Saturday, July 12, 2008
I'll be waiting for your change of heart
Hello, folks. I was afraid someone would comment between when I uploaded the image and when I found the time to write the entry at work (days elapsed) but no such luck. :) I figured out what caused the thing I uploaded a couple entries ago -- and was affecting the image we have here likewise -- to be sideways. Apparently my phone's camera puts in EXIF information with orientation. It doesn't name the phone or do anything practical, but does mark whether an image is supposed to be horizontal or vertical, even if the presumption is wrong. 
I found the "discard EXIF orientation tag" toggle in IrfanView so all is well. Anyhow. Here we have a "Kurrant" made by American Elecrical. I won't rave on about it because it gets 40 miles to the charge and, since it's classed as a neighborhood vehicle, can go 35 miles per hour max, but the price is $1000 plus dealer fees so it's great for errands and downtown commutes. I'm still looking for my electrical distance-commuter car. Someone said that in Finland they are developing a Smart that's electrical -- I suppose this would be competition to Norway's Th!nk (which Ford had begun to market here in 1999 before getting stomped on [see Who Killed The Electric Car? for more info], but may come back under a different partnership). Okay, bring some of that love over here now...
I have been a member of Classmates.com for many years, but never paid for their Gold membership, which gives one the ability to read the bulletin boards and send email and see full profile details. (Not that most people write anything.) I'd been looking for my old friend Carrie Cockrell who sort of disappeared in 1997, and it turns out she's got a nice profile there. The site offered me the ability to write an email to her. And upon hitting Send, the site says "Okay, now buy a Gold membership so we'll actually deliver it." Sonovabitch... So I ante'd up for a three-month stint, enough to look at all the stuff I'd want to (then discover a couple hours pretty much covers all the bases, so the other 89 days is for waiting for my contact efforts' replies?). And this let me see who those three people who signed my Guestbook are, and discover that "signed your Guestbook" really means "visited your profile (as 64 people have) but didn't click 'Don't show that you've been here' after looking", not something actually special. I emailed everyone who had left their mark, then looked up a few people so I could leave my mark and email them (hey, I paid for it, I'll damned well do it!). Funny, nearly a week later, only one person has replied (and it's not Carrie) -- and this is someone that a mutual friend is always telling me the whereabouts and whatabouts of so it's not like neither of us had lost touch for real. Tangental thought: my wife's 30th high school reunion is coming up in a couple months, and she keeps throwing away the postcards and so forth because she's not going.
Stupidity of the day, as of several days ago, is that my boss-unit decided it was time to move everyone around, to put the old people who solve problems together, new people together, the morning shift together, the swing shift together, and the graveyard shift together. Thing is, now it's only the old people and the new people who sit in the section where all the call/ticket monitor display screens are. This means that the morning and swing shift people can stand up and look at the screen over the cube walls (if they are at the right angle), and the night shift people are too far away. Call hold times are increasing because now we don't know that there are calls holding. My boss had me moved to this corner with the office sociopath (this cube has never been used for that reason, because he's like a betta fish), and had me do this at the beginning of a shift when we were getting call after call rather than later in the day when there would be few to no calls. I emailed him asking if we could get one of those monitors (since two are like eight feet apart on the same wall) moved the the wall off to my side, where it would be clearly visible to 2/3 of the techs. "Nope, nope, probably can't do that," he said out of hand, casting an image of laziness about making a request. Days later one of those old guys said that the reason was probably based on how much of a pain it was for him to get the monitors we have put up in the first place: there was the request and the waiting, there was the monitors sitting in boxes for two months doing nothing, there was the eventual actual ceiling work to put those in, followed by a month before those monitors actually worked... Still, you never get anything if you don't ask.
I found the "discard EXIF orientation tag" toggle in IrfanView so all is well. Anyhow. Here we have a "Kurrant" made by American Elecrical. I won't rave on about it because it gets 40 miles to the charge and, since it's classed as a neighborhood vehicle, can go 35 miles per hour max, but the price is $1000 plus dealer fees so it's great for errands and downtown commutes. I'm still looking for my electrical distance-commuter car. Someone said that in Finland they are developing a Smart that's electrical -- I suppose this would be competition to Norway's Th!nk (which Ford had begun to market here in 1999 before getting stomped on [see Who Killed The Electric Car? for more info], but may come back under a different partnership). Okay, bring some of that love over here now...I have been a member of Classmates.com for many years, but never paid for their Gold membership, which gives one the ability to read the bulletin boards and send email and see full profile details. (Not that most people write anything.) I'd been looking for my old friend Carrie Cockrell who sort of disappeared in 1997, and it turns out she's got a nice profile there. The site offered me the ability to write an email to her. And upon hitting Send, the site says "Okay, now buy a Gold membership so we'll actually deliver it." Sonovabitch... So I ante'd up for a three-month stint, enough to look at all the stuff I'd want to (then discover a couple hours pretty much covers all the bases, so the other 89 days is for waiting for my contact efforts' replies?). And this let me see who those three people who signed my Guestbook are, and discover that "signed your Guestbook" really means "visited your profile (as 64 people have) but didn't click 'Don't show that you've been here' after looking", not something actually special. I emailed everyone who had left their mark, then looked up a few people so I could leave my mark and email them (hey, I paid for it, I'll damned well do it!). Funny, nearly a week later, only one person has replied (and it's not Carrie) -- and this is someone that a mutual friend is always telling me the whereabouts and whatabouts of so it's not like neither of us had lost touch for real. Tangental thought: my wife's 30th high school reunion is coming up in a couple months, and she keeps throwing away the postcards and so forth because she's not going.
