Singing to George
So, I’ve been known to sing to my cats.. Its not an everyday occurrence but sometimes it calms them down, and sometimes its just for me more or less. Usually I’ll sing a lullaby, an nonsense song, or something of the sort. But this time I made up lyrics to go with the song “What Does He Want of Me?” from Man of La Mancha.
They’re pretty good I think:
Why do you do the things you do?
Why do you do these things?
Why do you meow and paw at me?
Keep going on when you know I don’t see.
Why do you do all the things that you do?
And what do you want of me?
What do you want of me?
I’m half tempted to listen to the whole song and write lyrics for the whole thing…
Grandma Henson
So I’m waiting around at church between our morning handbell rehearsal and the service and I’m glancing through the order of service and noticing that there is an announcement for Christmas Poinsettias. The next thought I have is about my Grandma Henson. And I want to make a donation for a poinsettia in her name. And tears come to my eyes. And they’re tears of joy. And they’re tears of sorrow. And I realize how much I miss her. How much I miss her strength. How much I miss her ability to cut through family bullshit with grace. How much I miss her unconditional love. How much I miss her nurturing.
How much I miss her.
I see a lot of her in me. It makes me sad that she wasn’t able to see the young man I’ve become. I’d think she’d be comforted by the fact that I’ve found myself a spiritual community to be a part of.
I often wonder if she is here in some way.
So in theory I’ve been participating in Nanowrimo again this year. So far I’ve put in enough words for one day of effort on a straight line average basis.
On the other hand I’ve gotten lots of other stuff done, so I consider this to be a success.
My largest accomplishment was a reworking of my blog templates. From a broad design standpoint nothing huge has changed. But I’ve made all sorts of little improvements. Including:
- Comment forms on static pages, so you can see the blog entry while you’re commenting on it.
- Comment listings no longer direct to just a listing of the comments, but to the individual archive page, so you can see the entry and the comments on the same page.
- Yearly Directories. This was the most important part I think. My templates were last updated sometime in 2004, and at that point 18 months or so was a reasonable list. I’m upto thirty four months of blog entries. That just got to be a little insane to navigate, and often it the menubar was longer than the entry.
- Related links at the top. I reworked the sitewide template to allow a “topper” to be added to the menubar. The benefits of this is that the most likely to be accessed links are at the top of the page. No digging in below the search box.
- In general a better visual language for the menubar. I’ve broken it up with lines into their own boxes, so I can group links into more logical categories, instead of just having huge lists
- I’ve added an Atom 1.0 feed, and stopped linking to my RSS 1.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds. (They’re both there since there is no pressing reason to remove them, you just have to have already linked to them.)
To provide a little perspective on this, the Path to Enlightened Insanity via Defacted Musings, has gone from being driven by 16 templates to being driven by 25 templates. A majority of the preexisting 16 templates were also significantly changed.
My next focus is going to be implementing some templates and tags to reduce the size of my HTML pages, as they’re getting to be a bit big. (One HTML file is actually a whole megabyte on its own.. thats all text, no pictures!) After that I need to roll out my mailing list that I’ve had around more or less for a couple years, without advertising it..
Oh, yeah and all of this work is going ontop of Movable Type 2.64. Those of you who know blog software will think I’m crazy, but its like a VW Bug. It keeps going until you just decided to kill it. At the moment it does everything I need it to do. Sure I’ve stretched it with some plugins and some Server Side Include driven magic, but it keeps on trucking as a nice cornerstone to my website.
I’d replace it but I’m not inclined to rebuild everything.
Hoping for Nine Golden Lives
I’m finishing up some final tasks on my laptop as I lie in bed. One of my cats is resting his head on my shoulder. This is a new thing for him, its about two weeks old or so.
My boys, as I call the two cats who have been my companions for the past four years, never cease to amaze and amuse me. As much as I complain about them being attention hogs, cuddle whores, and noisy creatures, I don’t know what I’d do without them.
The potential of losing them scares the shit out of me. It is one of those things I try not to contemplate because it just brings out a raw fear of the unknown. All things considered, it is highly likely that they’ll be with me for the next ten or more years, or tonight could be their last night with me. I just don’t know.
I’ve lost pets before, but in all those cases they were “family” pets, where I was one of many humans with the relationship with the pet.
In this case I am the consistent human in my cats’ lives. It is different somehow.
I had a friend who has an older cat who is suffering. She fears having to make the decision to put her cat down. I don’t even want to contemplate being in that position, let alone the decision itself. My advise to her:
Compassion is doing what is right for someone else, even when it doesn’t feel right for us.
I’ve been reexamining the golden rule, and trying to figure out if I live it daily. And I’ve discovered that I try to and want to, but it is harder than I thought to actually live it consistently.
Even with that said, I don’t envy the situation of the pet owner who is faced with the decision to end a pet’s suffering by ending his or her life.
