Errors and Omissions

Well last week was pretty damn grim - my birthday was just horrible - I think I'll just pass over that rather than memorialise it

Let it come down

Well, that was exciting - we had a rainstorm yesterday afternoon (a change from the regular 7pm ones), and wow did it rain. 7 inches in about 2 hours, thats some heavy shit.

Cat was coming to pick me up for 5, but the rain had flooded so many intersections (and cars), she didnt get here til 5:30 (for a 10 minute drive) and we had a look at the queue to get off this island and decided we could just have dinner here instead (which we did, a middle-easternish restaurant that was pretty underwhelming over all), then finally left about 7. \

Amazingly, the drains here are so good that the floods had all abated by then, and the bottlenecks cleared up so we had an easy trip home. I wish I'd gotten a picture of some of the major intersections though, with water four and five feet deep ... and idiots trying/failing to drive through it.

Still struggling

Each day seems awfully hard, and leaves me wrung out. And Cat keeps saying, "I know it's hard, and I'll try to avoid taxing you with anything extra" .... which lasts about 30 minutes each time, before she does anyway. I get that it's hard for her and she's not very well still, with the Meunieres disorientation coming and going, but ... geez, she's not actually working a job, can nap every afternoon. Eh, I'm just being bitter and unfair.

Last Sunday was a bit of a fiasco - Cat's birthday, and we went (after a late-ish breakfast) for a road trip to a park called Weeki Wachi (sp?), to watch underwater mermaids swim/dance. No really, google it. Well the drive up was pretty enough, along a toll express, but we stopped just before the park for lunch at Ruby Tuesday's and that was pretty bad: food substandard and not very warm, waitress totally checked out and oblivious.

THen we got to the park, to find it full (no parking even in overflow), and realised we should have gotten there 3 hours earlier. At Cats instigation we wisely gave up on the idea, then tried to find a different route home, hoping to drive by the sea.

Ha! Instead we stumbled onto route 19, which was basically 40 miles of endless stripmalls, fast food, and ... well pretty much any sort of product-sale you could think of, except for gin-joints :)   Really horrible. She spotted a Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts, and decided ice cream would cheer her, but we couldnt get any, the service was really horrendous (and the 2 donuts we got were stale as shit).  

Still couldnt find a coast road, so we drove home on 19, through several torrential rainstorms (all heading for that Park, so aborting that turned out to be a doubly-good idea).

OH well, dinner at the Columbia was much much nicer - very upmarket & swank, without being TOO horrendously expensive (the Babe Ruth Steak was $39, the priciest entree ... which I ordered of course lol).

Grim

Bad week at work - imposter syndrome, bumping up against bits that I'm not esp familiar with (and which have been mutated -radically- since the last time I did deal with them, esp SSIS). Lots of depression & frustration.

Also financially squeezed, without the income from Leidos I'd budgetted on for last Friday, we've been running on fumes all week - and Cat's kind of ignored that and kept spending carelessly, despite my pleas.

Bad week all around.

Vertigo

Cat's Meuniere's disease has unfortunately reemerged as an issue, again, so we had a pretty quiet weekend, & she spent a lot of it lying down to minimize the vertigo.

On the bright side, I drove us to Fresco's for a wonderful brunch, looking over the yacht harbour.

I seemed to spend a lot of the weekend zoned out, myself, tired from the work week. I guess the last 18 months of indolence take some time to put behind me. Nice holiday (heh), wish it could have continued longer.

Leidos ... Incompetent? or Evil and Incompetent?

I'll go with the latter, I think.

The latest (and hopefully final) screw-over by Leidos is to inform me today, that - despite what they told me in April - I will NOT be given my final pay on the last day of formal employment there, today (having been on unpaid leave for the last four weeks). No, now I have to wait another two weeks. No actual reason given - it's not like it hasnt been known when this is happening for the last 28 days. Just, Fuck You, We Can.

Which is pretty much the Leidos motto, actually. nowadays.

HR departments are notoriously poor quality, the world over, but for a combination of incompetence, malice, deceit and fraud, I dont think you could find anyone to compete with the Leidos HR department.

Adjusting

Still adjusting - for me, mostly about adjusting to a new job, so very different in ethos, setup and environment; and at having to go to the office every day, not just roll out of bed at 2 minutes to 8 for an 8 a.m. start. I must admit, it's leaving me quite exhausted at the end of each day, between the earlier start (6:30) and the mental stretch and concentration.

