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Huh, My winter cold has arrived early…

DawnofthedeadThus far it’s just annoying.

Hopefully it won’t get any worse than just annoying. I don’t actually feel too bad, just tired. I guess it’s not surprising now that the stresses are reducing some. The weather is changing here and between that, my body remembering the pollens from up here, and pretty much everything in my environment changing I’m bound to react a little.

It doesn’t make having the cold any better but it does at least explain why I might have been susceptible so dang early in the season.

Ahhh well, at least it’s not like I’m going to have to worry about calling out sick to some inhuman manager.

Nothing to do but rest and ride it out. There are things I can do that require only a digital presence. 

Thus far no drugs or anything have been necessary. But coffee is my best friend right now.

I do want to go take a walk later in the day just to be outside. It’s nice that it’s not blazing hot up here.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll take my computer with me up to the forest, find a nice rock and sit there writing. This new machine has a lot of battery life and if worse came to worse, I could always pull out the Goal Zero for additional power.

My walk is contingent on how much energy I have… 

Right at the moment, that is questionable this thing is accelerating. So it might be a very slow day.

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Is CRAZY contagious?

HqdefaultFor years, there’s been a kinda crazy lady living within a block of my home in the mountains. 

This is a woman that has on more than one occasion been seen on her balcony bare breasted speaking fragments of half a dozen languages doing the Xena Warrior princess war cry or arguing with one or more of the voices in her head.

On at least one occasion she’s been out on the street lying naked having a full on temper tantrum.

It is not uncommon to hear her having these fits once a month or so, they go on for an hour or so then she gets bored and shuts up.

Crazy manHer immediate neighbor was a decent guy, But over the years he’s gone downhill. He’s on heavy medications and way too much “Medicinal” Pot. With him, the problem seems to be Tourette’s syndrome (after a fashion). Something will frustrate him and for the next 30 minutes there’s a stream of bellowing obscenities, punctuated by fuck in all it’s various forms.

Usually, the neighborhood only has to deal with one of them having a bad day at a time.

Since I’ve gotten back up to the mountain, both of them are having bad days every day sometimes all day, and well into the night. We’re talking about screaming at the top of human vocal ranges. Imagine the screams of the damned souls in Hell.

Needless to say, it’s making it tough for me to calm down. The very last thing I need is conflict or soul chilling screams right now. I really need peace and quiet. I’m thinking someplace away from all people, off grid – maybe camping someplace? 

The thing is, The Crazy is strong with these two. Do I have to deal with their shit and my own too. can’t I find a moment’s peace? What happens if in dealing with their shit and my own… I end up just like them. 

There’s a fragment of something about looking into the abyss and having the abyss look into you. I can’t remember all the quote right now. There’s something else about dealing with monsters.

I did find a few moments of not only peace, but joy, over the past few weeks, but that is over now I fucked it up. Now it’s back to just dealing with stupid shit.

Sigh, Time to go walkabout!

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And So Labor day comes to a close…

Wasn’t a bad holiday.

Didn’t get as much done over the weekend as I’d hoped to but today was a nice day. 

labor-day.gifWent to lunch at a friends place, played in the pool and got some sun. Not too much, but I am slightly sunburned; To be expected after being a nocturnal creature for 3 years.

It felt good. My body was making it’s own Vitamin D and my skin warned me when it got to be time to go back into the shade.  Perhaps not as quickly as it should have but I think my body was enjoying the solar bombardment. I’ll have to be careful the next few days just to make sure I don’t overdo it accidentally.

I swam the length of the pool several times and realized how out of shape I am just because the endurance in the water wasn’t what it should have been.

Water and I are, and always have been friends. I’m no Aquaman, but I’m comfortable in the water and also found that due to the amount of fat I’m carrying around that I’m way more buoyant than I should be. I had to spend more effort staying under water than I used to.

Ahhh, the “fun” of aging! Damn it.

Fall is upon us, 9/23/2019 is the official day, Plants here in the mountains are already showing signs of the coming seasonal change.

