An interesting topics that has been on my mind lately is the appropriate role that computer games play in our lives. I’ve never had a whole lot of patience for those who view any form of entertainment as uniformly good or uniformly bad. There are, I’m sure, various forms of entertainment with no redeeming value (cockfighting comes to mind), but to be blunt they are generally reserved for those people that are not exactly waiting to become productive members of society. A symptom rather than a disease.

I recently ran across an article on The Strategy Page that points out how video games are becoming an asset to our military:

American troops appear to have a considerable advantage because most of them grew up playing video games and using PCs. More and more military equipment uses computers, or are basically electronic gadgets. American troops require a lot less time to learn how to use this stuff, and tend to be very good with it. This extends from fire control systems in armored vehicles, to new radios, electronic rifle sights and training systems (which are very similar to those video games.)

I can also think of many other uses of video games. In addition to the old “eye-hand coordination” argument, I think they also help people develop the ability to think more quickly on their feet and make time-sensitive decisions when under pressure. It seems to me that most any task that involves cognitive or physical exertion is probably not a complete waste of time. Even spectator sports like football can be helpful. I’ve seen people who can barely string together a grammatically correct sentence discuss the intricacies of a 4-3 defense placed up against West Coast offense.

And so it is with video games. Some are certainly better than others, but curiously society by-and-large makes no attempts to distinguish between productive video games and non-productive. They are generally considered either all good or all bad, or to the extent that distinctions are made they are usually along the lines of violent or sexual content.

And yet while I can appreciate the contributions that video games make (or can make) to society, I can’t help but notice that the effects it seems to have on those I’ve seen partake in it regularly are predominantly negative. It seems that more than occasionally they become all-consuming to many of their participants. Those I know that game do so for several hours a day every day. Whatever the point of dimishing returns exist, I’m not sure they particularly care where that line is.

On the other hand, games are increasingly becoming a social experience. Multi-user games such as EverQuest or City of Heroes and their ilk actually encourage communication in those that are at a loss to communicate otherwise. In many cases I think of the people I know that are avid gamers and to whatever degree it may be hurting their social life, I’m pretty hard-pressed to say that their social life would be peachy-keen otherwise.

Video games have become less goal-oriented (where you jump through a specified number of hoops) and more life-oriented, where there is not a single set goal but rather a giant playing field that you build up characters and… socialize… by forming various alliances. And that makes me think about online communication.

The BBC recently had an article that touched on how predictions that online communication would diminish personal communication. I heard those arguments ad infinum back when I was BBSing. It was frequently said that online chatters were avoiding reality, isolating themselves, and so on. To be honest, they weren’t entirely wrong. But it also came at a time in my life that I needed the help. I needed to learn how to talk to people… particularly of the female variety. Online relationships became real-life relationships all the time - in fact, in those cases where we never did meet, the friendships eventually faded away. I made as many lifelong friends fr0m the Camelot BBS as I did at North Mayne High School. More, probably.

Of course, that brings me back to the video game dilemma. At some point, and I’m not sure what point it was, I did sacrifice my “realtime” relationships for the ones that were online. A lot of my problems in high school had to do with not having very much in common with my classmates - even online I gravitated towards people that went to other schools, including our my high school’s rival only a couple miles away. But looking back I see ways that I could have made it work. I can see with crystal clarity girls I could have asked out with probable success and people I could have hung out with socially with just a little more effort. But it was effort I did not need to exert and so I didn’t.

Balance has always been an issue for me. It is an issue for a lot of intelligent people. In fact, most people I know that are discernably more intelligent than myself have even more difficulty juggling non-academic things. Most seem to throw themselves 100% into one of a handful of notoriously geeky things such as anime, comic books, and… video games. Such things are not solely the realm of geeks, of course, but you’ll notice that many of those that sail to the top in expertise tend to be those that have dedicated their intelligence, time, and imagination towards non-utilitarian ends.

Of course, then, it is not the existence of these distractions that is the problem, but the inability of a lot of people to deal with it handily.

My home state of Delosa has three or four somewhat distinct regions. Southeastern Delosa has a somewhat heavy Germanic culture, so much so that it is sometimes referred to as Bavariana, after the East German province from which it picked up a vastly disproportionate number of immigrants. Clancy is from out that way. Colosse is in the central-western part of the state and is generally considered part of the southwestern section of the state. West of Colosse is where Delosa’s southern culture starts getting muddled as it starts picking up some of the French culture of Louisiana and the oil culture of the central-southern states. Colosse is sometimes considered an entity unto itself both because it’s an international city and becomes it sometimes has the scorn of the rest of the state as as rural and urban Delosa fight for state funds. The fourth part of the state, including most of the central part, known derisively as the White T.

It is an unfortunate thing that to get from Colosse, where I live, to Beyreuth, where Clancy comes from, one has to drive through the southern branch of the T. Some of it is logistical. The cops in that part of the state are notoriously corrupt. Dixonian license plate prefixes are different depending on which part of the state you are from, making it easy for a cop to immediately tell out-of-town cars. The Ivorian cops intentionally target people from outside the area. And it’s more than just a matter of it being a speed trap. My brother got a ticket for having signalled for too long before changing lanes. A friend got a ticket for “accelerating too quickly” (below the speed limit the entire time). Basically, if they want to get you they can. And if you’re an out-of-towner, if you’re young, and if you’re alone, the chances aren’t bad that they will want to get you.

But worse than that logistical issue is the moral issue. It’s the part of the state that represents the worst of the south. Poverty combined with corruption, but more than any of that is the racism. The most infamous town there is Davidsport. Davidsport is a town of about 14,000 with not one of them being black. Homeowners refused to sell to blacks and apartment owners were good at finding reasons not to rent to them. Out of town banks even found reasons not to lend money to blacks because their investment wasn’t safe when considering their neighbors. Eventually the federal government got involved and forced the neighborhood to allow a black family to move in. They lasted less than six months, as did the two families that followed. Eventually they gave up because black families were less than enthusiastic to move into a town where they were so clearly unwelcome.

