We had a little excursion to DisneyWorld a few weeks back and it was a really different experience. We thought it would be a nice, slow-paced, quiet couple-centric trip without Matthew there, but we were wrong.
Because our trip ended up centered instead on a little flamingo called Terrence. I named him after Terrence Stamp, thinking of his costumes for "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert". and sent him to Melissa as a gift. Both she and Terrence were homesick for Florida (Melissa grew up there), and what a wild ride it was...
I like movies about the undead. But call me a Zombie Snob (snOmbie?), but I think the latest trend of inserting Zombies or vampires into every corner of film culture is diluting something great into a yawn-inducing me-too shoveling festival. For every "Shaun of the Dead" there's a "Lost Boys 2 : The Tribe"
Treading on thin ice in it's wake is "Rosencranz and Guildenstern are UNdead", which at least isn't a DIRECT re-imagining of Hamlet with Vampires in it, but it still steals the title of the original "Rosencrans and Guildenstern are Dead"(1990), which, besides being hilariously written an incredibly acted, remains possibly the best example of self-aware characterization in cinema today.
Friends and Horror Aficionados assure me that there ARE still good undead movies being made, such as the surprising "Let the Right One In", and all I can do is hope that this keeps the genre fresh amidst all the "Underworld" sequels and commercial tripe. Fingers crossed that George Romero can deliver us from evil... and I know just how ironic that sounds.
Monday morning I found out that my company was going with the "In Crowd" of companies and laying off lots of people. How did the companies end up doing this on the same day? Facebook perhaps?
Home Depot is going to have to cut about 7000 employees. Even shut down the Expo locations. *OUCH* - Caterpillar : Dude, *20,000* total now. Got nothin on me. It hurts but so do my sales. - Pfizer : About 19,500 here, Cat. Ouch indeed, HomieD. Need a pill for that headache of yours? I gotz the goods. ;) - GeneralMotors : about 2k jobs in Ohio and Michigan. Even with the Fed Money. - SprintNextel : GM - Dude, I CAN HAZ BAILOUT TOO? You just blew a load of it for your cars to be in the "Terminator - Salvation" movie! - GeneralMotors : Yep S/N. Gonna ask for $3 Billion more soon. Fingers crossed.
I laugh because it's the only way I can deal with this. I was having an IM conversation with a coworker in Little Rock (The Home Office) and he had to break off to escort one of our members out of the building and lock up her laptop. All in all, four employees just in my department are gone : Two report analysts, a mid-level manager and our FRACKING DEPARTMENT HEAD! We just brought this guy in back in September.
So now it's only seven of us left in the department, and we're scrambling to change our methods entirely to suit the new Division Head's declared direction for us. Our Department is called Enterprise Reporting, and my job is in two programs: (1) Concord eHealth, which doles out reports on server health (Disk space, CPU Utilization, Bandwidth) and (2) WebTrends, which creates reports based on clients web site logs (Number of Hits, Visitors, Page Views). 80% of my time and effort has gone towards Concord in the past three years. And Friday, I was informed that this program was going away. I am to stop new reports and slowly shut down the existing ones over the next month.
This program was my life. And because it was so popular, I had to write some automation programs from scratch in VisualBasic just to distribute all of them. (I called the automation program "AutoMAIL" for those of you Anime fans...)It was a lot of work to create the automation, but today I have over 500 reports that have to go out every week, and there is no way that would be possible for a single person to do without coming down with Carpal Tunnel in just under a month. As it is, Concord just churns out PDF and Excel reports to it's own UNIX server. Over the past three years I engineered a SYSTEM that would do the following: -FTP the reports from the server -Rename the files to something readable -Merge related PDFs and even Excel Spreadsheets -ZIP the resulting files and archive them -Email out the ZIP to a list of recipients -Email me with an error message if something goes wrong
All of this runs automatically, on a schedule, without any action required by me. This was the most involved, complex program I have ever written, and it worked beautifully. Any coders out there know the pride and satisfaction of creating an efficient program that is easily customizable and saves so much manual work. And it's gone now. The pinnacle of my professional skill will be useless in about a month.