I’m still trying  to figure out where / what I want to do for my “Walkabout” to clear my head. It looks like I’m finally finished with the former company. Just a few more things to do around the house, and I can be gone for a few days.

I don’t want to spend a fortune but I do need to get away. New vistas, new people, new adventures, that sort of thing. Nothing too strenuous, but something fun just for me.

That Adventure should start on the 11th of this month. In the mean time, there are chores here and one of those chores is the routine of looking for a job and all the crap that entails.

Hope that your short week is calm and mellow which is how I’m feeling right now.

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Huh? Google contractors unionizing?

Google logoWell it’s about damn time!

Generally, I don’t go for Unions. But after decades of seeing the kinds of excesses those at the top of tech companies engage in, I can’t say I’m surprised.

Tech companies have gotten away with figurative murder for years. They’d hire people, work them into the ground, then fire them when they’d burned ‘em out. They’ve on more than one occasion, forced the worker they were going to fire to train their H1B1 replacements, knowing they could work the H1B1s like slaves, and have no repercussions. But during this time We had a president saying H1B1 workers and migrant workers were doing jobs that Americans wouldn’t do. That was bullshit then, and now it looks like the bullshit will be exposed.

For the worker it’s not just about the constant job hunt. For the laid off workers it’s about having resumes with a string of jobs that ultimately hurt their long term prospects to find gainful employment. As HR departments and “Talent Placement” agencies started making statements in interviews like, “You’ve had a lot of positions over the years,” without factoring in the context. It made reliable hard working people suddenly less employable.

Facebook emblemHR and Talent agents will deny that contract work or multiple layoffs have any bearing, but the reality of what they do, versus what they say couldn’t be more different.

Google’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil” I have no idea what their motto is now; “Be Super Evil?” It’s not just Google, it’s Facebook, Twitter, and the plethora of other tech companies whose sole aim is to use and control people in almost any way possible.

I welcome unions in the technical field today. Twenty years ago I would have been against them. In my most recent employment, in addition to the absolute control the supervisors had over each employee, many of them were fond of saying, “Do you want to keep your job?” or something similar.

The implied threat being that they’d find a way to fire you for no reason at all. It could be that they simply decided they didn’t like you.

management slavedriver.pngIt had nothing to so with your abilities or your performance. They’d find something. They’d rely on inaccurate metrics, write you up over 10 second late return to your desk from a break or lunch,  or say that you spent too much time with a customer. They’d find a way, then screw you. And you’d have no recourse. This was as an employee of the company. I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone who was just a temp contractor.

Middle Management and above all drove Teslas, high end BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars, or Audis. The average terrified worker came to work in some kind of beater that was barely running, belching oily smoke and obviously in need of significant repair for which they had neither the time or money.

Middle Management and above were always on vacations. The workers couldn’t get time off approved. My final paycheck included over a month of unused vacation time. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to take a vacation, it was because for 3 solid years every single vacation request was denied. “For Business Reasons“

I’m not into the bullshit philosophy that everyone should have the same everything… But when you have this kind of disparity and simultaneously the “upper class” delights in tormenting, terrorizing, and generally fucking with lower echelon workers, Well the next logical conclusion, aside from multiple lawsuits that the workers can’t afford to pursue, is an overarching protection mechanism like unions.

The Technology Industry has finally matured. Now they’ve reached the same point that the Steel & Textile industries reached 100 years ago. Yet for all their “Forward Thinking” they’ve made the same mistakes and committed the same atrocities. I guess it’s human nature, those in power will inevitably abuse that power, and eventually the subjects of that power will rise up against oppression.

Maybe I’m still steamed about the layoff. Maybe I’m pissed off that where I worked I was told I could move to another department after I learned the product (A lie). Maybe it’s just that I’ve had a belly full of abusive, arrogant, shitheads. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above. But today, right now, I say unionize the whole damn tech industry. That might change over the coming months or years. But for right now…

Google, Facebook, Tech companies etc… You assholes have made your beds. Now you’re going to get the dry angry vengeance ass fucking you so richly deserve. 

