Let me tell you what I've done. (part 4)

In Part 1 I covered my work history from my High School days until I got a job offer at Specialty Records in the Spring of 1992.

In Part 2 I covered my time at Specialty Records from my hiring through my years as a Statistical Process Control Coordinator.

In Part 3 I covered the transitional period from the CD / DVD split in 1995 to my acceptance of the role of DVD Asset Manager in 1998.

In this part I will detail my years as the DVD Asset Manager, from 1999 to 2007.


I loved being the Asset Manager.

Let me back up a little bit. After confirming my interest in the job in late 1998, I formally accepted the offer in January 1999, after the WAMO Multi-Media Center - our compression, encoding, and authoring facility - had moved into a separate building. (This was the original location of Specialty Records, and had been used for various purposes throughout the company's history.) My interview consisted of going to the office of the head of the department, who said "So, do you want the job?", to which I responded, "Yeah." And I was in.

There was a transitional period, of course, during which I broke the news to my current manager, and then began turning over my duties and functions to various other people in the department - or not. In times like this, some things which seemed like they were worth doing when one person is doing them no longer seem worth doing when they need to get turned over to other people whose plates were already pretty full. Even after I came on board with WAMO, I was still working "bicoastally" as I called it, heading back to my old desk (a mile from my new one) for an hour or two at the end of the day to carry on with some of my old duties for a few weeks.

I got a crash course in DVDs. Fascinating, amazing stuff. I developed what I call an iconic concept of the structure of the DVD - little interlocking chunks of pure mathematics that slide over and alongside each other and try to fill a complete three-dimensional volume where the third dimension is time, and each chunk is constrained to a degree by its neighboring chunks. I realized that figuring out how the content of a DVD fit together was an exercise in systems thinking, much like thinking about how all the different elements of a closed environment - like, for example, the weather systems of a planet - influence, affect, and constrain each other. Suddenly my knowledge of non-linear dynamics started to muscle its way to the front of my mind, just waiting for a chance to express itself.

My predecessor had created several Excel programs to deal with the calculation of bit-budgets, the determination of how the various video files must be compressed in order to fit together with all of the other content on a DVD. My manager gave me seminars in DVD compression theory. I absorbed everything that was being thrown at me, and then I did my thing: analysis and synthesis. I took it all apart, studied it until I understood the internal mechanisms of each piece, and then put it back together in a way that was more streamlined, more efficient. I revised, and re-revised, and re-re-revised the existing bit-budget calculators until I had something I was comfortable with, something that would work in any variety of situations. I developed calculators for dealing with Drop-Frame and PAL timecode.

I threw myself at the problem of subtitles. Dozens of different subtitle languages might be on a project, and I had to make sure they were all right - you don't want to get Estonian when you hit the button for Latvian, or Mandarin when you select Cantonese.

I ate, drank, and breathed DVD assets. Video on Digital Betacams, audio on DLTs, subtitles in zipped files via e-mail or FTP, ROM content, menus, everything. Utilizing all available space on the disc, maximizing video quality while allowing sufficient flexibility for the unexpected.

I worked directly with the clients. At first this was a team effort; the Operations Manager was the primary contact and the Asset Manager was essentially the sidekick, or the good cop to the Operations Manager's bad cop, depending on the circumstances. In time that changed, and I became the direct contact for most of the project, once the initial agreement to do the project had been established by the Operations Manager.

It was great. I would partner with the clients, develop relationships with them, get to know their needs and desires and quirks. Make them feel loved, if I was doing my job right. Let them know that their project was in the hands of a team of people who really, really gave a damn about it.

And what projects we worked on! I will not mention any specifically, but we did work on some of the biggest DVD releases of the day. And small ones, too, lots of those. Big or small, we treated all of our clients and their projects like they were our top priority. Which they were.

And more than once, more often than it should have happened, we spotted something that we brought to the client's attention that they were able to correct sooner rather than later and avoid major expenses down the road. Saving our clients' bacon was just another aspect of the job.

Of course, the hours were long. Of course, the work was hard, and complex. Most of our clients were in other time zones. California. England. Japan. We had to arrange our schedules to cater to their needs. I was on salary - I had been on salary since I had become SPC Coordinator in 1993, or shortly thereafter - so I worked whenever and as long as was necessary to get the job done.

Things went on like this for over a year. Really, for the most part, everything I just said remained true throughout my entire tenure as Asset Manager. But after a year, things started to change.

More management stuff. Maneuvering. Power grabs. Tectonic plates shifting. Alpha Males going up against wannabe Alpha Males.

The guy who was in charge of WAMO suddenly left.

That was an icicle through the heart. I didn't know what this meant. I really hadn't seen this coming, or if I did, I tried my best to pretend it wasn't.

(Now we get to the tricky part of the story. Stuff that happened within the past decade. Fresh wounds. Things that are still active, even though neither of the companies involved technically exists anymore.)

A new company came onto the scene. A competitor, though it was officially betting many of its chips on a new and different format. People started to leave our company and go over to theirs.

Teamwork has a dark side, one which many companies don't understand. Sometimes team members develop loyalties to each other that are stronger than their loyalties anywhere else.

People went over, and others jumped ship. Not all at once. One at a time, slowly, gradually. People became fed up with the situation at their current company and saw the promise of a better tomorrow at another company, where they would be working alongside people with whom they had already developed working relationships.

The trickle turned into a deluge. I decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about. I talked to the people over there, was made an offer, made plans to leave. By then it must have been early 2001.

The two companies squared off. Legal threats were made. Something had happened, something that actually gave one company some legal leverage over the other.

On the day I was to give my two weeks notice, a legal agreement was reached. The new company agreed not to hire any more employees of the old company for a period of one year.

The last helicopter had left Saigon, and all I could do was was watch it fly away.

I knew the score, then and there. The new company couldn't afford to wait a year for me. They would have to fill my position somehow, with someone. At the end of the year I would be free to go over, but would no longer be needed.

We decided to make the best of it, abandoned orphans huddling against the storm. The bonds between those who remained behind grew tighter.

The year came and went. And at the end of it, the new company was all staffed up.

And we carried on. We muddled through. The business environment changed. Our new competitor was formidable, and they knew what we knew. We had lost much of our management and leadership. New people were assigned from outside the department.

That situation continued for years. Developing relationships, retaining customers, bringing in new customers, all were major challenges. Dealing with competition. Reducing costs, reducing turnaround times. Dealing with the changing business climate.

When I started in 1999, our turnaround time was - as stated to every client - eight weeks from receipt of last asset. We reduced that turnaround time, again and again. We improved our operation and increased efficiency and developed tricks that let us get things done that much faster. In the end turnarounds were expressed in days or even hours, not weeks.

We endured corporate changes. Paper billionaire AOL bought Time Warner and rapidly drove it into the ground. The combined company, reeling from this disaster, began shedding parts of itself, trying to cut its losses, trying to do anything that might put it back into the black. In the end we were cut loose and sold to another company, a company whose name we still bear.

Something similar happened to our new competitor.

The world changed on September 11, 2001.

We moved in 2002. We packed up all of our equipment, all of our assets, left the ancient, original home of Specialty Records and moved into a shiny new facility located within our main factory. We tried to settle in and make the place work.