Stupidity of the day, as of several days ago, is that my boss-unit decided it was time to move everyone around, to put the old people who solve problems together, new people together, the morning shift together, the swing shift together, and the graveyard shift together. Thing is, now it's only the old people and the new people who sit in the section where all the call/ticket monitor display screens are. This means that the morning and swing shift people can stand up and look at the screen over the cube walls (if they are at the right angle), and the night shift people are too far away. Call hold times are increasing because now we don't know that there are calls holding. My boss had me moved to this corner with the office sociopath (this cube has never been used for that reason, because he's like a betta fish), and had me do this at the beginning of a shift when we were getting call after call rather than later in the day when there would be few to no calls. I emailed him asking if we could get one of those monitors (since two are like eight feet apart on the same wall) moved the the wall off to my side, where it would be clearly visible to 2/3 of the techs. "Nope, nope, probably can't do that," he said out of hand, casting an image of laziness about making a request. Days later one of those old guys said that the reason was probably based on how much of a pain it was for him to get the monitors we have put up in the first place: there was the request and the waiting, there was the monitors sitting in boxes for two months doing nothing, there was the eventual actual ceiling work to put those in, followed by a month before those monitors actually worked... Still, you never get anything if you don't ask.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
you have to wonder if the state recycles
Stupidity of yesterday: My wife called me from her work about ten minutes after she left the house, and told me there was a photo opportunity on our street because there were cop cars and fire trucks and so forth blocking her way out so she had to turn around and take the back way. I hiked a block with my camera and... Seems a couple people missed the fact that it's 25 miles per hour on this street. A black small pickup and a black van were on the right side of the street, both on their driver side doors. Judging by their roofs, both had rolled once. No idea how the people involved fared because they were evacuated a few minutes before I got there and the story somehow didn't make the papers. We were in bed at the time of this event and somehow didn't hear a thing, not the crash and not the sirens.
Stupidity of today: Yesterday I got a notice from the state Dept of Licensing, saying it was time to renew the tabs on my car. Fine, dandy. But they also said that when I get my new tabs they'll be attached to brand new license plates with a completely different number. Or for $20 more, I can keep the number I have. (That seems like paying to have your phone number unlisted. No time or labor is needed to keep things the same, but you pay for the priviledge.) When I got my new plates, I found out that the difference is they've added a new security feature, a hologram down the middle, so that's why they're replacing everyone's plates. Which my wife thought was pretty rediculous since she got her car ten months ago, thus her plate will be replaced yet isn't even a year old. So I suppose that $20 is to pay an inmate a dime (if that) to press a special non-sequential plate. If I'm going to pay for a license plate, it's going to be a vanity plate, and that's something I have wanted to do for many years. Used to be Washington vanity plates would benefit the Department of Wildlife (which I'm all for), but I think there are other agencies nowadays that one can kick in for -- and I'll take any one of them except the Law Enforcement Museum. No idea if I'll ever actually get a vanity plate, all I know is that now I have to memorize a brand new plate number and it's a good thing that I no longer work in a place with parking permits that are based upon license numbers.
Stupidity of today: Yesterday I got a notice from the state Dept of Licensing, saying it was time to renew the tabs on my car. Fine, dandy. But they also said that when I get my new tabs they'll be attached to brand new license plates with a completely different number. Or for $20 more, I can keep the number I have. (That seems like paying to have your phone number unlisted. No time or labor is needed to keep things the same, but you pay for the priviledge.) When I got my new plates, I found out that the difference is they've added a new security feature, a hologram down the middle, so that's why they're replacing everyone's plates. Which my wife thought was pretty rediculous since she got her car ten months ago, thus her plate will be replaced yet isn't even a year old. So I suppose that $20 is to pay an inmate a dime (if that) to press a special non-sequential plate. If I'm going to pay for a license plate, it's going to be a vanity plate, and that's something I have wanted to do for many years. Used to be Washington vanity plates would benefit the Department of Wildlife (which I'm all for), but I think there are other agencies nowadays that one can kick in for -- and I'll take any one of them except the Law Enforcement Museum. No idea if I'll ever actually get a vanity plate, all I know is that now I have to memorize a brand new plate number and it's a good thing that I no longer work in a place with parking permits that are based upon license numbers.
