Aimless Wandering

I found this story from Marketplace over on The Consumerist, I understand the desperation but reading the story just made me ill.

I know that the resetting of interest rates has been traumatic for people and as a result have put many in some pretty severe dire straights…

Without even looking at the fact that prices have slumped and that many are now upside down on their mortgages - something that I don’t think many would have expected, or at least would have expected that prices would have dropped as much as they have - the fact that interest rates were going to rise was something people people should have seen coming.

Lets face it interest rates are volatile, they always are.  ARMs are fine options if you go in to them with the understanding (and expectation) that rates at some point will almost definately rise.  It was always a huge fear of mine when we had an adjustable rate loan (other than a charge card) that rates were going to rise and I was very happy that we re-financed those loans long before rates went up.  The extra money we were paying with a fixed rate over an adjustable rate was worth the piece of mind that we weren’t going to get hit with a rate adjustment.

We were also very careful when we bought our house to make sure that we would be able to always afford our payments it was why we bought the house we did at the price we did.  When we were negotiating for our house the sellers agent tried to get us to agree to raising our offer because our loan was approved for almost 60k more than the listed price of the house.    We made it clear that just because we were approved for that loan amount didn’t mean we wanted to or felt we could afford to make the payments on a loan for that amount.

But when I read stories where people have an attitude like these folks outside of Stockton it makes me ill.  I feel for the fact that they can’t make their house payments, I truly do.  But this attitude that they took of - well we stopped paying our mortgage and now we have savings and can go out and spend money again - bothers me.  The fact is these folks are going to be evicted.  Fine, the courts and such are so backlogged that they’re going to get a few more months in their home before they get thrown out, but the fact is they’re going to loose their home.  The money that they’re spending now probably isn’t really their money since the owe it to the bank, and even if the bank doesn’t collect all of it they’re going to need money to find a new place to live…

Maybe the family used a poor choice of words when they said it feels “great” to not be paying their mortgage - but the way it comes across just sickens me.

Ok, just to make sure that this doesn’t get misconstrued - I think lower speed limits around schools are a good idea.  I also have not gotten a ticket for speeding through a school zone…

But I think way too many municipalities sign their school zones poorly at best..  One thing that they get right in Florida is that school zones are very well marked - it’s very evident that you have entered a school zone and when you have exited a school zone.  Even better is that many of their school zone signs have flashing lights that alert you when the school zone is active (kids are out and about) and when it isn’t… 

Then there are school zones like the one I drive through every day.  First there’s a sign that indcates when you have entered the school zone - but none to indicate when you have actually exited it.  Ok fine.  But then there’s the wording of the sign:

School Zone.  Speed Limit 25MPH When Children Present.

At first glance it makes sense - if there are kids around slow down.  Fine. Sure.  But is that when kids are around because it’s the start or end of the school day, or when kids are in the school, or maybe when they’re out in the school’s play yard?  Better yet, how am I supposed to know when kids are present?  The school is set back from the road and it’s hard to see if any body is there until your at the school, so am I supposed to know the school calendar?  Is it my responsibilty as a driver to know when school is in session even if I don’t have a child that attends this school?

But that’s ok because in the three years I’ve driven past this school I have never seen a child at any time of day.  During pickup and dropoff times the school is protected by a phalanx of SUV’s belonging to the parents picking their kids up from school so even if there were kids outside I’d never see them due to the SUV barricade.

There is a crosswalk that crosses the street in front of the school.  It’s well marked with an overhead sign and flashing yellow light.  Maybe that’s when we’re supposed to slow down?  Of course the light rarely is turned off on days when school is not in session so the light has a tendency to blink when there’s nobody around…

Oh, and then there’s the fact that this is an elementary school located on a  rural road - with no sidewalks and relatively narrow shoulders.  Few if any parents would allow their kids to walk or ride to school along this road…

So why again is there a school zone?