We streamlined our processes. I developed interactive Excel spreadsheets that allowed any member of any subdepartment to access the project book for any project at any time. Prior to that, all of the information had been written by hand in a paper book, or several paper books, if there were multiple versions of the same project going through. At each stage the person checking the subtitles, or compressing the video, or encoding the audio, or designing the menus, or authoring the project would have to consult the paper book and enter their specific information in it, assuming they could locate it. When I developed the electronic book all of that changed. Everyone had access to all information instantly, including new and improved versions of all of the bitrate and timecode calculators I had developed, regardless of who else was accessing that same information at that time.

I travelled to Ireland in 2002, and again in 2003. I became a blogger in 2004. My father died in 2005. I went to Ireland for a third time in 2006. I bought my grandmother's house shortly after I got back.

We sustained several Reductions In Force. We were cut to the bone and beyond, while customers became ever more demanding. With bloody-minded determination we soldiered on. We did more with less, became cross-functional, became more agile. We continued standing, continued marching, when we should have fallen.

Up until February 27, 2007.


Next: The end of the world, and what comes after.

Let me tell you what I've done. (part 3)

In Part 1 I covered my work history from my High School days until I got a job offer at Specialty Records in the Spring of 1992.

In Part 2 I covered my time at Specialty Records from my hiring through my years as a Statistical Process Control Coordinator.

In this installment I will cover the transitional period from the CD / DVD split in 1995 to my acceptance of the role of DVD Asset Manager in 1998.


Things had actually begun to change at Specialty Records before I got there in early 1992. As a relative newcomer I am not as well-versed in the saga as some of the old-timers, but I believe the story goes something like this: Several years before I came on board Specialty Records had formed a business partnership with WEA Manufacturing, where the WEA stood for Warner, Elektra, and Atlantic. Collectively these three companies were a part of Warner Brothers, which merged with Time, Inc. to form a megacorporation called Time Warner in the early 1990s. This megacorporation had a controlling interest in Specialty Records, but had agreed to let the president of the company - the son of its founder - run it as he saw fit.

That changed a few years after I signed on. Gradually Specialty Records lost its identity. In time the entire company was rechristened under a new name: we were all WEA Manufacturing. But that wasn't the only change brewing.

New technologies were emerging. Research was being done, in our facility and elsewhere, to determine how to put full-length movies on CD. Most of the early tests that I saw were of low quality images, worse than a cell phone video uploaded to YouTube. But in time things improved. Things got more serious. The guy in charge of CD Pre-Production was leading the charge towards this new technology, whatever it would be. It went through several versions, and then one day it was finished. It was ready.

It was SD, the SuperDisc.

Around this same time other things happened. The guy in charge of Pre-Production became a Vice President. The President of the company, the son of its founder, suddenly retired - and was replaced by an outsider appointed by Time Warner.

A competing digital video format arose and went toe-to-toe with SD. In time the two sides, remembering the destructive battle between VHS and Betamax, drew up a compromise. Everybody pulled out their patents and slapped them onto the table to determine how much say the various members of the competing alliances would have in the design of the final product. The two formats merged, combining - mostly - the best features of each format into a new digital disc format that would be known as Digital Versatile Disc - or DVD.

A new sub-company formed, Warner Advanced Media Operations. WAMO. The guy in charge of Pre-Production became its lead. WAMO would focus on DVD production, to the exclusion of all else.

A team was chosen. About half of existing Pre-Production staff would join the new group. The rest would remain where they were.

I was not chosen. My partner was. Later, my former boss, now the VP in charge of WAMO, confided to me that it was because he had an Electronics Engineering degree, and I did not.

"I have a degree in Physics, you know," I said.

"Oh," he responded, taken aback. He had apparently overlooked this. I don't know if he reconsidered his decision in that moment, but in the end I remained behind with CD Pre-Production.

Things changed in CD Pre-Production, of course. The departure of our top manager meant a rearrangement of the management structure and a reconfiguration of the department itself. In the end most sub-managers remained where they were, and managers from other parts of the company were reassigned to the top positions.

The scope of my responsibilities changed, too. No longer focusing solely on Pre-Production, I was now responsible for keeping track of the performance of CD Stampers at Press throughout the facility - thousands of stampers running multiple tests with dozens of measured characteristics in each test in over a hundred presses scattered across a large factory.

The new corporate management was making changes, too. Statistical Process Control fell out of vogue. Instead a group called Andersen Consulting was brought in to redesign the factory. They knew what they were doing, no need to hear any comments from the bottom up.

I wasn't comfortable with the changes, for the most part. Not just because I am naturally suspicious of any change, which I am, but because I didn't like where my projections said things were going. Not just as a result of these changes, either. The whole music industry was in trouble. Sales were down, way down. Alternative Rock had mostly played itself out. Used CD sellers were no longer our biggest threat; now people were learning to copy CD's digitally onto CD-R's using their home computers. CD Piracy wasn't just for pirate factories in China and Bulgaria anymore. And there were rumblings that some people were simply creating digital files of songs and trading them over the Internet. Soon, some people feared, nobody would bother to even buy CDs anymore. I argued that people would always want to own things - that you couldn't hold and feel and smell a digital download, that you couldn't display them on a rack in your house to impress friends and burglars alike.

Then a naughty schoolgirl started dancing around while singing "Hit Me, Baby, One More Time", and the music industry was saved. For a little while.

But I knew it would soon be time to get out.

In the years that followed the CD/DVD split in 1995 CD Pre-Production, and Production as well, had suffered through several Reductions in Force. Personnel were shuffled, duties were rearranged. An attempt to revive Statistical Process Control through a select team of five people chosen from throughout the facility - including me, and the head of CD QC who had come with me to the SPC Seminar in Knoxville - had fizzled. New management strategies came in an endless procession. My duties veered more from conducting data collection and analysis to the nitty-gritty of keeping things running. I had done a few cool things along the way, automating the data collection system by having the testers reprogrammed to write their test results directly to a 3.5" floppy disk that I changed out once a week, reducing CD identification data entry errors by installing barcode readers on each tester and revising the stamper tickets to carry identifying information that could be scanned directly into the testers. The collected data was uploaded to two computers with 500 MB hard drives and analyzed using dBase III+. But now I was just as likely to be changing an ink ribbon on a barcode printer as I was to be analyzing the performance of a related group of stampers across the production floor. I was increasingly unhappy where I was, and increasingly hoping to get out.

The opportunity came towards the end of 1998. I had maintained good relationships with everyone in the DVD Pre-Production group since they had split away, and when an opportunity was going to be opening up in the group that they knew would be a good fit for my talents they gave me advance warning. The job would be DVD Asset Management. I would be in charge of keeping track of all of the physical assets that would be transformed into the digital content of the DVD. I would also be responsible for determining how those assets would fit together on the DVD once they were converted to digital files. Training would be provided; the person currently doing the job would work with me during a transitional period. The hours would be long, the work would be hard, and I would be working with some amazingly talented people. Was I interested?

I told them I had to think about it.

My grandmother had had a stroke not long after I started my job in 1992. She was hospitalized for several weeks, and was eventually rehabilitated to the point that she was able to come back to my mother's house. But there was no question of her living on her own, and I was no longer available to be a full-time nurse. But I was on a 4x4 schedule, which meant I was available for half of the time, four days out of every eight. Days that I was not available she would stay with one of my two aunts who lived up the street, unless it was a weekend, and then she would stay with my mom. Or my aunts or my brother could sit with her at my mom's house, some of the time.