I have stopped in Davidsport twice. One time we were coming back from a party and there was a black guy among us. It was silly, but even in broad daylight we had someone accompanying him at all times. Coming from a multicultural city, there really is something quite creepy about a town that is entirely white. Especially when you know that it’s not an accident. I accidentally stopped in Davidstown on my way back to Colosse over Christmas. I had thought I was at the next town over.

I kicked myself when I realized that I had patroned a Davidsport business, even if it was just for gas.

In the (conscious or unconscious) minds of many whites, blacks and black culture are disconcerting. They represent urban crime, welfare queens, and so on. More than a couple people I know that swear they aren’t racist are concerned when they get a black neighbor because of what it will do to property values (it’s not them, you understand, but other people).

The ironic thing is that racism aside, Davidsport is about as crummy as a town can get. There used to be a billboard just outside town limits that accused a former mayor of murdering someone and the town council of covering it up. The billboard was knocked out by a hurricane that hit a year or two back, but one had to look twice to see the effects of the hurricane because a number of the buildings and gas stations have been boarded up for years. Less than one-in-twenty have a college degree (I just looked that stat up) and few with an education would ever want to live there.

But at least they’ve got their pride.

Hitcoffee.com now belongs to Will; the scammers who had bought it trying to cybersquat, apparently dumped it just as quickly.

Hooray!

One of the perks at working at Falstaff has always been the monthly luncheons. The Fallon family that owns the company also owns a string of restaurants and it shows in their cooking. It’s also a paid lunch that usually lingers a couple hours.

Unfortunately they are no more. The most immediate issue is that the company has grown too big for everyone to fit in the breakroom, so they had to move it off-campus. What used to go into the food now, I’d imagine, goes into renting the meeting hall. The other downside is that instead of it being a lunch they’ve decided to make it a breakfast, from 6:30-8:30 in the morning.

None of this is ideal. But the wave of complaints that came was mighty spectacular. Perhaps even enough for me to decide that if I start a company I will not bestow generosity that I cannot continue indefinitely because eventually it will be expected. That combined with the whole stock-option thing have given me a somewhat negative view of many of my coworkers.

A long time ago, tensions were running pretty high as we had several toxic personalities in QA at the time and QA and programming were at each other’s throats. Willard and Carl Davis (then the head of QA) had to pull us all into a room and remind us that this is a good job that we have and that in Mocum or Deseret as a while (excluding Gazelem) we’re unlikely to find better. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it had an effect on me. It was indeed a much better job than I thought I would find. It was enough to get me through some really tough days. That was probably the low point of my employment with Falstaff.

Carl Davis is gone, but Carol and I suggested that Willard give the speech again. He entitled the PowerPoint slide with the old joke “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

It reminded me of this classic Demotivation poster:

I think a company in Germany must have read it, too:

When a company seizes the initiative and sacks morale sapping staff is it paradoxically laying the foundations for future disaster? In a bold move, Nutzwerk, a German company specialising in the development of technology fundamental to delivering internet services, has implemented a policy of sacking workers who persistently complain. It’s reasoning was that people who persistently complain have poor productivity and undermine the spirit of their co-workers.

I actually have some rather serious thoughts on the matter, so stay tuned. In the meanwhile, if you’re not familiar with Despair.com’s motivational posters or just haven’t seen them in a while, go read more here.

Link on the German company courtesy of Ethan.

Falstaff has been saying for at least six months now that we were going to get stock options for whenever or ifever the company goes public or gets sold. They set the timeline at 4-5 years. I think 6-7 is probably more realistic, but it should almost certainly happen within the ten year window that they have set up for the options.

I’ve come to find out that their rhetoric actually trapped them into giving us the options. The COO didn’t realize that he is legally liable for statements on stock options, so when certain elements within the company wanted to pull them off the table, they couldn’t. I’m not sure of all the legalities involved, but since employment law documentology is our core business, I assume that they know what they’re talking about.

They finally sat us each down individually and let us know how much was going to be available to us and at what price. The options were… amazingly generous. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone who takes advantage of them could clear $50k. At least $25k is likely. It’s not often that I am so presently surprised by any employer. I figured that since they were kind of packed in to doing this, they would make a weak offering. But I guess they figured that if they were going to do this, they would do it right.

In addition to being taken aback by the generosity of the company, I was similarly stunned by the somewhat skeptical reaction they got from the RLC Department as a whole. They were tickling the tonsils of the gift horse with their nose. Martin and Kirk seriously batted around the idea that they would stall going public or making a sale until after the 10 year window. They figured that screwing us over would mean more to the company than maximizing sale or IPO timing. I explained that it would be doubly counter-productive for them to push back a good offer just cause they worry that we would be getting some of the money they might otherwise get. Considering where our company is headed and how much it would have to offer when/if it became public, what we’re getting isn’t that big a deal on the bottom line. Then of course the skepticm shifted into how much more they could be giving us if we really wanted to be nice.

I harbor no illusions about my employer. But you know, on a day when they’re going out of their way to be generous, it strikes me as truly bad form to complain.

Anyway, it’s all hypothetical. I won’t be here when it comes time to collect. Most of us won’t be, statistically speaking. It’s not so generous as to give me pause about leaving. But I’ve never been offered stock options before. That alone is pretty cool.

Charlie: What I don’t understand is how come I need to take classes in sociology to become a computer programmer?

Me: Everyone should take sociology.

Charlie: Why?

Me: Because the ability to compare cultures and acknowledge the cultural norms that we take for granted will make you a more worldwise person.

