Just noted in passing, that a lot of folks are finally starting to come to the awareness, and are now blogging about it, that not merely as a nation, but possibly as a species, The End Is Near.
Please take a look at We're Toast, from the excellent blog, Nature Bats Last.
And just in case nobody bothered to "think it through" -- most people either can't or don't -- expect a really itchy future to be settling in here in Maryland, and probably most of the East Coast. Bats eat insects... and an entire species of bats that each devour half of their own body weight in insects every night, is likely to effectively go extinct quite soon.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Noted In Passing: I Need A New Gig
Well, I hadn't really intended to post anything today, but sometimes one feels the call, even if one has no answer to give.
A lot of people are worried because their unemployment benefits are about to run out. My own unemployment benefits ran out sometime back in 2002. That's right, I haven't had a "real job" -- of the sort that withholds from a paycheck -- since 2001. After a year of perfect attendance on time, no sick leave, and only one day off called to jury duty, the Dot Bomb Economy finally cashed me in, having survived the first two rounds of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a fair number of UNIX/Linux jobs, some of which paid fairly well for a while and then ended, the projects completed. I had become what's called a "jobber". Something needs doing, I do it. Need to migrate an Access database that's gotten too large and is expected to increase in size? I did that. I ported the data over to MySQL and Apache on Linux (Ubuntu) and wrote PHP scripts for accessing the data and doing data-entry. This wasn't exactly rocket science, but it was something they couldn't get done in-house. Other assignments included debugging an existing mailing-list and then (inexplicably) migrating it to Microsoft Outlook Server from a Sendmail/Procmail/Mailman setup. I've done work porting a Linux-based anti-spam system, for web-based mail, to Mac OSX. It worked great on Linux and it worked great on OSX, too.
That sort of gig has gotten a lot more few-and-far-between, and even the infill gigs I had hauling construction and remodeling scrap to the junkyard have gone away.
In case nobody had noticed, the economy is getting worse, not better, at least in terms of jobs. Yet here in Montgomery County, Maryland, everyone seems to have a job, except for me.
I've been getting by on a combination of a disability and frugality. Frugality is a habit enforced by the combination of the tiny amount of money the disability hands out and the outrageous cost of everything here in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. There are people here who aren't even considered middle-class by local standards who think nothing of paying $10.00 for a burger with fixings every day at lunch, and who wouldn't be caught dead shopping at Marshall's. I'm counting the slices of bread I have left for the month's sandwiches and shopping at K-Mart for "Joe Boxer" on sale days. Every few months I treat myself to a movie if it looks to be a worthwhile blockbuster.
I don't have an active cellphone account although I do have two cellphones, the so-called "burn phones" that you can pre-pay for a month, use for a month and then store in the electronic doodads drawer until you need them again. I don't have an iPod, iPad, camphone, or any of that sort of junk even though I sort of invented the modern concept of beltcom (they actually call them "smart phones" these days) back in 1996. I think the technology is great. I just hate what it's done to the mainstream culture. I'll be damned if I'll pay to carry one of the damned things just so that people can spam me with work-related communications in my off-hours, or to just spam me with robo-calls. I do have a very nice Nokia 770 "internet tablet", and it works just fine for playing video or audio, recording, that sort of thing, but it does not have a GPS or phone, though I could connect to such devices with BlueTooth.
I suppose that this is the single biggest example of why I don't really consider myself to be part of the mainstream culture.
The mainstream culture, and most of the subcultures, think nothing of carrying a device that can intrude at any time, in any place, and has integrated time-and-location tracking. As near as I can tell, these people have no concept at all of privacy and I blame the ubiquity of the cellphone.
Another way I'm probably more alienated to the mainstream culture than is the average illegal alien: Imagine if you will, that due to some incomprehensible fluke of chance amounting to Divine Intervention, I meet an attractive female who actually expresses an interest in "going out or something". I will sheepishly have to admit -- or perhaps not sheepishly -- that I do not have a cellphone number. Well, that instantly places me in "loser land", and I would reasonably expect to be informed with absolute truth that "but even the homeless have cellphones, WTF is wrong with you?" -and I suppose I could just lie and claim to be Amish or something. That's really going to help get a date, I assure you, claiming to be a devout religious separatist. If the conversation continues at all after that, it will be because they've suddenly switched interests... from possible affection, to studying the total freak loser.
