Schedule for Week Ending 3/8

So things are beginning to slow down, it seems, thankfully. The schedule sheet is actually quite small in comparison to the previous few weeks.

Monday - 11:30 to 20:00 (8.5 hours)
Tuesday - OFF
Wednesday - 11:30 to 20:00 (17 hours)
Thursday - 15:30 to 24:00 (25.5 hours)
Friday - 18:00 to 24:00 (31.5 hours)
Saturday - OFF
Sunday - 7:30 to 16:00 (40 hours)

Yay, two days off! It's so much harder to get to forty when you're working five days in a week, it seems.

Feathers On My Breath

Bobby Jindal

So, wow. After the Obama faux State of the Union last night, there was of course the obligatory Republican response. This year it was performed by one of the Republicans' last, best hopes for the 2012 election, or so it seemed before the speech, Bobby Jindal. Jindal has been the governor of Louisiana for about a year and a half now.

Among is claims to fame recently has been his refusal of unemployment funds from the federal government to his state to boost the failing budget in Louisiana. This portion of the stimulus contribution was approximately 2.6% of the whole thing - Jindal accepted the vast majority of the funds but refused to accept the portion specifically for unemployment insurance for his state. Genius.

Anyway, the speech last night had me in stitches. First of all, I watched the response on MSNBC after Maddow, Olbermann and Matthews had a shot at analyzing the Obama speech. When Jindal walked out, he was welcomed on that network with this great moment:



Yep, that's Chris Matthews uttering an 'oh god' as Jindal awkwardly strolled out to the podium.

The speech itself had me laughing the entire time thanks to his Kenneth the Page cadence in speaking. He read the words from the prompter like he was reading a storybook to kindergartners rather than making an actual speech to adults. The only way for me to describe it is surreal, since I was literally laughing out loud for the entire first half of the speech.

Anyway, he mentioned a couple things, such as a fictitious LA-Vegas rail plan and revealing his apparent undying hatred of volcano researchers. He specifically mentioned "$140 million for something called volcano monitoring" in the stimulus bill, citing it for being a wasteful stimulus item. What this item actually entails is seismic research by scientists attempting to better learn how to predict catastrophic eruptions. Obviously, money going to research generally helps create jobs or at least retain researcher positions rather than laying people off to keep important natural disaster research going.

The funniest portion of the speech had to have been Jindal's inexplicable citing of Katrina, one of the most oft-brought up examples of the last administration's failures.

Schedule for Week Ending 3/1

Kind of a strange schedule. The phasing out of some of the late night stuff has continued, and it looks like I'll be a normal person for a bit.

Monday - 15:30 to 24:00 (8.5 hours)
Tuesday - 10:00 to 16:00 (14.5 hours)
Wednesday - 10:00 to 16:00 (20.5 hours)
Thursday - 12:00 to 24:00 (32.5 hours)
Friday - 15:30 to 24:00 (41 hours)
Saturday - OFF
Sunday - 7:30 to 16:00 (49.5 hours)

I might come in later than ten on Tuesday and Wednesday, who knows. Getting off at midnight and coming in at ten is a dumb idea anyway...

Blogroll Shuffle

A bit of movement down on my blog roll, so I figured I'd make a post about it. I took off a couple of inactive/deleted blogs and threw on Andrew's new Twitter account for your amusement. Hopefully he posts enough Sonic documentaries and details of playing Rock Band to entertain the masses.

A Trip to the DMV

It finally happened today. I became an official resident of New Jersey, replacing my Minnesota license and getting new plates for my car. It was a joyous occasion, to be sure, but as anyone will tell you, the DMV isn't all that much fun.

First of all, since New Jersey has to be contradictory and unique, it's not the DMV in this state. It's the MOTOR VEHICLE COMMISSION, or MVC. It's a little ways up I-295 in a city called Mount Holly, which was fairly easy to figure out with a little cellular assistance and Google Maps. Eventually I pulled in, noted down all the information about my car, and headed in.

Oh, that reminds me. New Jersey uses a "six point" identification system, which requires you to have documentation that "adds up" to six. For instance, a birth certificate/passport is four points, an out of state license is one, and a social security card is one. It took me about an hour and a half to finally find my birth certificate this morning, but with that done, I was off.