Charlie: But will it make me a better programmer?

Me: Considering that you’ll probably be working with a bunch of outsourcing Indians, probably so.

I have been a supervisor for over a week now and it is… exhausting.

The department as a whole is quite overworked and I have been trying to split my time between supervisory tasks as well as my QA duties. I actually ended up working over the maximum 55 hour weekly cap. And I’ve really been working if not every minute of every day, but pretty consistently. My self-assessment of my work ethic has improved considerably. It’s amazing how much a particular job or set of tasks or working environment can affect how hard I work.

I’ve also found my tolerance of others not working has dipped considerably. I find myself getting agitated at all the goofing off that’s going on. Willard’s ability to see beyond that is even more amazing in my eyes. But since work ethic has been a problem for me, I’m not in the best position to confront the issue. But it’s amazing how much differently you view things when it’s your responsibility to make sure that everything gets done, rather than just certain things getting done.

I’m nowhere near the supervisor that Willard was when he was the OSI Leader, but some of that will come with time.

I made a point to have lunch with Simon on Friday. The leader, I’ve determined, can be quite a lonely position to be in. Carol warned me as much when I got the promotion. OSI (my team) is almost intrinsically less dramatic than ANG (her team) for a handful of reasons, so I haven’t had it quite as bad.

-{This post was originally written yesterday}-

Me: You excited about the Canadian election today?

Willard: Sure. Well, as excited as an American whose never lived in Canada can be, I guess.

Me: I hear they’ve been a democracy for like… decades now.

Willard: Doesn’t the Queen has to appoint their pick?

Me: I think the Governor General does that.

Willard: Who appoints the Governor General?

Me: The Queen.

One of the more remarkable things about Falstaff is that employees have more-or-less been given free reign when it comes to our computers. We can install what we want. We can surf the Internet to and from wherever we want.

That is until recently.

Due to some fluke, I cannot access certain sites on the web without going through a proxy. I am relatively confident that it wasn’t something crafted by IT. The sites being blocked are not particular problematic ones. It just so happens, however, that one of the sites blocked is Hit Coffee. So posting from work and whatnot will be pretty limited until they get this fixed.

On a side note, in real life my boss Willard and my webmaster Webster have the same first name. Willard’s name is first alphabetically and so when I thought that Hit Coffee was completely down, I almost emailed Willard to inquire about it.

That would have been bad.

Moving on, when I brought up the idea of utilizing Instant Messaging to help the team communicate more easily, he informed me that the company was looking in to disabling IM. Well, their plan is to prevent all IMing outside the company, but since even messages from one desk to the desk next to it go outside the internal network, I’m not sure it’s going to work how they think it is. IT seems optomistic.

So in the interest of smokin’em while you got’em, I invite any and all of my readers for a limited time (when they cut us off at the end of the month) to Instant Message me. My AIM name is K U M E D E I N… without the spaces.

Clancy and I have decided that when we move to Estacado, we’re upgrading to a queen-size bed. The good news is that it will give us a little more room. The bad news…

I never expected an argument with my wife - even before I had the first clue as to who my wife would be - regarding bed comforters and themes. I generally consider myself an easygoing (read: apathetic) individual when it comes to such aesthetics. To the extent that I do have tastes, I would think they almost uniformly unoffensive because they’re so conservative. Clancy, as it turns out, prefers design and something considerably less plain. What I consider too busy she considers just right.

Over a dozen hours were spent looking at these things. An inverse chart between how much I liked something and she liked something was figuratively drawn. Ooooh, nice and plain and calming colors, I would think. Bo0ring, she would reply. This looks nice, she would think. That’s busier than a mall on December 24th, I would reply.

The funny thing about all this is that when we met, her comforter was a wonderful plain green (or was it blue? The fact that I can’t even remember what color it is speaks volumes as to how wonderfully invisible it was) while mine had a bit more design on it. This, along with my general aesthetic apathy, is why Clancy was taken aback at my boring tastes. I just naturally assumed that our next comforter would be like the current one. She assumed that it would not. She did not understand why I was so adamant about having a comforter unlike any that she had ever seen me have. The answer, interestingly enough, was that I have never picked out a comforter before. I always got handmedowns. If I seemed a bit headstrong, I suppose, it was because this was my first chance to be able to pick out what it would look like.

The fact that could not be escaped, however, is that she really cared and though I had opinions I really didn’t. I think at times she might have confused my unwavering opinion for stubbornness. I think I probably did, too. I wasn’t going to change my opinion on what I wanted, but I was pretty willing to accept what I didn’t want. Of course, my begrudging acceptance wasn’t what she wanted for our first joint decor adventure. She wanted something we could agree on.

We ultimately decided not to get a comforter and opted instead for a quilt. She more-or-less took her first choice of a quilt, though it was one I found less offensive than most. And she gave me the option of a compromise pick. I figured that the compromise pick was something we were each okay with but not excited about. The one we chose was one that one of us (her) could actually be excited about. And being happy for her is enough for me.

Delsie wasn’t my first girlfriend or my first… first, but she was my first many-other-things. She was something of a crystal-waver and incense queen and believed that she was reincarnated from some queen of Atlantis. She wasn’t stupid, but she was often quite silly. I really wanted to buy in to her little world, but I honestly couldn’t. But she was a sweet girl. Loyal to a fault, extremely resiliant, and a loving smile that could light up a room.

She was a sweet girl that got on my nerves endlessly. I could never place my finger on what it was about she and I that didn’t work, but it became pretty apparent pretty early on that only one of us had that assessment of our relationship or lack thereof. She was pretty fixated on the relationship as my eye was on the lack thereof.

