks on hold and I had to call back later.

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I had an interview this morning. It was for a Perl development job, which is different, but related to, my usual work as a Systems Administrator. The coders sit together in an open space, their desks built of doors, in Tellme fashion. That and the right combination of Dilbert strips taped on a cubicle support column gave me a good feel. I was introduced to a pair of easy-going would-be colleagues, who told me about their somewhat unconventional development methodology, and prepared to give me a technical challenge and a whiteboard to solve it on.

I was a little nervous, to be sure, and I usually write code sitting at a terminal, with access to reference doumentation. I conjured a passable, though not impressive, solution to the problem. The “elegant” answer was indeed quite pretty. They asked what I knew of database programming, and I had to admit that, while I once got really freaky with Bugzilla, I’m hardly an expert on database programming.

I know the hiring manager from school, which is a plus. He came back and said that the guys liked me, and ordinarily, at this point, this is where he said he’d say he’d give me a call; Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the technical prowess that they wanted. He asked how I felt about doing QA, which was the only other position he saw coming along. I offered that I didn’t know much about QA, I’d be most concerned with whether I was qualified to do that work.

I appreciated his straightforward refusal.

Back in the car, I started arguing with myself over the verdict, but my rationalizations could not overcome the simple fact that in this economy, they are better off holding out for someone who is not only a good culture fit, but is also better up-to-speed on the work that needs to be done. It is not enough that we both know that I could do the work, the fact stands that someone else out there can do it better, and she also needs a job.

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Meanwhile, this article from Reuters reports that:

Pregnant women who drink eight or more cups of coffee a day may triple their risk for having a stillborn child, scientists in Denmark announced Friday.

Holy crap! That’s a lot of coffee!! I tend to down a large coffee every day or so myself, and that seems like an awful lot, but eight cups!? That must take powerful, pregnant-woman cravings that are beyond my understanding.

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Microsoft maintains that its growth prospects are strong. The company will be coming out with “incredible products that change the world,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer John Connors said at an analysts conference last month in New York.

Still, Connors acknowledged the question that has been hounding Microsoft lately — whether “those products translate into the kind of profitability we’ve had from some of the very incredible products we’ve done historically.”

seattlepi.com
Maturing Microsoft looks to new markets to keep growing

The reason I’m not a successful businessman is that I would be hard-pressed to promise my investors that I would be coming out with “incredible products that change the world” with a straight face. I’d then start laughing my ass off when I had to explain that even though I was about to release “incredible products that change the world” that they may not make us much money as the other incredible products I have released before.

The fact that I haven’t encountered a Microsoft product that I’d call “incredible” or that I expected “would change the world” probably doesn’t help. Historically, Microsoft hasn’t relied on releasing incredible products that would change the world, they take an existing product that looks set to make a lot of money, perhaps because it will change the world, and appropriate one of their own to make money off of.

You’d think the CFO would at least be honest. If I were an investor, I’d get excited by news that “We’ve found some excellent software products in the Open Source world that we can re-implement and bundle with Windows.” Even that, though, sounds like another Microsoft strategy employed to manipulate the market: vaporware.

Microsoft has a history of observing a new software product emerge from somewhere else that they can’t compete with, so they squelch it by announcing that they’re already developing an alternative that will destroy their competitor. They don’t actually have to ship anything, they just have to scare away the competing investors and potential customers who would be reluctant to purchase the new software before they knew what the more-likely-to-win-marketshare alternative would be. The promise of “incredible products that change the world” sounds like some sort of blanket statement to cover whatever the next innovation in the high-tech industry will be. “I can’t tell you what the next big thing will be, but you can rest assurred that we will 0WN it.”

Which they have to say with a straight face, because they’ve run out of new products to force down our throats.

It seems like Google has a solid track-record of creating new services that rule. I wonder if the reason they haven’t gone public yet is because they’d prefer not to be bought out by Microsoft. I’m curious to see what they will do with blogging.

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I was never too satisfied with my own attempt to articulate my position on the looming conflict but I am extremely satisfied with Azeem’s “War now is better than war later”.

The gist of the argument is that, yes, Bush is evil too, and his henchmen are making a mess of the process, but since we’ve put up the forces and the rhetoric to fight a war, it is best to get the thing over with and move forward in the world. I would add to this the obvious, that Saddam Hussein is unlikely to go away on his own, and the sooner we disarm him, however clumsily, and with whatever unknowable repurcussions, we’re still better off than with a wacko tin-pot dictator in the Middle East giving the shaft to his own people, and quite possibly giving nasty things to the enemies of his enemy to mess with us.

I also appreciate the reminder that just as American War is motivated by oil, French and Russian Peace is also tainted by crude. More than anything, though, it seems that Chirac is jealous not only of America’s power, but that a spoiled brat from Texas is willing to wield this power. It cheapens a French leader’s sense of self-importance, especially when small, emerging democracies on the same continent have the temerity to speak up and suggest that “maybe the moron has a point.”

It isn’t so simple as choosing between the lesser of two evils. It boils down to the fact that, rightly or wrongly, the issue has been brought to a head, and it must be resolved. The choice for the free world is to lose credibility by backing down, and allow a dictator to continue screwing his people, while contemptuously defying the will of the United Nations, or to let the United States go to war yet again, and deal with the consequences of the ensuing bungles of American foreign policy.

The best course to me seems for the nations of the world to let President Bush do what with his limited imagination he is capable of doing – let him have his war, let the bombs fall, and the people die, because however terrible war is, it is not definitively worse than the current “peace” – the smarter leaders of more progressively sober-minded, peace-loving countries should get together and hammer out the plan for what happens next in Iraq. Bush can be trusted with war, but Americans running a Muslim country is one of the things that seems to scare everyone; Those who want what’s best should accept what is likely to happen and best prepare for an aftermath.