In 1995 my father had a stroke, and the home care problem compounded itself. His stroke did not affect him as much physically, but left him with general weakness and some aphasia.

In 1996 my grandmother entered the first of a series of nursing homes. Her condition gradually began to deteriorate.

By late 1998 her condition had worsened dramatically. She had been receiving her nutrition through a Peg tube directly into her stomach for over a year. A series of urinary tract infections had weakened her considerably. I did not expect her to live through October that year. But she rallied, only to get another UTI in early December. She came back stronger than ever from that one.

I had been spending all of my free time with her during her time in the nursing homes. I would come home from work and go directly to the nursing home and sit with her until visiting hours ended. Weekends, too. Every Sunday we went to church together in the chapel at the nursing home. Could I really take on a job that would put tremendous new demands on my time?

On December 13, 1998 my grandmother died.

I told WAMO that yes, I would be their new Asset Manager.


Next: I become the WAMO Asset Manager. And then things change, and change again, and change some more.

Let me tell you what I've done. (part 2)

Hooboy, this is rapidly growing into a memoir. Fine. It's just going to take a lot more parts than I originally thought.

In Part 1 I covered my work history from my High School days until I got a job offer at Specialty Records in the Spring of 1992. In Part 2 I will cover my time at Specialty Records from my hiring through my years as a Statistical Process Control Coordinator.


The job that I was offered at Specialty Records in the Spring of 1992 was nothing spectacular: I would be working as a plater in the Plating department of CD Pre-Production.

I need to explain a little bit here, which is a problem from this point forward in my job list: you probably have no idea what I am talking about, and in order to make you understand, I have to explain several levels down. It's very difficult to do this in a conversation without running the risk of having the person you're explaining it to zone out, glaze over, lose interest. But explanations are important, or you might get the wrong impression of what these jobs are.

In CD Pre-production a "source" is provided by the recording studio to the manufacturer. At the time that I was working in that department, the sources were sent in on a magnetic medium known as a 1630 tape, though today sources may be CD-R's or (as is the standard now) digital files. This source was checked by our Pre-Mastering department and then sent on to CD Mastering. The Mastering department would transfer the information on the source onto a recordable master medium, using one of two methods. This is the point where the information taken from the tape is converted into the "pits" and "lands" that represent ones and zeroes on a compact disc. The form that the recorded master takes is a ghostly image of a CD on a semi-transparent material on a glass disc about twelve inches across and a quarter of an inch thick. Once this recording process is complete, a thin layer of metal is deposited onto the surface, adhering to the walls of the microscopic pits and lands that have been recorded. At this point, the Glass Master* is ready to be delivered to Plating.

In Plating the Glass Master is carefully prepped for the Plating - or electroforming - process. This process is really quite simple, and probably something you did in your high school Chemistry lab. The Glass Master is loaded into a workholder with a nickel "contact ring" around the outer edge. The workholder is mounted on a rotating shaft so the whole thing spins like a wheel seen face on. The workholder is then lowered into a solution of nickel sulfamate, positioned so the face is a fixed distance several inches from a basket of nickel pellets. An electropotential difference is set up across the solution, with the workholder and Master having one charge and the basket of nickel pellets having the opposite charge. Nickel ions from the solution migrate onto the molecules-thick layer of nickel on the face of the Glass Master and adhere; more nickel ions migrate out of the basket and dissolve into the solution. When the process is completed, you have "plated" the Glass Master with a layer of nickel a fraction of a millimeter thick. After carefully peeling this plated piece from the glass, you have a "Father" - the inverse image of the pit-and-land structure that was recorded at Mastering, as well as a blank piece of glass with some residual recording medium on it.

From this Father you now make a second-generation plated part - a "Mother". The trick here is you need to set up an electrochemical barrier on the surface of the Father before you make the next generation, or else you will have what is known as a "weld", or a "hubcap." From this Mother you make many inverse images, structurally identical to the Father, called "Stampers". These stampers are then trimmed to size and otherwise prepared for the Molding process, and then sent off to make CDs.

It was an interesting job. Turns out I'm allergic to nickel, as are many people; the allergy expressed itself as an outcrop of little red pimples on the underside of my forearms. I wore a lot of teal shirts so they wouldn't show the nickel sulfamate stains. Nickel sulfamate is now regarded with a lot more caution than it was in those long-ago days. Also, the edges of the plated parts were razor-sharp and less-than-razor-thin; everybody got cut at some point, but the trick was not to lacerate yourself too badly - or cut a tendon, or lose one or more fingers.

During my interview, the person who would be my boss's boss confided to me that the company was looking to hire college graduates with technical backgrounds for this job that barely required a high school diploma because they had something special in mind, something that would be coming down the road in a few months.

I started in May of 1992. I guess it was around December of 1992 that a posting went up for a new job in the Pre-Production department that required a technical background and a college degree. But what the heck was an "SPC Coordinator"?

I would find out. I put in for the job, and got it. I think my shift supervisor was angry that I had bid out of his department.

Statistical Process Control, or SPC, was a "new" way of looking at production processes that had first been developed in the early twentieth century. It involves data-based decision making and an advanced understanding of the nature of variation. All variation can be divided into two types: that which is a normal part of the system, and that which comes from outside the normal functioning of the system. Both should be minimized, but each must be dealt with in a specific way. The fundamental mistake of any operation is to treat the normal variation of the system - "Common Cause Variation" - like the variation coming from outside the normal operation of the system - "Assignable Cause Variation," and vice-versa. The goal of the SPC Coordinator would be to analyze the operations throughout Pre-Production, which included Pre-Mastering, Mastering, and Plating, apply SPC analysis techniques to these processes to identify Common Cause and Assignable Cause Variation, and to teach all employees of the Pre-Production department to use these techniques to improve the processes on their own.

Of course, this wasn't just something I picked up on my own. I went to Knoxville, Tennessee for a four-day seminar conducted by Dr. Donald J. Wheeler, covering not just the principles of Statistical Process Control but also the underlying Quality philosophy of W. Edwards Deming. I was accompanied by five other people from our company: the other person hired as an SPC Coordinator, the man who would be my supervisor, the head of CD Engineering, the head of CD QC, and the manager of all of Pre-Production.

He was the key figure here. He was the son of the President of the company and grandson of its founder, but that didn't mean he didn't earn his keep. He was a rough-and-tumble character, overbearing, demanding, imposing, loud, smart, all business but with an engineering background. He took me under his wing and taught me to stand up to him, so I could give as well as I got - while I would have several levels of management between me and him on the organizational chart, I was also technically on his staff, and he didn't want cringers or yes-men. He was also the visionary, the guy who was driving the Statistical Process Control movement in the company, as well as the one who was actively exploring new technologies even while Compact Discs were still fresh and new. He was also next in line to be President of the company. He was ambitious and determined. I always said he was a man who was driven to succeed at any cost, and he didn't care who he had to drag along into success with him.