I hesitate to say that Buck was a friend, though that’s a convenient stance to take. Buck was what we used to call a kikker. A kikker is someone that likes to dress up in a big hat and wear a big buckle and talk with an accent but wouldn’t know the first thing about milking a cow, much less riding a bull. He had a few stock phrases that became his mantra, but it was more reminiscent of that nerd we all know in some way or another that spends half his time making reference to some obscure anime. Except that Buck used country songs and had a much lighter selection. But Buck seemed to be a good guy as well. Obnoxious, but harmless.

Delsie and I had run our course after about three or four months. The annoyance factor was already outweighing the not-even-friends-but-still-with-benefits thing that we had and was about to outweigh my desire not to hurt anyone’s feelings. The notion that I was even capable of hurting anyone’s feelings was an alien concept to me at the time, and not a concept I was particularly enamored with. That’s about where I was when I got wind that Buck was kinda sorta interested in Delsie.

I don’t know if it was out of benevolence or simple exhaustion, but even though I could have dragged out the not-even-friends-but-still-with-benefits thing a little longer, I enthusiastically helped facilitate their coupling. I pinged her on her thoughts of him. I put the thought in her head that he was single and may make a good boyfriend. I reported back to him that she sounded somewhat interested and that he should ask her out.

She was annoying but good hearted. He was obnoxious but also good hearted. It sounded like a match made in friggin’ heaven. I was always a little amused how much they discounted my involvement in their coupling. She often approached their relationship as a repudiation of my coldheartedness. The implicit question was always “Aren’t you sorry now?” Even Buck got into it, explicitly talking about how I really screwed up my relationship with her. They weren’t ugly about it by any means, but their framing of the relationship contained a very different picture than the one I saw.

He moved in after a scant three months. A little under two years later, he moved out. Three months later, they broke up entirely. Considering how happy they had seemed, it was all rather mysterious. She announced that she never wanted to see him again and he said that even though he was heartbroken over it, he would honor her wishes.

It wasn’t until a year after that when I got the full scoop. Apparently, every night one of two things would happen. Either she would be “in the mood” and they would have sex, or she would not be in the mood and it would happen anyway, in a more forceful manner.

For the most part, Delsie was a free spirit, sexually. Very uninhibited. That she and I didn’t actually make it to home plate was purely through diligence on my part and a moral conscience that wasn’t completely out to lunch. She never struck me as the type to say “no” very much as long as she was comfortable. The more insistent he became, the less comfortable she was. She had lost all interest in him sexually after a year or so of living together.

That means for over six months, every night they spent together he arguably raped her. And to the extent that it wasn’t rape, it was more resignation than consent, which in some ways makes it worse. She had simply lost the will to fight back. She had lost enough autonomy sexually to become a sexual possession. The thought of all this still sends shivers down my spine.

As does my own culpability. I’m not sure how much my actions contributed to the self-esteem that gets one into a relationship like that, where it takes her a year to walk away from something so obviously wrong. I was always pretty upfront with her about where she and I stood (and more importantly where we didn’t), but I’m not sure my bluntness was anymore helpful than deception would have been.

And, of course, I helped engineer their couplehood. I somehow completely missed the darkness in Buck’s soul. It’s blindingly obvious now, of course, but it almost never occured to me that this yokel could be as evil as he was goofy. Maybe not evil, but certainly twisted and probably without repair.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that sometimes you really don’t know someone as well as you think you do. And sometimes the things you do to someone can put them in a position to endure much worse than you could imagine ever doing to them.

Career Builder has five signs that you should consider quitting your job. A couple ring familiar:

1. You ask your new boss for supplies and she hands you a No. 2 pencil and legal pad — and nothing else. While not all companies can afford to outfit employees with late-model laptops, cell phones, pagers and company credit cards, it is important that you are given the tools that you need in order to do your job. If you aren’t, or if the company questions you every time you ask for a new pen, it could be an indication of financial stress.blockquote>
Before I got to FalStaff, they were considerably more cheap than they are now — and even now I am relatively certain that the thriftiness is costing them money in the long-term and even medium-term. The biggest thing is that they used to have community staplers. Some jobs that might be acceptable, but at the time we were printing out and stapling at least 20 different times a day. There would be lines at the stapler.

The second one, etched into Falstaff folklore, is that we spend a lot of time reproducing documents. For two years the company refused to buy a scanner so all of the documents had to be reproduced by hand. The department complained, but to no avail. They could not see the utility in spending $500 on a scanner and good text-recognition software.

Mr. Fallon, the president of the company, was at a conference when he was asked what kind of text-recognition software we used. He said that we didn’t use any and it took several reiterations before the people he was talking to were convinced that he wasn’t joking. A week later the department had a new scanner and software.
2. You were shown to a cubicle your first day of work, given a company manual and haven’t been spoken to since. Even if you have years of experience, you should always be given some kind of orientation or training during your first days on a new job. The companies that are known as the best places to work all have substantial training programs and processes in place to make sure new employees feel comfortable and supported right from the start. Be wary if you feel like you have been left to go it alone.
I still don’t have an employment contract. They had me copychecking documents before I even knew what they were. The only reason I knew for sure what the company did was by reading a magazine the company puts out while I was waiting to be interviewed. We have no training process — our training process is done through the negative reinforcement of a FAIL stamp.

3. Every time you tell someone about your new job with the company they raise their eyebrows and say “Really? Wow… good luck with that.” A company’s reputation isn’t always completely accurate, but it does usually stem from legitimate information. Good companies to work for are typically well-known and well-respected in their communities. In fact, you should ask others in your industry and the local business community what their thoughts are about the company when you are doing your initial research. If everyone you ask has a negative tale about your new employer, chances are their impressions have some validity.

