Been away for a while, and came by to check in, and see everyone else is looking for work/hiring, too!

Passed my 7 year anniversary at the beginning of April, and I'm just kinda done with this company. The business is heading away from the GovEd market (which I work in: government and educational sales), and i don't have a lot of work to do on a daily basis, but the sales department is in denial about this movement of the company away from GovEd and keeps trying to put projects on my plate that we just simply are not the right answer for.

It's frustrating, because as I try to write the sales proposal for them, they can't give me legitimate answers to the customers' questions.

Me: "Ok, customer wants X, and we don't do that. So I checked "Does Not Comply" for that requirement."

Salesperson: "NO! Answer yes! We have this (totally unrelated) feature!"

Me: "So you want to sell them N to solve problem X? How is that going to work for them?"

Salesperson: "Doesn't matter; Once we get in the room with the customer and start negotiations, we can address those 'edge cases' in person."

Me: "You realize that the document I am building commits us to providing THIS feature X in the way THEY have defined it, right?"

Salesperson: "But our product doesn't do that."

Me: "Thatsmyfuckingpoint!"

Anyway, am out looking for work, interviewing, and talking with my manager about when we should plan for my departure. I'm thinking mid-June, but my Mom and Sister are on my case about leaving my job without another one already lined up. And I see their point... why not just keep doing the minimal amount of work my job takes, rake in the $100k/yr, and just keep my mouth shut?

Hm. They do have a point there...

Turns out our local rugby team - the Seattle Seawolves - really need a weirdo like me right now to come in and help manage a couple of different projects in the office. That would be cool. I hope that works out. But not banking on it ... it's not like there is an open job req or anything ... just me and the boss chatting over beers and discussing life, the universe, and everything. But he's gonna see what he can do.

It'd be nice to care about my work again.

BOOM! That's lovely communication and honesty, right there. That's the good stuff, because - even if it doesn't work out between you two in the end - you will both be clear on WHY it didn't work, because everything is up front and genuine and honest. I love this for you... honestly.

That's actually why we are going! Already have tickets, and an Airbnb within walking distance of the stadium!

Back from almost 3 weeks of stay-at-home-vacation, and I'd be OK not working ever again, honestly.

So at the end of the month I'm going to Greece and Italy for two weeks.

And I'll still have a reasonable amount of stored up vacation time to use later this year.

I'm going to do a lot less sitting idle at the computer, this year, and instead - if I don't have any work to do - I'm going to go do other stuff. Screw being "available". I'm a fucking writer. Nobody has a legitimate urgent need for a writer.

Let's see how long I can keep this up.

I read Dave Grohl's "The Storyteller", and ... shit. I didn't think I could love the guy any more than I already do... and now I do love him. Even more. Also absolutely FLOORED to hear that the entire Nirvana experience was less than 3 years, start to finish. It was the least time he was in any band in his life. Crazy.

Currently re-reading George Stewart's "Earth Abides", because I need to think there is a future out there, and this one is pretty dang good.

My Mom, the Republican apologist, gave me a copy of "The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the myth of the Scandinavian utopia" because - I assume - she wants me to read a polemic against progressive societies and uphold the hate-based principles of the american right wing.

I haven't opened it yet.

And I am regularly excited, intrigued, and humored by Fermat's Library's Journal Club, a service that emails you a (somewhat) random scientific paper weekly. The contents of these papers are always an interesting read, and it's not just new stuff... one of the papers they sent out recently was written in the 1960's. This link to one of the papers - "Why can't you separate interleaved books?" is a perfect example of the fun and weird stuff I learn from their service.

So they put in 2.05 megajoules of energy and got out 3.0; the first time a fusion reaction has produced more energy than it took to create.

Of course, to get it to that state they used 300 megajoules of energy to do it, soooo....

But... the lasers they were using are old and inefficient. And not tuned for this purpose. And working in a facility that isn't designed for this kind of work anyway...

So the NEXT researchers get to build a more finely tuned mechanism to test the methodology that produced the positive result. And THAT is exciting. The key result here is that their METHOD is better than existing attempts, and is coming at the problem from an entirely different direction. That's exciting!

They are currently estimating some interesting accomplishments and proofs of concept in the next 40 years, or so. But there is light on the horizon!

There's always a seat at the fire for you, lil.

Now that the Texan Hershel Walker has lost his bid to be governor of Georgia (and how the hell is that even a viable candidacy?!?) ... can we talk about how problematic it is for REVEREND Raphael Warnock to be in public office?!? WTF?

