My head hurts

Have been thinking about looking now for a new contract to pick up when the current one ends in a few weeks. Thought that by starting early I could prepare myself and ease into things a little slowly; didn’t expect to find myself swamped with stuff to do now just for the possibility of a job further down the road. Weird little universe, innit. You put yourself out there and damned if it doesn’t take you up on the offer.

Have been struggling to tweak my resume and detail how I fit the RFS requirements for one job, digging back through 20+ years of experience to try to wring out the last sad bits of proof that I can do a job that I know I can do in my sleep (and in less time than they think it will take). And I’m starting to think I’m not going to be able to scrape together enough. I hate RFPs and now I hate RFSes, too.

Have also been trying to copyedit some sample pages for a freelance job opportunity — it was supposed to be straight up proofreading but turned out to be a full copyedit instead. Not sure I have the time or energy to do a full copyedit on a 200-page manuscript in two weeks, especially now that I’ve seen how much work the book needs. Proofreading would have been easy peasey; copyediting, not so much.

And there’s a job that I’d really enjoy for which I have to rebuild my current very-targeted resume into a completely different very-targeted resume. Time’s running out to apply for it, if it hasn’t already. How badly do I want it?

Tonight, though, I have a massive headache, part of it left over from being sick this past weekend and part of it the happyhappyjoyjoy of a minor eye infection. Sitting in front of the computer doing any of the above is the last thing I want to do. So tonight I think I’m going to defer.

Shall I or shan’t I

So, I’m aimlessly browsing through friends of friends on Facebook, looking for anyone I might know or have an interest in connecting with. Two very small and unexpected degrees of separation later and I”m faced with a slew of people I’ve only met in this persona.

Should I friend or shouldn’t I? Should I blur the lines between my worlds? Next thing you know, I’ll be following them on Twi…oh, wait…

Oh. My. God. Should Facebook really be this nerve wracking? Will they accept my request or won’t they? (Hey, one of my nieces didn’t so who could blame you.) Can I avoid taking the rejection personally? (Clearly you haven’t been reading this blog if you think the answer is “Yes.”) Will they think I’m a complete nutjob? (Well, hey, if the blog fits…). Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!

Decisions, decisions.

In the end, I pretended I was bold.

So, if you got a friend request from me and want to say “Hell, no!” to it, don’t worry — I’ll stop crying eventually.

Breaking the Internet

As if the usual H1N1 fearmongering hasn’t been enough, now US government officials are apparently warning that:

 ”The Internet in that country could actually break if an H1N1 flu pandemic forced millions to telecommute from home, a finding that has implications for Canada, because the continent’s telecommunications backbones are so closely connected.“

(Someone made a similar comment when Michael Jackson died, that the massive rush of people to the verify the reports broke the Internet. Pfft.)

“But while the Internet “pipes” are built big enough around office towers or large post-secondary campuses to handle Internet use during a normal workday, the Internet infrastructure that services most residential neighbourhoods is not designed for the kind of intensive use typical of most workplaces, said the GAO.”

Which begs the question, “What kind of work are these people doing that there is “intensive” work-related Internet use?” In most offices I’ve worked in, usage is highly localized (local networks and Intranets primarily) — the amount of external Internet traffic would be primarily people surfing YouTube and checking Facebook and reading their personal email.

Let’s face it — if there really is a massive H1N1 pandemic to rival the 1918 Spanish Flu, most people will be either laid low by the virus itself or kept too busy caring for their sick family members to be hanging out on the Internet more than they normally would. And the Internet doesn’t really have a single breaking point. It isn’t a case of one server, one router going down and byebye InterWebs. Any bandwidth problems are likely to be localized and primarily affect people sending and receiving large files, streaming video/audio, hitting the same sites at the same time as the rest of the planet (hello Twitter slow down as people decide to share their flu experiences with the world or government health sites kacking as people panic about death-by-flu),  or using a VPN. (Our company VPN is slower than molasses on a good day.) Most people I know who telecommute work primarily on their local machines and access the Internet (for work purposes) mostly for email or research or FTP. (Yesterday, for example, I worked from home. I accessed the Internet primarily for work-related chat, email, and to access our VPN. Fairly typical and fairly minimal Internet usage. On the other hand, on my days off, you’re likely to see me watching marathons of my favourite TV shows on YouTube or uploading/downloading large files as I work on the sites that I’m working on or downloading podcasts. In short, much higher Internet traffic.)

The bigger problem IMO would be companies or government agencies being able to provide adequate service coverage if half (or more) of their workforce is sick or telecommuting. It’s a concern every year — if your office is anything like mine, the plague does the rounds every year, sometimes a couple of times a year, wiping out half the office. Forget the Internet breaking — I’d be more concerned that stores might not be able to open.