My last employer in Colosse gave us 5 rather nice shirts with the company logo on them. About one in three IT people in the city of Colosse have apparently worked for the company. Whenever I’d wear the shirts, strangers would periodically tap me on the shoulder and ask if they were still the same horrible employer they were when they used to work there. Complete strangers. Sometimes we would even trade war stories. I can’t believe I haven’t talked about this particular employer more than I have. I don’t even know if I have a pseudonym for them.

4. After two weeks on the job, you are already halfway to becoming the employee with the most seniority. One of the biggest issues for human resources professionals today is employee retention. You will notice that most of the country’s top companies have employees who have been around for years. Lengthy employee tenure is often a sign that the company is doing something right. “I joined a firm in St. Louis and learned that the company had seven other employees come and go in the past year,” says Sarah, a public relations executive. “What’s worse is that it was only a five-person operation. That should have been the first sign that the company was not a great place to work.”

I was in the upper half of employees at my current employer less than a couple months in at FalStaff. The same is true of the above company, except they managed to do it with a lot more people.

5. You answer the phone while the company’s secretary is away from her desk and find that the voice at the other end is a collection agency calling for the third time that week. While this sounds unbelievable, this actually happened to one worker, who said other employees at the company were eventually instructed to not answer the phones. “It became a joke with all of us,” she commented. “We used to run out and cash our checks as soon as we got paid and were always afraid that they were going to bounce!” If you see any signs that your company is in real financial or legal trouble, get your résumé back out on the market.

My ex-girlfriend Julie’s employer fits this bill. For a long while there she had to wait months before she could cash her checks or they would bounce. They’ve expanded threefold in the last year, but the employees are still told they need to wait a couple of weeks. Her employer makes even my worst employer sound like a cakewalk. She’s paid very well, though.

6. You notice that every day for the last five days, at least one person has run crying from your boss’s office. While not everyone’s boss is a bundle of joy, you should expect to be treated with respect in the workplace. If you see signs that the executives running your company make all of the other employees shake with fear, burst into tears or work on edge all the time, look for a greener pasture. There are companies out there that find success without putting employees through the ringer.

No real complaints here. I’ve generally had good bosses. Julie’s boss once screamed at a pregnant employee who wanted to go home before she got ill that he hoped she would figure out how she’s going to raise the baby in a tin shack after he cans her. Such outbursts were not uncommon, apparently.

When I was seventeen and barely literate in 1993, I started writing a novel. I was the main character, of course, and it took place in 2007. The love interest was (of course) a girl I had a crush on at the time named Kadie. Kadie had a younger brother named Tyson who was about nine at the time. Kadie played a prominant role, though pretty much all I said about Tyson was that he was gay.

While back in Colosse, I was informed that Tyson came out of the closet last year.

It’s either an interesting coincidence or I saw it in him even when he was nine years old, I’m really not sure which. But it is actually the latest in a handful of “predictions” that came true:

George W. Bush was president and not particularly popular. Well, originally it was going to be Jeb Bush as Jeb was the one who was supposed to win in 1994 and Dubya was supposed to be the one to come up short. After the election I switched Bushes.

The Los Angeles Raiders moved back to Oakland. There were rumors at the time that it would happen, but no one took them especially seriously.

Jacksonville got a professional football team.

There was a major terrorist attack by Middle Eastern extremists in 2001. The attacks in the book took place on March 2, 2001 (3/2/1) and in Seattle. Hundreds, not thousands, died. But still, terrorism in 2001!

Given how warped my view of the world was at the time, I’d have to ultimately chalk it up to the blind-squirrel-nut theory.

The domain was friggin’ registered yesterday. Unbelievable. I have checked on the status of that domain at least once a week since it expired on 10/29/5. I understand the rationale for giving the owner of a domain a little extra time with it so that it doesn’t get swooped up a day after it expires due to some miscommunication, but it sure would be nice if there was some way to know exactly when a domain will become available without having to spend $60 to backorder it.

Of course, the current owners of the domain may have backordered in, and if so are more deserving of it than I. I don’t know, it wouldn’t irritate me quite so much if they were actually doing something with the site other than running ads for those that mistype “hotcoffee.com” or something (hotcoffee.com is itself, incidentally, being cybersquatted upon)

Oh, well.

Stupid Internet.

A couple weeks ago, Willard announced that they were going to refill his former position as the OSI Team Leader and George Welton’s previous position as ANG Team Leader. Carol Goddard was pretty quickly chosen as the ANG Team Leader when Carrie Bonds, her only real competition for the spot, was promoted into Legal Standards & Compliance.

With Golden Boy out of the department and my taking his place as Project Coordinator, it gave me what I considered to be the inside track that Clem would have had if he weren’t so reviled by the rest of the team (except Edgar). Of course, the problem with being given such a great lead-in is that there’s nowhere to go but down.

It was interesting sitting in Clem’s shoes for a little while. The tendency to act like a superior has a much bigger pull than I had imagined. I don’t have his Napoleonic tendencies, but even I found myself saying things that were probably out-of-bounds. Clem took note of what Carol had noted before: The job of Project Coordinator was meant to be a leadership position. I said as much when Clem got the spot (and was worried because of that).

There was a lot to learn, and Clem had to teach me most of it. That, of course, helped even further solidify my status as the most natural candidate for the job. If it went to Simon or Martin, they would have to be trained again from scratch. Unfortunately, that meant that it would be no surprise if I got it and kind of eyebrow-raising if I didn’t (had Clem not been spared by way of promotion to software support, that would have raised some eyebrows in much the same manner). The strange thing is that I had determined that I was perfectly okay going back to my old job as it would be a relief from the pressures of being ultimately responsible that things get done. I wanted the spot, to be sure, but I think in my mind it had mostly become a matter of pride.