It is hard to live the Golden Rule.
Another Trip Around the Sun
So I just completed another trip around the sun since I became a separate being. (For the purists out there, I’m declaring this about seven hours early. If you knew that, umm you better be my parents or you know a little too much about me..)
Nothing amazing, it feels like just another day.. I cheated and opened the gifts my parents sent me last night before I went to bed. Very cool snazzy stuff. ;-)
High Standards: A Tribute to HC
Recent revelations at my current workplace and personal life have brought back memories of working through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
I know for many Katrina signifies failure and death on the Gulf Coast.
For me it signifies success in a blast fire oven.
When Katrina hit I was working in Logistics and getting stuff moved around the country. Usually this job was all about negotiation and getting everyone on the same page and with their ducks in a row to get things done.
Katrina instantly multiplied the number of pages ten-fold and sent the ducks into a flurry of action and interaction unmatched even by the sub-molecular flurry in a nuclear reactor.
It is amazing how much the usual political bullshit, turf wrangling, and general friction points get ground out and expunged damn near instantly when extreme situations arise.
Honestly much of working through Katrina’s aftermath is a blur.
There is one interaction that I still remember.
I was in the office late managing to get a few ducks in a row to get bananas from our Florida port to Atlanta. This wasn’t something we usually did as Atlanta used to be served from Gulfport, Mississippi. Our Gulfport operation had lost the gamble with Katrina when a casino was dropped upon it. Moving this sourcing point was no easy feat, as it doubled the transportation distance and time over pulling them from Gulfport.
I was working with one of our trusted, long term partners, an Atlanta based family run company. Usually we worked with MC, the operating manager, and son of the couple that ran the business.
However MC has volunteered and was driving one truck of a convoy of relief supplies into Gulfport, so I was working with HC, his father.
HC was an older man, sharp, personable, although like many his age he lagged in his computing abilities.
I remember I was talking with HC at the end of the day putting the finishing touches on getting the Florida-Atlanta lane ready to go and getting all the ducks in a row. HC and I had worked through a number of issues and we were wrapping up the call. When, he meekly asked,
“Nick, can I ask you a favor?”
“Sure HC, what can I do?”
“MC and our dispatcher are out of the office and they’re the ones that pull the loads,” trucker speak for the exact details needed to get a truckload of product from point A to B, “off the computer, and he’s not here.” HC paused and uncharacteristically meekly, and a bit embarrassed he continued, “I dont’ know how to do that.”
I quickly offered to pull the loads for him and fax them to him.
He held himself to high standards and was uncomfortable letting me see a deficiency. For me this was the simplest problem I had solved all day, it was a relaxing relief solving a simple problem. But for him, it was a compromising of his high standards.
I’m not sure if that was the last interaction I had with HC or not. It surely is the last one I remember.
He passed away on Christmas Day 2006.
I’m sure he never compromised on his high standards.
Gay High Standards
I’ve learned that I share two major pieces of my core identity with a former classmate of mine from middle school and upper school. We both hold ourselves to high standards and we’re both gay
L, my former classmate and I were good friends, but we drifted apart in upper school. I don’t remember anything specific that pushed us apart.
I was chatting with another recently single friend in Columbus Ohio and I recommended okcupid.com to look at guys personal ads. Just out of curiosity and to validate that okcupid is as useful in Columbus as it is in Seattle I did a search for gay guys in Columbus.
I noticed a picture that looked familiar. It could have been L, but it also might not have been. (We’even’t seen each other in eight years.) In laziness and coyness I just left him a woo, a simple show of interest. A little more coyness later, I’ve confirmed that yes, this is L.
L has felt guilty for abandoning me in a “dire circumstance”. The thing is I can’t and won’t fault him with abandoning me. It would have been nice if we had been closer friends, but the closet is a strange place and I find it hard to fault anyone for their actions or lack thereof when they are in the social straight jacket of the closet.
So thats where I see L as being hard on himself. Now for the trickier and more personal part.
I don’t want to share this next part, but part of me says I must.
This occurred when I was 17, during the summer of 1998. A period when I knew L, and went to school with him. I had at this point started flirting around with Yahoo! Personals and I met up with D, a guy who went to Wright State University, at the local Don Pablos. We had a good lunch, then he invited me over to his place. Being naive in the patterns of gay relationships I agreed, and left my car at Don Pablos, and rode with him, to his apartment. Once we got there I had no idea where I was.
We had sex. It felt good, liberating really. I remember having confused tears of relief. Then it turned to a point where I wanted it to stop and it didn’t. I still remember cuddling with D, watching the red LED clock tick off the minutes.