After getting everything processed, I was given the number 94 when they were on 79. Not so bad, and it didn't take that long, about forty-five minutes at most. I got called up, and the entire process took about forty-five more minutes thanks to the computers getting screwed up for a bit, and number 106 was called before I got done. Eventually I had to take the obligatory photo for my license, my title got transferred, and I was given new license plates. It surprised me - they gave me my actual license and plates right there in the DMV.

So now I guess I'm an official resident. I have to put my plates on and get my car inspected in the next two weeks and then I'm good for another year. This is really something I should have done a long time ago...

Lotus'd

Brandon Bird is pretty much the best artist.


Music unrelated but awesome. I wish I were alive in the sixties, kind of.

Schedule for Week Ending 2/22

This week has been pretty crazy. I've got one more day left in the week and I'm already four hours over time, yay. Anyway, here's what next week's shaping up like.

Monday - 14:00 to 24:00 (10 hours)
Tuesday - 15:30 to 24:00 (18.5 hours)
Wednesday - 11:30 to 20:00 (27 hours)
Thursday - 18:00 to 22:30 (31.5 hours)
Friday - 15:30 to 24:00 (40 hours)

REVISED 2/17

I should have the weekend off, since Brian said he could work the Sunday shots we have. This leaves plenty of weekend left for hanging out with Adriana! If you're wondering, the weird timing on Thursday is due to taking off early to grab her from the airport. I thought I wouldn't have enough hours, but evidently there are plenty to be had.

Letting Go

If there's something that I've learned about in the past year, it's letting go of things. Letting go of feelings, people, ideas, futures. It's certainly and important skill to develop, though to master it makes you almost inhuman. People must grope in the dark to find the courage to continue on without something that seemed almost essential, or at least quite important.

Loss is something people feel very differently. Some obsess for years over what they could have done to prevent its occurence. The real truth is that such notions don't matter in the least. Certainly, there is value in retrospection, in peering back at the mistakes you make so as to not make them again, but obsession is unhealthy. Be assured that those around you, despite how graceful they might seem in their handling of grief, all wounds scar in some shape or form.

When someone loses something or someone they care about, it's tempting to simply fall apart, to mourn the loss so extensively that you lose your own self-conception. You become your grief. It's tempting to blame yourself for things, but in actuality it's never that simple. You are what you are, and you can't be anything else in a puff of smoke.

The lingering pain is what gets people, what ruins people. The initial loss will always be a shock to the system, whether a good friend or a lover, but if one makes the conscious decision to begin to heal, the process begins almost immediately. Acceptance is the final stage of grief for a very good reason; you have to trudge through everything else before you can truly accept the events of your life. Without that initial agony and pain, accepting the events in your life is meaningless.

You'd Better Run

Economic Apocalypse

So I was passing this around to people yesterday and figured I would post it here. The juicy stuff starts at about two minutes and twenty seconds:



Transcript:

On Thursday (Sept 18), at 11am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic out there.

If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2pm that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.

So basically if the "free market" had anything to say about it, our economic system would be in utter ruin worldwide because of a massive bank run. Congratulations Fed, you saved us from a far, far worse fate.

C-SPANning the World

As I write this, the Senate vote on the stimulus bill is about 36 minutes away. At the moment C-SPAN Radio is covering the debate live with the Republicans decrying that this is simply the shameless expansion of government and clinging to the dead notion of supply-side economics. It's kind of sad, actually, some of the tactics that they've been using to discourage the passage of the bill.

Honestly, I don't blame the Republicans for playing the obstructionist card here. They've really got absolutely no reason politically to be for it. Some form of it will undoubtedly pass, and then we sit back and wait to see the effects it has on the job market and economy. If the stimulus is successful, the Republicans get little to no credit for it; it was the brainchild of the Obama administration. If it ends up failing or the perception of the public is that it's failed, the Republicans get to say "I told you so" if they were (mostly) against it.

But seriously, they are really running out of ideas.



Thank you Senator Thune. In knowing how tall a tower of ten billion hundred dollar bills would be, I am a more informed citizen on the notion of the stimulus.

Distress

I haven't been sleeping that well lately. I keep waking up during the night because of bad dreams or for simply no reason at all. I really, really dislike losing friends.

I miss my friend.

Schedule for Week Ending 2/15

Quick and dirty schedule. This is going to be a very, very long week it seems from the looks of it.