Mid-week or so, Willard pulled me into a conference room to ask me about some more restructuring within our division of the company. He asked for my input. I felt that I had tanked. I didn’t like the idea because it involved getting rid of QA and if I didn’t get the promotion of my going back into programming. But I also didn’t like it from a more institutional standpoint and said as much. I just couldn’t for the life of me see a real upside to what was being proposed and was worried that it was indicative of a lack of insight on my part. On the upshot, the mere fact that he asked me seemed a good sign of things to come until he pulled Simon and Martin over to ask the same thing. Great… it was a part of the “interview” and I tanked it.

Simon had to leave early on Thursday. Willard, for whatever reason, let it be known that they had chosen who would get the OSI Lead position, but he didn’t want to say anything until all three candidates were here. Was that because Simon was the selectee? Possibly. So I went home on Thursday knowing that Willard knew my fate and I did not. I was quite distracted all night long. I wanted to go to bed at 7 just to bring zero hour that much closer.

Friday morning came and went and we heard nothing. I was about freaking out at this point. I was paralyzed in my Project Coordinator duties because if I was going to turn over the keys that day, I should make as few decisions as possible. I put off going out to lunch in fear that when I was gone he might finally be ready. Eventually I had to take lunch because I needed to make a trip to the Post Office. I ate lunch at Wendy’s and Bill Darden, CIO and Willard’s boss and co-participant in the Lead selection), who avoided eye contract with me.

I was back from lunch for an hour or so before Willard pulled Martin into a conference room. I figured that it would be best to go first or last because either he wanted to tell the lucky winner first or he wanted to console the two runners-up first. Either way, the second position was a loser. When Martin got out, he tapped me on the shoulder. I was #2. Great.

Willard asked how things were going and tried to make light conversation. I was pretty distracted, so he got down to business. He had chosen me to go second because he knew that it would likely be the first or third that everyone would think got the spot… and he wanted to throw them off because I was selected for the promotion.

Something you probably didn’t know: “Bad Habit” was considered as a title for this site. Turns out it was in use too frequently elsewhere so it didn’t make the final list of candidates.

Anyway, so I have been tagged by Barry. Here are the rules:

The first player of this game starts with the topic “five weird habits of yourself,” and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don’t forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says “You have been tagged” (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.

As most of you know, I usually decline to forward these things largely because by the time they get to my little corner of blogland, most everybody has already partaken. But five habits is something I can come up with pretty easily.

1. I only cash my paychecks every six weeks. Drives Clancy crazy, but I let them accumulate in my desk until I have three and then I go cash them. More than one former employer has tried to use this as evidence that I am well-paid if I can comfortably go without cashing my checks right away. This every-six-weeks thing is actually an improvement. I used to only cash checks once I got around to it. In the meantime paychecks would get lost and I would forget about them. When I departed one former employer, they cut me a check for nearly $2,500 (in addition to my severence package) because the accounting department said that I had declined to cash that amount in paychecks (it was an $8/hr job… I think that was something five paychecks). The state of Delosa still owes me $150 from unclaimed checks, but I haven’t had time to jump through hoops in order to reclaim that money. Given recent discussions with Clancy, I don’t think this little habit of mine is going to last much longer.

2. I set the alarm to go off even when it’s a weekend and I don’t have to get up. If I’m going to be able to sleep in then dag-nabbit I’m surely going to be able to appreciate it by pointing out to myself whenever I would have to get up anyway. My ultimate goal is to get up as early on weekends as I do during the week. Right now I get up at 6am… that may be stretching it. Maybe when I only have to get up at 7.

3. I don’t put my seatbelt on until I’m moving the car forward. In other words, if I’m pulling out of a parking spot I go in reverse, put my seatbelt on, then start driving forward.

4. When choosing sides for a bed, I always insist on the side furthest from the door. Doesn’t matter whether it’s by a wall or not by a wall, on the right side of the left… I just want the side furthest away from the door. Similarly, I strongly dislike having my computer situation so that I am facing away from the entrance to a room, though that’s how it is set up presently.

5. You ever seen Natural Born Killers? There was a routine in there where Juliette Lewis’s family was presented as a sitcom (Rodney Dangerfield as “Dad”). They bleeped out some cusswords and yet left others untouched (the movie was irredeemably rated “R”). I am like that sometimes. I don’t have a problem with cussing, but as often as not I blurt out rated-PG censor cusswords. My “F” word is Frag as often as it is the real thing. I am also really prone to say “Good grief!” and “Good golly” and “Holy heck.” This is less unusual in Deseret than it is in the South, though. One common expression up here is “Oh My Hell”… I have yet to pick up that one. When I first met Clancy, one expression I used was “Dag nabbit!” which she found hilarious because it was considered an “acceptable curseword” for a card game. She had never heard anyone use it in any other context. I picked it up from a coach/teacher from high school. I even usually say it with a thicker-than-usual southern accent because that’s what he had.

One of the bigger clouds hanging over the heads of Clancy and I are what is going to happen when she gets out of residency here in Deseret. It’s only six months away! She had more-or-less decided that she wanted a Residency Extension, which basically means that we pack up and go somewhere else for a year. There are only twenty-five programs or so that offer RExts. Of those twenty-five, roughly ten were remotely of interest from Massachusetts to southern California.

Our first choice was a very competitive program in the pacific northwest that unfortunately had three times as many applicants as positions to fill. Next down the list were Beyreuth, the town in western Delosa where Clancy is originally from (Beyreuth, with a population of a hundred thousand or two, had a program. Colosse, with a population of a million or two, did not. Quite strange.), and Santomas, a rapidly growing city in the southwestern state of Estacado. Beyreuth was closer to her family, so it seemed that she was edging for that preference. My preference was Estacado because of size (half a million or so, roughly), among other considerations.

I got a call on my cell phone yesterday. “Santomas made an offer!”

