July 2008 Archives

We are each of us faced with large problems, and small problems. Sometimes, to keep from feeling overwhelmed when there are large problems that take a lot of time to work through, we turn to the small, nitty little things that irritate the crap out of us, and we tackle those. Knock a bunch of those off our plates -- or at least grouse satisfactorily about them -- and we can convince ourselves we've accomplished something.

This is about a nitty, irritating thing of little consequence, but since it points to a larger issue -- a society that wants to punish the many for the sins of the few as the lazy-ass way to address issues -- I felt it worth blogging about.

There are four entrances to the parking lot where I work. My drive in, while not the very worst in the world, is nevertheless significant enough that I really want to make it as efficient and pain free as I possibly can. I have a route I take and it takes me past one of the four entrances. That is the entrance I use. It's convenient.

This morning, it was blocked off.

I rounded the corner, and the next two were also blocked off. The final, fourth entrance, the furthest from my route and from the area where I park, was open.

Irritating. Nitty. Small. So you just know I had to comment and see if I could, well, "do something about it."

I asked the guard on duty at the entrance, the guy who stares at you to make sure you're wearing a badge and not carrying a bazooka into the building, why they chose to block off the entrances. Turns out the contractors on the site who have been converting the old manufacturing building into offices and labs -- and there are tons of these guys on site -- have taken to using these entrances as sort of thoroughfares, blasting through the parking lot with their trucks and trailers as they come and go.

'k, so rather than pull the contractors into a meeting and telling them "don't do that any more" they just block off the entrances. So all of us, including the 600 employees in the facility, have to funnel into one entrance.

Some one thought this was a good solution. From my perspective it's sort of like building a wall around your family room to keep your toddler from coloring on the walls in there. Sure, it keeps the kid from coloring on those walls, but now no one can go in there to watch TV.

From my perspective, it sometimes feels that's how society at large handles things, too. I'm talking nanny-laws. For example, the relative handful of people who refuse to wear seat belts who then get into accidents that cost the insurance industry some money they'd rather not spend has spawned nanny seatbelt laws. Pop down to the corner store, don't bother pulling the band across your chest, a cop notices you're seat belt-less, and you stand a chance of having to pay a fine. I always figured it should be different -- IF I choose to not wear a seat belt AND I get into an accident where someone has to scrape my sorry ass off the road and someone else has to foot that bill, well, punish me and mine at that point. Or, better, the person who caused the accident that turned me into jelly. Don't punish me if nothing happens, fuck sake! Raise my insurance rates if and only if my hypothetical choice to not belt up causes them to pay out more.

Or this one: New Fast Food Outlets Banned In South LA

On Tuesday, Los Angeles City Council unanimously agreed to ban the opening of new fast food outlets in South LA for one year, in the hope this will give time for healthier restaurants to gain more of a foothold in a part of the city that one recent survey said had 30 per cent childhood obesity.

So that doesn't really penalize all of us, but the thinking is the same: because some people overeat food that is of questionable health value, the city is banning new incidences of those sorts of eateries. I still do not believe that there is a societal harm that is costing all of us when many of us have lifestyles that lead us to obesity. Any societal harm to date seems to be stemming more from the nanny nature of government taking the brunt of increased costs of social services. Maybe put social services on a diet, instead of people? I don't know. I don't have the answer. But it irritates me that punishing the many for the sins of the few is in the forefront of the mind, here.

I also think about lawsuits that, in the end, cost us all in increased prices for products and services, because the actions of one or two idiots end up making some lawyer wealthy. This is more gut-feel, though. I lack hard data for this and, being as this is a blog and not a piece of serious journalism, I can't be arsed to spend time searching for it.

I'm really just cranking on about the moron who thought chaining off the parking lot made sense. :-)

Now that I need to take out third and fourth mortgages on my property in order to be able to afford to take my car to the gas station every now and again, I've become a bit cost conscious these days. In the old days, when my laptop started getting a little boggy and slow-running, I'd just, well, run out and buy a new one.

