I’m having coffee with a friend from work who quit a few months ago. I’m really looking forward to seeing her. Keeping up with friends during a pandemic when you no longer work together can get tricky. Speaking of work, because of drama, my previous boas was fired in February and I’ve been reporting to the CEO ever since. It’s supposed to be interim, but there’s no end in sight. It’s surreal. Not entirely a bad thing - I get exposed to some things I normally wouldn’t - which isn’t entirely a good thing either. I’m trying to keep my head up, but also keeping my options open and updating my LinkedIn profile just in case. I’ve got a kid graduating high school on Friday. All the feels around that one. Lots happening in every direction. I hope you’re all well.
Formalize that. Titles are way cheaper to give out than raises. Demotions are harder than pay cuts. Make it known that you find your current place in the org chart to be more strategic, with greater transparency into the problems your organization faces and more ability to solve potential problems before the rest of the office becomes aware of them.Speaking of work, because of drama, my previous boas was fired in February and I’ve been reporting to the CEO ever since.
Graduating is great! Will that be in person? I feel really bad for all the kids that wanted that big graduation ceremony and couldn't get it.
My job is grant funded and because of that I'm only allowed to do full-time employment and have to nearer than a multi-day drive, so I'll be unemployed in a few months. I've started training my replacement. As part of that I made a big list of all the specialized garbage I know. It's a lot. That's going to take a lot of effort for them to learn. Also turns out one of the three people that's leaving is going to a fellowship at the CDC in global health which is essentially what I want to do so that'll be a good connection to keep. A Portuguese friend of mine and I are talking about trying to meet up in Belgrade. Haven't seen him in four years or so. We were going to go to Ukraine last year, but the pandemic won. Need to look at pricing since debt is coming at me fast, and need to look at if things will even be open or not. I'd say it's got maybe a 10% chance of actually happening at best, but it's fun to plan travel again.
Mom goes in for a biopsy today. After a little scare a few years ago, so opted to get more frequent mammograms, and the latest came up with lots of little spots. It is concerning. But she goes in today (at noon) for her appointment... and because of COVID, nobody can come in with her. And my Dad is pretty reliant on her for a lot of things - his memory is fading - and so I am going over to their house to hang out with dad, while mom is getting examined and getting news. Alone. Fuck every little thing about the American healthCASH system. In other news, my new dog Moxie continues to be a wonderful (and giant!) girl, but she's Going Through Stuff right now... one week after getting her she started her first "heat" (estrus), so visits to the dog park stopped, and we focused on walking her more often... but she is BIG with super long legs and simply outpaces me or my wife even at our fastest walking speed. So I bought an e-bike (for a great deal/discount from a private party) to exercise her more. But it's going to take a little training for both of us... I haven't been on a bike (outside of Burning Man) in decades, and she still pulls pretty hard at her leash. Hopefully we will find a happy medium, and I can run her for the next two weeks until her fertility wanes and she can go back to the dog park... oh, and her Kennel Cough goes away, too. Yeah. She got kennel cough from who-knows-where, and is dealing with that, too. I finally got ahold of her breeder (I got Moxie from her first owner, who couldn't keep her), and it turns out she doesn't have her shots or anything yet, either. So before we go to the park again, we gotta get her shots... but she can't go to the vet right now because of the Kennel Cough and being in heat... so we are in a waiting game for the next two weeks or so. But hey... the front yard my Mom designed and we planted together is coming together nicely. Things we planted are flowering (clematis mostly right now), and everything seems to have taken well to being transplanted. And work has calmed down. And now I need to go hang out with dad. Take care Hubs!
Finally all of my parents have vaccination appointments. Supposedly next month we are going to double the rate of vaccination and open it up to anyone over 18, but I'll believe that when I see it. It does feel like we're in the home stretch, but reading the online discourse and especially that discussion last week on here about masks feels like you're all in a different world from us. Not just because you're ahead of vaccinating, but because masks are all but despised over here, with the head of our CDC calling them useless well into the end of last year. Personally I've given up on...caring? getting angry? a while ago about how things are going or what policies we should be doing, because it's clear that I'm powerless and I too know the Serenity prayer. I just have to suffer through until the end, hopefully staying healthy, accepting that this country of mine is a neoliberal paradise whose left wing has crumbled and that accepts unnecessary deaths to allow people to go to restaurants. Anyway. Eurovision is BACK and it's wonderfully ridiculous. We are hosting this year, so it's a bit more special, watching for example my hometown in the completely unnecessary tourism-pre-song-promo's they're always doing. My aquarium is doing fairly good, I have one kind of algae that I may or may not have under control now that I've culled my largest plant and everything is growing at their maximum rate again.