Monday - 15:12 to 24:00 (8.8 hours)
Tuesday - 14:00 to 24:00 (18.8 hours)
Wednesday - 14:00 to 24:00 (28.8 hours)
Thursday - 19:30 to 24:00 (33.3 hours)
Friday - 0:00 to 8:00 and 15:30 to 24:00 (49.8 hours)
Saturday - 11:30 to 16:00 (54.3 hours)

UPDATED 2/09

Not sure if this will stand or not. Basically there's stuff going on from 0400 to 2400 every day M-W, so we're going to be stretched pretty thin.

Priorities

I've been thinking lately of goals, setting them and achieving them. I never set many goals, honestly, I just sort of float along saying "come what may". I suppose I'm handicapping myself by not allowing myself to succeed in this fashion, though of course I also can't fail. But anyway, let's set some goals, shall we?

First of all, I haven't seen the ocean in months. I believe the last time I did was taking the Cape May ferry back in early September and walking along the beach in Delaware. Thankfully, I'll probably be going to the beach in only a couple weeks with Adriana, seeing as she's never seen the ocean. This should get me off the hook for this "see the ocean in the next month" goal, but we shall see.

I need desperately to find some kind of art to hang on my walls. I'd rather avoid posters, considering it probably looks fairly messy. Just cheap, framed bits of art, maybe landscapes or cityscapes (bonus at night!) So let's see, for this goal... let's say at the end of March I need to have at least three bits art adorning my humble abode. Probably one in the bedroom, one in the foyer, and one in the living room.

I want to do more electronics work so my skills don't get rusty, especially on the programming side. Namely, I would like to grab a microcontroller (let's say Arduino because I'm impatient), an LED driver (TLC5940 is familiar) and some LEDs, perhaps RGB. Toss them on a project board, wire 'em up discretely and I've got another cool thing I can hang on the wall, or at least plug into it. If I think pretty elaborately, maybe a one color 10x10 or RGB 5x5. The latter would require five of the driver chips, which isn't too bad for a three color capability, and only about $25. Okay okay, I'll stop being all techie now and just post a bunch of pictures that a system like this could display!

Of course, it's also animated, so there's endless possibilities. Here's the template in case you want to make your own - please do and send 'em to me! (Right click, save as, open with MSPAINT and use the fill tool)

Cold

It begins, invariably, in your toes. The very extremes of your body, the ones most vulnerable in their separation from the central trunk. Trudging through the vast expanse of snow, your toes begin to feel not-so-snug within the confines of heavy wool socks and thick rubber boots. The material surrounding your feet becomes saturated with sweat, conducting the heat from your body externally. Soon enough the socks begin to feel cold themselves, uncomfortably so.

Your fingers, too, despite being locked in thick winter mittens, begin to feel the sting of the cold. Dexterity suffers, of course, the joints little by little becoming stiffer. The snow crunches beneath your rapidly cooling feet as you continue onward. The cold becomes a minor sting, then pain sets in. The movements you make with each step forward strain on the arches of your feet, making you wince from time to time.

But the pain wouldn't last long. The toes are the first to lose feeling before the rest of the foot slowly goes numb. Your feet were soon like bricks; you were able to balance on them, but you weren't entirely sure exactly where they were as you haul yourself forward. Your hands, too, were losing feeling, though much more slowly. The loss of movement now hinders your ability to flex your fingers - would you feel them even if they could curl into a fist? The cold travels up your legs, up your arms, inexorably marching toward the core of your body.

As your feet before them, your legs become stiffer as you march over a snowy hill, peering down from its peak to find nothing but another endless white field. Forcing onward, the hill seems steeper than before, forcing you to break into a bouncing run. Your knees won't bend. You fall and splash into the hard snow, wincing as it permeates the space between your thick down coat and snow pants. It would take a few moments to drag yourself back up, working the joint of your knee until you were certain the same thing wouldn't happen again.

The bottom of the hill on this side looked the same as the one before it. Trees dotted the horizon, and you used the occasional one you pass to sturdy yourself to rest for a moment. Sweat drenches the linings of your jacket, the long underwear you wore. It is the enemy, siphoning precious body heat from your skin, robbing you of warmth. Onward you move, as the sun begins to set to your right, stars slowly becoming visible like pinpricks in a tarp.

