Live from Austin!

Total current budget for Maine nuclear inspectorate: $276,000/year.

Number of employees: 2.

Salaries: $71,000/year for nuclear safety inspector, $76,000/year for his advisor.

Year when safety inspector job was supposedly eliminated: 2005.

Total nuclear facilities in Maine: 0.

[source ]

Salary of Clerk of Court in Pasco, Florida: $136,576.

Number of days you have to fail to bother to turn up in order to be sackable: 44.

Resulting number of days of work required per annum: 8.

Number of days you have to be retired to get full retirement benefits: 1

Additional income the current Clerk of Court gets because he retired for a day during one of his absences: $6,242.34 per month.

[source ]

I just learned that IBM has renamed OS/400 again. It was called i5/OS last year, but this year they renamed it…

i

Yes, the letter ‘i’ in lower-case. IBM i.

Fabulous! That’s going to be really great for searching for information, isn’t it? Hardly any web pages contain the letter ‘i’ on its own, or sentence bridges like "…I downloaded the patch from IBM. I then…"

It’ll work especially well in IBM Lotus Notes, where searches are case-insensitive and punctuation-insensitive unless you reindex the entire database with non-default settings.

I also look forward to the support calls. "There seems to be some corruption in the database, the OS field says ‘i’." "Yes, the machine is running ‘i’." "A running eye?" "It’s running IBM i." "The letter ‘i’?" "Yes, the OS has a 1-letter name which is a lower case ‘i’."

Somehow I get the feeling this is going to be the best renaming since that UK railway company called itself ‘one’.

Ah well, I’m sure they’ll change it again next year.

[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]

AP reports:

Saying surfing the web is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone, an administrative law judge has suggested that only a reprimand is appropriate as punishment for a city worker accused of failing to heed warnings to stay off the Internet.

In his decision, Spooner wrote: “It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.”

He added: “For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes.”

This is something I’ve been saying for a while in the periodic arguments over whether businesses should try and lock down the Internet to only “approved” sites. Do the same businesses search employees at the door to make sure they don’t bring in newspapers, magazines or mobile phones? Generally not. (If you work for the NSA, your mileage may vary.)

Slacking is a time-honored tradition. If you ban the Internet, people will spend their time talking about last night’s TV, making paper planes, or whatever.

Now, get back to work.

As far as work goes, today was a change of pace, as I was asked to travel to Virginia to give a presentation to a bunch of sales account managers. These are the guys who handle the big customer accounts and keep the million dollar deals flowing, and the company needs to make sure they know everything there is to know about Lotus software… so I was asked to go tell them where they can find everything there is to know about Lotus software. Metaknowledge. There’s more to this nickname than mere whimsy.

I had the option of staying overnight at the conference facility outside Leesburg, but I had been advised that it had highly limited entertainment options. I decided to fulfil a dream and make it a day trip, traveling with just a courier bag for luggage. Businessmen are supposed to just carry a briefcase, but a courier bag is close enough.

I got to Logan at a civilized hour, and made my way through security; the line was short. The long line was the one on the other side which snaked across to the Starbucks counter. They were the only coffee vendor on the gate side of the security checkpoint. I queued for a while, and then saw the sign saying that the espresso machine was out of order.

Well, that was that. I walked off. I needed caffeine, but Starbucks filter coffee is the crack cocaine of the coffee world; charred to perfection, it packs 3-4 times the dose of regular home-made filter coffee. Instead, I found some insipid New England Coffee Company stuff at a pretzel and hot dog stand. It had been formulated on the Dunkin’ Donuts principle that if you water it down and add lots of cream and sugar, nobody will ever notice the difference. Pity I don’t add cream or sugar.

The flight down was uneventful. I ended up sitting next to a dark-haired girl from Colorado who was about to start eighth grade, and was traveling alone. She was reading a book on genetics, which looked to me like an introductory college level text. She was very talkative, so we started chatting about genetics. She was also interested in web development, and told me how much better Fireworks MX is compared to the version I use. To round it off, her favorite subject is mathemetics, though she also likes languages and is studying French, Latin and Hebrew.

I showed her the book I’m reading at the moment, which is a biography of Nikola Tesla. I told her about a few of his inventions, and how bad luck and bad judgement had cheated him out of fame and fortune. She thought my noise cancelling headphones were really amazing; I explained how they work. We chatted on and off for most of the flight.

To be honest, she reminded me a little of the geeky Jewish girl on Malcolm In The Middle. I was overjoyed to discover that young girls like that really exist; I hope she goes on to great things. I almost wanted to give her my e-mail address in case she wanted to chat, but of course people would probably think I was a Catholic Priest…

I don’t remember there being girls like that when I was at junior school. If there had been, I might have shown some interest in talking to girls. I also hate to think what she’s going to go through when she winds up in an American high school. But anyway…

The presentation went well, I think: I was the last person to present that day, and nobody walked out. I wrapped up early, making up for everyone else running over schedule all day, which I expect was popular. And a couple of people commented that they’d been with the company years, and had still learnt something.