And it turned out that she was warmer on Estacado than I had previously thought. It’s not perfect. The pay is less than we might have liked. The hours are going to be pretty awful, with her working almost as much as she did during the intern year of her residency. With the University of Estacado unleashing thousands of graduates a year on the city, the job market will be far from ideal (though still better than Beyreuth). On the other hand, as it turns out U of E has a very aggressive national merit scholar program that a handful of my friends took advantage of, many of whom still live in the area and speak very highly of it (and have volunteered to help me on the job hunt). Southern Airways also runs a lot of direct flights to Colosse for dirt cheap, so visiting my parents on weekends is not out of the question.

But mostly it’s just a matter of knowing where we’re going to be. There has been so much in the air lately. Clancy has been running herself ragged trying to get applications in and I’ve had to be the overbearing husband in nudging her to do it even when she was tired and irritable. One night she woke me up at three in the morning, devastated because she knew she wouldn’t be able to finish a couple of the applications in time (and with only 25 programs or so, every application counted). There was also a sense of dispair when the Cascadia program in the northwest fell through and she wasn’t sure that any of them were going to accept her. While logically I believed that she would land something, I felt like she might not.

But wonderfully she did.

It was an odd sensation to not know where we were going to be in six months. Now it’s sort of odd to know where I will be.

It’s been a blast from the past at Falstaff as we find ourselves stuck between a rock, a stone, and a hard place.

Last week Willard let it be known that with four positions being vacated, there was room in the budget to hire one additional person. Corporate math for you. Marcel, who left the company to attend Beck State full time, came around looking for a part-time job. The thing about Marcel is that he could do on a part-time basis what someone off the street wouldn’t be able to accomplish full-time. He would also provide some much-needed experience within the OSI team. On the other hand, we knew he was mostly biding his time until he could make his way down to BYU, so he wasn’t a longterm solution. On top of that, whatever money our department saved by hiring someone part-time would evaporate, so it was use it or lose it (more corporate logic. Govt logic, too!).

Ultimately we opted for Catwoman. Catwoman was the top candidate last time we were hiring before they decided not to fill that position. None of us know her real name, but when Willard discussed her with us he mentioned that, among other things, her idol was Batman feline adversary, so the name stuck. Even when she didn’t get the job she stayed in touch and so she was the first person that Willard thought about when he needed to hire. The thought of a real live girl on the team… a hot girl at that… a hot girl that liked comic books and listed UFC fighting as her favorite sport… enough to blow everyone’s mind.

When we took a vote, Marcel was doomed. 6-2 in favor of Catwoman, Simon and I the only dissenting votes.

Eventually enough of a stink was raised and we were alotted Catwoman and Marcel, though the latter only for a month.

But I finally voiced my opinion on something that Simon and I had discussed a couple weeks ago. If OSI was going to expand, we needed to take Frank Goddard. Why? Because Frank works on the ANG team. And his wife was just named leader of that team. If that’s not a problem in the employee handbook, it ought to be. I brought the issue up with Willard and he at least partly agreed.

So after all this time, it looks like the OSI team may remain entirely male after all. The female goes where all female employees go, to our sister team. If that comes to pass, Charlie, Gordon, and Martin are going to be devastated.

So a rock is putting Catwoman on our team and leaving Frank under his wife. The hard place is taking Frank and leaving at least the air of sexism. So what’s the stone? The stone is Jarvis.

Jarvis left the company about the same time that Marcel did. Jarvis was Willard’s deputy and my boss for a month or two. He left the company to go work for DesPower. That ultimately didn’t pan out and he’s looking for work again. Simon and I commented just last week how we would really use someone as knowledgable as he. Willard, however, had already called Catwoman and was strangely lukewarm to having Jarvis back. In fact, I got the distinct impression that Willard was at least partly glad that Jarvis was gone.

But it’s really hard to say “no” to someone who has so much to offer the company. The stone is that we hire Jarvis, who would have to go on our team, we’re still a team full of guys cause Catwoman gets jilted again, and Frank is reporting to his wife.

A while back I wrote about my irritation with the conspiracy theory that drug companies don’t want a cure for cancer because they make so much money off of treatment. A corollary to that is the notion that doctors and our health care system are geared towards treatment rather than prevention. Whether it’s because they’re greedy (cause they get more money from sick people than well people) or simply narrow-sighted, since they’re trained to treat and cure and not prevent, they don’t have any interest in the latter.

This idea not only makes me angry because I’m married to a doctor, but it also makes me angry because often (though not always) those making the claim are part of the problem. And even if they aren’t, there are enough to suggest that it’s not that doctors aren’t interested in prevention, patients aren’t interested in prevention.

Who is the one telling you that you should lose weight? That’s a doctor, and he’s trying to prevent something bad from happening. Are you listening? Probably not. Who is the one telling you to stop smoking? That’s a doctor, and she’s trying to prevent something bad from happening. Simply because we don’t listen doesn’t mean that they aren’t talking. And this is a big one: who support vaccinations that prevent bad things from happening? Doctors. Who opposes them? Many of modern medicine’s harshest critics.

Jane Galt’s entire post on prevention (though it deals more with the pharma side of things) is worth reading, but one section in particular stood out:

There are major incentive problems with vaccines, and to be fair he touches on one of them: because vaccines protect you against something you haven’t got yet, patients are more likely to sue if something goes wrong. And as they become more widespread, people are tempted to free ride on the vaccinations of others. It is only because almost everyone is vaccinated that phobic parents are willing to let their children go un-immunized; if measles and polio were widespread, they’d be a lot more worried about possible blindness and paralysis than about the extremely rare side effects of vaccines. This is a public health problem in areas like Boulder, where bobo parents refusing to vaccinate their children have caused a resurgence in diseases like Whooping Cough and measles–unfortunately, affecting not just their children, but adults whose immunity has waned over time.