So it was with that sort of support that I began my role as SPC Coordinator. My partner and I also had the advantage of having spent seven months in the trenches with the troops. We knew them and they knew us. We knew what they were going through and what their processes were. We had gotten up to our elbows in nickel sulfamate with them, and had worn bloody Band-Aids on our fingers under our gloves alongside them. That was another smart move by the guy in charge, one that - sadly - is not emulated in other contexts, where production workers are issued mandates from engineers and other "gods from above" who have neither experience in the processes nor a personal connection with the operators.

And it went well. We experienced that bizarre phenomenon whose name escapes me at the moment** that is reported by everyone who begins such a program: as soon as implementation starts, there is a disproportionate improvement in process yields, often before anything can actually be done to change the processes. There are several hypotheses to explain this, but I believe the leading one is that operators, realizing that someone finally cares enough about their processes to want to do something about them, independently start addressing all sorts of low-hanging-fruit issues that have been obvious all the while.

Eventually things settled down and we were able to start to distinguish Common Cause and Assignable Cause Variation, as well as process-to-process differences. My partner and I were given several assistants who we carefully groomed in the methods of SPC. After a year or so, after we had done one-on-one training with every member of the Pre-Production department, we designed our own SPC Seminar built around Don Wheeler's Understanding Statistical Process Control. Dozens of managers and engineers from throughout the facility went though our course, and came out with a basic introductory knowledge of SPC as well as a copy of Wheeler's book.

But things change. Things always change.


*Not to be confused with a "Recording Master", which we always assume is locked in a vault somewhere at the studio. This is sometimes not the case.
**As dee points out in the comments, this is the "Hawthorne Effect."


NEXT: Things change. Change is not always good.

Let me tell you what I've done. (part 1)

A few months ago this was going around the blogosphere as an honest-to-goodness meme: people were spontaneously writing out their work histories, like resumés in essay form. Nobody seemed to be saying "I saw so-and-so do this, so I thought I would, too." The odd thing was, I had been planning to do the same thing myself for some time.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to review my resumé and I found myself thinking, "Dammit, I've had some great jobs." It was depressing, really. But maybe I should take hope knowing where I've been.

So here it is. It turned out to be so long that I've had to break it up into multiple parts.


I didn't have very many jobs in High School. I really wasn't working towards buying a car or having beer money, so I tended to focus on my schoolwork all through the school year and play all Summer long. My only significant job was in the Summer after my (I think) Junior* Sophomore year and consisted of dogsitting for a neighbor family while they were away on a multi-week vacation. They kept the dog cooped up in a small room in their basement, lined with papers, and they wanted me to let the dog out and clean the papers twice a day. But Skippy was a young, energetic dog, and it seemed cruel to keep him cooped up in a stuffy room for so long. So I visited him multiple times each day, and took him out for extended romps. He and I developed a bond that Summer. They moved away later that year, and I heard that Skippy was hit by a car and killed soon after.

The only other jobs I had in High School were actually after graduation and before the start of college. One was an inventory job at a store at the Wyoming Valley Mall. It was me and about two dozen other temporary employees, hired specifically for a big inventory count. Each of us was assigned to an area, and we were paid something around minimum wage for our efforts. I completed my count quickly, efficiently, and accurately, turned in my numbers, and was paid for the time I had worked. Other people who were working more slowly and less efficiently were still on the job, earning money, when I was sent on my way. I learned a lesson about doing a timely and efficient job that day.

I searched the mall for other job opportunities and found one as a stock boy at a women's clothing store. That was interesting, for the few weeks that it lasted.

In college my main job was maintaining my GPA to maintain the merit-based scholarships that were paying for my education. Without them I would not have been able to attend college, or would have had to go into debt so deeply that I might still be trying to pay off my loans.

Between semesters I worked at Owens-Illinois, later OI-NEG, later Techneglas. This was a glass factory that manufactured TV faceplates. (The NEG stood for "Nippon Electric Glass", a Japanese manufacturer that bought, and eventually closed, the factory.) For three summers I worked there, handling heavy faceplates for eight hours at a time. My fingers are still curled from the carpal tunnel I developed there, and I have learned to ignore the hisssss of tinnitus that came from being exposed to the industrial sounds all day.

During my time in grad school I was a "teaching assistant" in Introduction to Physics labs at the University of Delaware. What this meant was that I was the teacher for the lab, responsible for introducing upwards of eighty non-science students to the wonders of Physics in action, and designing, administering, and grading exams. This lasted as long as my graduate career, one semester.

After I left grad school I made the decision to stick it out in Delaware for at least the rest of the term of my lease and find employment somewhere in the area. Newark, Delaware is an area full of industry of all sorts, so this didn't seem like such an unlikely proposition. With the guidance of one of my former graduate professors I was able to get a job at a solar cell manufacturer called AstroPower. I started off assisting in the testing and evaluation of incoming silicon substrates that would be turned into solar cells. I took to the work, and was fascinated by the place, and at the end of the first year of my lease I signed on for a second. Changes came to the place, including my first experience with a Reduction In Force, or RIF; I survived it, but my supervisor did not. I assumed his job while maintaining my current pay, which was barely above minimum wage. As the second year of my lease began to draw to a close I observed that I had taken on more and more responsibilities, including the management of several employees, but was barely making enough money to pay the rent. With some regret, I informed my manager that I would be leaving when August rolled around. And I did, with a heavy heart.

I came back to Nanticoke feeling like a failure. I began a half-hearted job search, but shortly thereafter my grandmother was felled by sciatica. She needed around-the clock assistance just to get around the house - my mom's house, since it was the only house of a local family member where my grandmother would be able to get around without needing to climb stairs. Getting a nurse to watch over her would be prohibitively expensive. Since I wasn't doing anything else at that moment, I was the obvious choice to be her caretaker.

She gradually regained her strength and mobility. I took her out on the occasional outings, including shopping trips. By the Spring of 1992 she was able to live on her own again. Which was fortunate, because shortly after that I received a call that there was a job available for me at a place I had been trying repeatedly to get into - Specialty Records, a local record, tape, and CD manufacturer.


To be continued. Part 2 will cover the various jobs I have held at Specialty Records and its successor companies.

*The Summer after my Junior year I was at Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences.

Review of Watchmen (the movie)

It is impossible to talk about this story without including spoilers. Any spoilers I give will be announced, and presented in invisible text that requires you to highlight it to read it. If you can read the words between these dashes - INVISIBLE TEXT - then this will not work for you, and you will have to keep your eyes open for SPOILERS AHEAD warnings.

First things first: if you are going to see this movie, I HIGHLY recommend purchasing and reading the Watchmen graphic novel, so that you will be able to see the similarities and differences, and judge for yourself how well Zack Snyder has translated this story to film. This is not, however, an absolute necessity. But if you plan to see this movie, it is imperative that you read this first:

snopes.com: Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky!

That way I won't be the only person who caught that joke during the opening sequence.

I won't go through this story scene-by-scene. Trust me when I say that visually it is very faithful to the graphic novel, with a few flubs: the Minutemen-era Comedian looks too old, Hooded Justice looks too pudgy, and Nite Owl II looks too buff in his Nite Owl getup.

