Category Archives: Life

Reflections: Work & Change

This is a piece I started almost a year ago, set aside for polishing and never returned to. It started as a rant and morphed into a looking back at what, now, might be the fullness of a career.

It seemed like it might be a good companion piece to the recent post, Ground Rush, so here it is for your dining and dancing pleasure.

The original title was…

Vent: Work

Things have been changing recently at work. In fact, for two years or so, lots of things have been changing at work; you’ve probably noticed.

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Corporate Corpus

The awkward Supreme Court ruling, known as “Citizens United,” has generated a lot of discussion about corporations being people. Note that this 2010 ruling did not establish corporations as people: that’s been on the books since the early 1800s.

The Citizens United ruling allowed them to spend vast sums of money as “free speech.”

Anyone not terribly alarmed by this and what it implies for our political future isn’t paying attention.

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Ground Rush

It’s Monday, but for me it’s the middle of week two (weak, too?) of six in the, “oh, crap, they eliminated my job, now what,” fun-filled fun fest. If you’re tuning in late, here’s chapter one of the story. So far, I’ve applied for a dozen different positions, had two interviews, and have another one scheduled tomorrow.

Given that The Company seems fine with the idea of losing my 33 years of experience (and over 35 years of software expertise), I’m very tempted to just consider the retirement options. They aren’t what I’d hoped for, but… well, we’ll see.

I mentioned before that, if the clock does run out on this, it would be just in time for my birthday. Turns out, if I don’t find another position within TC, my last day at work would, in fact, be my birthday.

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Let’s go to the movies!

Yesterday I threw down the gauntlet regarding Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. In fact, that article was a first entry into a discussion about how we’ve constantly upped the ante regarding violence in movies and television and modern life in general.

That larger discussion will evolve over time as I find things to say about it. In this article I want to talk specifically about the Batman movie… or rather about the “going to the Batman movie” theater experience.

When it comes to going to the movie theater to see a movie, each time I do that lately I seem to find one less reason to do that ever again. Let me count the ways:

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Beating Swords into Rockets

Saturn V

Kudos and congratulations to Curiosity! The Mars Space Laboratory — the “rover” — is safely down on Mars. Other blogs have covered it in great detail, so I won’t go into it. The Bad Astronomer is a great place to start with anything space-related; here’s a good one, and here’s another. Maki, over at sci-ənce, has a really cute comic. And you can always count on Randall Monroe, over at xkcd, for a good take on it. (And speaking of xkcd and Mars, I’ve always loved this one.)

But I do just want to say, “Wow! This is really cool!”

And isn’t Curiosity an apt name for a mission designed to slake ours.

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Olympic Dreams

So I was watching the Olympics, which is what everyone is doing these days, and we’ll get to that in a moment.

What I was watching is that one gymnastics event… you know the one, where the gymnast hangs from a pair of parallel bars and does her amazing acrobatics while suspended above several horizontal sheets of glass, each separated by about six inches.

Wait… What?!?

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Bang, Bang; You’re Dead!

The tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, naturally re-activated the “discussion” of guns and gun control in the blogsphere. As with reproductive rights and gay rights, it’s not really a discussion so much as two sides throwing comments (or worse) at each other.

At least they aren’t throwing bullets (yet?). I guess that’s something.

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Gobsmacked!

So this morning I get up and check my work email. There’s a meeting invite from my boss, posted early this morning, for a 9:30 meeting titled “Re Org Update” and to be held in a conference room (rather than in my boss’s office).

None of that sounded good. Unexpected meeting being held immediately. Odd location. No details. I did a [Reply with Comments] to say, “Oh, oh… this doesn’t sound good,” hoping for a calming reply.

No calming reply.

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Hail, Yes!

Now, this is what I call a hail stone!

I’ve seen pictures of similar spiky monsters, but this is the first time I’ve seen one in person!

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Season of the Spark!

I felt a spark while shaking hands with someone tonight, and that [obvious pun]ed the thought that, “Oh, gee, here we go: The Season of the Spark.”

Now I do mean a literal spark, as in zap, as in ouch, and that ouch-rageous zap signals (again, in the very literal sense of exchanging a very readable, very detectable, signal) the Season of the Spark.

And that means two things.

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