retstak.org

yeah. I’ve been a Bear fan for a long time, but this is ugly. 39-3 Oregon, and still a quarter to play.

Yonder about three months ago, I got business cards from work. They gave my title as ‘Business Analyst’.

Today, we got an org chart. On this one I’m listed as a ‘Software Engineer.’

Yeah, I’m not even sure my company knows what I do. So I have decided that today, I am a ‘Business Software Analyst Engineer’. A co-worker points out that if I get my project management certification, then I could be a Business Software Analyst Engineer Manager.

Okay, I confess, I’m easily amused.

In other news, I’m going to start learning C#. If I’m going to be a software engineer, then I’d better start acting like it. ;) (And yeah, I’m going to fiddle some with Java too, but the company uses more C#, so it’s a better place for me to invest some time.)

More later.

[Second in an occassional series that I've dubbed "Tales of the Commute".]

So the car ahead of me in the onramp today was a Lada. Now, first of all, that’s not exactly a common brand here in the United States. I’m a bit of a Russophile, so I recognized the Russian car company, but I’m not sure others would. It’s not overly suprising to see one here as there’s a large Russian community in Sacramento, but it’s still unusual.

But it wasn’t just the unusual car type. Attached to the bottom were a pair of balls. You know, the ones people attach to their trucks to suggest that it’s their *ahem*. Again, other than the slight incongruity of them being on a Lada, no big deal.

No, what got me is that the balls in question were dark blue with a yellow stripe down the middle.

I really don’t want to know.

One of the amazing things about fandom is the respective fan funds. There’s a triangle of them connecting the three largest concentrates of fandom in the world. (There’s also several minor ones, my favorite of which is CUFF, which sends fans back and forth within Canada.)

The first one, connecting Europe with Australia, is GUFF, which stands for the Going Under/Get Up-and-over Fan Fund, depending on the direction of the trip. As this is the leg of the triangle that I can’t participate in, I don’t know all that much about it. The next trip direction is EU -> AUS, for the Australian Worldcon next year.

The second one, connecting Australia with North America, is DUFF, which stands for the Down Under Fan Fund. This fascinates me, as Australia’s always seemed like a nifty place to visit. (That’s why I was hoping to get there next year, but my plans to be employed full-time by this point have been thwarted by the economic meltdown.) Anyway, this year’s DUFF trip is NA -> AUS for the same reason as GUFF.

And then there’s my favorite fan fund, TAFF, or the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund. Now it might be my favorite because I hang out with Chris Garcia at conventions and thus get the full fury of the manic TAFF delegate. TAFF connects Europe and North America, and got its start in a one-off fund to bring a great fanwriter named Walt Willis from Ireland to the US in 1952, which means the fund is the granddaddy of all the fanfunds and, well, older than my parents. (There’s a lot of things older than my parents in fandom. There are things in fandom that are older than my grandparents, actually. And if that doesn’t make most folks in fandom feel old…)

And TAFF is NA -> EU this year. And they’ve just called for nominations

So, what’s the catch, you ask? Well, if you win, you get to spend two years (or until the next person travelling in the direction you took your trip in goes) managing the fund and raising more money for it. This means talking it up whenever possible. Basically, you’re trading two-four weeks of awesomeness with two years of representing and earning more money for the fund. Thankfully, fandom is generally generous with both items and money to support the fund.

TAFF is the trip I’d like to do, as I seem to have more friends in British fandom than I do in Australian fandom, which is probably partially a function of the APAs I’ve decided to join. This would be the year to do it, too, as the trip is supposed to be attending the Eastercon in 2010, but Corflu’s the weekend before, and it would be fun to attend both and get the general vibe of things.

But after some thought on the matter, I’m going to hold off for a few reasons:

1. I’m still a newbie, and trying to convince folks to vote for me would probably take some doing. (I could probably find nominators, but again, it helps to be better known.)
2. Even if I could get past the hurdle of point one, I’m part-time at my job. This means I get no vacation whatsoever. My attendance at Worldcon was sandwiched by two days of eight hours and three days doing my usual time, and I still lost four hours of time I’m allotted every week. It wouldn’t be fair to either myself, the British fans I meet, or the fund in general for me to have to put in work time while I’m on the trip.
3. Even if I overcame both those hurdles, I’m still dependent on the US Government providing me some small measure of my income, and the draconian asset limits attached to that. (Seriously, to get disability in this country, you are allowed to own a house, a car, and no more than $2000 in assets.) Since the TAFF fund gets put in your name, I blow the asset cap with money that isn’t even mine.