I can live with Rorschach having learned Parkour somewhere along the way. It's not unreasonable for someone who does the things that he does to have developed such a skill. I can accept characters like The Comedian and Ozymandias having near-superhuman fighting abilities. But for Rorschach, Nite Owl, and the Silk Spectre to also have these skills? We know that Dan and Laurie can handle themselves against a large number of assailants, and Rorschach can hold his own against a superior foe through grim determination and bloody-mindedness, but to have them delivering the same WHAM-BANG! punches and kicks as their more physically-developed compatriots stretches credulity a bit - and reduces them very nearly to the level of simple action heroes.

Action is a problem here. Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan were characters defined in the graphic novel by their sparing use of movement - when Rorschach explodes into action it's always a surprise, and Dr. Manhattan is almost always where he needs to be when he needs to be there. Their movie versions move around a bit much. Rorschach I can almost understand - without motion he might come across as little more than a mannequin. But Dr. Manhattan seems a bit too prone to reach out and grab people when he wants to make a point. Perhaps this is intentional.

One major departure from the book: when Dan and Laurie are attacked by several groups of knot-tops in an alleyway, they do not hesitate to use lethal force against their attackers: necks are broken, knives are turned back on their wielders. By comparison, when Rorschach is attacked by an overwhelming number of assailants, he responds with a non-lethal level of violence, at one point seizing an assault rifle and beating its owner with the stock. (Granted, anyone who has been blasted with a makeshift flamethrower probably isn't feeling too charitable towards his assailant for his level of restraint.)

And then, of course, there is the climax.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Yes. It's different from the book, but everyone knows that. Truth be told, the climax in the book is somewhat silly, and the reaction of warring factions to the sudden appearance of a precursor to an alien invasion is, to say the least, somewhat implausible. (Which must be taken with a grain of salt when you're accepting the presence of the big blue naked guy with god-like powers.) The reaction of warring factions to this variation on the theme is only slightly less implausible.

But that change triggers other changes. Suddenly the role of The Comedian in the whole plot becomes more difficult to fathom, the reason for his murder harder to understand. In the book he accidentally discovered the secret plot in a manner consistent with his character. In the movie no such plot exists for him to discover; there is no island full of artists and writers and scientists, all working on a top-secret "special effect" for a non-existent movie. So the discovery of a secret so enormous and a plot so inevitable that it shakes The Comedian's worldview to its roots has to come about in another way, and is explained in a throwaway line stated so quickly that it is easy to miss.

Dan Dreiberg gets a bit of salvation in the movie: instead of caving in entirely to the futility of standing against what has been done, he at least lashes out with a few moments of pointless violence. In the end, though, the scene feels as extraneous and out-of-character as Arthur Dent angrily squishing the other-dimensional mice at the end of the movie version of The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Dr. Manhattan's soliloquy upon his arrival on Mars is very much as in the book, though slightly too linear. (And, sadly, Phobos and Deimos are done wrong! Having two moons isn't the same as having two Moons!) The same can be said of Laurie's piecing together the truth of her own past. In the movie this is done in a somewhat contrived way, as Dr. Manhattan jogs her memory so she can see her past the way he sees all of his own time. In the book it is the pressure of repressed connections that will no longer be denied. If you read nothing else in the book, read this sequence. This could have been done better in the movie without too much effort.

One scene disappointed me more than the climax, and that was the penultimate one: the meeting of Laurie, her mom, and Dan. In the book this took place in Sally Jupiter's retirement resort in California; in the movie it is unclear where it takes place, though it looks like Dan's brownstone in New York City. In the book the confrontation between mother and daughter packed more of a punch, and Dan and Laurie were on the run and in disguise. In the movie the confrontation falls as flat as Dumbledore's truncated confession at the end of the movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Dan and Laurie seem to actually be planning to get back into the superhero business. (Setting the stage for what one person leaving the theater suggested could be called Watchmen 2: Electric Boogaloo.) Also, one of the key lines - "Nothing ever ends" - is transposed from Jon to Laurie, who says that it's the sort of thing Jon would say. If I could see one scene added to this movie, it would be the conversation where Jon actually says this.

*END SPOILERS*

This is a dark, violent, and fun movie. Fans of the book will not, I think, be too disappointed, while newcomers will not, I think, be too confused. It's definitely not for kids: there's a whole lotta big blue schlong bouncing around here, along with some less-frontal nudity. There are F-bombs a-plenty, there's a decently clear view of a hardcore cartoon from a Tijuana Bible, and there's The Comedian. There are also historical Easter Eggs thrown in, though at times it feels like a costume party. (Watch for Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, the Village People, and Lee Iacocca!) There are also outstanding performances by all of the actors major and minor, and incredibly faithful casting and costuming of secondary characters - Bernard the newsagent and Dr. Malcolm Long are immediately recognizable. (I guess Harlan Ellison was too old, and slightly too tall, to play Big Figure.)

At two hours and forty-some minutes, I didn't feel like the movie dragged at all until the very end - and even then, I didn't check my watch until the credits began to roll. Much of the music from the book appears in the movie, with the notable addition of two (!) Leonard Cohen songs.

I liked it.

Watchmen time

It's Watchmen time!

I'm trying to go into the movie with an open mind. I already know of two changes, one major and one (relatively) minor. I hope they retain the backstories for Rorschach and the Silk Spectre II.

Director Zack Snyder has said that he sees this movie as being an extended video ad for the book. If the movie gets more people to read the book, it will be well worth whatever changes he has made. And at a running time of two hours and forty-six minutes, it sounds like it will be well worth the price of admission.

Of course, the best version of this movie is the one that plays in your head when you read the Alan Moore / Dave Gibbons masterpiece, as I have at least once a year since I first bought it in the days following September 11, 2001.

Check out these two videos. The first was made as part of a competition early in the production to design a 1985-era Veidt Enterprises "Ozymandias" action figure commercial.

This one was just sent to me by a friend, and imagines what would happen to Watchmen if it became a Saturday morning cartoon show. Anyone familiar with the book will recognize the German Shepherds and butterfly with "friend to the animals" Rorschach!

The South Mountains

I got a few more photos as I made my way home past the cemeteries this past Monday. But remembering this photo, I decided to try to get images of the mountains that form the South border of the Wyoming Valley. So I managed to squeeze in two more panoramic shots, from perhaps 250 feet apart.

This first image is made of nine (!) overlapping photos and covers about 180 degrees. According to Google Earth, the snow-dusted humps in the middle distance are about 1.66 miles away, while the higher ridges are more like two miles, and are only about 850 feet higher than the spot where I was standing.


The same, but different: this panorama, a composite of five photos, is taken from about 250 feet to the East of the previous one. The main feature in the distance is Luzerne County Community College - just a quarter mile away, and easily accessible by foot if it weren't for the huge gully that surrounds it like a moat on its North side.

Here's an oblique Google Earth view of many of the places covered in this walk, facing South. The cemetery complex occupies much of the lower half, with the yellow brick road of South Walnut Street dividing it into two unequal parts. The Duplin (Skatarama / Bowl-O-Rama) is visible at the lower left. (The damage to the Skatarama side, with its missing roof, is visible even here.) Luzerne County Community College is in the upper middle left. The mountains that form the Southern border of the Wyoming Valley are in the distance.


Finally, here is an overhead shot, with North at the top (as is the standard convention.) Plymouth Mountain is at the middle top. The Susquehanna flows from the right top to the middle left of the image. Interstate 81 slashes across the lower right, paralleling the mountains and then slicing through them.