This is not just vanity and pride talking, I am losing my main area of expertise, the main reason for employing me. I will still have WebTrends, but that is a fairly closed system, fairly easy implemented once you have a system set up. I'll also be training on the new reporting system: SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, but I'm the last of my department to train on it.
My manager assures me that if they didn't think I could transition to the new way of doing things, I would have been let go with the others, so that bodes well for me. She has always been a great boss - always looks out for me and gives it to me straight, and I trust her. My logical mind knows that I am unlikely to be laid off - but this is a fear that transcends logic and even the established trust we have.
Everyone is fearing for their jobs in this economy. I feel like the protagonist from FINAL DESTINATION: I have somehow survived something horrible, but I feel the guilt of it. Along with the foreboding that I did not dodge this entirely and it will come back for me.
- posted by Chris @ 2/03/2009 PermaLink
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... Along about the time that Roosevelt was about to lose his temper over [the failure of the Public Works Administration], the First Lady talked him into talking to a very successful social worker named Harry Hopkins, who only wanted a few minutes of the President's time so he could ask one question. He showed the President figures (that he later showed Congress) showing that there were about 3.5 million Americans in 1933 who were heads of households between the ages of 18 and 64 that no employer was going to hire, no way, no how, not for any amount of money, and he asked: "Can you give one legal reason why we can't just hire those people ourselves?" The thing is, he got that estimate of 3.5 million people by going through the state-by-state lists of people who were already on the dole, people who were already receiving some kind of charitable or government cash hand-out because they weren't working. And what Hopkins realized was that not only did the American people deeply resent those people for taking money and doing nothing all day, the recipients weren't any happier about it, either: they wanted to work. So FDR shoe-horned a program through Congress, first as pilot program called the Civil Works Administration, to raise about $1200 (1933 US dollars) per year per unemployed head of household: $1000 per worker per year for wages, $24 per worker per year for administrative costs, the rest for hand tools and raw materials for whatever projects he could make up. To get CWA funding, a job had to be something that no corporation was interested in providing, and that no government agency was interested in funding, and it had to be as labor-intensive as possible (see photograph above right).
Conservatives in both parties hated it. And still do. And campaigned hard against it in the 1934 congressional primaries. Al Smith's right-wing Democrats convinced FDR that if he kept the CWA, it would cost him his majority in Congress, so he shut it down after only four months. In that four months, CWA workers had already built 1,000 rural airports, built 40,000 school buildings, built or resurfaced a quarter-million miles of roads, and laid twelve million miles of sanitary sewer lines, some of the first sewer lines laid in most counties. In four months. Right-wing Democrats and anti-tax pro-corporate Republicans screamed bloody murder about all the money that the CWA was "wasting," but (and this is a point I'll come back to again) we're still using almost all of that stuff today. 75 years later, those "worthless" "make-work" projects are turning out to be some of the most valuable stuff the government had done in its first 150 years of existence. So contrary to what the right-wing Democrats in Congress were telling FDR he "needed" to do to "save" the 1934 congressional elections, terminating the CWA turned out to be the least popular thing he did as President, and as soon as the elections were over, on voter mandate, FDR brought it right back again, rammed it through Congress again as the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Only this time it had full funding, and a Congressional and Presidential mandate to try to hire every single one of the roughly 3.5 million unemployed, non-disabled, work-aged heads of household in America. And in almost no time at all, they came as close as makes no difference, getting to 3.3 million, on one simple philosophy: you tell us whatever it is you "do," and we'll find you a job doing it. Those jobs paid very nearly jack squat; nearly all WPA workers ended up living with their whole families in roughly 8" x 10" or so rooms in improvised "boarding houses," spare rooms leased out by people who were house-rich but cash poor, trying to save their homes, tenants with no control over the menu of the meal plan it came with and shared use of a single bathroom (or maybe just an outhouse and an outdoor water pump) with 3 to 8 other families. Nobody lived well on the WPA, but nobody starved either. On the other hand, nobody worked terribly hard, either, and I know this one from a very personal source: my paternal grandfather was a WPA veteran.