Can't do that any more.
Yeah.

So the other day I donned coveralls, heavy-duty rubber gloves, face mask, bandanna and eye-protection then grimly set to work cleaning out my computer.

The very very first thing I did was download a wonderful freeware app called CCleaner (Crap Cleaner).

The blurb from their site pretty much says it all, and accurately:

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

I learned about it from one of Kojo Nnamdi's Computer Guys. In this case it was John Gilroy, the Director of Business Development at a company called SolutionsDevelopers (provides software development and IT consulting for the Microsoft platform) who touted this lovely little app and he's mentioned it on several of the shows. He knows his Windows crap.

Since installing and running it, my laptop shed fifteen pounds of unsightly fat. Its keys are dazzling and the whole system has a much more cheery disposition. Yeah, and it runs better than it did. Better, stronger, faster.

This is a no-brainer. It's so easy, even my techno-ignorant father could run it.

Did we mention that it's free?

Look for the button in my side bar and go get you a copy of CCleaner, too. It's free, but you can donate via Paypal to help them out if you wish. It's nice that you don't have to, but when you can, hell, it's worth saving the thousand on the new laptop, innit.

Turns out I didn't need the gloves and eye protectors after all!

I've been on a nutrition kick for quite a while, and because I lurve food I'm always on the look-out for nutritious food that actually tastes wonderful.

I ran across this recipe in a "Weight Loss" guide put out by Prevention Magazine and figured, since I took the time to port it into my database, I'd share it with you.

The cool thing about this recipe is that it supplies a good portion of protein (builds muscle), dietary fat (aids in cell construction), and is moderately low in carbs.

Click here to go to the recipe.

Fresh in time for summer, the AP recently wondered, " How much skin is too much at the office?"

New or young employees showing up to professional office settings in tank tops, flip-flops, exposed bra straps can cause the summer heat to ramp up inside managers' offices. While some companies have dress codes, many do not. Apparently too, people today are not necessarily taught what to wear to work.

I just thought I'd share a few thoughts about office dress.

1. Writers for television series "House, MD" like to have House mock Hospital Administrator Lisa Cuddy's perpetually plunging décolletage. The undercurrent there is that middle aged women who expose cleavage -- no matter how lovely -- are showing desperation.
2. When I was a young engineer, we had a new hire from college join us just in time for summer. I was pregnant with my first child and feeling particularly whalesque at the time. "Beth" had a lovely, athletic build and was one of those who could look sexy in a flour sack. Instead of flour sacks, however, Beth chose to wear tight-fitting high-cut shorts and midriff tops, and those skanky strappy sandals that say "fuck me" to passers-by. Interestingly enough, Beth never had to do any of her own work. In that day and age, most of our co-workers were guys. I think you get the connection. When their own work started slowing down, it was the first time I'd ever heard of our department's dress code. Beth quit shortly after.
3. In my father's day ('round the time Fred Flintstone was just starting his first paper route) there was only one uniform for the men in corporate settings -- white long-sleeved button shirt, black or charcoal suit (pin stripes were verboten), dark, solid-colored tie, black shoes. When I entered the corporate work force, things had loosened up a little and women were permitted to wear pants suits or very dressy slacks, colorful dresses. Men could wear nice button-down dress shirts with khaki slacks.
4. Casual Friday! About a decade ago the company I work for started to permit people to dress down on Fridays. The intent was that we could wear clean, untorn jeans instead of khakis or pantsuits. In the Southwest, however, we had already been wearing jeans most every day, at least in the engineering sections, so we took "Causal Friday" to mean we could wear shorts. This apparently really bothered the manager in one of our Texas divisions. He passed a rule: Men's knees could NOT be exposed. Women could wear skirts or tasteful shorts, but men had to have covered knees. One guy showed up wearing pants that, today, we would call capris. He was sent home. See, you could be sexist in those days.
5. Today, every day is Casual Friday where I work, although most of us keep the clothing in good taste. We're not exposing belly buttons, undergarments, nipple-outlines, butt cheeks. Our clothing is clean and well mended -- mostly. Men wear shorts if they wish. We all wear jeans if we wish. Even my boss's boss wears casual looking capris and tropical blouses (she's female, so it's okay). I wish, however, they would re-institute a dress code. I'm not sure how they could get away with what I have in mind, however, given you're not supposed to notice the particular details about any one individual, officially, but here's what I wish: grotesquely overweight people, particularly ones who are hirsute, are prohibited from wearing anything that exposes any bit of drippy flabby flesh. No shorts. No skirts or dresses above ankle length. Long sleeves and very high necklines or even scarves are required. I just don't know how much more of this guy's ape-ish bowed legs I can see each day. I try to look away, but the image is burned into my mind like a particularly gruesome accident site.

