For the sixth year in a row, Minnesota has been named the most livable state in the country.
Minnesota?
I’ll be the first to admit that any state boasting both Jen and James Lileks has something going for it, but most livable state? How is this possible?
I detect a certain pro-youth bias in this week’s Friday Five. All of the questions are about hair. But what if we don’t have hair? Fortunately, I still have some left.
1. What shampoo do you use? White Rain Naturals. Simple, inexpensive, and gets the job done.
2. Do you use conditioner? What kind? No, there’s really no point with hair as short (and thin, in places) as mine.
3. When was the last time you got your hair cut? I don’t know exactly, but it must be about a month ago, because I’m due for another haircut. We have a hair trimmer at home, and Marie uses it to cut my hair to a uniform length of 1/8 inch. This has to be done every three to four weeks, or it starts to look uneven — apparently, the hairs have differing opinions about the best growth rate. I’ve tried to get them to agree on a single standard rate, but they don’t listen to me.
4. What styling products do you use? I used to try to do that. I experimented with various mousses and gels to try to get my hair to stay the way I combed it. I finally realized, about six or seven years ago, that what I was attempting was futile. My hair was thinning on top, and as a result, the hair density there was insufficient for those products to work. It’s a matter of sociology, really. If the population is too low and the individual hairs live too far apart, you just can’t generate the sort of solidarity and community spirit that is needed if the hairs are going to cooperate and point in the same direction. They become rugged individualists and each goes its own way. The fabric of society was breaking down. Riots and looting were imminent. Something had to be done.
I decided only two responses were possible: resign as their leader and let anarchy reign, or impose a fascist dictatorship. I chose the latter and got a crew cut. The individual hairs are now free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t involve growing more than half an inch. This enabled me to dispense with not only styling products, but brushes and combs as well. Once I’ve stepped out of the shower and dried my hair, I’m done with hair care for the day.
The loss of individual freedoms is regrettable, but at least I’ve made the trains run on time.
5. What’s your worst hair-related experience? Believe it or not, at my mother’s urging I actually got a perm once, sometime in the late ’70s. I was so horrified at the result that I made them remove it immediately. Whatever you’re visualizing as you read this, it was worse. Best not to think about it any further.
I picked up a box in the hallway yesterday. IBM uses a lot of paper, so there are often empty boxes around, of the sort that hold ten reams of paper. Usually I take them home; they have handles and removable tops, and make good storage boxes for all kinds of things. But I didn’t take this one home. I took it back to my office and tucked it between my desk and the storage cabinet. If I have to clean out my desk, I’ll need a good sturdy box.
I’m not saying that’s going to happen. I just want to be prepared. And I like dramatic gestures, so I’ve decided that the box will stay where it is until I have to use it . . . or until I’m sure don’t need it.
I’m also making a mental list of the things I’ll do with all the extra time I do find myself unemployed. (Why should Greg have all the fun?) This is all part of my strategy for turning the whole matter into a no-lose scenario. If I get laid off, I’ll feel smug about having snagged a box before the rush started. And I’ll get to sleep late and spend more time blogging (in between job interviews, of course). If I don’t get laid off, well, I keep my job! Either way, I win.
UPDATE: Perhaps I should write down the URL of this Slashdot thread on a piece of paper and stick it in the box, just in case. And maybe this one, too.
I’ve been an IBM employee for a year now; the beginning of May was my anniversary. I hope I will still be one a month from now. But that may not be the case.
The Wall Street Journal and other news sources are reporting that IBM will announce layoffs in its U.S. operations later this month. I’ve been expecting something like this. Technology companies are not doing especially well right now, and IBM’s earnings for the first quarter were disappointing. The stock price has fallen, and investors want to see evidence that costs are being cut. The traditional response is a layoff.
If my team is affected, it seems inevitable that I’ll be the one to go. I was the last one hired, and even after a year of acclimation, I’m still not as effective as my colleagues who have been here longer. Letting me go would be the logical thing to do. I can only cross my fingers and hope my team won’t be affected.
When I was laid off from Alcatel a year ago, I found a new job almost immediately. But I was very lucky: I had a brother already working at IBM who was in a position to put my resume in the hands of the right person at exactly the moment when a position opened up. That sort of thing is not likely to happen again, and job prospects in the current market are pretty grim.
But if it comes to that, I’ll find something. I always do. I’ve spent most of my technical writing career as a contractor, and that experience has taught me that any job can end without warning, whether it’s “permanent” or not. (In fact, my five-year stint at Alcatel was arguably the most permanent job I’ve ever had, even though it was a contract.) You just have to suck it up and hit the street the next day as a full-time job hunter.