Grampa Hicks was himself a right-wing anti-tax anti-communist Democrat of the American Liberty League school, and he hated the WPA with a fiery passion for the entire rest of his life. It was from him I first heard the joke: "How many people does it take to do one WPA job? Three. One on his way to the bathroom, one on his way back from the bathroom, and one leaning on the shovel pretending to work." But here's the funny thing. You know what Grampa Hicks was before the Great Depression? He was a bum. A mostly-unemployed unskilled laborer on the rare occasions he had a job, a street brawler and small-time crook, a chronic alcoholic and wife-beater who spent most of the 1920s in jail. So when he showed up in one of Harry Hopkins' branch offices and they asked him, "What do you do?" all he could answer was, "Nothing." So they stuck him on one of the WPA's archetypal projects: a National Guard armory. Under the thin pretense of "military preparedness," Harry Hopkins made up this total BS scenario whereby some day, in some foreign invasion of the US, we might end up having to retreat all the way back to any random tiny little town in America, so every tiny little road-crossing town and every suburb and every city neighborhood in America should have a solidly built, concrete-block or raw stone building that the state militia can store their weapons in until that day, and can use as a fort when we get nearly conquered. Nobody was fooled. Everybody knew it was a lie: it was building buildings just for the sake of building pointless buildings. Furthermore, the whole "fort" thing was just an excuse to make the job take longer, to build out of improbably heavy materials and as slowly and carefully as possible, so those mostly unskilled laborers didn't run out of something to do before Hopkins and his few staff could come up with something else to do. Grampa Hicks went to his grave still mocking the work he'd done.
But you know what? There's a funny thing about that, something I'm pretty sure Grampa Hicks never thought about. First of all, if it weren't for the WPA, we Hickses would still be bums. Grampa Hicks was desperate to get out from behind that wheel barrow and that shovel, but was too drunk to do plumbing. So he took to hanging around when the electricians were running wire, and managed to get himself a totally useless job as a sort of human Vice-Grip. "Here," says the skilled electrician who was himself out of work, yelling over to my grandpa because the WPA wouldn't spring for proper tools, "you there -- hold these two wires together while I tape them together." By following that guy around and watching over that guy's shoulder, Grampa Hicks taught himself basic electrical wiring. And when the WPA was over, he was able to lie with a straight face to employers that he was a skilled electrician, and that got him his first real job, one his son learned from him, and that I learned from my dad that paid my way through college: electrical sign erector, IBEW local 1.
Most of you don't know, but Melissa had to have her wedding rings cut off. An unfortunate side effect of her ALS is that once the muscles in her fingers atrophied, there was some swelling and we couldn't remove the rings. It was sad to see them cut off, sitting twisted and open in a plastic bag in her drawer.
THIS SHALL NOT STAND.
So for Christmas, I had a jeweler make the rings whole again... AND intertwine them with her Jens Hansen ONE RING that she wears with her Frodo costume. (A fellowship of nine friends pooled their money and bought it for her back in 2003.)
The Result : The Ultimate statement of Geek Cred. She wears this around her neck all the time now.
I've talked to a lot of people in the past month about Melissa's disease, and about my role as a caregiver for her. Yes, it is grueling at times, she does require assistance at night frequently, and it takes a lot out of you. But if someone were to ask what the most difficult part of taking care of Melissa is, I could sum it up in one word:
LUNCH.
Allow me to provide some background. ALS can do some weird stuff in your brain, including re-wiring your taste buds for some odd reason. Many people lose the taste for certain foods they've always loved, and have odd cravings in their place. Melissa, for example, lost the taste for ANY dessert about a year ago. Let me say that again for emphasis: SHE CAN'T EAT DESSERTS. (And you thought the whole not-able-to-walk thing was bad!) Anything sweet like chocolate or pie makes her nauseated. The only thing that I've been able to get her to eat was a small teaspoon of vanilla ice cream, and that was only once.