It's also kind of alarming how amateur this place was (until my boss started, about 3 weeks before me) ... documentation is either wrong or nonexistent, ditto most policies. Oh well, we'll lick it into shape.

Memorial Day we took it fairly easy: Cat was really wiped out, so I did the driving, and we didnt go anywhere much, just lunch at the Acropolis. And it was nice enough but man do I miss the Santa Fe - for the food (obv) but also for that warm sense of being among friends, of being home.

Exploring

Well, we took time this weekend for some exploring - drove down to Picnic Beach Park area, which looked very nice, yesterday. 

Today we went to 'First Watch', billed as supposedly the best brunch place in Tampa, which if true, fuck it I'm driving to Orlando for brunch, because it was awful - Cat's salad was wilted, elderly and devoid of dressing, my potatoes were similarly well past best-by date, and the eggs benedict was very short on hollandaise, with eggs still partly clear from being so undercooked: plus slow and surly service.

After that disappointment, we drove out to StPetersburg, vaguely thinking of looking at the beaches, but we wound up at the Pier, where a thousand yachts seemed to bob their heads at us. Very fortuitiously, Cat needed a pee and we saw a public restroom, however while turning, we saw a beautiful looking bistro (Fresco's Waterside) right by the yacht harbour, with a park literally right outside the front door - obviously divine providence, so we stopped there for a late lunch, and it was sublime. So confidence in the universe much restored :D

the zombie blog staggers on

I'm hoping I may have time and energy enough to revive this blog, at least occasionally, so here goes!

Arrived in Tampa from N'awlins on Mon 11th May, found a house to rent Wed,  13th May, got truck and movers to unload Fri 15th May, started new job Mon 18th May, got paid Thu 21st May. Whew :)

It's been a bit hectic, but Cat is bearing the brunt of unpacking/organising - then again, she hasn't started looking for a job yet, so that pretty much works out. 

The new house is great - all wood floors, 3 good size bedrooms, 2 office/bonus rooms that are also a good size (my wargaming room and Cat's sewing room, and a big lounge/dining room, plus a decent size kitchen this time. A few teething problems, but nothing unusual really.

Work is ...interesting. Haven't been a one-man DBA shop for 15 years, so there's some adjustment. THis might also be the smallest company I've worked for, so I also need to adjust to a much lower level of formality and organisation (and hte abandonment of a WHOLE lot of Best Practice stuff, like change control, separation of security functions, etc). Certainly not boring, though, as I'll need to get my head around being an Active Domain administrator on the side, as well as learning something about MS Dynamix AX, which is billed as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, but actually it's an accounting package - general ledger, billing, accounts receivable, all that song and dance - plus a customer-facing section for the franchise holders to handle their accounts.

On the road again

Well, a charming Christmas present - our management have screwed the pooch, and we are not included in the final round of bidding for the contract I'm working on, so the job will evaporate in May. There's a vague promise that 'some of us' might be moved to other contracts, but honestly that just feels like a feeble figleaf to hide their ineptness.


Oh well, at least I've got a few months to find somewhere else - not a great prospect for a 53 year old IT specialist though, I suspect this will get ugly.

Greek government gives in on no-referendum pressure

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."

Thanks, Aristotle, you can resume your seat now.

Holy Mother Church

Stolen entire from the ever-entertaining Charlie Pierce:

However, and I say this in all Christian love and fellowship, the Clan of the Red Beanies has got to go, and that means everyone up to and including the guy who got elected by all the other red beanies to wear the big white beanie and sit in the Chair of Peter. The institutional Church is corrupt, root and branch, and it needs to be taken to pieces and sold for parts. At this point, it is little more than an elaborate international conspiracy to obstruct justice that also happens to have a really good art collection.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/occupy-vatican-city-6519264#ixzz1bHnl9k17

As ye sew, so shall ye fail to reap, apparently

Well the racist shitheels in Alabama* have passed & had enforced new rules to ensure maximum legal hostility to illegal immigrants, including making it a felony for an illegal immigrant to have any dealings with the apparatus of the state (applying for a drivers license, requesting water deliveries, etc), making it permissible for police to check immigration status on a traffic stop, and forcing schools to check the immigration status of children's parents.**

Of course, this has had a predictable and desired (by the Alabama swinefest) result, that illegal Hispanic immigrants have been leaving the state in droves. Of course, non-brown-skinned immigrants dont even get questioned or harassed, so they aren't leaving.