Naturally, as soon as I was clear of the cemeteries the sun emerged from behind the clouds, casting beautiful shadows on the snow. But by then it was too late for me. I had to finish the walk to my mom's house, shovel the sidewalks, and then start thinking about lunch. It was nearly 4:00, after all!

Yellow Brick Road panorama, March 2, 2009

Intersection of South Walnut and Washington Streets, Nanticoke PA
Panoramic composite of six images
March 2, 2009

I must have made quite a sight this past Monday, walking against the wind through a cemetery, my long black coat bundled around me and flapping behind me, carrying a partially-collapsed tripod with a camera the size of a deck of cards on top. I had toyed with disassembling and re-setting-up the tripod every time I saw something interesting, but after the second time I decided "The hell with this!" and began to carry it like a wizard's staff, legs folded together but fully extended, careful not to trip and smash the attached camera against the ground.

I made my way through the cemetery in the northwest corner of the complex of cemeteries that line Washington Street and came out the side gate that opens up onto the road still paved with yellow-pink bricks. This alley has long been one of my favorite subjects for painting and photography, and I decided to take a shot at it again this day. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, so I hiked along the grassy tree-lined strip so along it as not to leave my pigeon-toed bootprints on the bricks.

I decided that since panoramas seemed to be the order of the day, I would run across the street and try to get a panorama of the cemetery and the road. There was pretty much no traffic this afternoon, but naturally several cars showed up as I tried to cross the street. I set up in front of what used to be Skatarama, near a spot where I had once found an old red bandanna hanging on a fence. I waited for one more car to pass, and then began snapping my photos - twice as many as the Panorama Assist mode recommended, to maximize the overlap of the images.

A word to any would-be panorama photographers: Avoid utility lines wherever possible. Some parallax effects are always going to come into play whenever you take a series of photos from a single pivoting point and then try to merge them together into a single flat-ish image. You want to have lots of overlap in your images so you can do all sorts of cheats and blends to make the image look seamless. But with utility lines, there's nothing you can do to make them look seamless and straight. I did my best, generally choosing points where wires connect to some foreground object to do the breaks. But some artifacts are obvious in the photo above. The section of wire in the very middle of the image turned out to be the most difficult to make look smooth.

I'm safe

...for the moment. My employer just eliminated another 200 or so jobs. I'm getting bumped to night shift. At least it's still the 4x4.

Cinram lays off 200 workers Business citizensvoice.com The Citizens' Voice
200 Laid Off at Cinram in Olyphant - pahomepage.com

The Jones mystery

JONES
Thomas W. Jones
1856 - 1919

Ann W. His Wife
1860 -

Richard W. Jones
1880 - 1916

Tombstones reduce our lives to their simplest components: sometimes nothing more than a family name, sometimes the briefest of biographical information - family name, first name, middle initial, year of birth, year of death.

This marker caught my eye as I walked through the cemetery the other day. Perhaps it was the color, or the crisp inscriptions, or the fact that the three people whose names are on the stone were all born in the nineteenth century. It was only after I came home and studied my photos that I realized there was something strange going on here.

The first thing I noticed was that there was no date of death for "Ann W. ". This is not unusual for an infant's grave, and there are plenty of those in this cemetery, but this is not one of them. This is the wife of Thomas W. Jones, who was four years younger than her husband, who was twenty years old when their son Richard was born, and - perhaps - fifty-six when he died, and fifty-nine three years later when her husband died at the age of sixty-three.

A son dies three years before his father. A flag indicates that one of the people buried here was a veteran. But who? Was it the son, dead of injuries sustained to his body or his mind on a field in France while fighting the War to End All Wars? Was it the father, who perhaps served in the Phillippines or Cuba in the Spanish-American War?

And what of the mother? Is she even buried here? Did she perhaps move on, leave Nanticoke, remarry? Do her bones rest somewhere else, under another name? Or did she go to her grave a penniless widow, deprived of her only son, with insufficient funds to even pay someone to engrave the date of her death on the family stone?

There are ways of finding these things out. Public records, genealogical societies, old newspaper clippings. Someone, somewhere knows what became of Ann W. Jones, born 1860, wife of Thomas W., mother of Richard W. But her stone does not tell the tale.

Cemetery and the Duplin

Ruins of the old Duplin Mill as seen from Nanticoke Cemetery.
Composite of four photos taken March 2, 2009.
Open in new window/tab for larger version.

This was my first stop on my walk through the cemetery cluster that occupies much of the south central section of Nanticoke. I've long wanted to do a photo session with these ruins as seen from the cemetery, and with recent rumblings suggesting that a plan is in the works to tear the place down, I figured now was as good a time as any, and better than some.

This building has had several identities over the decades: it was the Duplin Mill, an old "throwing mill" where my grandfather was a foreman. Later it was McGregor Sportswear, and then was converted in the 1970's into L.S. Skatarama / Bowl-O-Rama by local businessman George Ellis.

Skatarama - which occupied the right half of the building, as seen in this photo - was destroyed by fire in 1992, but Bowl-O-Rama continued to operate in the undamaged half of the building up until last year. Now the building is vacant. Every few years a plan is announced to tear down the place; this is accompanied by a brief flurry of demolition activity, which usually results in a big pile of bricks and other assorted rubble appearing on the sidewalk in front of the place. All activity then stops. Eventually the bricks are taken away. Then nothing else happens until the next announcement of plans to demolish the place.

Now that Bowl-O-Rama is closed, though, it seems more likely that demolition plans may actually be carried through. That's too bad. This used to be a major center of industry in Nanticoke, and then a major recreation center. Maybe once it could have been one or the other of those things again. But now it is a crumbling husk, a ruined hulk occupying half of a block. Still, even in the state it's in, it is a huge and imposing structure. I'm glad I got to photograph it before it's torn down.

Another American Portrait

My car has been having problems starting off and on for a few weeks - really for just two days a few weeks ago, and then again last Monday. As of last Tuesday has not been able to start at all. The guy sent out by AAA was able to get my car started this morning, and I drove it across town to the garage across the street from my house there. (Going on three years since I bought it, and I still haven't moved in!) They weren't sure when they could look at it, and I didn't expect them to be done with it today. I had taken along my camera and tripod with the idea that after a few hours at the house I would walk back across town by way of the cemetery and get pictures - I figured the new-fallen show should make for some pretty landscapes.

That's just what I did. Turns out the car needs a new battery terminal end - the acid that's been vomiting out of the Sears DieHard battery since the day after the warranty expired ate away at the terminal end on one of the cables, causing it to be unable to supply enough current to get the engine started. Plus, the battery itself is just about due for replacement, so I told them to go ahead and do that, too. They'll have these things taken care of tomorrow...at which point we'll find out if the starter is still working OK.

The walk across town was insanely cold. What a day to not have earmuffs with me! I stopped at one spot in the cemetery, unfolded my tripod, attached the camera, and got ready to take a picture - and suddenly the wind picked up to something that felt like 30 mph. The wind chill made it feel like my face and ears would freeze off, and the wind was strong enough to nearly tip my tripod.

I got a few snapshots and a quick panorama and I moved along. I hustled along a long, curving path, intent on getting out of the cemetery and into a place a little less exposed to the wind. At one point I glanced back and saw this - and knew I had to photograph it.