So NewTeeVee is reporting that Comcast’s Senior VP of user Experience Gerald Kunkel is saying that Comcast is experimenting with putting cameras into devices so that Comcast can know who is in your living room… What Comcast is trying to do is have your DVR or cable box recognize you and then serve up show recommendations or targeted ads.

Mr. Kunkel (aka Big Brother Wannabe) says that the system wouldn’t use facial recognition but rather some sort of general body form recognition so that supposedly Comcast (aka The Ministry of Love) wouldn’t have a picture of you on file…

Now I’m not a conspiracy theory, tinfoil hat wearing kind of person (besides the tinfoil just makes it easier for the aliens to read our minds not harder) but this – this scheme just creeps me out… Despite what Comcast says this scheme just reeks of George Orwell’s 1984. TiVo has been reporting viewership information on it’s DVRs for quite a while – but just cataloging what I watch is very different from WATCHING me watch TV. I may have a blog – but I don’t broadcast all my activities for the world to see and I DON’T want some company or worse the government keeping that close a watch on what I do.

Which comes to my other concern, the government has already been conducting warrantless wiretaps of people’s phones which sadly doesn’t seem to upset most folks. What’s to stop them from now tapping in to Comcast’s video feed of my living room? Or worse coercing or encouraging Comcast to improve the camera quality so that the government could peek in on what we are doing? In the last 8 years we’ve given away many of our civil liberties in the name of increased security – but allowing a company to put a camera in our living room to better personalize our viewing experience or some crap – NO, NO, NO, NO!

In all honesty it’s not much further of a jump for Comcast after installing such cameras to start sending us messages like:

“Hey Bill, you’re looking a little chubby there. Maybe you need to add fitTV to your channel lineup.”

“Mary, the living room is looking a bit dirty, maybe you should straighten up… but leave your TV on.”

“Roy you perv, we’re turning your porn off go find a preacher and confess your sins!”

“Betty, we saw you with the milkman and we’re telling your husband…”

Really, what’s to stop these from becoming like the two way view screens in 1984 that were used to spy on the public? Hmm, I wonder if Comcast is next going to decide that their bills are too wordy and experiment with sending them in Newspeak?

Honestly I can’t believe that a company would be so daring to even try something like this. I have been a Comcast subscriber in the past – but with them even considering something as creepy as this I’d have to think long and hard about ever subscribing to their service again…

No, not that Biggest Looser. 

I’ve had this rolling around in my head for the past week…. 

Why is Ralph Nader running for President again?  I mean really, he’s been in what 4, 5 Presidential elections and has he even managed 10% of the popular vote?

Ralph, there’s a message the American people have been trying to send you :  ”We don’t want you to be President.”

Now I’m all for third party and independent candidates.  However, they need to have a message and a platform that appeals to most Americans - that’s the same if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.  Ralph Nader and most third party and independents don’t have that, if they did then more people would care that they have entered the race.  If these folks had platforms that made sense, or in some cases at least remotely appeared to have been devised while not stoned or drunk, then they might have a fighting chance of raising enough money to put together a viable campaign.

I think by now it’s apparent to most that of all the possible third party candidates out there - Ralph Nader is not going to be the one to capture the imagination of this country and generate the support that will lead to a winning Presidential bid.  Honestly, I think Jesse Ventura has a better chance of getting elected President as a third party candidate than Ralph Nader - Heck, Ventura has name recognition, military experience, and even political experience…  Besides, how much worse than what we have now could he be?

The other thing though is the way this year’s election has been going.  Let’s face it, the Republican and Democratic candidates have now been campaigning for a year or longer.  Folks like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee who were mostly unknown a year or two ago are now household names.  These candidates have been grabbing headlines for well over a year and have the advantage of a significant amount of publicity.  For a third party candidate to throw their hat in after how much has happened in this election is setting themselves up for an even larger uphill battle.  Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was part of the reason that Mike Bloomberg ultimately decided not to run as an independent this year…

So again I ask, why is Ralph Nader running for President again?