Your mind was slowing now, as if afflicted by the same condition your body was suffering from. You are on the ground again, now, laying in the snow, unaware of how you got there. Your legs will not answer your commands, numb and stiff from the effects of the cold. Your body has abandoned them, and to a lesser extent your arms. The warm blood that still flows through you is devoted to keeping your trunk and brain active, though even this emergency procedure has begun to fail.

And just ahead is a cabin, suddenly. You hadn't seen it before but you are grateful for its presence here. Finding your legs unreliable you drag yourself toward it, tugging with both arms in the snow, taking your time. Before you know it you're in front of a warm fire, curled on the wooden floor of this miracle cabin. Content for a moment, you realize that the warmth was slowly increasing. You would have been thankful for it, but soon your skin felt as if it were aflame. Shedding your jacket grants you temporary reprieve from this, but the problem grew worse and worse. Your clothing is removed, one piece at a time, though you still felt you were on fire wearing the bare essentials.

Your capillaries flare in a last desperate attempt to save you, heating your skin rapidly as they flush your flesh with the last of the warm blood pumping through you. The process was faster now that you had no insulation, the cold quickly quelling the nerves in your skin, numbing and deadening. Hallucinations were constant, though grew no more or less realistic as the higher functions of the brain were already gone. The eyes grow heavy, the head grows weary. Sleep is all you know.

Things to Know About New Jersey

1. If it snows, people talk about it, always. Half an inch of snow means everyone starts panicking and talking only about snow; once 2-4 inches are predicted, people begin to wonder whether or not they should attend work. To me, this is ridiculous.
2. Jughandles are the devil. They perplexed me when I first came out here, and now they just anger me. Yes, I understand the principle; three right turns = one left. And yes, I'm sure there are plenty of idiots out there who would turn left at the non-arrow light and get broadsided. I get that. But jughandles make very little sense, because the right turn at the end is just as dangerous, considering most of the time you're forced to stop in order to properly yield.
3. "Pike" means "road" and not a kind of fish or spear.
4. People totally freak out when you take too long to turn left because you prefer to err on the side of caution. Seriously, calm down.
5. People in New Jersey hate Delaware; the forty-nine other states hate New Jersey.
6. People tell me that southern New Jersey is full of hicks, but all I see are old people in Moorestown.
7. Bruce Springsteen is a hero here. I think he's so-so at best.
8. The beach is not called the beach. If you say "I'm going to the beach" people will probably look at you funny. If it's the coastline of Jersey, it's called the Jersey shore.
9. Wawa is basically a 24/7 Subway with a convenience store taped on. Very handy if you work second or third shift frequently as I do.
10. It costs $4 to leave New Jersey going into Pennsylvania and nothing coming back. No wonder people hate it; you have to pay to leave.
11. Camden is awful and I never want to see it save from the PATCO train. Never.
12. Speaking of the PATCO, it runs from fairly far into southern New Jersey (Lindenwold) all the way to Philadelphia at Locust/15th and 16th. It's $4.70 for a round trip last time I rode. Also it gives you dollar coins, which are useless in any situation that does not involve the PATCO.
13. Southern New Jersey belongs to Philadelphia and northern New Jersey belongs to New York City. This has the side effect of southern New Jersey/Delaware being fans of the Phillies, Eagles, and Flyers. I wondered why I was in New Jersey and no one liked the Devils; this is because the Devils are in northern Jersey, making them "just another New York team".
14. My Name is Earl takes place in the county immediately next to mine. I should go searching through the trailer parks.

Smile Like You Mean It

Save some face
You know you've only got one
Change your ways
While you're young
Boy
Someday you'll be a man
Oh girl
He'll help you understand

And someone is calling my name
From the back of the restaurant
And someone is playing a game
In the house that I grew up in
And someone will drive her around
On the same streets that I did
On the same streets that I did...

Girl Scout Cookies

Are completely awful for you. I bought a box for $3.50 from upstairs (they apparently have yearly sales where they just have a place to drop your money and pick up a box) and I grabbed some thin mints. While eating them voraciously, I noticed that each cookie contains 1.5g of Saturated Fat. ONE COOKIE. That's 7% of your daily value of the stuff, in one cookie.

Needless to say, I gobbled down half the box in the preference of not caring. But my god! I should have gotten the shortbread ones...

Anyway, I didn't see the Super Bowl, but had a great evening anyway. An evening with cheese and ice cream. I'm going to be dead of a heart attack by 28...

UPDATE: I finished all the girl scout cookies. They have supplied over two days worth of saturated fat.