Interesting flu-related site to check out:

Google Flu Trends
It “provides near real-time estimates of flu activity for a number of countries and regions around the world [including Canada] based on aggregated search queries.” Judging by the map, Canadians are currently the ones most intensely querying about the flu. (According to the actual data, more Canadians than anyone else in the world, including the US, were searching on flu-related terms in the last couple of weeks. )

Sometimes a living language needs to be slapped

I love that English, like all living languages, grows and breathes as words fall in and out of vogue and new terms are coined and cojoined.

But I hate to see words misused. Especially if that misuse makes it into the popular lexicon.

“Blog” is one of my biggest pet peeves. This post is a part of a blog. It is on or in a blog. I was blogging when I wrote it. But, unless there’s nothing here at all except for this post, this post is not a blog. It drives me nuts to see people write “I just wrote a blog.” when they mean they just wrote a post or article on their blog. I suspect it drives me nuts less because of the actual misuse and more because I fear that the misuse will eventually become the new proper use, and that’s just wrong.

Today, while browsing through declawing articles at Suite 101, my pet peeve is “digit”, as in “Declawing a cat involves amputation of the last digit of each toe.” or  ”The procedure is not a simple nail trim, it is an amputation of the first digit.” or “Basically, removing a claw requires an operation similar to amputating the third digit of a human finger.” Thankfully other writers on the site got their words straight but seriously? The fact that the first three declawing articles I read all had the same misuse of “digit” is disturbing and just about makes my head explode.

(As an aside, there is no “pro” side to declawing — there are just excuses and weak justifications that all point back to human convenience.)

Taking up arms

The younger of my two older brothers and I have always looked alike enough to be twins. Same height, same dark hair and dark, deep set eyes. We look less and less alike as we get older, mostly because I get heavier and paler and he, reborn as a surfer dude in his middle years, is slim and tanned. But the eyes, the hair, those are still very much alike. We are even going grey in a similar pattern.

In some ways, we are on the same wavelength mentally. In most other ways, though, we are almost polar opposites. Understandably, I think, given that our birthdays are exactly opposite one another in the calendar. (A quirk of the zodiac means we aren’t opposite signs, though.)

As a young man, my brother was overwhelmingly concerned about people trying to hurt or kill him. I don’t know if that was a built-in natural tendency or a direct result of what he read and watched. He read Soldier of Fortune magazine regularly, trained in judo, ordered knives and other weapons from the US. He learned to shoot (guns and bows) and prepared mentally for a nebulous future disaster that he intended to survive. At one point, he even seriously considered joining the French Foreign Legion. It wasn’t a mindset that I could or can entirely understand.  It wasn’t all about him, though. In saving himself from this looming disaster, he also wanted to save and defend those near and dear to him. Would kill to save them — us — with whatever weapons he had available. I still wonder sometimes what brought him to that dark place where the only future he could envision was terrible and violent. What happened to him — in this world or in a previous life perhaps — to make life all about defense.

Whenever I would visit him, he would usually grill me about my beliefs. At the time, my spare moments were spent in spiritual exploration, in learning about tarot and astrology and other tools. I don’t know if the iterrogation was meant to expose the flaws he felt must exist in my beliefs in order to bring me around to his way of thinking or if it was a subconscious attempt to find a firm foundation in them that he could build on himself. All I know is that he puzzled me. This was a man who believed wholeheartedly that Hell was real, but Heaven was not, and as a result he was so afraid of dying that he would fight tooth and nail to live, sacrifice whoever he had to to do it. And he couldn’t understand that anyone, least of all his sister, wouldn’t feel the same. (I think he’s mellowed some as he’s gotten older and had children, but does that scared boy still exist somewhere?)

I thought of him the other day as I was reading a post on someone’s blog about guns and the right to bear arms. (I can’t remember whose blog it was — I’m sorry — or I’d link to it.) I’m not pro-gun but neither am I anti-gun. My brother, on the other hand, thinks everyone should learn how to defend themselves with a gun. I can’t make him understand that I don’t want to. It’s not that I don’t think I could shoot someone — it’s that I strongly suspect that, in a fearful, panic-stricken moment, I could and I don’t ever want to put myself in the situation where I have to make that choice. It’s a karmic debt I don’t want to take on if I can avoid it – saving the body but wounding the soul.

Surfing the waves of bitterness to calm waters

I’m trying really hard to keep myself in a happy place these days. It’s too easy to get mired in the quicksand and I don’t want to lose more years to it than I already have.

But there are certain topics that push all my buttons. Most people who know me in Real Life™   know what those buttons are. I can’t really vent satisfyingly about most of them here (or even on XUP’s anonymous rant page) because people will know conclusively who I am if I do that — witness protection isn’t helpful if you give yourself away at every turn.

I’m slowly divesting myself of the obligations that bring these topics front and center in my inbox on a regular basis. Unloaded one last year sometime, and got rid of another earlier this year. But it’s a lengthy process for just one duty — double it, triple it, and it grows exponentially. So in the meantime I have to force myself to just shut up and not speak my mind, which, if you knew me, you’d know is really, really, REALLY hard.