That's St. Mary's church, framed by several trees in the cemetery. Note the flags standing straight out due to the wind.

I did get a few more photos and panoramas on the way home. Maybe after my body temperature gets back above room temperature, I'll get around to posting them.


Title reference: Another Monkey: An American portrait

Wow, I'm tired

This was a damned weird week at work. I saw stuff that just shouldn't have happened. We all ran ourselves ragged trying to deal with things before they got out of control. My right hand is now covered with twice as many cuts and burns as it was a week ago.

But it's done. And maybe I'll get to go back for another four next Friday.

Didn't wind up going to my brother's tonight like I thought I would. He's working sixteen-hour days, and the weather's supposed to be crappy tonight, so we decided to get together some other time.

Didn't get to see Venus and the Moon tonight. That was weird. When I walked out of work it was to a gray, cloudy sky, but the edges of the clouds were glowing with the last rays of the sunset. I thought the clouds were scattered and relatively thin, but the place where Venus and the Moon should have been was simply blank. So now I think that there was an upper deck of clouds that was very high and thick, and the scattered glowing clouds I was seeing were much lower.

It took me too long to write that last paragraph, and I'm not even sure it made sense. So I'm going to call it a night. See you tomorrow!

Thirdday blues

I'm tired. Getting worn out. I'm sure I have all sorts of stuff to blog about, but I can't remember what. The evening of the third day of the rotation can be like that.

And there is a fourth day, which is great. I was worried that we might have had a one-day shutdown tomorrow. Money is good.

No rest after work tomorrow, though. On the way home I have to stop for gas, then pick up my mom and head with her out to my brother's house for a few hours.

Can't even sleep in Monday morning; I have to call AAA* first thing and have them give me a jump and/or tow to the service station near my house across town. Then I'll do some long-overdue maintenance work at the house, and maybe even take a nap for a few hours. Maybe I'll fire up one of the DTV converter boxes I bought with the government coupon and see how well they work without an antenna. (My guess is, not very well.)

Sometime during my four days off I need to take my mom's car for an oil change and then wash off the highway grime I've accumulated this rotation.

Today at work was not as chaotic as the first two days of the rotation but was still very bad, much worse than the previous rotations I've spent in this area. Plus I found out that on the first day of the rotation, something got messed up on one of my jobs that I should have noticed - would have noticed, if I hadn't spent most of the twelve hours that day running from system to system to clear alarms. I hope things get straightened out soon, before anything else gets messed up while I'm busy dealing with whichever piece of equipment is screaming the loudest.


*The American Automobile Association, of which I am a member, not Alcoholics Anonymous, of which I am not.

Rain in Winter

Winter has been running hot and cold lately. Well, more like cold, very cold, and not really so cold. Today fell into the "not really so cold" category, though I was in work for most of it. When I took my lunch at 4:00 PM (it was one of those days; I had last eaten at 3:30 in the morning, and would be leaving work at 6:00) I was a little surprised and disappointed to see that the day had turned dark and rainy. Not that I will miss the snow that has finally been washed away, but I was looking forward to seeing Venus and the Moon tonight.

While searching for a picture to put on yesterday's Venus/Moon post, I was a little surprised to see how much snow we had on the ground on March 20, 2007. But this is not that unusual. Here are images from a snowstorm on March 24, 2005. I don't think we had March snow in 2006 or last year, and I didn't start my blog until May 2004 so I don't know offhand what the day-to-day weather was like.

The rain concerns me, though. One of the big purchases I'm trying to save up for is a few truckloads of dirt - topsoil, maybe even - to pile around the foundations of my mom's house and help direct rainfall and surface water away from our basement. Basement flooding from groundwater seepage has been a major concern in past years, and I expect it will be an issue sooner or later this year.

Venus and the Moon over the next few days

On the way home from work today I saw the most stunningly tiny crescent Moon I have ever seen. It was partly obscured by clouds, which added to the beauty, tinting it a deep orange. When I saw it, perhaps around 6:15 PM, the horns appeared to be pointing directly up, or nearly so, suggesting it was very nearly directly positioned above the Sun. (I am far more used to seeing the Moon south of the Sun - to the left of the Sun in the evening, to the right of it in the morning.)

If you have noticed that intensely bright beacon in the western sky just after sunset, then you already know where to look to see the planet Venus. Over the next few nights the Moon will be in the same general neighborhood.

Phil Plait did a post alerting readers to the "Beauty Without Borders" project, which invites people to join in observing the Moon and Venus over the next few days. This is something anyone - well, almost anyone - can participate in, regardless of how light-polluted their skies are. Venus and the Moon are that bright. Even partly cloudy skies should not make viewing impossible, though there's a limit to how much cloud cover the two brightest objects in the night sky can penetrate. Get photos if you can, and share them with the world!

Venus, the Moon, and a neighbor's house,
viewed from the bow window of my mom's house
at 8:12 PM Tuesday, March 20, 2007.

From the Beauty Without Borders website:

An Evening With Venus
Join this event from anywhere in the world, even if you are going to watch from your deck or backyard. Use binoculars if you haven't got a telescope.

Already 16 countries has got together to enjoy the beautiful views of Venus.
Start Time: February 25, 2009 at 7:00pm
End Time: Sunday, March 1, 2009 at 9:00pm
Location: Global - Everywhere, Your street or your event street, you choose.
Venus event;

The crescent Venus meets the new Moon, will be an awesome spectacle, seen and shared locally and globally. “On the evening of Feb. 28, the crescent moon will pass near Venus and will create a beautiful sight for sky watchers.”

Work and dead batteries

Good news: I'm going back to work tomorrow.

Bad news: The battery problems that I noticed when I ran out to get a new monitor on Monday have apparently worsened to the point that my car will now not start. I spent much of these past few days running errands with my mom in her car, so I didn't actually get to check the car until now. Looks like I'll be borrowing her car again for these next four days, and then spending money on a new battery next week. Dammit.

The original battery lasted over eight years; this one isn't quite four-and-a-half years old.

I hope it's just the battery.

Sex on Fire / All Fired Up

The Internet is a scary, amazing, wonderful place, and an amazing research tool for even the most trivial things.

Saturday night, half-delirious in my post-rotation state, a song was bubbling up from my hindbrain. Problem is, I had no idea what it was. It sounded old, but I had a feeling it was new, or relatively so. I couldn't catch many of the words, I knew there was a chorus of "(sooooooomething) this (something)'s on fire" - or something like that. I tried Googling various chunks of that, and I didn't recognize any of the results. After a few minutes of searching I decided to take a stab at one of the results, since it was a YouTube video and I would know pretty quickly if it was the right song. And it was. Kings of Leon, "Sex On Fire": (right-click to open in new Tab or Window)



Thing is, simplistic as it is, annoying as the video of the oh-so-pretty lead singer writhing sweatily on the floor, apparently in a feverish delirium is, this song sounded familiar. But why, and to what? Some words kept pressing themselves into my mind:

Now I believe there comes a time
When everything just falls in line
We live and learn from our mistakes
The deepest cuts are healed by faith

Yes, of course. "All Fired Up" by Pat Benetar. I called it up on YouTube and was amazed at the similarities, down to the opening chord changes - though the Pat Benetar song is far more complex and, in my opinion, the far superior song. Listen for yourself (right-click here to open in new window or tab) and see:

That wasn't the only research I did that night. But I'll leave the other story for another time.