Now the average reader might rightly conclude that any man who hasn't had a date in (checking my watch) 18 years is going to be pretty alienated from the mainstream culture. Well, 15 years ago, I would have cheerfully told anyone "if you had my last three girlfriends, you wouldn't be interested in dating anyone, either". Well, times have changed, and such jobs as I have had were deep in the technology sector, and deep in that slice of the technology sector most populated almost exclusively by men of the type of whom is said "the odds are good, but the goods are odd". This is a far cry from my days in the government, when I was the only non-gay male under 50 in a government clerical office. Whether or not I wanted to know, all day every day I got an earful of every last gossip, concern, personal triumph or tragedy, and who was or wasn't hot or not. I might not have wanted to know a whole lot about what women think and say, but I was deeply and forcibly immersed in their subculture. To this day, I find myself slipping, now and then, into the regional accent of the clerical workers who mostly commuted in from places like Lanham or Anacostia. I can speak better -- or less haltingly, at least -- in the argot than I can in mainstream "white collegiate" English. Writing, fortunately, has no accent: working mostly alone in deeply technical jobs mostly dealing with the guts of the InterNet, I hardly spoke to anyone face-to-face for days at a time.
So, philosophically speaking, in spending years tuning the building blocks of the modern mainstream culture, did all of that isolation and nearly-autistic concentration alienate me from the mainstream culture? Or was I just becoming alienated because I didn't like the culture that was emerging from my work? (And the work of so very many others, to be sure.) Maybe it's just in my nature to be easily alienated. And maybe that culture just likes to alienate people.
But I have digressed.
The disability I collect was awarded because I had become incompetent due to a medical misdiagnosis. The patient presented the doctor with mixed signals and because the doctor was mostly in the business of treating indigent addicts, the patient was prescribed powerful drugs which did nothing to treat the real problem, a severe and increasing thyroid deficiency. The disability payments were probably handed out so that I could take the proper medication, levothyroxine, and to recover as best I could.
A while back, the disability review board sent mail asking what treatment I was getting and would I please go see a doctor of their choosing. Then I got a phone call, asking for some clarification. Then came a letter telling me, never mind, you don't need to see a doctor. Maybe they found this blog.
But I have been asking around and checking the resources on the World Wide Web, and this is the story I get: in the opinion of the review board, I am well. Or if not actually "well", and who is, these days? -I'm not disabled.
And so, I must commiserate with the folks about to lose their unemployment benefits, I'm probably about to lose my disability benefits, probably right as the deeps of winter set in hard.
Thus, back to the workplace, if I can find a job in a culture that has mutated while I was away. I can also commiserate with those women who took a decade out of the workforce to develop their family.
So where will I be working? Probably not in Montgomery County. First, none of the usual agencies that might tend to hire people recovering from disability are hiring; MoCo is letting go, if anything, and the Federal government is likely to go through Reduction In Force as soon as possible as part of the austerity measures that will be required to tackle the out-of-control deficit.
Secondly, most of the employers who hire skilled labor are deeply into credentials, the more degrees the better. It's not quite as bad as downtown in the District, where even the strippers usually have at least a Liberal Arts BA degree and I've met some who have several. I've heard all of the best call-girls can give good conversation to PhDs. I wouldn't know, personally, but the point is that the whole region is awash in talent, both raw talent and highly-cultured talent. There's a lot of competition, and I don't have a degree. I'm not likely to get one, either. I am not gregarious and the crowds of any campus frankly scare me. Besides, any degree would likely only qualify me to spend the rest of my life being frankly scared in a crowded building in a crowded part of a crowded city. I've "neglected to apply" for probably several dozen Linux jobs for which I easily qualified, and which would pay in the range of $110,000/year simply because I'd have had to commute via public transportation at peak rush hour. No amount of money was worth losing my mind, it seemed to me.
Third: as near as I can tell, some sort of reverse-civil-rights movement is afoot here in MoCo, with all non-skilled jobs being reserved to "latinos". In any case, it's dangerous to be the only person at a work site who doesn't speak Spanish. Construction jobs are scarce, in any case, and I'm getting to be too old to be pushing a mower. I've done both, for years at a time... but my health isn't what it once was.
The only good thing about this, so far, is that the disability review board had the decency to wait until after I had my cataracts out, rather than waiting until I was about to go blind and then dumping me onto the winter streets.