One topic involves rising costs of remaining a member of an organization that increasingly does less and less for many of its members. I have no intention of renewing my membership  (we’ve long since parted spiritual company, the organization and I, and cutting the ties is just a legal formality), but the mishandling still makes me angry. Having to watch the perky, Pollyanna evangelists patronize the disgruntled vocal few just adds an extra twist of bitter.  “Why I’ve made a million dollars extra over my career because of the organization; if you haven’t, clearly you don’t know how to be a good member.”  (It reminds me of an episode of “Trading Spouses” I watched on YouTube — related to something I’ll be posting about later — in which someone said that the people who haven’t recovered economically from Katrina just haven’t tried hard enough to get off their lazy asses.)

*sigh*

Not ready to be an orphan

Seven years ago, my mother developed breast cancer and survived.

One and a half years ago, she developed cancer in her remaining breast and survived.

Today, a routine visit to her urologist for her chronic kidney stones has raised the spectre of cancer yet again. Today, it is a vague but sinister “something on the CAT scan” spectre. Tuesday, when she visits her oncologist, it will either gain a name — and power — or it will dissipate.

We joke about keeping her stocked up with illegal recreational drugs for the pain. We joke about her going on a spending spree with their savings account in her last days so that my father is forced to find a sugar mama to keep him.

We joke when times are black. It’s a coping mechanism. You laugh or you slit your wrists in despair.

We joke, but my father has serious health problems of his own and I doubt he’d survive my mother by very long.

It’s too soon.

It’ll always be too soon.

Beam me up, Scotty

(This post was actually written on September 2 but, for some reason, I didn’t bother to actually publish it. It’s not quite as timely as it might have been had I posted it at that time, but it still contains thoughts I wanted to share, points I wanted to make.)

Some days, I think I must be an alien. I just don’t understand why people get worked up over what seems to me to be a fairly minor thing.

Take, for example, the brouhaha in September over the following 9/11 ad using the WWF name and logo.

The stink that arose about this ad was over the imagery and the tagline “The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.” WWF themselves quickly condemned the ad, saying it had been rejected by them after it was presented to them by a Brazilian ad agency.

But let’s pretend they hadn’t, that they had actually approved of the ad. You could argue that it is perhaps too soon for something like this (assuming there is ever a right time) or that it is in poor taste (I’m personally more offended by the “Save the whales” PETA ad showing a fat woman at the beach but that’s a whole ‘nother issue and even then I’m more puzzled than upset), but the level of vitriol leveled at the people who made it boggles the mind. Most people would have a hard time imagining 200,000 people wiped off the face of the planet by a single event — the shocking image in the ad is a stark representation of the very factual tagline, and it puts the tsunami loss of life (and Mother Nature’s power) in terms that most people can understand by giving an idea of how many planes it would have taken to equal the same number of people of who perished in the tsunami.

I get that emotions run hot about 9/11, even eight years after the event.I don’t feel those emotions myself, but I really do understand. But it still seems to me that there should be a point where articles, ads, and discussions that don’t maintain a sacred, reverential attitude towards it won’t be buried under mountains of sinister, frequently threatening outrage. If you’re not with us, you’re agin us.

A second example from around the same time was Aubrey O’Day being vilified for, among other things, saying that Hitler was brilliant during a discussion on FOX’s The Sean Hannity Show. How dare she! Why, brilliant people are always working for the good side of the Force. Clearly everyone working for the “other side” is stupid or they’d be on our side.

I could take Aubrey to task for so many things she says but is the concept that dictators are very intelligent really that hard to believe? Sure, they’re usually stark raving bonkers as well, but crazy and brilliant aren’t mutually exclusive, and I doubt that a stupid or even a mediocre dictator-wannabe would live long enough to actually become a dictator.

Her comments were called disgusting, unforgivable, inane…yes, perhaps “brilliant” was a less-than-perfect choice of words, since people usually equate “brilliance” with good qualities in good people. But no one seems to be particularly offended by the possible misuse of “brilliant”, but rather are offended by the classification of Hitler as an extremely intelligent man. When did intelligence become the birthright of only the good and just?

Basement Cat strikes again

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I found this image macro particularly funny because (a) I’ve been watching the Nostradamus Effect episode “The Third Anti-Christ?” today and (b) Basement Cat has been meddling in work issues again.

(As an aside, that’s a stunningly beautiful black cat.)

(As another aside, watching and reading about Nostradamus drives me about as nuts as books/shows about the 2012/Mayan calendar thing so, but I still do it. Clearly, I like being crazy.)

A long weekend wasted…

…is a long weekend enjoyed.

Got very little accomplished, but watched loads of old Brady Bunch and Family Affair episodes courtesy of RetroTeeVee at Youtube. (Just load the playlist you want and you’re golden for hours.)

Family Affair in particular was a favourite show when I was a kid. I loved Mr. French. We lived in and around Sidney, BC, in the early 70s and one house we lived in was down the road from where Sebastian Cabot lived. That was more exciting than pretty much anything I could imagine at the time. Weird to think that most of the episodes I saw were probably already in reruns by the time I saw them originally.