So back in August I was flipping through some of our publications and discovered that the instructions used by our night staff were horribly out of date and as a result pretty much useless.  I went to my boss to advise him of the problem and told him that I wanted to pull the publication and start working on updating it.  I knew what was missing and how it needed to be organized.  My boss told me that I was mistaken as my two predecessors had updated the publication “not long ago” and to not worry about it.  So against my better judgment I dropped the issue.

At the beginning of November my boss took a look at the publication after we had a problem and suddenly realized that it was horribly out of date and pretty much useless.  I did my best not to appear shocked by the revelation.  As a result he decided that he was going to revise the publication in question - not a problem except that he relies on me to oversee the daily operations and while he has a great grasp of the “big picture” of operations he’s no longer really familiar with the nitty gritty stuff.  As the boss I think that’s a good thing, but as the person writing an important operations guide for the staff it’s not so good.

Then there’s the fact that my boss is just a terrible writer.  On the plus side he knows he’s a horrible writer.  A small bonus is that he’s such a terrible writer that we can get away with some fun wording in some of our documents - take for example the recommendation letter that “came” from him with a phrase from Thomas the Tank Engine “…implemented processes that streamlined operations and resolved problems that have caused confusion and delay for customers”

So off he goes to do a comprehensive re-write of this publication - and unfortunately every so often showing just how out of touch he can be.  Just last week he called me in to his office because he wanted to know why we weren’t using a checksheet that he had just found.  The trouble is - we’ve been using it for the past two years…

After three months he sends me his completed revisions for review…  After 4 hours I only made it to page 9 - and you could count the number of original words left on 1 hand.  My boss swings by to check on my progress and sees how extensive my revisions have been.  He was shocked about all I had done but agreed that they were correct…

Then he asked me why he worked on it for the last three months….

I had to bite my tongue…

I know when I was growing up I used to play the game where you played your parents against each other - you know the scenario you want something so you ask mom and mom says no.  Since that’s not the answer you want you go ask dad in the hopes that he says yes….  While The Boy hasn’t started to really work that game, I’m sure it’s coming and while it will irritate me, in the grand scheme of things I’m ok with it.  It’s normal for kids as they’re growing up to do such things…

On the other hand, when you’re in your mid to late 30’s and trying such things on the job that game isn’t acceptable.  It’s childish and downright unprofessional, and yesterday somebody tried it with me and my staff.

We had a moron very novice computer user come to our Introduction to Excel class Wednesday - and by very novice I mean barely able to tell the difference between a keyboard and a mouse.  She told the class instructors and I that she really was looking for a way to allow users of her office to sign in on a computer and then use the information they provide when signing in to auto populate forms.  She wanted a way to get reports of how many folks used her office a day, and she wanted to be able to register students and track their progress through their coursework.  So we explained to her that what she really needed was a database and Access was the way to go.  We advised her to attend our Access classes so that she could gain a good working knowledge of the program, but while Access could easily do what she needed setting it up was rather complex and really would require the skills of an experienced database programmer - which we have on campus and available to her free of charge.

So she gets excited by the prospects and goes off on her way.

Now if you don’t know Access is a really powerful program - you could take a 40 hour class in the program and just start to scratch the surface of it’s capabilities.  Our Intro to Access class is 8 hours and really talks about the terms used in the application and builds a simple single table database and builds a form with the wizard.  The Intermediate class is also just 8 hours and covers editing forms, simple reports, and starts to explore relational databases.  By the time you complete the Intermediate class you know enough to start building simple but useful databases composed of just two tables.  However, we don’t go over things like building queries, custom forms, Visual Basic scripting and the like.  Heck some of that isn’t even in our Advanced Class.

24 hours pass and our novice user sends an e-mail to myself and the two instructors telling us that she was really excited to be taking on designing this database - and couldn’t wait to take our Intermediate Access class so she could start on her way.  The instructor again advises her that the scope of this project is very complex and really should be done by one of our in-house database programmers who were hired for just these types of jobs-

Apparently she didn’t like that response because she replied to that e-mail (and included her boss and my boss for some reason)  that maybe we should check with the other instructor first to find out what he thinks.  Never mind that the other instructor is also the least experienced and most junior member of my staff…  and that was when I snapped.