Sometime probably not too far in the future, my mother will pass on to her reward. The house where I grew up from the age of six years will almost certainly be put up for sale as fast as we can clear it out and get it ready for market. Nobody else in the family has designs on it, and recent trends here in Aspen Hill have convinced me that I don't want to live here. Some folks will say "but you live in Montgomery County and they've got great services and schools!" That may be true on average across the County but first, I don't have kids and don't care about the schools, and secondly, my neighborhood is turning into ghetto, headed for slum "with a bullet" so to speak, rocketing down the ratings charts of places anyone can even stand to be.
The County can go ahead and put in new curbs, gutters, and sidewalks, but so many of the people here are just mean most of the time, and petty when they aren't being mean, and irascible when they aren't being petty. You can gild the bird-cage, so to speak, but if it's still full of blue-jays, all you're going to hear is screeching. All I ever hear from any of them mostly amounts to "everything you do is wrong". Most of them don't even bother to change languages to English to make such remarks.
For a few years, back when it was possible to find affordable rooms, I lived downtown in the District. I lived in some of the poorest and most crime-riddled neighborhoods, but even there, it was possible to make a few friends out of the many strangers, to find one or even two jobs, to meet people, to go places and do things, and even if it was rough and poor, it felt like Freedom. Montgomery, at least my neighborhood of Aspen Hill, feels like jail. Everywhere you turn, everything seems to be run by one or another variety of gang, whether the gang is MS-13 or the Church Ladies Lawn-Nazi Squad. It reminds me of how you can throw a batch of crabs in a basket and not worry about them escaping; any that tries to crawl out will be pulled back in by the rest of the crabs. It's as if almost everyone here knows that the political policies have doomed the place and it's just a matter of time before the walls crash in and the roof comes down. Yet they'll be damned if they leave, or let anyone else leave, either.
My mind is pretty well made up. I'm ready to take on almost any kind of work that will allow me to support myself somewhere else. Since Montgomery County is one of the country's most expensive places to live, and destined to become moreso as taxes are raised "to maintain the level of services", almost anyplace else will be less expensive to live. A job I turned down here that paid $100,000/year because I didn't want to spend half of that on commuting and office-commuter apparel, I could take elsewhere for $45,000/year and live in the suburbs of a small city and drive into town and not have to pay for parking after an hour spent stuck in traffic. A crust in comfort is better than a feast in fear, in any case, and again in any case it is better to live modestly in an environment of hope, than it is to live like a king at the doorstep to Hell.
A lot of people are worried because their unemployment benefits are about to run out. My own unemployment benefits ran out sometime back in 2002. That's right, I haven't had a "real job" -- of the sort that withholds from a paycheck -- since 2001. After a year of perfect attendance on time, no sick leave, and only one day off called to jury duty, the Dot Bomb Economy finally cashed me in, having survived the first two rounds of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a fair number of UNIX/Linux jobs, some of which paid fairly well for a while and then ended, the projects completed. I had become what's called a "jobber". Something needs doing, I do it. Need to migrate an Access database that's gotten too large and is expected to increase in size? I did that. I ported the data over to MySQL and Apache on Linux (Ubuntu) and wrote PHP scripts for accessing the data and doing data-entry. This wasn't exactly rocket science, but it was something they couldn't get done in-house. Other assignments included debugging an existing mailing-list and then (inexplicably) migrating it to Microsoft Outlook Server from a Sendmail/Procmail/Mailman setup. I've done work porting a Linux-based anti-spam system, for web-based mail, to Mac OSX. It worked great on Linux and it worked great on OSX, too.
That sort of gig has gotten a lot more few-and-far-between, and even the infill gigs I had hauling construction and remodeling scrap to the junkyard have gone away.
In case nobody had noticed, the economy is getting worse, not better, at least in terms of jobs. Yet here in Montgomery County, Maryland, everyone seems to have a job, except for me.
I've been getting by on a combination of a disability and frugality. Frugality is a habit enforced by the combination of the tiny amount of money the disability hands out and the outrageous cost of everything here in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. There are people here who aren't even considered middle-class by local standards who think nothing of paying $10.00 for a burger with fixings every day at lunch, and who wouldn't be caught dead shopping at Marshall's. I'm counting the slices of bread I have left for the month's sandwiches and shopping at K-Mart for "Joe Boxer" on sale days. Every few months I treat myself to a movie if it looks to be a worthwhile blockbuster.