Of course, points two and three could be mitigated by getting a full-time job that offers a benefit like, oh, vacation pay, which is why I’m holding off at the moment — to let the economy warm up a bit and figure out what the future might hold as well as getting more involved and active within fandom. It’s possible I’ll re-evaluate in 2012 and do it then, but 2014’s looking a lot more likely at the moment.

But in the meantime, I just wanted to spread the word of the awesome things that are contained within fandom. And this is one of the most nifty parts, in my opinion.

First of all, I’m on swine flu watch, as one of my groupmates was pretty seriously ill yesterday, and my teacher forced her to stay in class until the midway point while he lectured (when he had first told us we had a quiz and the presentations and then she could go) and then we all shared a mic in giving our presentation. I’m hoping that she didn’t have the flu and thus, I won’t get it, but…this year, you can’t be too careful.

Anyway, if you didn’t catch my edit yesterday, this is what you missed:

So the quiz got postponed. However, our presentation didn’t go overly well today. The Star1/Star2 problem we were having I pointed out in discussions, but our main programmer couldn’t talk Access into doing what we wanted. We were fairly dinged on that one, but it was an Access toy database problem. But here’s a big hint to professors: when you require 3-5 tables in the assignment, it’s not fair to chew us out for including 3-5 tables when we could have done it in one.

To explain, here’s our Entity Relationship diagram in our presentation:

(You can click on that to make it bigger.)

Here’s how the prof said we could (and should!) have done it.

Besides the fact that this table assumes poly relationships aren’t acceptable (which, of course, in the US is true, but not in other places in the world), I’m not sure how you’d handle marriage dates, as obviously John and Jill would share a marriage date. And since our assignment said not to track divorces, I guess if John and Jill got a divorce, then we remove both their entries from the table. But what happens if Jill meets Johann and he sweeps her off her feet and they get married? Would I need to re-enter Jill at that time? Wouldn’t it be easier if her record already exists?

And that’s still not excluding the fact that the prof told us to use 3-5 tables in the assignment. I was pretty sure we could do marriage in two tables, but that still didn’t meet the three to five requirement. And as for the poly thing, he said we could make our own assumptions when I went up there and asked about things like gay marriage. So we made an assumption that poly was okay. Grr. And interrupting the flow of our presentation by asking us questions in the middle of it? *sigh* I dunno, I guess it’s a teaching style, but it seemed a little rude.

Grr. yeah. This is still eating me today, but i’ll try to drop it.

You know that dream about how you walk into class and everybody’s in there taking a test you didn’t know about?

Yeah, it’s like that. At least I’m not naked.

More later, perhaps.

[Edit: So the quiz got postponed. However, our presentation didn't go overly well today. The Star1/Star2 problem we were having I pointed out in discussions, but our main programmer couldn't talk Access into doing what we wanted. We were fairly dinged on that one, but it was an Access toy database problem. But here's a big hint to professors: when you require 3-5 tables in the assignment, it's not fair to chew us out for including 3-5 tables when we could have done it in one.]

The tale of the tape, so to speak, is in my livejournal. Here are my entries for 9/11/01. (And the next few days are filled with more reactions.)

The thing I find most interesting, looking back on this eight years later, is the sudden and abrupt change from what passes from normality (from the entry posted at 1:30 AM PDT) to the total shock six hours later. I’d later describe it that month as a discontinuity — where the graph suddenly jumps, leaving a gap in the line. And that’s really what it was to me. New York is far away from California, so, other than a few close calls, my only real connection with the incident was either friends of friends or a fellow alum of UC Berkeley showing his courage in helping to yank a plane from the sky somewhere near Pittsburgh.

So, in some ways, I feel like it’s not my anniversary to memorialize. It was a bad thing, definitely. It caused a discontinuity on the graph of our lives. But, in the end, except in grand scales that I barely comprehend, it didn’t touch me. Between that and the way things have played out in the intervening years, it’s lead me to that awkward position.

