a stranger's view

wandering a vast wasteland of mindless truth

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A few days ago one of my Opera Community friends sent me an email out of the blue. I had not looked at my blog or anyone else's in more than a year. Since then I've taken another look around. If you're reading this and you've looked at some of the other posts, you know that I've been away before, so it means that I'll probably be away again. Call it short attention span blogging.

So here's an update to my life, based on the last few posts.

Work got worse. The powers that couldn't do anything right decided to lay people off just as they piled more work on. I went from one demanding (50-60 hours per week) job to two and a half jobs, all in the space of four weeks. Within another six weeks I realized that I was cracking.

Weirdly--well, not so weird since I see pattern in chaos--a colleague who had been fired from the company in February 2008 contacted me that September about a job where she had landed. I left the company another six weeks after that. If you're counting, that's zero to gone in four months.

I write investigations for a pharmaceutical manufacturing company. When things go wrong, they call on me to explain why it is or isn't okay. It's not a great job, but it's interesting and the company is way better to work for.

My wife and I decided that the roots were down and we were tired of leasing a townhouse, so we bought a house when the US housing market was bottoming out. This meant that we saved about 25% off what the house was worth and we got an incredibly low interest rate on the mortgage. This balances out all the crappy real estate deals I entered into during the previous 25 years.

I gave up drinking. You will note that it was a demon I wrestled with, and finally I had to admit that I just couldn't get into the ring any more because I was getting thrashed every time I tried. I have not had a drink in about 5 months.

At the same time I volunteered to cantor at my church in addition to singing in the choir. It has been a nice dovetail.

My father is better but not great. My wife continues happy. The grey cat Robert the Bruce has calmed down. I have built another computer, dropped Opera by the wayside, and moved some of my computing to the cloud.

Life is okay. I feel as if something momentous is about to happen--but then, isn't it always if we just look for it?

A photo

I wanted to share a photo of mine.

No idea

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I am several sheets to the wind. This week has seen many stresses. I have contacted my recruiter, to see if something better exists, yet I am thinking that where I am is workable. That we are heading in the right direction. Hindsight is so clear, but the here and now is so much a matter of focusing on the right thing at the right time. That's not so easy.

I wish that I were more centered, that I saw reality for itself, in every moment. Alas, this seems to be a difficult thing to do.

confused

A Rip In Time

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For a year and a half I have been ripping my vinyl and tape to modernize my musical library. Today music is digital, consisting of a download in mp3 format or a WAV in CD format. So I am converting to both. I know that the MP3 is more modern, but I like a physical representation of my music. (Plus I haven't succumbed to buying a converter for my car so that I can listen to MP3 tracks on my car's sound system. I tend to think that the standard MP3 doesn't have the sound quality of a CD.)

It struck me today for not the first time, that I am listening to a slice of time when I rip my older musical library. It was vinyl, vinyl, vinyl for me and many others from the time we came of musical age until cassette tapes became ubiquitous. Those darn 8-tracks were an evolutionary dead-end, similar to the Neanderthal. I recall that cassettes became a viable medium sometime in the late 1970's. I bought a high-end cassette deck in 1978 I think. (1979?) But I continued to buy vinyl as my "music delivery system" until well into the 1980's. It wasn't until about 1985-1986 or so that I started to record every vinyl record onto tape when I listened to it. Even then, I still bought vinyl for several reasons: (1)used vinyl was one of my music sources and who ever bought used tape? (2)from 1986 through the mid 90's vinyl was discounted because consumers abandoned vinyl quicker than did the manufacturers of it. (3)Some of the music vendors were slow to adopt tape as a medium.

Last weekend I ripped four pieces of vinyl: The Who's Who's Next, Sugarloaf's debut album, Wendy Waldman's Strange Company, and a greatest hits compilation for Blood, Sweat & Tears. The middle two were purchased "as it happened" and represent the fact that vinyl was ubiquitous in the 70's. I bought the other two as vinyl was being consigned to the remainder bins because no one wanted it anymore.

But mostly, in my collection when I look at the vinyl I'm looking at 1966 to 1980 or 1982. From that point on, if it isn't from some minor label, it's on cassette tape. And from 1991 to present, if it isn't on CD, than it represents a really good buy from some discounter or used music store.

Today I ripped David Bowie's retro band Tin Machine's first cassette tape, self-title (check it out if you liked Ziggy Stardust). And now I'm ripping The The's album Infected, again on cassette tape. They're both from the mid to late 80's.

It's weird how physical things can indicate time. Not so much like an old rocker indicates a long ago time, but how the medium on which your music resides indicates when it was purchased. I don't know--this is probably something of interest only to older persons such as myself.

The database as a love affair

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I can't believe it's been nearly three weeks since I posted anew. Work subsumes my life, but I'm going to try to focus on something else. sing

I've written a database for my church choir to use to track its music inventory. It has unfortunately taken two months to get it going, and it still has a far cry to go, but at least it is useable. I have entered the musical holdings for two full file drawers of music and I'm poised to start on the third. There are many more to go.