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Annoying Software…

You know back in the day computers were supposed to make things better, more efficient, faster. They were supposed to make a better world…

Jump to 2019

I just spent an hour having to rename paycheck stubs from ADP. There’s a nifty little “Download” button that will allow you to download you paycheck stub. But there’s no provision for downloading a few or ALL your paycheck stubs where they have some kind of coherent name. By the time I’d downloaded all the paychecks I had 90 files named “Ajax-XXX”.

Completely useless, if you’re looking for information from a particular paycheck or wanting to group paychecks by year. The download routine could easily have said, “Pay Statement yyyymmdd”. Yeah that wouldn’t tell you which company but at least you’d know the time period of the statement without opening it. How about allowing a complete download of all pay statements at once instead of forcing the user to click download on each one? 

In point of fact the only filename that ADP sends is Ajax, my computer added the -XXX since it knew that I probably didn’t want to overwrite the original Ajax file with each subsequent Ajax file which would have left me with only 1 file containing the last statement I looked at.

Most bank statements, credit card statements, and any other statements you download do the same thing. Instead of writing a few more lines of code that make the filenames useful, the programmers leave you with crappy, meaningless filenames that you have to rename.

How about Chase Credit Statement YYYYMMDD, or Goldman Sachs 401K and a date, Edison YYYYMMDD. 

And while I know in America we write our dates Month/day/year. For the purposes of sorting filenames with a computer, using yearmonthday makes a lot more sense. If you do it the American way you’ll end up with all the April statements form multiple years clumped together.

It’s just lazy thoughtless programming.

Then there’re the companies that create overarching management software to control their suite of programs. (You know who you are) at first glance this seems like a good idea and could in fact be a good idea, EXCEPT that this management software allows you to modify or remove one application in the suite, then without warning goes off and deletes half a dozen other applications in the background. Then you go back to put the bit of the suite that you actually wanted to keep back on your computer and find that you can’t. Why? because said company downloads their “New improved lemon scented” application manager to your computer while you were deleting the application you no longer use. And NOW they want to to sign up for their subscription service.

Ahem. NO!

After careful evaluation, I used their new application manager to delete their entire suite of products in favor of cheaper, faster, and smaller products from another vendor that does the same thing, better!

I’ve had this little scenario play out three times over the past week. I’m not amused.

The reason that the paycheck stubs were so in my face is because of filing out the unemployment insurance forms online. EDD knew who I worked for and for how long, they displayed that information when I finally got logged into their system.

So why did EDD want me to manually calculate and disclose to them my quarterly income. Which I had to download the checkstubs to calculate. If EDD already had access to the payroll information why couldn’t their computers just calculate the quarterly information for the last 3 years? I thought that was what computers are supposed to do.  Was it some kind of test? Was it one of those stupid laws designed to catch criminals, that never work because the criminals know better than I what to disclose to make things look right and what information to withhold?  And therefore since I just answered the questions as they were asked did I just screw myself by answering honestly?

I personally think that unemployment should kick in and be started by the employer. It should be turned off automatically when you’ve used up your allotment or when you start a new job.  It should be simple, seamless, and efficient.  Why do we have people jumping through hoops answering questions that various entities already have the answers to?

But EDD goes above and beyond with their fabulous software. For reasons that I couldn’t figure out, I had to resubmit the same page, The one dealing with the quarterly earnings calculations 3 times. And with each resubmission request the system would blank all the data I’d plugged in. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to screen capture that page before I pressed submit. 

That meant that all I had to do was re-enter the information repeatedly, instead of recalculate the information.

I’m sure that there are folks who’ve had to do it all over again and again because hey, the expectation is that the EDD web page would take the information properly the first time.

These are some of the things that Software Testers (at least the Manual Testers) normally catch. This is why manual and automated testing should work hand in hand. It’s also why you only release software after real users have had a crack at it. Real users do stuff that you never anticipate and uncover interesting bugs.

So all you automated testing folks keep at it and keep delivering software that does annoying things that you never anticipated. 

Live it up, But not on my dime, I’ll get rid of software that’s glitchy faster than superman.