Separation of church and state, anyone?!?

FANTASTIC. Sleep the sleep of the free, my friend. You made it.

Laughing at Twitter.

Laughing at Herschel Walker.

Laughing at Elon Musk.

Laughing at anyone that still calls themselves a "republican" in the USA.

It's all you can do, really...

for every oil baron that donates their wealth ... the better thing ... would be to not have gotten all that dirty money to begin with. it's not robin hood if what you're robbing is the commons.

Goddamn poetry, right there. Nailed it.

I may steal this and make it my first (and last) Tweet. (Yes, I created a Twitter account to watch it burn to the ground.) And it would be ironically poetic to make my one and only tweet a stolen and unattributed quote... :-)

It took me 4 days to read this article in full, when I found it the other day. Absolutely brilliant work, and presented cleverly, in a way that non-finance people can understand.

"Genuine question, how does one get by on $13 an hour?"

By making the worker subsidize their income from other sources.

NOBODY gets by on $13/hr.

But, like Q says in her comment below, when she splits the rent/utilities, healthcare covered under her parents plan, and phone covered under her parents plan, then she can totally live off of $13 an hour!

Phone $80/mo. Healthcare $250/mo. Rent $400/mo (just picking a number at random. insert whatever number you want, or is appropriate for your area, from $300-$2000/mo.). Utilities at probably $100/mo.

So she is being "subsidized" $830/mo. That's how she can live on $13/hr.

No shade to Q, of course. This is totally common.

But when you back up and look at the big picture of how communities work, how taxes work, and how businesses work, you realize that everyone in Q's life is PAYING HER EMPLOYER for the privilege of employing her for $13/hr, rather than her employer just paying her a living wage.

"But I can't afford to pay my receptionist $25/hr!" the business owner cries!

Then you don't have a viable business, sir. It's as simple as that. If you can't pay a living wage to each of your employees, without accepting handouts from your employee's families, or getting tax cuts from the local municipalities, then YOU DON'T HAVE A VIABLE BUSINESS.

Period.

That company will fail, because it has failed to adequately calculate their cost of operations, which only ever go UP. And if you have a hidden number in the cost calculations of your budget that keeps going up forever... you will fail. Eventually.

This is why businesses are complaining they can't hire anybody... the working class have found out they were being cheated, and inadvertently subsidizing their shitty employers' business plan, and aren't having it anymore.

And there are literally dozens of famous successful businesses that operate with integrity and pay people properly, while still providing excellent products at a competitive price. Dick's Drive-In and Gravity Payments are just two of them, employing different methods to achieve the same result.

... add to that the fact that I am extremely good at what I do, and what should take me a week only takes a focused patch of about 3-4 hours ... so I know I can leave something until the absolute last minute, and still get it done.

Which is a TERRIBLE stress-maker for me. I know I have this project. I know it will take me 2-4 hours to do it. I know I have three weeks to do it. So I will put it off - constantly beating myself up for not doing it - for two and a half weeks, then finally do it.

Bleh. Terrible way to work.

The Big Moon are a recent discovery of mine, and I am as enchanted with them and their music/lyrics as I am with Wet Leg and Billie Eilish.

I wanna speak but I'm wondering how

And I wonder since when was my voice a foreign object in my mouth

Just gorgeous.

And, if you are a fan of Spotify, simply selecting their track "Wide Eyes" and choosing the automatically generated playlist for that song, will lead you to hours of great music. It was my wife's and my soundtrack for much of our weekend cabin getaway last weekend...

Holy cow! SuperShotPRP sounds like an amazing breakthrough!

Is there a way for us chuckleheads to get a couple grand invested at the earliest stages? :-)

I'm no millionaire VC, but would love to support your project, and benefit in the long run from your world domination efforts! :-)

At least you can dive into work, and start being productive. All the waiting and idling must be torture. With work to do, you can distract yourself from the world outside your door for a bit of time.

Here's hoping the Visa arrives immediately.

Hm. They unearth a tomb. Of a man. With twelve(?) women buried with him. And this burial is on top of an existing archaeological feature (like a re-used tomb). And has some wealth in the pit.

And suddenly this is Genghis Khan?

The tomb that was literally designed to never be found? All the builders were killed. All the mourners were killed. All their families were killed. And the killers were killed. All to ensure the location of his final resting place was never discovered.

