May 30th

Today is the Memorial Day holiday here in the US of A, where they celebrate people who have died in wars by going shopping.

It's too bloody windy to fly, so I've been wasting spending the day moving parts of my website to the Google. We set Vic's website up with the Microsoft Live Small Business Server, but the Google Sites stuff seems a lot simpler to use.

It's been interesting to read some of the stuff I posted years ago.  We're getting there, so hopefully I'll be able to switch the old web site off before it expires anyway :o)

I got a FasTrak doohickey, and went to register it per the "you must register this immediately" instruction in the bag.  Well, you go to the web site, and start the registration process.  Here it is.  See where it says about the Toll tag number being 10 digits?  It's not -  it's 12.  The leading 2 are zeroes, so you assume that you need to enter 1234567890, right?  When that doesn't work, you try 001234567890?  Sucker.  You need to enter 01234567890.  Obviously.  This'll allow me to only pay $2.50 or whatever it is, rather than $6 when I ride the bike across during the rush hour.  And not have to stop and fumble around for cash while the person behind gets more and more irate that he's not sitting in the queue for the traffic lights just the other side of the toll plaza.  Good times.

In the evening, we decided to barbecue, as it was too bloody windy to fly.  I threw the ball around outside to wear Tilly out, so she'd calm down while I was cooking (she gets all wound up about smoke). When Vince arrived, he played with Tilly for a while, and then when Jen arrived, she played with Tilly for a while.  We stayed up pretty late talking and so on, so Tilly was pretty much done for by the time we headed off to bed :o)

Unions and stuff

A friend of ours (well, of Vic's, I don't have any friends) is getting laid off in a month.  She's basically the "new guy", and they're getting rid of a level of supervisors, so everybody's moving down, and getting lower pay grades and salaries and suchlike.  At first this didn't sound so bad, but I've been thinking about it, it's ret stupid.  If you want to get rid of the supervisors, you should get rid of the supervisors - the way this has gone down you've pissed on everybody from the supervisors on down.  The supervisors have basically been demoted, and nothing says "attaboy" quite like a demotion and a pay cut.  The poor bastards who were thinking that they're almost supervisors have just been pushed back that number of people, so they're feeling like they'll never get ahead.  I'm sure some senior people are now having to be... um... less senior.  So, rather than lose some supervisors, you've lost new people who you need to be ready to replace all those boomers who are soon to be retiring, and given your workers' morale a healthy kick in the nads at the same time.  It's OK, I'm sure the management can say "hey, they should be happy they still have jobs".

Why am I doing this?

Well, for the last <mumble> years, I've had my blog on my own web page.  That's all well and good and everything, but my hosting provider managed to be down for >2 days, and their response was basically "oh, sorry" without any sign of "and this won't happen again because we're doing <x>".  Screw that.  I also find I turn my desktop on less during the summer (I only play Warcraft in the winter, when I can't fly as much), so I'm stuck trying to remember WTF I've been doing recently.  So I figured I'd use some of this cloud based nonsense to throw stuff down from wherever I am, whenever I feel like it - I've already moved my email to Gmail, so Blogger looked like the best idea.  Oh, and people can comment on my blog.  Here we gooooo....