Boulder, for those of you unfamiliar with the area, is a posh yuppie new agey hippie liberal college town (University of Colorado). I point out the politics/spirituality/juju of Boulder because it represents the new agey sort of attitude that believes that vaccines are harmful but doctors aren’t effective because they’re unconcerned with prevention. Of course, many of such people will only accept cures that aren’t chemically synthesized because chemical compounds are bad for our health, as evidenced by how much shorter our lifespans have become since we started making pills rather than pulling them from roots in the ground.

Anyway, people in general are suspicious of vaccines in part because they are not immediately familiar with the problem. Once they become so, of course, it’s into damage control and suddenly they wonder why doctors didn’t stop this from happening in the first place.

All is not well in Deutschland:

Germans are leaving their country in record numbers but unlike previous waves of migrants who fled 19th century poverty or 1930s Nazi terror, these modern day refugees are trying to escape a new scourge — unemployment.

Flocking to places as far away as the United States, Canada and Australia as well as Norway, the Netherlands and Austria more than 150,000 Germans packed their bags and left in 2004 — the greatest exodus in any single year since the late 1940s.

High unemployment that lingers at levels of more than 20 percent in some parts of Germany and dim prospects for any improvement are the key factors behind the migration. In the 15 years since German unification more than 1.8 million Germans have left.

“It’s hard for me to even imagine any more what it’s like to have so much unemployment,” said Karin Manske, 45, who moved to the United States with her two children eight years ago to start her own business as a consultant.

“It’s hard to fathom because Germans are such skilled workers,” Manske said in an interview with Reuters in Los Angeles. “I love the adventurous spirit and won’t go back. You can start a business on a shoe string and work hard to succeed.”

The article brings to mind three somewhat disparate thoughts.

The first is memories of Colosse. Colosse is full of people from around the country. What I found interesting, particularly when I was in college, were those that moved to Colosse, Delosa, and the south more generally because of the opportunities that exist there… and then proceed to complain that Colosse isn’t nearly as good as Boston or Chicago and that Delosa’s culture is kinda backwards compared to the enlightened New Englanders. Everyone, of course, has a right to their opinion, but I found it odd that at least particularly when it came to economic policy the fact that southern governments are so non-progressive might be at least a little responsible for the fact that the opportunity they were persuing was in Colosse and not Baltimore. They move across the country to seek opportunity that they can’t find at home and then try to turn their new home into the old home that they had to leave (or were bribed away from).

I wonder about those Germans that are coming to America and wonder how many of them will have a good deal of problems with everything that’s wrong with our country — everything that is not like the Fatherland (except for the unemployment rate)

I don’t hold a whole lot of punches in my critiques of Deseretian culture, but at the same time I try to recognize that some of the things that I really don’t like out here (heavily Mormon culture) heavily influence the things that I can appreciate (the general cleanness of the place, for instance). Ultimately, the things I like aren’t enough to keep me here, but that’s part of an equation. Some people seem to think that you can just get rid of everything that you don’t like while everything that’s good will naturally stay in place.

The second thought is on an article I read a while back suggesting that the United States is having a little more difficulty with bringing in educated immigrants than we used to because they’re opting for Canada or Australia. I am quite interested to see if that happens. The fact is that American culture and economic policy really doesn’t mesh with the priorities of much of the rest of the world. We want the freedom to bear arms, but it seems that most foreigners are more interested in freedom from people that bear arms. Not to mention health care and religious zealotry.

The question we may have to ask ourselves someday is whether American exceptionalism will come back to hurt us. In some ways the exceptionalist culture that we maintain is kept afloat by immigrants, both legal and illegal and both educated and uneducated. While we have little to worry about uneducated illegals making their way into the country, it could be problematic if we have to start relying on our own public education system to produce great American minds without educated outside influence. If they do start opting for Canada and Australia in large numbers, it could really hurt us. On the other hand, for all of the paradise that Canada is supposed to be, they’re the ones losing their educated people to us and not vice-versa. So maybe they’ll get the Indians and the Germans and we’ll get the Canadians.

The last thought has to do with education levels and the lady who commented that it was surprising that Germans are unemployed in such high numbers when they’re such skilled workers. I find the notion that an economy will grow to meet the needs of its workforce, instead of vice-versa, to be odd.

A while back I read an article about the alleged engineering gap that Americans have. A debate opened up at Asymmetical Information on the subject, bringing up the question: if there are many engineers unemployed or underemployed against their preference, can we really say that there is a shortage of engineers? Even if we stack unfavorably in comparison with the Indians, just because we have less does not mean that we have too few engineers… it often means that we’re not providing engineers with job opportunities that make young men and women choosing a career path envious.

But a lot of the collegiate education debate is around graduating as many people as possible rather than graduating what we need and needing what we are currently graduating. I may someday write a post making the case that our education system has gotten a so segmented with overspecialization that our scientific degrees are (correctly or incorrectly) seen as unuseful outside of the specific field. The original idea behind a liberal arts education was that it would make people ready for brain-intensive careers (in law, education, etc.). I am generally in favor of more useful degrees over less useful ones (don’t get me started on the people majoring in Lesbianism in Mayan Culture), but I find it interesting that the people with more generalized business degrees are doing so much better than those in the most specialized engineering ones.

Unfortunately the current economy is stacked up so that any investment by an employer in an employee is probably wasted (and vice-versa), so many of the tech companies want employees pre-trained. As tuitions continue to increase and companies decline to train, the much-heralded “continuing education” is coming at the expense of the employees having to undergo it at the benefit of the corporations that can afford to require it and the government that seems to have more important things to spend its money on.

But unless we can convince employees to stick with companies even when they can make more elsewhere, and unless we can convince employers to invest in their employees, its going to be quite difficult to change.