I think the headline writers were drinking more heavily that day and made a leap not yet supported by evidence.

Justine Frischmann (Suede, Elastica) has been fascinating me recently...

She started a band as an art project, accidentally became a hit musical artist, didn't like the lifestyle, and quit. She's now a painter and wife to meteorologist in Colorado, and has no interest in making music anymore. That was just where her artistic inclinations leaned at the time. She did that, and has now moved on.

I kinda love that. A lot.

But, practically speaking, that's not how people use variable rate charging.

In the vehicle's setup menu, you can choose to "Charge when fees are lower" or "Charge immediately when plugged in" or set a specific timeframe to charge, which is usually late at night. Most people, when charging at home, have a fast charger installed, so even the largest battery is fully charged from fully drained in about 4 hours. And something like 90% of EVs never go below like 40% battery, or some crazy stat like that? (I can't remember the exact number, but it was something like 40-45% battery.)

Then you never ever, in the life of the vehicle, EVER open that menu again. You completely forget that setting ever existed.

In some model vehicles it is possible to adjust that setting via a mobile app ... but I suspect that is rarely used by anyone but the most passionate hypermilers.

Practically speaking, electric cars are just cars you put less gas into. You don't drive them differently. You don't interact with them differently. They are just cars, in the end. And setup menus are opened the first week you have the car, and - if you remember - the last day you have the car (to make sure you delete your personal information and home address before selling it!).

Not yet?

I'd like to do Critical Northwest again - the weeklong summertime campout - at some point, but this year was too close to COVID and Monkeypox... and it turns out there was a significant COVID outbreak amongst attendees this year.

So at least another year before I do that type of event again.

In the meanwhile, a bunch of seriously old school burners like myself are getting together for a birthday party on Saturday. It will be the first time most of us have seen each other face-to-face in about 3 years. So it should be a lovely time. There will also be espresso martinis. So yay!

The lawyer that got ahold of Alex Jones texts has now read through them all, and he says that it fills him with a feeling of overwhelming sadness and pity.

He EXPECTED to see Alex Jones as the hub or nexus of a grand group of plotters and right wing movers and shakers.

What he found was a profoundly lonely guy, ostracized by everyone he idolizes, and grasping desperately at the edge for any shred of recognition from those he admires.

And Alex Jones also sent erotic photos of his wife to ... Roger Stone.

Just .... eeew.

I have a nice Tuff Shed in my back yard as my workshop. I put it in the northwest corner of the yard, behind our big Douglas Fir tree, to make it a little less of an eyesore and keep it mostly out of direct view from the house. It's got a foundation under it and everything. Great little box to do woodworking jobs in, build fun stuff, rebuild a motorcycle, etc. It's my workshop.

Problem is, there's no power out there. So I run a 100' heavy duty extension cord across the lawn, and have a seriously janky breakout box inside the workshop to power tools, lights, etc. And regularly pop the fuse on the GFCI at the house, because electrical loads over long runs of wire act weird...

So finally took my father-in-law up on his offer (yes, he passed two months ago) and am getting two 20A circuits run out to the shop professionally.

The electrical contractor is FANTASTIC (As You Wish Electric in King County, WA if you are interested), and for about $3800 they are running power from my breakout panel AT THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF MY HOUSE all the way out to the northwest corner of my property where the Tuff Shed is.

They hooked me up with the trenching company to dig the trench out to the shop (60 feet, approx) while avoiding my 100-year old Douglas Fir tree's roots. FOR $4500!!!

I was talking to the trenching guy and laughing because the HOLE is going to cost more than the entire new electrical line, all the hardware, and all the labor to install it!!

He said, "Oh yeah. I know. NOBODY wants my job! :-)"

Here's another angle to consider: Lying does her a disservice. Maybe she is trying to improve. The coach help that happen without your candid feedback.

I've been through these types of executive coaching things before, and the coach won't share each interview with her; the coach will share aggregate findings across all interviewees. They will call out specific phrases, but in relation to a specific topic.

So the Coach will say things like, "Your team has found you to be quick to decide on a course of action, even when other ideas haven't been fully fleshed out. They say, 'she's a quick decider, but does so without all the facts'."

The first part of the sentence is an aggregation of the feedback, and the second part reinforces the coach's point with a direct (or slightly edited) quote.

