Welcome to the recession. My employer has reduced the budget. We will maintain a constant headcount but need to reduce discretionary spending. We’ll keep serving bagels on Friday mornings, but no more fancy salmon dill red bell pepper pesto “lite” cream cheese.
All the same, while I can enjoy Philly Cream Cheese-“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”? Haha! 1980s flashback spread!
Mainly, I am happy and lucky to be in a pretty decent position to ride out this downturn with my income intact. Though, I have a nice cushion in the bank just-in-case. If I do find myself unemployed I may move out of my place and hit the road for several months.
On a less jovial note, the remains of a bookstore I recently saw in the Inner Sunset:
One week ago the people of this country began to party in the streets. I was actually driving down 16th St when I had to stop because the street had been spontaneously closed by joyful San Franciscans. Once I got on my way home I passed Market and Castro. Castro was blocked off for a formal street party, but the crowds seemed subdued. Upon arriving home I saw that Prop 8, repealing the right of people to marry a person of their own sex, was ahead.
Joy at electing a remarkable man to the White House. But a gut-punch to those of us who feel deeply about equal rights.
Just now I received a link to Keith Olbermann, and NBC commentator, who does an excellent job of expressing my dismay over Proposition 8:
The gist: marriage is about Love. At the time Barack Obama was born his parents’ marriage was illegal in 1/3 of the United States, and in the days of slavery, marriage between black people was illegal. There is no advantage to be had in opposing gay marriage, and in this culture where we feel uncomfortable about the impermanence of relationships, and the high rate of divorce, if two people can find love, we ought to allow them to enjoy it the same as anyone else.
While there are lawsuits out to restore same-sex marriage through the courts, my personal hope is that we can put it on the ballot again, and that next time it comes before the people of California, the people will have grown in their own hearts to accept that allowing lovers to marry is what we ought to do. We gained ten points since the last ballot proposition, and Prop 8 would likely have failed were it not for balls-out misinformation fear campaign by the Mormon Church and other cultural conservatives, who viewed popular support for same-sex marriage in California as the first step in a trend that would ultimately lead to acceptance of same-sex marriage throughout the United States.
We have work ahead to ensure the rights of a minority that has been tormented for too long.
One of my favorite automation strategies is to use Makefiles. The reason is that unlike a shell script you get free error-checking: a Makefile will bomb out on you if one command in the sequence fails. You can also chain targets together, lay out sub-dependencies, and the rest. I’m just finishing up on a little project which has this as the top-level target:
# default
all: dhcp sync yay
# cron-able
dhcp: hosts restart-dhcpd
# Positive feedback rocks!
yay:
@echo
@echo "YAY! Have a fortune cookie:"
@echo
@fortune -sa
The first target, “all” is what will be run when a user types “make” and you see that things get broken down further. The “sync” target depends on the user to either enter a password or forward an ssh credential. (more…)
I voted! This is the first time I encountered a line at the polling place, which had twice as many booths as usual. I’d say turnout is high but there are also a fuckload of propositions on the San Francisco ballot, which was 4 over-sized cards, most of them double-sided.
I spoiled my first ballot, and had to ask for a fresh one.
Last week I contacted the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission regarding Prop R, to rename the sewage treatment plant for George W Bush. I just heard back from their Communications and Outreach department:
Dear Daniel Howard
This is a modern facility that protects the ocean and the environment every day. And yes, we feel that this proposition would denigrate the fine work performed at our plant.
Please do not reply to this email.
If you have additional questions, please submit them through our Feedback area at: http://sfwater.org/feedback.cfm
I have long thought the Internet needed a tip jar. I felt so strongly about this that back in 2003 I spent some time building my own online feed aggregator, which had the ambition of collecting feedback (like Digg) and later monetizing by allowing users, should they desire, to “share the wealth” back to site authors. Say, if you’d marked 50 pages that you like, and decided to chuck in $5, the site could take your $5 and try to give, say, 10 cents to each site. In this way people could gain some modest remuneration for the Internet publishing efforts.
Of course, that was a bit ambitious for me and the project was scrapped when I scored full-time employment.
Briefly, the idea is you can earmark sites for tips of various sizes, then send in a few dollars via PayPal. Tipjoy will then pass the tips along to site authors. They profit by collecting a 3% transaction fee, and I assume they get some float off their PayPal balance as well. At this time authors “cash out” via Amazon.com gift certificates or by sending the money off to charity. That is for legal reasons though it sounds like they hope to traffic in cash in the future.They recently added the ability to cash out via PayPal as well, and deposit to a checking account is a planned feature.
I added a tip jar down in the feedback section below. I set the default to a modest 2 cents. I’m more curious than anything as to how many folks would bother to spread the karma.
I was just mulling over proposition 8 and how happy I am to see that Google and Apple have each taken a public stand against it. So, I figured I’d shoot a brief message off to upper management suggesting how proud I would be if my employer were also to take a stand in defense of civil rights.
Then I wondered that other people may have similar sentiments and similar inclinations to share their feelings with their management. I’m not holding my breath that my company will take a stand, but it doesn’t hurt to share the idea.
I consider it a hard-won blessing that I work in an industry where I can feel comfortable openly expressing my support for the rights of homosexual people.
UPDATE: Due to multiple requests, a “sample text” that folks should feel free to steal / adapt for their own purposes:
Boss,
I think it has been great that both Google and Apple Computer have both publicly stood in defense of the diversity of their employees and their community and made a public stand against Proposition 8.