In theory, it’s better to have a little warning that something like this is going to happen. But in practice, there’s not much you can do about it except worry. I’ve been laid off without warning before, and I actually prefer it that way. At least it’s over quickly and you can move on.
Well, if I didn’t want to know about this, I guess I had no business reading the Wall Street Journal. Nothing to do now but update my resume and then try to think of other things until the announcement comes. Either way, life will go on.
I was shopping in Wal-Mart recently (looking for a Mother’s Day card and some cardstock for printing a board game), when I heard a baby crying. That’s not unusual in a place like Wal-Mart, but it got my attention for two reasons. First, this baby was really howling — not like it was in pain, but seriously cranky. And second, the crying sounded slightly odd, in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on. After a few minutes, I decided to follow the sound and find out where it was coming from.
The source turned out to be a young woman — a teenager, really — in the handbags and accessories department. Sure enough, she had a baby, and she was briskly patting and rubbing its back, trying to get it to quiet down. Then I looked closer and saw that it wasn’t a real baby. It was a life-size infant mannequin. The crying had sounded odd because it was artificial — a digitized recording of some kind. This clearly wasn’t any sort of doll; it was a robot baby. And the girl caring for it wasn’t playing. She seemed quite serious about what she was doing.
I didn’t want to stand there and stare, so I walked on. But as I continued shopping, I kept trying to figure out what I had seen. Where did that robot baby come from, and why was she carrying it around in Wal-Mart? As I left the store, I noticed that she was sitting on a bench just inside the front door, feeding her “child” from a bottle. I got half a dozen steps into the parking lot, and realized that I couldn’t leave without finding out what was going on. Retracing my steps, I approached the young woman and said, “Excuse me, but I’m curious about your baby. Can you tell me what it is?”
She smiled and explained that she was participating in a Baby Think It Over class, designed to give teenagers a taste of what it’s like to be a parent. The “infant” was a RealCare Baby infant simulator. The baby is programmed to need feeding, changing, and so forth at unpredictable intervals, and records how well you care for it, so you can’t just leave it in the trunk of your car while you go shopping; you actually have to carry it around with you, just like a real baby. (That’s why she had it in Wal-Mart.) The student has to wear an wristband with an identifying disc that fits into a recess on the baby’s back. This is to ensure that the student actually cares for the baby personally, instead of palming it off on someone else. When I saw her patting the baby’s back, she was also inserting her ID in the recess so the baby would recognize her.
I had no idea this technology existed, but it sure strikes me as a good idea. Any new parent can tell you that you can’t really know what you’re getting into before you’re confronted with the reality of a baby that you are responsible for, twenty-four hours a day. I see that the RealCare Baby comes with an operating handbook for the instructor, but none for the “parent.” Just like the real thing.
This week’s Friday Five is about pastimes and avocations.
1. What are your hobbies? I used to have more, but the only one that has really survived the time pressures of parenting and working full-time is my fascination with games. Originally, it was just role-playing games (primarily D&D), but in recent years I’ve become rather obsessed with board and card games, too.
2. Do you collect anything? If so, what? No. In fact, I’ve never understood the collector’s urge — the desire to acquire things just to display them, or to seal them away in a climate-controlled vault to protect their resale value. I try never to buy anything that I don’t intend to use.
3. Is there a hobby you’re interested in, but just don’t have the time/money to do? Singing. I’ve been active in choral music on and off through the years. In the mid-Nineties I was active in the Concert Singers of Cary for several years and enjoyed it immensely, but dropped out because of the grueling rehearsal schedule and the fact that I was spending so little time at home. Eventually, I’ll go back to singing in some way, probably by joining a church choir or a barbershop group.
4. Have you ever turned a hobby into a moneymaking opportunity? No.
5. Besides web-related stuff (burbs, rings, etc.), what clubs do you belong to? At the moment, only one: TAPIT, the Palm user group that meets monthly in Cary.
When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, there were reports that the outgoing Clinton staffers vandalized the White House. These reports were denied by the Clinton administration, but have recently been confirmed by the GAO.
Here’s what has me confused: one of the examples of vandalism cited in the GAO report is that “as many as 75 computer keyboards had to be replaced ? at a cost of more than $5,000 ? because Clinton staffers had broken off the W keys.” OK, let’s ignore the “as many as” and “more than” qualifiers and assume that exactly 75 keyboards were replaced, at a cost of exactly $5000. That works out to $67 per keyboard.