NOTE TO SELF, 5/3/09: Don't leave stories for other times without leaving notes for yourself as to what the story is. I know the research involved an actress, I just don't remember who.

NOTE TO SELF, 1/23/10: It was Tara Lightfoot, the model who appeared in a Snorg Tees ad wearing a T-shirt that says "I Drink Your Milkshake."

Good news, bad news, good news...

GOOD NEWS: Nicky now has Dolly back.


After church yesterday my mom and I went out to do a little shopping. I had a 15% off coupon at a store, and the coupon was expiring yesterday, and I knew I could get dimmable fluorescent light bulbs there - it's the only place I know of where you can get these things. So after Mass ended at about 12:45 we headed up to the store. By the time we got done there it was just after 2:00.

My mom then asked if we could stop at a bank that stays open until 3:00 on Sundays so she could deposit a refund check she received for overpayment to a doctor. (It's unusual for there to be any banks open on a Sunday.) We went there, and then I decided to stop at a pet supplies store to get a toy for Nicky that would keep him amused until we located Dolly. On the way there, my mom asked if we could stop at a local chocolate shop and see if they had any discounted Valentine's candy - specifically chocolate-covered soft caramels. (They didn't have any Valentine's candy, so I got her Easter candy instead. Paid through the eye for it, but, hey, it's what she wanted.)

The upshot of this is, after we ran all these errands and got home, it was already after 4:00.

We got home and I presented Nicky with the interim Dolly - a small blue furry puppy with floppy ears. He wasn't very interested. I ate quickly, went online, read my mail, checked my junk mail on a whim, and wound up banging out yesterday's post. I then meandered around the Internet a while, checking Facebook and my friends' sites.

After a while I started to feel guilty. I had promised Nicky I would look for Dolly, and I had a pretty good idea where to look, and here I was screwing around on the Internet. I didn't want to log off, but I didn't want my monitor to burst into flames while I was away. So I switched off the monitor and went off to search for Dolly.

I looked in the most likely spot - some boxes near the bottom of the steps to our basement. Nicky often plays with Dolly on these steps, and I toss my coat on top of the boxes when I come home. Maybe Dolly had fallen between or behind the boxes? I moved them around and searched a bit and came up empty.

I then moved to other spots I hadn't had time to search earlier in the week while I was at work. I looked around my bed, and behind it, and under it. Nothing. Then I began to pull the blankets off, layer after layer. And there, tangled in the blankets, was Dolly! I had found her!

Nicky was happy. He had been showing an increasingly disturbing lassitude the past few days, which I attributed to pining for the loss of his favorite toy, and his sudden improvement in spirits seemed to confirm what I had believed. He carried Dolly around, and yelled at her, and yelled at me when I tried to move her into a better position for photos. But something still seemed wrong.

Whatever. I had been away from the computer too long. I switched on the monitor, got ready to report the good news, and...

...nothing.

BAD NEWS: My monitor finally died.

Well, it was hardly a surprise, but it was upsetting. No image, no nothing - I did manage to get a white spot in the middle of the screen at one point, but that didn't last. My monitor was dead, and there was nothing to do but replace it.

GOOD NEWS: I got an new monitor, and it didn't cost me an arm and a leg.

More like just an arm. Still, it's bigger than my old CRT that I bought back in 1999, which was a 19" diagonal as compared to this 21.5" wide widescreen monitor, and it cost less than half as much as that one did, and weighs about twenty-five pounds less. It took me a while to set up, and I didn't much like the "force-fitting" of the screen to the base - it took three calls to the Samsung help line before I got someone who told me just to push down as hard as I could. Note to the folks who design those helpful pictograms to show non-literate users how to assemble things without the use of, say, detailed directions using words: These things suck. Please use words.

BAD NEWS: Nicky still was not himself.

He's been displaying increasingly odd behavior. Saturday morning he wasn't himself. He usually nudges his face into mine when my alarm goes off, and then paws at me to pet him as I am getting ready for work in the morning. Saturday he did these things, but without much enthusiasm. Saturday evening my mom found him lurking under her bed, resting against the baseboard of radiation, trying to get warm. He usually doesn't do this. As I headed to bed that night he did the same thing against the kitchen baseboard.

Sunday morning he mostly ignored me.

Sunday evening he was already in my bed when I got there, and hissed at me and ran away as I went to bed.

This morning he was not in my bed. I found him crouched on a mat in front of the downstairs bathroom.

He's also not eating right. He normally is a little piggy, eating all of his food and then raiding the other cats' bowls and eating whatever they haven't. These past few days he has taken a few bites, swallowed with an exaggerated gulp, and then wandered off. Sometime he would retch afterwards, sometimes throw up a little mucus.

Today we decided to take him to the vet. My mom called first thing this morning and was able to get an afternoon appointment, which gave me a chance to go out, do some monitor shopping, try to set up the new monitor, and spend some time on the phone with customer service before it was time to pack Nicky into his crate and take him to the vet's.

GOOD NEWS: It's probably just a food allergy.

Nicky cried the whole way up, a pathetic, eerie yowl that I have only heard when we are taking him to the vet's - and once, in the middle of the night, when he had a nightmare. The vet was able to see him fairly quickly and ran a battery of tests and checks, none of which revealed anything suspicious. He then asked about changes to his diet, and we noted that, yes, we had just started him on some new cat food that we bought last Tuesday. He suggested that we eliminate this from his diet and switch him back to what he had been eating - perhaps he is allergic to some specific protein used in this new cat food. We had been thinking along these lines already, but we wanted to eliminate the possibility that it could be something else.

BAD NEWS: This visit DID cost an arm and a leg.

So that's a total of two arms and one leg for today - or, in other terms, nearly everything I earned in these past few days of work. But these were necessary expenses. Without a monitor I would be - was - blind online. And I would never skimp on something like today's trip to the vet.

That's OK. These expenses have been deferred through the magic of credit cards. I'm starting to look upon debt as a measurement of optimism, of hope for the future. I have faith that someday I will be able to pay back all these debts.

Here's hoping that the future holds more good news, and less bad.

For ME? How exciting!

Just got this from "U.S. Customs and Border Protection" (infocbp [at] customs.com). Just another example of how far this country fell during the Bush years: high-ranking federal officials writing like they're, I don't know, Nigerian scam artists or something:

We hereby bring to your notice that a consignment been delivered at your residence by a diplomat had been stopped by us. This is a security measure put in place by United States of America check terrorism and money laundry through the sale of illegal drugs locally and internationally.

After examination, we found out that the consignment contained the sum of US$3.7 Million, which upon further investigation revealed that the fund was your inheritance.

Consequently, the diplomat will deliver your consignment at your residence after all protocols have been observed.

However, in order to procced we need you to reconfirm the following information,

Full Name:

Residential Address:

Date of Birth:

Occupation:

Telephone/Mobile Numbers:

We await your response.

Regards,
W. Ralph Basham
Commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

(Yes, that period at the end is in the original. A nice touch.)

Oh boy! I inherited the sum of US$3.7 Million! I can't wait to go out and spend all those U.S. dollars!

But wouldn't it be more efficient for me to just send this guy my bank account numbers, so they could deposit the money directly?