's'all. You got any dress code stories?

There's a bagel shop within walking distance of my home (disclaimer: yes, I'm perfectly aware that New York Bagel Snobs will claim that the food served there cannot properly be called "bagels" since they're not made in New York, but, fuck'em, saying "bagel" is far easier than saying "bagel-shaped food substance."). I go there a couple of mornings a week -- sometimes with the dogs and I eat outside. They get a bagel-shaped dog cookie to share, too.

These kinds of counter-service eateries often have tip jars near the registers. Toss your loose change, or a dollar bill in if you wish. Some peeps think that people who do not actually wait on you at a table do not deserve any sort of gratuity, but I figure that their wages are still calculated at food server scales, they do actually do some work on your behalf, and if they're friendly and prompt enough, tossing my change or a buck in every now and again doesn't take the skin off of my nose.

Yeah. Except today I could not do even that small bit, because the tip jar was gone.

Joolee, the manager at this particular eaterie, explained it to me. "Corporate had us remove them. They said taxing it was problematic, and there was the kerfuffle at Starbucks where supposubly managers were taking money from the tip jar ... "

'k, I didn't know about any Starbucks tip jar kerfuffle, although a cruise through Google News turned up all kinds of blogs and editorials about tip jars in general, but I digress.

"So you gonna get a pay raise, to make up for the loss of tips?"

She snorted. I was glad she wasn't near the food. "Yeah, right. This is corporate, we're talking about."

Yeah, she had a good point.

Joolee said that while the money never amounted to much, the company claimed it cost the company effort to estimate how to tax the workers for it (that's way doubtful). She said that often they would purchase gift cards for the cooks and servers out of the tip income, making it easier for the company to track. No more gift cards, and no increase
in pay is probable.

But large corporations are run by bean-counters and corporate bean-counters are all about pinching pennies, and never, ever about the people who make the company do what it does best.

Fucking bean-counters.

Y'know, a friend and I were talking about Bastille Day (as opposed to Best Deal Day) and Guillotine and it makes me think that in those times we the Common Peeps rallied against the despotic monarchies. I wonder when the new revolution will arise where the Common Peeps -- including lower and mid-level management I suspect -- once again rise up and beat down these latter day despots? I'd hate to see another Union movement, but I am getting pre-tty sick and tired of corporate mentality and bean-counterism.

Fuck sake.

A police force has apologised to Islamic leaders for the "offensive" postcard advertising a new non-emergency telephone number, which shows a six-month-old trainee police dog named Rebel. The German shepherd puppy has proved hugely popular with the public, [...] But some Muslims in the Dundee area have reportedly been upset by the image because they consider dogs to be "ritually unclean", while shopkeepers have refused to display the advert. Tayside Police have admitted they should have consulted their 'diversity' officers before issuing the cards, but critics argued their apology was unnecessary.

If Muslim shopkeepers do not want to display the image, then they don't have to display the image. If they dislike seeing it, then don't look. Man up. Throw it in the trash. But, hello, in our culture (as in British culture) -- which just happens to be the culture in which these Muslims chose to live -- dogs are revered as loving companions and heroes.

Learn to deal with these things, you whiny-assed schmucks.

Aside from that, any culture that considers dogs to be "ritually unclean" really needs to grow the fuck up and enter modern society.