In its place, Melissa has cravings for certain... non-dessert stuff after dinner. For a long time, she'd eat a bunch of green olives. Yes, without the martini. In the past few weeks it suddenly changed to pickles. She told her dad to pick up a jar of sliced pickles out of the blue one day, and threw a fit when I brought her the nightly bowl of them. She informed me, quite pointedly, that what I had were pickles sliced in cross-section, or pickle CHIPS. What she really wanted was pickles sliced longways, or pickle SPEARS. The fact that she had left off this oh-so-crucial bit when she asked for "sliced Pickles" was dismissed.
These cravings do bleed over into other areas, namely Lunch. Now her mom is Betty Crocker when it comes to cooking, so the fridge is constantly full of single-serving leftovers and the pantry is always stocked with assortments of cheese, deli meat and chips. We never had a problem with lunch before, but now every day when I come upstairs at noon and ask her what she wants to eat, she gives me that look that says "What *IS* this 'Lunch' thing that you speak of?" as if she has never been faced with this dilemma in her life. Then she spends about 10 minutes pondering what her body craves and might possibly be within driving distance.
"Come on, Mel, you KNEW that this was coming. You had lunch yesterday, and every day before that most likely." She nods smiling, and I usually make my sandwich downstairs while she decides. "Perhaps tomorrow you can think about this before Noon? That way we can have it ready to actually EAT at lunchtime?" She looks up and thinks for a second and replies "Nah. This is fun. This is good quality time that we have together."
So aside from Lunch, most everything else about taking care of her is not a big deal.
"I've got an idea for a new invention!" said the short gentleman. He had the pale skin of someone who didn't leave the house much. And not for something even marginally cool as addiction to PlayStation.
"Everyone hates cleaning the litter box," the man said, not waiting for the sarcastic response I had just thought of. As a service, I try to think up new ones for each customer. Personal touch and all.
"This is the LitterMaid!" He even spoke the name in bold lettering. "Every few hours, this motorized arm will come out and scoop the... stuff.. in the litter box into this receptacle on the end, leaving the box clean! Then all the owners need to do is empty the receptacle bin once a week or so."
For a man who builds cat toilets, he was unusually uneasy about saying the excrement-related words. But I had to admit, it was a good idea. Margie had one of those white over-haired cats that James Bond villains have a penchant for. "Fluffles." Thing hated me and it was mutual. He gets to sit around all day, eat and sleep, and I had to clean out his shitbox. Pleasantly imagining less time inhaling cat ass, this idea was striking a chord with me.
We looked over the papers together. It would retail around $100, be available at all the pet stores and WalMarts, good. But it was too simple. We'd never make money on it if it was a one-time sell. The shut-in guy said we could sell disposable replacement plastic receptacles, but most people would probably just empty them and put them back to save money. I needed to add a design flaw, so the thing would break. Not right away, or it would be perceived as cheap. But having it fail slowly, after months of getting used to the convenience of it...
I looked over the schematics and had a thought. "Look, what if we put the motorized arm in the BACK of the litter box instead?" Mr. Pale just looked at me and blinked. "Sir, cats use the back of the litter box about 80% of the time. If the motorized arm started there, it would cause a jam almost immediately. Sure, my design allows for some reversing when it comes in contact with an immovable... mass... but Litter boxes are often in garages or out-of-the-way areas where people won't hear the process, and it'll be left to grind away for hours, maybe even days! Over time, maybe 12 months or so, the motor could burn itself out due to stress."
Smiles didn't often cross my face. It was a novel feeling.
Whitey didn't understand, and kept going. "I had a configuration like that in my early designs, but the motor burnout caused me to change it. That and the constant NOISE of that thing grinding to a halt every hour or so. Nearly drove me mad. That's why I changed the design to what you see here."