Where is the White House buying computer equipment? Of the sixteen keyboards for sale on the Best Buy website, only the four most expensive have prices over $60. And that’s if you buy only one of them at list price. The federal government, which buys items like keyboards by the truckload, presumably pays wholesale prices for them, probably with a hefty discount.
So how does the White House end up paying $67 for a keyboard when I, a lone consumer, can get one for $12.99 at Best Buy (and for 99 cents at Computer Surplus Outlet)?
Set your TiVo to record the Friday Five, because this week it’s all about television.
1. What’s your favorite TV show and why? I don’t have one at the moment, because I’ve been watching very little TV in recent months. It’s not that I’m not interested, just that I don’t have time. There are several shows that I’m interested in and that could become my favorite, if I get a chance to see more of them: Enterprise, Jeremiah, and Justice League are contenders. I really enjoyed the first season of Dark Angel, but I haven’t seen much of the second. And I used to like Buffy a lot, but it’s become a very strange show this season and I’m not sure I want to watch it any more.
Actually, I don’t think I like the question, because it requires me to pick a single best show out of all the ones I like, and I don’t want to do that. I mean, how can I choose between Law & Order and Powerpuff Girls? It is not possible to compare those shows in any meaningful way.
2. Who is your favorite television star? Sorry, but I don’t have one at the moment.
3. What was your favorite TV show as a child? I could name several shows, depending on which part of my childhood you’re interested in, but I was a big fan of Lassie when I was a preschooler. (My obsession with Star Trek actually dates from the ’70s, when I was a teenager. I saw the show during its original network run in the ’60s, but I wasn’t impressed; I preferred Lost in Space. Hey, I was only seven years old!)
4. What show do you think should have been cancelled by now? That’s a stupid question. If I don’t care for a show, I won’t watch it. But who am I to say that it ought to be cancelled? Isn’t it the height of arrogance for me to decree that because I dislike a show, nobody should be allowed to see it? I don’t expect the entire TV industry to be ruled by my personal tastes and preferences.
I will say that I gave up on ER this year. I used to love that show, but my enjoyment of it was eroded by three things: (1) departure of most of the original cast and their replacement by less capable actors, (2) steady deterioration of the writing, to the point that the show was no longer plausible, and (3) the fact that, due to (1) and (2), I found that I no longer cared what happened to the characters.
5. What new show do you hope escapes the axe this season? Too late — The Tick is already gone.
Well, that was an educational experience.
Marie did not go to work on Tuesday; she was out sick with some sort of virus. By that evening, she was feeling better, but I was coming down with the same thing. It’s the sort of virus that makes you unwilling to travel more than six feet from a bathroom. It pretty much turns you inside out for a day, then goes away. I was ill with it all Tuesday night and most of Wednesday.
The first symptom to manifest itself was severe abdominal cramps. It felt like someone was grabbing handfuls of my guts and twisting them in opposite directions. When I described the sensation to Marie and Ruth, they confirmed my worst suspicion: this is what they go through every month. It is a credit to their compassionate nature that they actually listened sympathetically to my groans of agony and pleas that they find some quick and effective means of killing me. The temptation to laugh their heads off must have been considerable.
I don’t think I’ll ever laugh at a PMS joke again as long as I live.
This week’s Friday Five is all about restaurants.
1. What is your favorite restaurant and why? Anyplace where I can get lots of vegetables. I love Chinese restaurants that have an all-you-can-eat buffet, and steak houses (such as Golden Corral) that offer the same thing. Cafeterias are good too. Why? Because I’m on the Weight Watchers plan, and I can eat a lot more vegetables than anything else within the limitations of my diet.
2. What fast food restaurant are you partial to? Chick-fil-A and Subway. Since I started on Weight Watchers, those are just about the only fast-food chains I set foot in.
3. What are your standards and rules for tipping? 15% for decent service. More for exceptional service, and somewhat less for an all-you-can-eat buffet format, because that’s basically self-service. Perhaps I should reconsider that, though, because the waitstaff still have to refill drinks and replaced used plates with fresh ones.
4. Do you usually order an appetizer and/or dessert? I always like to start with a salad. If a diet-friendly soup is available, I’ll sometimes order that too. But never dessert. Restaurants never have diet-friendly desserts, and I usually don’t have room left for it anyway.
5. What do you usually order to drink at a restaurant? Water. Except at Chick-fil-A, which is the only restaurant I know of that has Diet Dr. Pepper on their fountain. I’ll occasionally order hot tea in a Chinese restaurant if the weather is cold. And since acquiring the coffee habit, I like to finish with a cup or two.
I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry now. Is it lunchtime yet?