This has also had a predictable and somehow unexpected effect, that the farmers using immigrant labour, are unable to get their crops harvested.

 Apparently americans aren't willing to work that long and hard for not very much money, and farmers aren't prepared to push up the wages to overcome that. So much for free labor markets

 Spencer said that of more than 50 people he recruited for the work, only a few worked more than two or three days, and just one stuck with the job for the last two weeks.

Of course, if the reich-wing get their way in California, Arizona & Texas, the same problems will multiply afresh ... California, being so dependant on illegal immigrant labour for a huge variety of farm, sanitation, & service staff, could just about grind to a halt. Excellent idea, guys, well done.






*among several other states, but this is the one being reported on atm
** I dont see how these things could stand up to examination under the US Constitution but given the savage lawbreakers and vile criminals that make up the bench of the SCOTUS, anything is possible. I give you, forex, Bush v Gore.

Right on the money

A slightly modified quote:
“Since the financial aristocracy make the laws, is at the head of the administration of the state, has command of all the organised public authorities, dominates public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from Wall Street to the meanest suburbs to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others. 

A slightly modified quote: Sound like modern-day America? Well, it's Karl Marx' critique of France in 1848, just pre-revolution

or as Spinoza put it: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

happy 70th birthday Leonard Cohen

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

The columbian exchange

This was fairly interesting:
This portrait shows, right to left:

• Louis the Petit Dauphin, died of measles in 1712 along with his wife and eldest son
• Louis XIV, who had smallpox in 1647 and survived to die in 1715
• Louis the Grand Dauphin, died of smallpox in 1711
• The future Louis XV, who only survived the measles epidemic that killed his parents and elder brother because
• the woman on the left of the picture, his governess Madame de Ventadour, locked the royal doctors out of the room

It also had this bit which puzzled me:

The question, "Were New World populations significantly reduced by Old World diseases introduced after 1492?" is currently considered settled by historians, and the answer is "Yes". If this startles you, it *is* a paradigm shift from what you probably grew up learning

Really? What on earth are/were they teaching their kids in the USA about this? I would have regarded it as totally anodyne and accepted wisdom. Though the extent of it did surprise me a bit:

Ninety percent of the population of civilized Mesoamerica and Andean America perished by 1568. Civilized highlanders constituted the vast majority of America's precontact population. Consequently, their sixteenth century epidemiology determined the magnitude of "the worst demographic disaster ... in the history of the world." (emphasis mine)

 Ninety percent? Makes poor old pasteurella pestis look like a piker

Edited to add a link to this hysterical parody site! Completely OT for this post, but .... Go read it
(courtesy of the wonderful Debra Dickerson)

The Black Death

This is simply fabulous:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN_phBiMqKc

Class warfare, part 3 zillion

Yet another state has proposed raising taxes on low-income residents to pay for new corporate tax breaks. Leading lawmakers in Missouri want to eliminate a property tax credit for low- and moderate-income seniors and people with disabilities in order to help finance new tax credits for businesses.
Sadly, swaps like this are increasingly common; both Michigan and Wisconsin have cut low-income programs this year to pay for business tax breaks.

Because clearly low-income old people and disabled people dont need all that money

Poems...

A Woman's Poem

Before I lay me down to sleep, I pray for a man, who's not a creep,

One who's handsome, smart and strong.  

One who loves to listen long.

One who thinks before he speaks,

One who'll call,

Not wait for weeks.

I pray he's gainfully employed,

When I spend his cash, won't be annoyed.

Pulls out my chair and opens my door.

Massages my back and begs to do more.

Oh!  Send me a man who'll make love to my mind,

Knows what to answer to, "How big is my behind?"

I pray this man will love me to no end,

And always be my very best friend.

A Man's Poem

I pray for a deaf-mute gymnast nymphomaniac with huge boobs,

Who owns a bar on a golf course,

And loves to send me fishing and drinking.

This doesn't rhyme and I don't give a shit.

The End.

 

From the marvellous Twenty-four at heart

Fidel is Dead rumour!

From the incomparable Boz:

Update: I decided to include "Fidel is dead" in the title so that people searching for the rumors can read about the more important news on the island. I should just put "Rumor: Fidel is dead" into the title of everything I write. Apparently it draws attention.

 Priceless

And his blog is well worth following if you want an eccentric & interesting summary of political news & stories from Central/South America.