Be straight with the Coach. Tell the truth. They will decide what to do with the responses they get, and how much weight to put on each individual's responses. Who knows ... they may choose not to use your feedback at all, if it is too far divorced from the other responses.

Lying always comes back to bite you eventually. In this case, you could lie and wind up with an emboldened boss who thinks she and her techniques are perfect, or tell the truth and wind up with a boss who actually improves and becomes easier to work with.

"But... we know what quantum entanglement is. Quantum entanglement is quantum entanglement. We have the mathematics that allow us to describe the relatively complex system of two entangled atoms, and we have obviously designed an experimental setup and procedure that allows us to do it."

I'd disagree with the statement "we know what it is".

What we know are the symptoms of QE when we see them.

What we DON'T know is WHY it happens, since it doesn't fit into our models of how the world works.

It's like the two-slit experiment, where light is both a particle and a wave... we can demonstrate it, but we don't know why it happens.

So we can currently point at something that makes no sense and say "that's quantum entanglement", but we cannot say how it works or why ... and then on to your next question; is it something we can use in some way?

I hope I live long enough to learn the mechanics of how QE works...

The work you are doing reminds me of my early days in the Silicon Valley tech industry... we'd dumpster dive behind various tech companies (like DEC, or Apple, or SGI) and find old hardware like your drill press... and then have to figure out how to make it work, all with nothing but voltmeters, oscilloscopes, and catalogs of microprocessor chips that showed processor pinouts. (No internet, back then.)

We'd jury-rig the equipment to do whatever we needed it to do, build shit, and sell products.

Product development was only limited by how creative we could be with the stuff we salvaged or got second-hand with no manuals or cables...

I loved digging in, figuring out how some device worked, then trying to make it work differently to do whatever we needed it to do to work on our "production line". (Which mostly consisted of Henry, the EE, telling me what to do with the soldering iron before surface-mount tech took over.)

I can appreciate the personal thrills and fun you are having as you make these things work with elegant, hand-engineered solutions... but it is so far outside of my depth by now, that I can only view the waves as they crash on the beach, without understanding what is making the water move.

Still... I find all of your updates fascinating!

I know I am late to the party, but there will never be a better thing for you to do at this point in your life, than to pull up stakes and move somewhere else on a whim.

First off, you get out of your parents house. That has to happen for you to become an individual.

Second off, you gotta deal with all the stuff around moving multiple states away. (Hint: Take nothing you can't fit in a backpack and suitcase. Literally nothing you own today is going to matter in the least, in your new place.)

Third, if it turns out that Austin isn't your jam, you now have more information about what you DO like, and what is ACTUALLY important to you, so your next move is going to be even better.

Fourth, if you DON'T go, you will always wonder if you'd missed out on anything amazing... it'll bug you at night for the rest of your life. While you will NEVER long for having stayed at home living in mom's basement.

Fifth, you will meet awesome people in Austin, because they have also heard the stories about Austin, and were drawn there. Will you all stay there? Will it vibe with all of you? No. And that means they will relocate to other amazing places (NOLA, Stockholm, Portland, whatever) and you will be able to visit them and see places you might not have visited, if you didn't already know someone there.

GO. DO THE THING. You are at the time in life when there are literally NO repercussions from experimenting and trying new shit out.

Later on in life, you won't have these options, and you will forever regret not taking advantage of them to their fullest.

Had a Zoom call with them last night. There was a lot of euphemistic terms thrown around, and implications, and, honestly, embarrassment. But I think they just went with a nasal cannula, and didn't do anything to reduce the oxygen they were breathing in. So no 02 deprivation so no death.

They were talking about the old hose in the tailpipe technique... but they have a newer car with a catalytic converter, and that's just not going to work on any reasonable timescale.

They may have lost their nerve. And yet, they are so deeply unhappy...

I wish our medical system was more humane.

It is an unusual model to ask people to 'apply' for an account on the site ... so I like it. I always like iterating on things and trying new things out.

From the newbie's perspective, though, it seems like they should have a way to see our 'applications' as well. Scan through the participants on the site, their little mini-bios, and decide if this is the community they want to throw their hat in with.

Maybe the 'application' blurb appears on each of our profile pages? So newbies can figure out the difference between WasOxygen and mike and b_b, etc?

I did a class on building fire poofers, and had a good time with it. But didn't build one, in the end.

However, the people I know who build these things like this guys' simple, direct instructions, images, and videos: https://foxfuramused.com/2011/10/12/fire-toys/