My happy joy toy arrived today. So far, no love. It ties in to your Gmail account, see? But I have a hosted Gmail account. Rumor has it that hosted gmail accounts work, but when I try to log on I get this error message:
Sorry…
This account cannot be used on the phone because it is missing the following application: cl. Please contact the domain administrator for toldme.com or sign in using another account.
Alas, there is no information to be found on the Internets, and since I have a mere “standard” hosted gmail account I am not entitled to contact Google about the problem. So, I posted a message to their web “help forum” and we’ll see if someone knows. Meanwhile I guess I switch back to my old Sidekick and figure out how to migrate all the data I have stored on that device to the new thingus. With any luck I can shake down some Google employees for some technical support. I hope this isn’t another general case of “eff you hosted domain losers!!”
NOTE: A Google employee has already offered the guess that “cl” may be the Calendar application, so I’m seeing if I can make something happen . . .
UPDATE: According to a reliable source, there is a bug related to registering G1 accounts on hosted domains that surfaced this evening, October 21. They are working feverishly to fix this issue, and I hope we’ll be online tomorrow, October 22.
UPDATE:dannyman@toldme.com is now using his G1 as intended. Yay!!
My new toy is due to arrive on Wednesday. This morning I asked myself “where is my G1?” I cast about on the ‘net for answers. T-Mobile’s web site explained to look up the tracking number on at UPS’es web site, so I wrote them and asked where’s my tracking number? Then I peeked at the forums and saw that I can use my cell number as my tracking number! Pretty slick!
The next thing I did after that was to get my real tracking number from the UPS web site, stick that in Google, then bookmark the link to that page so I can just check that bookmark over the next couple of days to see if my widget has arrived yet in the mail.
One thing I have begun to do is leave low-value cards at the fare machine. That way I don’t have to screw around with "add fare" in the train station which can suck if you’re caught without change. I figure someone purchasing a new fare card can use the buck I leave behind.
The other day I saw someone leave a $0.05 at the machine in San Bruno.
Trivia: this is the 1,004th post in my WordPress installation. And of course, that represents only a portion of my journal from the past decade. I surpassed 1,000 posts earlier today while migrating some of the travel log from HTML into WordPress, which is one of my less exciting ways to kill time on a weekend.
I had previously bought some stock at $2.10 a share, you know, as a gamble. First time I ever bought stock in an individual company. Well, I lost on that one. No biggie.
I like how amid the financial turmoil, that my bank can fail, and that immediately, I am a customer at some other bank. That’s really swell. We call that “graceful degradation.” Go go FDIC!
Still, I am a little sad. I liked Washington Mutual. Now my bank matches my credit card. Enh.
I hate mobile phones. I have had a Sidekick2 forever because it lets me jot down notes and do e-mail and IM and check things on the web. But I fricking hate talking on mobile phones! I have been tempted to ditch the expense and hassle of carrying a device around all the time and move back to index cards and save myself $50-$60 per month. Alas, a mobile phone is basically required of any SysAdmin. In the past year I have had the good fortune of working at a larger company, where I’m only on-call for two weeks every other month. So, I have begun to leave the mobile device not-on-my-person when I’d like to relax. It is kind of a bummer for people who want to call me, but the tranquility does me good.
Anyway, the HTC Android “Google Phone” was announced yesterday. I bit the bullet and pre-ordered an upgrade for my trusty old Sidekick2. After all, a lot of the same team who designed the Sidekick went to work on Android, and the large company I work for is sending out the bonus checks this week. I’m starting to get a little excited at the idea of having a GPS device, because mapping is so hot. But the other win for me is to annoy the iPhone people.
Because I am a cantankerous old mobile-phone hater, I’m also naturally annoyed at the whole iDong Mac fanboy spectacle. The iPhone is that first fancy phone, but my soul reviles at the thought of paying a premium to get locked into the whole iTunes racket and . . . ugh. It is a toy! The open development platform is going to be a nice improvement on the Apple-mediated iPlatform. Anyway, the other reason I’m looking forward to getting the new Android is to steal the self-satisfaction from my iPhone comrades. “My phone does all that janky stuff too, but it costs me somewhat less and I have greater freedom.”
What is neat about mobile phones and other “micro-computers” is that there is no dominant operating environment yet. Apple and Google are trying to get in early, and doing a better job at it than Microsoft, and it is refreshing that Google’s device emphasizes open source and platform portability. We’re going to get to replay the “OS Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s all over again and I honestly think the Android platform has a lot of potential to dominate. I personally believe that in the next few years it will have surpassed Apple a great deal, because much as MS-DOS was licensed to a growing horde of PC makers, Android seeks to live on many devices, and Apple, just as in the old days, will become that special province with 10% market share of loyal Apple weenies. I liked Apple weenies a lot more when they were persecuted oddballs. These days they’re just irritating.
The following bit of advice, while not of my creation, has been well-received of late:
You’ve been meeting folk but there are those who you’d rather avoid, and you delete them from your phone. Later, they call and you answer because the number looks familiar: maybe it is a family or coworker! Awkwardness ensues.
Solution? Keep the number, but change the name to “Do Not Answer” — especially if you may have a tendency to get drunk / lonely.
I do not actually use this strategy, but I read it a couple years ago and its re-telling was recently well-received, so I thought I’d share.
/d
Me? I recently changed my voicemail to explain that I tend to avoid my mobile phone altogether and that e-mail works far better. I really dislike talking on the damn thing. It makes my brain warm and leaves me feeling anxious. Yeah, I’m weird.