I sent her a response (and included my boss and her boss) telling her that everything she wanted to do with this project was well within the capabilities of Access…  However I’ve been teaching Access for several years and been using Access for several more years and what she’s looking to get out of this database is beyond my abilities.  With that in mind, I felt that the advice she was first given by us two days ago and again by the first instructor this morning was the best possible option.  In order for this to be done right she really needs to speak with the database programmers…

She responded only to me asking for the phone number of the database folks…

Ah yes the joys of manning our classrooms. We had a visitor yesterday in one of our classrooms looking to make a poster. I prepped him, he could make his poster on the monochrome printer so his posters would only be one color. No problem he says and starts printing his posters… Life was good.

Until he looks around the room and spots our color posters.

“How do I make this printer print my posters in color like those?” he asks me.

“Um, you can’t, that’s a MONOCHROME printer. It only does ONE color I respond.

 … because if you ask me again maybe the printer will do something different.

So I’m watching the coverage of the Florida primaries this morning and the anchor on the unnamed cable news channel I’m watching actually asked some senior member of one of the campaigns:

So what do you think your chances are on Super Tuesday?

As if the campaign member was going to say anything other than we’re going to win it all and our candidate is going to be the next President….

So like many site owners I like to go through my webstats and see just what it going on at the sites that I run. I get intrigued by some of the incoming links and like to take a look at them periodically. I had been seeing the occasional spam site linking over, but today I found something worse… A malware site linking over – and the site attempted to stick a Trojan on my system, and I was on my Windows machine. Since IE is NOT the default browser, my browser and my OS are fully updated and so is my AV software. As a result they failed as my AV software blocked the attempt, but still it’s something to be wary of…

So you put on your resume that you’re an experienced web designer.  You even own a music sales website that you claim to have designed.

In preparation for the work that you were supposed to be doing on our website you were told at least 5 times by several people not to work on the live version of the site.  You were told repeatedly that a development server existed for you to design your pages on and test them out before you implemented your changes on the live site.

So off you went to go work on updating and redesigning the website.  Not surprisingly, after looking at the underlying code on the page you discovered that the design is fairly amateurish at best and decided to work to update the templates used.

On the plus side, you created a CSS template to standardize the design and layout of our webpages…

What you didn’t do - was create that template on the development server!  Knowing that our webpages as originally designed DIDN’T conform to any real design standard, you should have realized that the pages were going to act somewhat unpredictably when you applied that CSS template to them.  That happens to be exactly why we told you to work on the friggin development server!!!!

Even worse was that you didn’t even bother to go through the site to see what happened after you had applied the CSS template.  So you had no idea that the template had screwed up several pages.

Then you ran in to a problem as you were working on a page so you contacted the server administrator for help.  When the server administrator discovered that you were doing development work on a production server  he told you to stop - your response was to argue with him that you were just creating CSS sheets and editing HTML and not writing scripts!

Then when OUR boss confronted you - you got rude and actually yelled at him!  YOU were wrong.  YOU ignored what you were told, YOU were the one who broke the pages.

When you were asked why you deliberately ignored what you were told you came up with ridiculous excuses.   First you told us you didn’t have access to the correct network - you were reminded that wasn’t true.  Then you told us that you couldn’t work on the laptop you were issued because the display was too small and you couldn’t read it.  Then we reminded you that you could use one of the monitors that was at the desk you were working at…

Then you tell us that you don’t understand what the development server would do because you don’t understand how that would help you - even though you can’t remember what the page looked like before you screwed it up!  Then you gave me a blank look when I explained that if you screwed up the page on the development server, what was on the public server would be untouched - and you could compare the two SIDE BY SIDE AND SEE WHAT THE CHANGES WERE!

The bottom line though.  This is just one more reason why I have absolutely NO CONFIDENCE in your abilities - real or claimed on your resume - and if I had any control over the situation, I’d fire your ass already…