I don't have an active cellphone account although I do have two cellphones, the so-called "burn phones" that you can pre-pay for a month, use for a month and then store in the electronic doodads drawer until you need them again. I don't have an iPod, iPad, camphone, or any of that sort of junk even though I sort of invented the modern concept of beltcom (they actually call them "smart phones" these days) back in 1996. I think the technology is great. I just hate what it's done to the mainstream culture. I'll be damned if I'll pay to carry one of the damned things just so that people can spam me with work-related communications in my off-hours, or to just spam me with robo-calls. I do have a very nice Nokia 770 "internet tablet", and it works just fine for playing video or audio, recording, that sort of thing, but it does not have a GPS or phone, though I could connect to such devices with BlueTooth.
I suppose that this is the single biggest example of why I don't really consider myself to be part of the mainstream culture.
The mainstream culture, and most of the subcultures, think nothing of carrying a device that can intrude at any time, in any place, and has integrated time-and-location tracking. As near as I can tell, these people have no concept at all of privacy and I blame the ubiquity of the cellphone.
Another way I'm probably more alienated to the mainstream culture than is the average illegal alien: Imagine if you will, that due to some incomprehensible fluke of chance amounting to Divine Intervention, I meet an attractive female who actually expresses an interest in "going out or something". I will sheepishly have to admit -- or perhaps not sheepishly -- that I do not have a cellphone number. Well, that instantly places me in "loser land", and I would reasonably expect to be informed with absolute truth that "but even the homeless have cellphones, WTF is wrong with you?" -and I suppose I could just lie and claim to be Amish or something. That's really going to help get a date, I assure you, claiming to be a devout religious separatist. If the conversation continues at all after that, it will be because they've suddenly switched interests... from possible affection, to studying the total freak loser.
Now the average reader might rightly conclude that any man who hasn't had a date in (checking my watch) 18 years is going to be pretty alienated from the mainstream culture. Well, 15 years ago, I would have cheerfully told anyone "if you had my last three girlfriends, you wouldn't be interested in dating anyone, either". Well, times have changed, and such jobs as I have had were deep in the technology sector, and deep in that slice of the technology sector most populated almost exclusively by men of the type of whom is said "the odds are good, but the goods are odd". This is a far cry from my days in the government, when I was the only non-gay male under 50 in a government clerical office. Whether or not I wanted to know, all day every day I got an earful of every last gossip, concern, personal triumph or tragedy, and who was or wasn't hot or not. I might not have wanted to know a whole lot about what women think and say, but I was deeply and forcibly immersed in their subculture. To this day, I find myself slipping, now and then, into the regional accent of the clerical workers who mostly commuted in from places like Lanham or Anacostia. I can speak better -- or less haltingly, at least -- in the argot than I can in mainstream "white collegiate" English. Writing, fortunately, has no accent: working mostly alone in deeply technical jobs mostly dealing with the guts of the InterNet, I hardly spoke to anyone face-to-face for days at a time.
So, philosophically speaking, in spending years tuning the building blocks of the modern mainstream culture, did all of that isolation and nearly-autistic concentration alienate me from the mainstream culture? Or was I just becoming alienated because I didn't like the culture that was emerging from my work? (And the work of so very many others, to be sure.) Maybe it's just in my nature to be easily alienated. And maybe that culture just likes to alienate people.
But I have digressed.
The disability I collect was awarded because I had become incompetent due to a medical misdiagnosis. The patient presented the doctor with mixed signals and because the doctor was mostly in the business of treating indigent addicts, the patient was prescribed powerful drugs which did nothing to treat the real problem, a severe and increasing thyroid deficiency. The disability payments were probably handed out so that I could take the proper medication, levothyroxine, and to recover as best I could.
A while back, the disability review board sent mail asking what treatment I was getting and would I please go see a doctor of their choosing. Then I got a phone call, asking for some clarification. Then came a letter telling me, never mind, you don't need to see a doctor. Maybe they found this blog.
But I have been asking around and checking the resources on the World Wide Web, and this is the story I get: in the opinion of the review board, I am well. Or if not actually "well", and who is, these days? -I'm not disabled.
And so, I must commiserate with the folks about to lose their unemployment benefits, I'm probably about to lose my disability benefits, probably right as the deeps of winter set in hard.
Thus, back to the workplace, if I can find a job in a culture that has mutated while I was away. I can also commiserate with those women who took a decade out of the workforce to develop their family.
So where will I be working? Probably not in Montgomery County. First, none of the usual agencies that might tend to hire people recovering from disability are hiring; MoCo is letting go, if anything, and the Federal government is likely to go through Reduction In Force as soon as possible as part of the austerity measures that will be required to tackle the out-of-control deficit.