I am ignoring the cry of reality that says no one much will really appreciate this database, use it for what it can do, and that the thing will die an early death despite how useful I think it is. confused

I love this about databasing: the moment of perfection is when you first conceive it. You know what the database could/should do, and you are positive that you can achieve every single aspect of it, fully realized in its perfect state.

Then you start to make the database application and it suffers from a dose of reality. What you envisioned in your fuzzy logic has had to come into sharp focus. It doesn't act like HAL on 2001: A Space Odyssey (or any other higher order form of AI). You can't make it as serviceable as you thought you could. You can't even see what you first envisioned. And so it goes. Soon, your first users (beta testers of a sort) are saying "it needs to do this." You respond and the whole thing gets clunkier. Or they say, "why can't it do that" and although you know it's a bad idea and you try to explain why it can't do "that" now you're left with the nagging feeling that the DB has fallen short.

In many ways it is like love. You start off with a vision of the perfect woman and the perfect relationship, but you both fall far short of the picture. And programming the database is like love in that you learn to go with the flow and find meaning in what is, not what you thought things would be. Sometimes you are surprised. Usually you are disappointed. But you live for the surprises.

bigeyes

Night of the Long Knives

When I worked at a pharmaceutical company in 1999, the site belonged to a major multi-national giant (think aspirin). They had put it up for sale and in that year it was purchased by a local management group. The buyers intended to make it a contract filler for pharmaceutical companies, but before they took ownership they expected the parent company to lay off a significant number of personnel that the new owners didn't want. My wife and I have forever after referred to it as the Night of the Long Knives (even though it happened in the daytime). When it was done, 19 persons were gone from a company of 200-250. They even called a guy up from several hundred miles away simply to fire him.

The past two weeks have been more like the Death of a Thousand Cuts. On Feb. 6th they "suspended" the director of manufacturing. On that Friday, Feb. 8, they "suspended" the manager of Quality Control and a guy who had numerous personnel complaints. On that Monday the 11th they fired my closest friend for a combination of reasons (none of them good). On Thursday the 14th they made permanent the suspensions of the aforementioned personnel. On Friday they fired the former Director of Quality Assurance, the manager of Validation, the manager of Tech Services, and the site administrator and executive assistant to the General Manager. The manager of Facilities announced his resignation last week too. This means that in the past ten days, six members of the management team have been fired or resigned. There are only seven others and that includes everyone up to the GM. Put another way, that's a total of 8 persons in a company site that has only 125 employees.

And the best money is on the bet that the firings aren't over. It would only take the firing of three or four more persons and then every person who presided over the debacle of 2007 would be gone.

It's refreshing to see things being done correctly, but you remember in school when two or three miscreants would cause the whole class to be punished? That's what's going on here.

Pray for us all. scared

Robert the Bruce


As of noon today, our new roommate. Named Robert, code-named Robert the Bruce or maybe Wee Robbie (because he is anything but wee)...



We still miss our big lug, but looking forward to getting to know the new lug.

smile

Extracted!

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The tooth extraction today served to "extract" me from the insane work week I've had. I forget the exact number, but I worked around 100 to 105 hours in 11 straight days. Not as killer as some people have been known to do, but killer enough for me.

Doing the nitrous oxide while my (split) molar was pulled and bone grafting material was packed into the hole actually wasn't so bad. The worst part was the needle that delivered the local anesthetic to the roof of my mouth. I was numb up to my eyeball!bigsmile

That was five hours ago, however, and the pain is starting to rise. I've got some hydrocodone/acetominophen combination pills to take--I wonder why they bother with the acetominophen?--and some mega-ibuprofens (of the 600mg variety). I also have to take a lot of antibiotics due to the work into the jaw, I guess.

No smoking for four or five days. There goes my Sunday cigar. mad And I suppose beer is a no go, given the painkillers.

Wish I wasn't fading so fast. I can hardly hold my head up and it's just dinner time.

ciao for now...bye

Topped out

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My hours for the first seven consecutive days of work topped out at 65.25 because my boss said "go home" yesterday. I think it was because she didn't want to work anymore and would have felt guilty if we were still there. Today we reached our finish line. In the recap meeting at 3 p.m. she told us to tie up the loose ends on our portions of the project and go home. I left at 4 p.m. and felt like I was playing hooky, even though I had worked 8.25 hours today.

I got home in time to smoke a fine cigar, drink a fine brown ale, and talk to my parents across the continent.

Tomorrow it starts anew. The second phase of the project will pass the others by. We've set up all of the batches for release. Now comes evaluating their data for the study protocols. That's my main responsibility, so now I have another artificial and incredibly stupid deadline.

Really looking forward to the tooth extraction on Friday.

Norway time?

Does anyone know how to get a blog to display "my" time instead of Norway time? All my posts that are made in the evening look as if they were made at 2 a.m. the next day.

mad