I shoved his plans back across the table. "Move the motor to the back. And add some useless bit of electronics on it to add some cost. Like some minuscule fan on the arm. Call it.. dunno, an 'Ionic Air Cleaner' or something. Something to make a Deluxe model so we can jack the price up $20. Then we'll have a deal, Mr. ..." I extended my hand, and realized that I still didn't know the guy's name.
"Casper," he said with the tiredness of a tour guide at the end of a long week. "Casper Fluffles."
5 Word Review: Oh Hell Yeah It Rocks. Slighty Longer Review: Never before has so much social commentary been put so DIGESTIBLY into a film, and most of that message is never spoken with dialogue. PIXAR has shined their "2-layer film" Formula (The kids get it on one level, the adults get the deeper message) to a mirror finish on this one. Not just an immensely enjoyable film, but a cinematic accomplishment with the way in which it is told.
Only drawback: WTF with the live-action scenes? Didn't really seem to have a reason.
And to quote Maddy: "Only Pixar could make us love a cockroach."
Doctor WhoWe speed-watched the entire 4th season with the assistance of a friend, and there were some really good episodes this season. Best of the bunch were the Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead two-parter and my personal favorite breakout, Midnight, which was like no other episode I've seen in the new series. There was minimal special FX, pretty much one set, and played out like a classic Twilight Zone episode, relying more on character and tension than technological whiz-bang, and it was INCREDIBLY good. And to boot, it was written by Russell T. Davies, who usually turns in the cheesy, overly-convenient coincidence-ridden episodes lately, so it was a nice surprise that he could do MIDNIGHT, which could almost be considered a "Period Piece".
We saw the season finale episode last night, and it was an incredible 2-part finale. They really did their homework in the episodes leading up to this, and it was quite well executed.
DragonConWith some help, Melissa and I are slowly fleshing out some ideas for costumes that could incorporate the wheelchair. Thanks to some feedback from Shawn, we might have nailed one down! No spoilers yet, we still have planning to do.
TransportationWe need to get rid of both of our cars and buy a wheelchair-accessible van for Melissa (which run about $18-25,000! ouch.) I'll be posting the cars on Craigslist and probably the AJC. If anyone is looking for dependable transport, comment for more info on them: - 1998 Ford Taurus SE - Hunter Green, 190k, New A/C, Alloy Wheels - $2000 - 2001 Mercury Sable - Tan, Premium Wheels, 134k, small swipe on rear - $3500
We're back from a brief hiatus! And we've been scheming in our absence to get people involved with ALS Advocacy in our own particular... Um...
"Idiom, sir?"
Yes, Idiom! Thank you. So here is the deal:
Fiver and I have started a team for the annual Walk to Defeat ALS, sponsored by the ALS Association of Georgia. This is the big fundraiser for ALS, since we don't have a telethon, and Mel wants to put our own Geeky spin on the event:
It's common to have people dress up for the walk, but I don't think they've been inundated with full-on geek cosplayers yet! Imagine if we had whole casts of movies and shows marching ?
The walk is Saturday, November 8th in Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta. Registration opens at 8:30 AM, and the Walk starts at 10 AM. The walk isn't long, only 5k, which most can complete in an hour. Heck, the DragonCon Parade is probably more of an effort than this!
Melissa and I would really appreciate people turning out for this event. The ALS Association has been a lifesaver in these past months. They provide counseling and equipment loaning for families with ALS. They have provided Mel with a roller-walker, a stair-chair and wheelchair, without which she would have been shut in and practically stranded upstairs in the house. The people are so very nice and helpful, and they seriously need your help. Just a few people are staffed for the whole state of Georgia, and they have to drive this equipment from their Atlanta headquarters to ALS patients from Savannah to the border of Alabama-stan, and you can imagine what that costs in gas these days.
So please consider joining us in the walk, or donating to sponsor Melissa. If you know anything about us, you can bet there will be lots of fun hanging out afterwards, so it won't be just a 1-hour deal.
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