I suppose it’s a moment like the Kennedy assassination, when, as Peter Gabriel put it so well in his song “Family Snapshot”, “Peak time viewing blown in a flash/ as I burn into your memory cells.” If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you know exactly the creeping moment when you first saw those pictures and realized that there was a discontinuity in your personal timeline and you will probably never forget it again.

And that’s about all I have to say about that. I’ll go hang the flag before I go to the Social Security office today, though.

Don’t mind me, I’m in spitting nails mode today over several dozen things all colliding at once.

Some of it is financial troubles, which I don’t feel like getting into right now. But here’s the exchange on Twitter that has pushed me over the edge. (Sorry, underpope, you’re not the reason I’m spitting nails, but the convo with you caused somebody else to tweet things that really set me off.)

katster: I need to win the lottery. It’s the only way I can get myself out of the hell I’ve been residing in.
katster: I don’t know how else I’m going to be able to pay my bills and build up a modest reserve, let alone do fun things.
katster: Oh right, I forgot. I’m not allowed to do fun things because I’m poor and thus lazy.
underpope: Sounds like you’re tuning in to the Governator’s mindset there.
katster: it ain’t just the governator. it seems to be a common thought of Republicans in general. :P
underpope: Sadly, this is true.
katster: Yeah, and it’s eating me up more than usual today. I think I need to find a new job, but where is the next question.
SocialMedia_Mkt: stop eating, be productive, you need a job right: [link to how to monetize Twitter redacted]

Now, I happen to think that folks that think they can monetize twitter are pond scum and should be first against the wall when the revolution comes, but that’s beside that point. It’s the nature of that advice that just made me see red. On a day when I’m already feeling like crap, this was the last thing I needed.

So yeah, today’s epic fail award goes to assholes like the one above who doesn’t have hesitation to tell complete strangers to stop eating and become pond scum.

Other than that, I may have more to say later on the other issues as I’m not sure how to approach them. But right now, I’m just — yeah.

So I have fortune set to run when I log into my shell account. Here’s the one that came up as I was logging in today:

Your fortune for the day:
Stay away from hurricanes for a while.

Already learned my lesson on that one, guv. (Hint: Do not wish for the hurricane that shares a name with you to be ‘big enough to retire the name.’ You will get your wish, but your name will also become an adjective.)

In no particular order:

• My souvenir book and program guide for the worldcon just concluded in Montreal came today. My cat is thankful to the committee for providing her with cat toys. Cat toys? I hear you ask. Well, you see, in order to keep the souvenir book flat, somebody attached package straps, and my cat seems to think these make wonderfully awesome toys. This is why I voted for the folks in Montreal; I knew they would be thoughtful like that. ;)
• Had to take my car in for servicing today — it needed an oil change. Not a big deal. On the way home, I found somebody with a car that had a license plate of RIP BUD, a license plate frame that read “In memory of my son Bud”, and one of those in memoriam stickers in the back window. I understand that grief is a powerful thing, but I’ve got to wonder what the story is that made somebody feel the necessity of shelling out for personalized plates to bear his/her grief. Guess this is one of those things to file away and let the brain see how they can make fiction from it.
• Got my first distribution of the eAPA out as the OE. It’s a bit scary being the dude in charge, but I think I can handle it. It’ll get easier from here on out, I’m sure. That said, I’ve got to start trying to figure out how to get new members — I love the ones we have, but new members are always fun. So if anybody out there reading this who isn’t already in on the fun that is the eAPA and want to join in, it’s once a month in pdf (and if you don’t have a pdf writer, I can turn it into pdf from Word or Open Office documents without a problem). The folks in the APA are nice and we don’t bite unless you ask really nicely. So come on…whatcha waiting for? Join in the fun. Toss me an email.

And I think that’s pretty much all the news that is news across the nation. At least, at the moment.

So we’ll leave this with a question: what sort of detritus is in your head at the moment?

And I celebrate by posting my absolute favorite Cal Sports commercial:

It never gets old.

Anyway, things look good for my Bears. We’ll see what happens, but we’ve got as good a chance as any of winning the Pac-10 and going to the promised land. And now that I’ve said it, I’ve jinxed it, but it should be a fun season either way.