Secondly, most of the employers who hire skilled labor are deeply into credentials, the more degrees the better. It's not quite as bad as downtown in the District, where even the strippers usually have at least a Liberal Arts BA degree and I've met some who have several. I've heard all of the best call-girls can give good conversation to PhDs. I wouldn't know, personally, but the point is that the whole region is awash in talent, both raw talent and highly-cultured talent. There's a lot of competition, and I don't have a degree. I'm not likely to get one, either. I am not gregarious and the crowds of any campus frankly scare me. Besides, any degree would likely only qualify me to spend the rest of my life being frankly scared in a crowded building in a crowded part of a crowded city. I've "neglected to apply" for probably several dozen Linux jobs for which I easily qualified, and which would pay in the range of $110,000/year simply because I'd have had to commute via public transportation at peak rush hour. No amount of money was worth losing my mind, it seemed to me.
Third: as near as I can tell, some sort of reverse-civil-rights movement is afoot here in MoCo, with all non-skilled jobs being reserved to "latinos". In any case, it's dangerous to be the only person at a work site who doesn't speak Spanish. Construction jobs are scarce, in any case, and I'm getting to be too old to be pushing a mower. I've done both, for years at a time... but my health isn't what it once was.
The only good thing about this, so far, is that the disability review board had the decency to wait until after I had my cataracts out, rather than waiting until I was about to go blind and then dumping me onto the winter streets.
Sometime probably not too far in the future, my mother will pass on to her reward. The house where I grew up from the age of six years will almost certainly be put up for sale as fast as we can clear it out and get it ready for market. Nobody else in the family has designs on it, and recent trends here in Aspen Hill have convinced me that I don't want to live here. Some folks will say "but you live in Montgomery County and they've got great services and schools!" That may be true on average across the County but first, I don't have kids and don't care about the schools, and secondly, my neighborhood is turning into ghetto, headed for slum "with a bullet" so to speak, rocketing down the ratings charts of places anyone can even stand to be.
The County can go ahead and put in new curbs, gutters, and sidewalks, but so many of the people here are just mean most of the time, and petty when they aren't being mean, and irascible when they aren't being petty. You can gild the bird-cage, so to speak, but if it's still full of blue-jays, all you're going to hear is screeching. All I ever hear from any of them mostly amounts to "everything you do is wrong". Most of them don't even bother to change languages to English to make such remarks.
For a few years, back when it was possible to find affordable rooms, I lived downtown in the District. I lived in some of the poorest and most crime-riddled neighborhoods, but even there, it was possible to make a few friends out of the many strangers, to find one or even two jobs, to meet people, to go places and do things, and even if it was rough and poor, it felt like Freedom. Montgomery, at least my neighborhood of Aspen Hill, feels like jail. Everywhere you turn, everything seems to be run by one or another variety of gang, whether the gang is MS-13 or the Church Ladies Lawn-Nazi Squad. It reminds me of how you can throw a batch of crabs in a basket and not worry about them escaping; any that tries to crawl out will be pulled back in by the rest of the crabs. It's as if almost everyone here knows that the political policies have doomed the place and it's just a matter of time before the walls crash in and the roof comes down. Yet they'll be damned if they leave, or let anyone else leave, either.
My mind is pretty well made up. I'm ready to take on almost any kind of work that will allow me to support myself somewhere else. Since Montgomery County is one of the country's most expensive places to live, and destined to become moreso as taxes are raised "to maintain the level of services", almost anyplace else will be less expensive to live. A job I turned down here that paid $100,000/year because I didn't want to spend half of that on commuting and office-commuter apparel, I could take elsewhere for $45,000/year and live in the suburbs of a small city and drive into town and not have to pay for parking after an hour spent stuck in traffic. A crust in comfort is better than a feast in fear, in any case, and again in any case it is better to live modestly in an environment of hope, than it is to live like a king at the doorstep to Hell.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
More From Ancient History...
"Deep in the darkest hour of a very heavy week, the Earthmen did confront me, and I could hardly speak..."
Friday, December 3, 2010
Where We're Coming From Here...
Just in case anyone forgot:
This is where we're coming from (so to speak)...
And we've been coming from here since the 1960s.
Try to not get in the way.
"And I've got a hammer, and I've got a bell, and I've got a song to sing, all over this land..."
This is where we're coming from (so to speak)...
And we've been coming from here since the 1960s.
Try to not get in the way.
"And I've got a hammer, and I've got a bell, and I've got a song to sing, all over this land..."
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