The week-long training event has a rather tiresome “Top Gun” aviation theme, so I snuck in some extra clip-art of my own. A slide on getting initial bearings was illustrated by the Navy Avengers of Flight 19, which famously disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. The new giant web portal for all IBM software group content was illustrated with a picture of the Hughes HK-1, better known as the “Spruce Goose”. Finally, a slide of information about bug reporting and technote databases had a shot of the Hindenburg. I didn’t label any of them, so I wonder if anyone got the references.

I’m now at Dulles Airport. I booked a late flight back, which allowed me plenty of time to chat to people after the presentation, get a cab to the airport, have something to eat, pick up a latte, and settle down by a power socket. Good move—if I’d booked the flight before this one, I’d have only just made it, which would have meant a big dose of stress. As it is, I’m pretty relaxed.

Dulles airport seems to be pretty empty after 6pm on a Monday, which made getting through security a breeze. Unfortunately, I read that they’re going to introduce new rules requiring security guards to check the functioning of every single electronic device. I’m not looking forward to traveling with that rule in place. For vacations, typically I have a PDA, digital camera, phone, camcorder, CD Walkman, headphone amplifier, noise cancelling headphones, and I guess we can add the GPS to that list now too. I draw the line at taking the laptop, though the phone does have a web browser.

I’m also irritated to read that the airlines have won back the customers they lost to Amtrak. Mind you, it probably comes down to price—it costs more to get Acela from Boston to New York than to get a plane. Libertarians will say it’s because Amtrak doesn’t have competition, but I have a hunch it has more to do with the fact that the airlines get billions of dollars more in direct and hidden subsidies.

There’s an Air France Concorde on the runway outside. It bugs me a little that I’ll never get to fly on one. And even after all these years, I can’t look at a Concorde without thinking of Barry Manilow.

The other thing about spending time in airports is that I end up looking at newsstands, which is generally a depressing experience. Arnold Schwartzneggar? Oh, puh-leeze. Already the far right Republicans are denouncing him as far too liberal; I guess they’re still upset that their prefered choice of Austrian to join the party shot himself in a bunker in Berlin years ago.

The flight was delayed. Very delayed. While we were supposed to be in the air, the plane was still on the ground at LaGuardia. I finally got home at 01:30. sara gave me a gentle, welcoming snore as I collapsed into bed.

Last week’s layoffs are now public news.

I was a zombie on Thursday afternoon, and I don’t remember too much of Friday. I’m hoping to make a fresh start on Monday.

Work in IT? Still got a job? Expect a pay cut.

It’s just dead in the office this week. Why am I even here?

I had an interesting 1-on-1 meeting with my manager yesterday. It turned out to be a personal review… for her. She asked me to tell her what she was doing wrong, what I found annoying about her, and so on.

Obviously, that kind of situation is most people’s worst nightmare. What they hear is “I’ve got this guillotine set up, and I’ve invited you to this meeting so you can lay your head down and try it out, to see if it’s comfortable.”

I actually don’t have any problem with her. Other people find her somewhat abrasive, but I’m used to interacting socially with computer scientists, so I have a high tolerance for that. Some have felt micro-managed, but I’ve managed to avoid that because if I told her what I was doing at any given moment she wouldn’t understand most of it.

So I thought for a moment, and realized that nobody else on the team was going to volunteer anything to her in their 1-on-1 meetings. On the other hand, I’m the only person who knows how to fix and improve breakages in the databases the team relies on, so I could probably afford to take a risk…

So I explained that I had no personal issues with her style, but that some of the other people on the team did, and that I’d heard complaints from them. I then recounted some of their complaints, without attribution, and with as much tact as I could manage. It seemed the right thing to do, as the alternative would be nobody saying anything, and people getting even more tense and upset.

In addition, I’m of the opinion that people shouldn’t ask questions if they don’t want to hear the answer. I’m aware that answering people’s questions can negatively impact one’s popularity, but I just don’t value popularity very much. After all, I saw what kinds of people were popular at school and in college.

I’m lying in bed beneath a soft flannel-covered duvet, with the ThinkPad from work. I’m using it as a VNC terminal to operate the iMac in the other room. It’s not as good as actually having an iBook, but it’ll have to do.

I notice Quartz/Aqua compresses pretty badly… JPEG artifacts everywhere. It’s usable, though, and it beats Windows.

My first thought as I woke up this morning:

“But I went to work yesterday…”

Life is so unfair.