I read statistics yesterday that in the United States, levels of criminal depression have climbed from 11% of the population to 42% of the population. Also that "wealth" is an excellent prophylactic against the mental health impacts of the pandemic. So I'm depressed? But also guilty that I'm not as depressed as I could be.
Over/Under: 3 years before I quit working and go take a climbing/mountaineering/hiking oriented yearlong sabbatical.
I think it's closer to six years if we're being honest here.
I am fascinated by the does-not-compute public reaction to the US disclosures on UFOs. Personally, I am comfortable not getting my head around it. I very much doubt my perceptions of reality, or that there is such a thing, in the way we like to imagine it. I expect that "simulation" is an inadequate way to describe or comprehend the nature of what we perceive, but I suspect there is something there. It is interesting to think that the influence of the observer is not restricted to quantitative quantum-level phenomena and individual consciousness, but applies to collective consciousness, and might be more qualitative. I know that sounds scientifically heretical, but I am not sure it is. If you haven't read Schrödinger's What is Life? I suggest it.
Before the pandemic I thought people mostly did the right thing. Because of the pandemic I now think people mostly do what they see other people doing. Nobody credible is freaking out about the US disclosures on UFOs. All of the pilots on 60 minutes are acting exactly as if they're dealing with a software glitch. 'cuz they're dealing with a software glitch.
They have two integrated software suites that synthesize data across multiple vessels, aircraft and other datapoints and display them for all members of the suite. They've been attempting to integrate what they have even closer. So if enough sensors agree that there's a "something" at 12nm traveling at 3000kt, aircraft within 2nm of the signal trace are given a visual indicator of that "something." The whole controversy is over the creation of false bogeys. If I had to guess? Someone is pushing the UFO narrative in order to make Raytheon look bad. Because obviously you can't publicly say "Raytheon's system is so terrible at integrating that it's showing us tictacs traveling at 20,000 mph" without violating a whole lot of security protocols.
They have radar, IR, and photo evidence of different events... not the same one. In fact, in the "big one" posted by the Navy last year, the pilot can be heard communicating with his Hawkeye (I assume) above. Pilot is telling the Hawkeye crew what he is seeing, and the Hawkeye isn't seeing it at all on their systems. I have no horse in this race. Maybe teenager aliens do flybys of Earth on a dare, once in a while. But for that to even be a possibility, it would still require the physics of the universe to be COMPLETELY different than anything we have ever conceived of, measured, or observed in the universe and all of our sciences. I'm opting to stand on the "science" side of this line, for now. I'm willing to have my mind changed, but nothing I have seen so far warrants it. And I was with the Desert Rat on the outskirts of Area 51, worked for NASA, and have friends both in secret military weapons programs and commercial spaceflight companies.
I agree that aliens doesn't make sense. I have a hard time believing that the military would compile and study glitches in such a unconstructive way. A glitch would be the first suspect in every case. Are they really consistently entertaining unknown technologies before ruling out a glitch?
I used to work for a company called Sterling Software. We were a government contractor that provided computer tech people to agencies like NASA. I was a SysAdmin for Macintosh computers, at the time, and worked for Sterling, at NASA. When budget crunch time came around, the Sterling Software contract was "renegotiated". Sterling wound up losing the bid to Volt Technical Services. So on a Thursday, we were all laid off and told to go home. (About 20k people.) On Monday we got a job offer from Volt offering us our old job back, at slightly worse terms. There's no company that has 20k skilled people sitting around waiting to be deployed to manage the servers and infrastructure at NASA. So we would go through this same performative dance every year or two. I worked with people who had been at NASA as a contractor for 20 years, and had been employed by 15 different companies. The only way you get invited back every single time is to be completely irreplaceable (hard to do, but not impossible) or completely inoffensive... you don't rock the boat... you keep weird things to yourself and don't raise your hand when you see problems. I am absolutely positive there is a development team within Raytheon who identified this issue before it happened, and know exactly why the pilot saw what he thinks he saw. They know which subsystem is having the issue, why, and how to fix it. But I'll bet the issue is where two systems come together and need to communicate with each other, but each system is written by a different company. Neither one wants to claim ownership of the glitch, but both know it exists, and it is going to take a joint effort to fix it. But the problem is rare. And collaborating with another company is hard. Especially if - by bringing it up - you are going to highlight an issue with the system that could potentially have pilots shooting live rounds/missiles at invisible spectral software glitches. That's quite a big issue. And someone isn't going to get their job offer letter when contract renegotiation Monday rolls around again, if they rock this boat and bring this issue to the fore. Much better for people to think it's aliens. I'm with Ockham's Razor on this one.
The base commander in charge during the Titan missile explosion made the observation in Command and Control that military culture is "fire whoever acknowledges the problem."