I had a meeting at work that I needed to go to. It took far more conjoling and nagging than it should have to get a ride back to my car. I wanted to get a shower, but he said I’d get used to the feeling. I still remember the meeting. It was canceled, but replaced with tasks that needed done. I remember working in the office at McDonald’s on some plan to speed the drive-thru up.
I remember wanting a shower.
This story still makes me uneasy even today, ten years later.
I remember telling this to a counselor when I was in Atlanta in 2002. I berated myself for being stupid, too eager, letting myself place myself in a position where that could happen. She told me I was too hard on myself, that I was being unreasonable judging my 17 year old self by my 21 year old standards.
To be honest ten years later I still think I was stupid and naive, but that experience still drives the personal rules I follow when dating.
Thank you D for teaching me to be cautious and untrustworthy of people I’ve just met. Fuck you for the way in which you did it. Bastard.
So thats it. I often have high standards, but even so I sometimes fall short of them.
Copy and Paste
If you watch me use a computer for long enough you’ll probably note that I’ll try not to use Copy and Paste. Especially in instances where I’m pasting in information but don’t have visual confirmation of what I’ve pasted. (e.g. pasting into a password field)
Instead you’ll see me going Cut, Paste into the field I just cut from, Paste into the field I need to place the clipping.
The reason I do this is I’ve run into enough instances where I think I have copied something, but upon pasting it I realize that I haven’t actually copied it.
The more and more I think about this the more and more I believe this is a design flaw that has been propagated all over many different operating systems. The key flaw is computers should provide some type of confirmation that they have received a user’s input and have acted upon it. (or are unable to act upon it.) As far as I know no OS provides this with their copy functionalities. The feedback doesn’t have to be bombastic or very explicit, but it should be there when you want to see it. With copying from text the feedback could be as simple as a sound or perhaps removing the selection on the text that was copied.
I’m not an interface designer, but I’ve been around computers and trained others on using them long enough that I feel I’ve got some intelligence about the matter.
Paying Respect
I’ll admit I’ve come to my wit’s end about ideas about Iraq. I still stand by my position that we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq, but now that we’re there we United States Citizens have a responsibility to the country and the people who live and lived there.
I recognize that I have little power to change what happens in Iraq. I can write on my blog, write my senator, or join a protest. Of course there are options that require more commitment, such as joining a humanitarian relief agency that does work in Iraq or with Iraqi refugees, or joining the Army.
I do one thing that actually keeps me connected and aware of my responsibility as an owner of the United States Government. I consistently read the Names of the Dead. It is a small pittance really, but it is a tendril that keeps me connected.
I’m surprised really on how often there is some way that personally connects me to the soldiers who have died in Iraq. In today’s article 22 year old Vincent A. Madero of Port Hueneme, California was the sole confirmed death. Those who knew me at Chiquita will recognize that I was the Logistics Coordinator for Chiquita’s trucking operations in Port Hueneme. I’ve been there, I’ve probably driven down, or walked on the same streets as Specialist Madero.
Reading the Names of the Dead has become a requirement and a high priority when I see in my RSS reader that it has been updated.
It is the least I can do to pay my respects.
Where I ramble on about HR stuff.
I’ve been ruminating on the relationships between employers and employees.
To no ones surprised I’ve come to the conclusion that its horribly unbalanced.
On the other hand I think the balance between Unions, employees, and employers sucks just as much.
I remember one of the guys I used to work with who had worked with unions on the employer side said, “You get a contract then you let them hang themselves by it.” Basically the employer gets what they need out of it, and you start terminating people for violations. Even if in a non unionized situation an employer would make accommodations.
I don’t have any broad sweeping suggestions, but two areas that have been bugging me.
The imbalance on expected notice. An employer usually will give no notice to an employee when it terminates an employee, but will expect two weeks notice when an employee terminates their employment.
My take on this is an employer should expect what they give. If you want your employees to give you two weeks notice, put in your policy manual that you will give them two weeks notice. (Or two weeks severance pay for anything but gross negligence.)
If I were to write a policy for my company it would go something like this:
An employee is expected to use their best judgement as to how far in advance to provide notice terminating their employment. We ask that you provide at least twenty-four hours notice, and take into consideration major projects and workflow. Former employees are also requested to provide email and telephone consulting, that will be reimbursed at two times the employee’s equivalent hourly rate.
Yeah, its unorthodox, but it also reinforces freedom, while encouraging people to take responsibility.
The other imbalance (or perhaps I should just call it rudeness) is employers who don’t provide a “no thank you” note/letter/email/phone call to applicants who are not selected. Ideally any employer would provide this to every potential applicant. At a bare minimum an employer should contact any applicant who was interviewed but not selected. This is simple courtesy, and in the age of application and resume management systems it is unforgivable that they’re not programmed to automatically send an email to those who are not selected for a position. Email more or less a fixed cost, not a variable one like a letter or a phone call.
Bottom line. Employers: Learn the golden rule.