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Microsoft sells OFFICE (the suite) while people may only need a small part of Word or a bit of Access. Microsoft sells WINDOWS (the platform) but a small org might just need a website, or a fileserver. It no longer fits Microsoft’s business model to have many individual offerings and to innovate with new application software. Unfortunately, this is exactly where free software excels and is making inroads. One-size-fits-all, one-app-is-all-you-need, one-api-and-damn-the-torpedoes has turned out to be an imperfect strategy for the long haul.

David Stutz
_Advice to Microsoft regarding commodity software_

Amen to that, brother!

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 http://www.spacemoose.com/strips/decades.gif
 I think he's an omnisexual predatorial nightmare beast
 which is why he rules

As you see, the above URL is definately not work-safe.

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Among the things that’s been frustrating me lately, is that, not only am I broke, but I don’t know exactly how broke. When I got back, two bank statements were missing. Quicken can’t handle the simple concept of reconciling things out of order. Actually, Quicken is very Microsofty, even more than Windows, in that if you don’t do it the way they have set for you, you’ll be forever haunted by it. I still have a huge batch of statements from “1902” that I tried to “import” from my last finance manager, that show up every time I load Quicken, because there’s no way to get rid of them, short of clicking on each in turn and clicking several times to confirm that I want it gone.

Bastards.

Anyway, I went to WaMu.com to look up my old statements online. Nope, they only show the last and the current statement. Why? Because if you want to see anything older, they already have a racket where you pay $4 for them to mail one to you. I ordered the two missing statements online.

A few days ago my latest statement arrived, which Quicken can’t reconcile, because I’m missing two of the earlier statements. This statement has charges for the two statements I ordered, even though I never received those. Today I called Washington Mutual to ask what’s up? They said they sent those to my California address, and I should harass the Post Office.

Ah, yes, the Post Office. When I moved back to Mountain View I got all 21st Century and went to their web site to set mail to forward to Mountain View. It costs $1 to do it on the web, though I figured this is better and faster that going down to the Post Office to wait in line, except after you fill it out, it then tells you that it will take a week to process. Say what? It is as if the “web enabled” feature takes the information you fill out, gives it to someone with a typewriter, who fills out the form, and mails it in to the Post Office, which hands it to someone who takes that data and feeds it into a computer.

So, mom says that she received a letter telling her that mail was forwarding. I’m not sure why she received this in Chicago, because they’ve only ever mailed such notices to my new address. A few days later, I received another in Mountain View, and I figured everything was right. Well, except, only about half of the mail that has been addressed to Mountain View actually shows up here. The other half seems to disappear into the void.

I’d been trying to work this out with the Post Office. I wrote them on their web site, they said I had to call the Post Office in Chicago. I asked them what telephone number should I dial, and they said that I could find out on the web site. I called Chicago, and the woman seemed very shocked at my problem, put me on hold, and then told me that I had to call before 9AM to speak with a letter carrier. The only correct answer to any problem is that someone else knows the correct answer to the problem.

I wrote another complaint on a different part of the Post Office web site, explaining how crappy this service was. They said that my problem had been referred to the local office, and someone would get back to me about this. That was five days ago.

Today I called the Mountain View Post Office, to find out what’s up. “Oh, you have to cancel the old forwarding,” meaning, the forward order I’d put in to shunt my mail to Chicago before I left on my trip. She said I could fill out the form at the Post Office.

So, I went down to the Post Office and stood in line to cancel the forwarding so that my mail could forward to Mountain View, and not come up missing every other day. When I got up to the lady, she had to go to the next counter over to find the form, which was a “request to forward mail” that had space to cancel an old forwarding request, and set up a new one. This seemed extremely straightforward, and hopefully my mail will start to turn up.

Maybe … I suspect the problems still aren’t over. Meanwhile, I need my bank statements, and I also need my phone bill from T-Mobile so I can send in for my rebates on my Danger Sidekick before the rebates expire. I called T-Mobile, who were very slick about it, informing me that the bill had been sent out, for such and such amount, to Chicago, which they had somehow magically determined to be my address even though they had sent my Sidekick to Mountain View. Okay, could you send me a fresh copy of the bill to Mountain View? No problem! After all, they make money only after I receive their bill, not by charging me to see my account history, like Washington Mutual’s “no-fee” checking account.

One piece of mail I did sucessfully receive was from Progressive explaining to me that they’d pulled my driving record, and discovered that the at-fault comprehensive claim I made in September, 2001, was due to an unsafe turn, therefor my premium for the year was up by $281, due immediately. I called Progressive, to make sure that they had the exact right explanation of the incident, to make sure that I wasn’t being charged for my own confusion from trying to guess which box on the web was correct when I signed up for the policy. Nope, everything is correct. Okay, I don’t have $281 right now, can I switch to periodic billing for this one-year coverage? No … but since you’ve already paid the bulk of the premium, they won’t actually threaten to cancel anything until I run out of pre-paid premium … so, I could get away with ignoring their warning letters for a while. They might get pissy and charge me a $5 late fee, which would be consistent with the slightly-higher cost of going in installments anyway. Gee whiz, okay.

What I mean to express in all this rambling, of course, is to never ever ever do your business through the USPS web site because not only is it slower that going down to the Post Office and standing in line for twenty minutes in the 18th Century way, but they also wont fill the form out properly to get your mail forwarded along to the correct address. After this, the only mail you receive will be mail you never really had to receive in the first place, and all the really important mail that you paid $4 apiece for will disappear into the void.

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