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The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
If you follow this journal, you know that October has been a long succession of disasters for Your Obedient Serpent. Many of them were car-related, and, of course, the climactic one, the destruction of my car on Halloween morning, was the proverbial bolt from the blue, the quintessential smite of angry divinity, if your metaphysics lean that way, or cosmic irony, if they lean in the other direction.

It's enough to prompt even the aggiest agnostic to wonder, "Why me? Who did I piss off?"

Well, I have a confession to make.

On September 15th, 2009, Jessica Simpson's dog was snatched by a coyote.

This was a minor news item, but one that prompted some small degree of amusement -- in part because so much of the "action" happened on Twitter.

We found one line in particular amusing:

Simpson, 29, has offered a reward to anyone who can reunite her with her 5-year-old, caramel-colored dog.

Quoth [info]halfelf: "It's like she's expecting a ransom note from the coyotes, or something."

One thing led to another, and, before the hour was out, "CoyoteLuvsU" had a Twitter account, and had posted the following:

@JessicaSimpson WE hAVE YouR TAsTY tASTy DoG. DElIVeR 100 bOnz + 1 roDe RUnnEr To THE olD TRee In THE MeADoW. CoME alOnE, NO AnImAL CoNTRoL.


Today, on the phone with my mother, I mentioned this gag. Being no great fan of either Twitter nor Ms. Simpson, she found it uproarious -- but then stopped, and asked, "So, when did you do this?"

"September 15th", I answered.

"Aha!" she said, wise in the ways of Old Man Coyote. "That's when your trouble started. You took His name in vain."

My mother has a wonderful Ominous Prophecy Voice, and it has only improved with age.

I confess, the logic is inescapable. Indeed, at the time, I said, "I am so asking for trouble by doing this."

Friday the 13th seems the ideal time to Confess and Repent one's sins before the Trickster.

Coyote, forgive me! I have taken Your name in vain,
and trespassed upon a Gag that was rightfully Yours!
The forces of Cosmic Irony have weighed heavily upon me,
and more heavily still upon my late, lamented Grape,
who has suffered in my stead. I repent of my sin,
and my hubris in attempting to leech your Yuks!



You know, when I first came into possession of that Little Purple Car, I asked the opinion of a former Aspire owner, who had rolled his on Interstate 5 a year or two before, and come out unscathed. He said, "They may not look like much, but they'll give their lives for you."

Indeed, sir. Indeed.

 
 
I feel: chastened
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
12 November 2009 @ 01:18 pm
QOTD  

I also think that a lot of folks who profess to love America love it the way Ike Turner loved Tina.

-- Mark Evanier

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The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
12 November 2009 @ 08:52 am
Mostly for my own reference:


Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design




While Dr. Akin is an aerospace engineer, most if not all of these Laws apply to systems design in general.

[info]normanrafferty should take particular note of the following:


14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".



Snagged from [info]theweaselking, whom I forgot to credit when I first posted this.

.
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
11 November 2009 @ 04:02 pm
The tow truck just took my little purple car away.

I loved that little car. It was the first vehicle I ever owned that wasn't a piece of rusty crap from day one.

I had that car longer than any dog I ever owned, and we'd been through a lot more together, so please pardon me if I mourn an "inanimate" object as if she were alive. I knew her moods, I knew her limits. I could and did out-drive Porsches in that little four-banger, because I knew exactly what she could do.

Goodbye, Grape. I loved you.


 
 
I feel: crushed
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
11 November 2009 @ 10:31 am
Feed Your Head: Things I KNOW, but need to LEARN  

Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So is optimism.


-- distilled from Robert Anton Wilson,
"Ten Good Reasons to Get Out of Bed in the Morning".




My thinking is broken. I've assimilated unhealthy memes.

Taking control of my life means, first and foremost, taking control of my head.

Re-Reading List:
  • Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers
  • S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action
  • R. Buckminster Fuller:

    • Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
    • Utopia or Oblivion
    • Ideas and Integrities
    • Critical Path (Have I actually read this, or has it just been sitting on my shelf for years?)

  • Sun Bear, The Path of Power
  • Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
  • Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • Richard Bach:

    • Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
    • Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Hush. It's my metaprogramming list.)




 
 
I feel: contemplative
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection

Fed Official Sees High Unemployment For Years

-- Associated Press, via NPR

You know, this actually makes me feel better about the job market in the near future.

Remember the Clinton Boom? (I know it's hard, but it really wasn't that long ago!)

Most "official government reports" of that period just foresaw the good times rollin' along. The few who saw the boom as part of a boom-and-bust cycle were dismissed as Chicken Littles. Same with the housing bubble that ranged through both the Clinton and Bush years.

In the same way, the government officials who currently insist that Recovery Is Just Around The Corner sound impossibly optimistic, seeing unicorns and rainbows in every little upward jig of an isolated economic indicator. Not only don't they convince us, they don't even sound like they've convinced themselves.

Official statements like this one sound so much more plausible. They're rooted in the "common sense" observations every one of us makes every day. They're logical extrapolations of the future from current conditions.

Just like those glorious predictions of the Infinite Boom.1

Because, you see, deep down, nobody really believes in change. They don't believe that things will ever be different. They find it hard to believe, in their hearts, that things ever were different, even if they experienced it themselves.2 My parenthetical comment above, about the Clinton Boom? 'Fess up: it's getting harder and harder to remember those times as genuinely prosperous, isn't it? Instead, it's just the top of a downward slope, not so much "better" as "where 'worse' started".

Don't read too much into this post, really. It's just an early-morning knee-jerk reaction to a headline article. Semantically, it boils down to, "hey, the government says this, so it must be wrong."

I suppose that's as good as any other method of economic prediction.


1Somewhere along the line, as Boom shifted into Decline and from there to Bust, the treatment of the "Technological Singularity" in speculative fiction shifted from "The Rapture of the Nerds" to the geek equivalent of Left Behind. See Accelerando, by Charlie Stross, for a good example of the latter.

2This is, of course, the root of Global Warming Denial.


 
 
I feel: busy
 
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
09 November 2009 @ 08:38 am
You know, I've been leaving my current position at the comic-and-game shop off of my resume, on the assumption that it's somehow "too trivial" and "doesn't look good" for a prospective science professional.

On the other claw, it adds two vitally important things to my resume:

  • Evidence that I am, in fact, currently employed; and
  • A position that I've held for more than a year -- the only one I've held for more than a few months, since getting my degree in 2003.*


I think I have far too much ego invested in the wrong places. I've been more concerned with presenting myself as a ⟨jonlovitz⟩Scientist⟨/jonlovitz⟩ than as a worker--and I have no idea if that's for the "benefit" of prospective employers, or to sustain my own precarious illusions.

So what looks better? A resume that says "I work in a comic book shop", or one that says "I haven't worked at all since 2007"?

Or have I already answered my own question?


*Aside from my time at AppleOne, which I treat as a single job instead of listing each contract/position individually.
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
07 November 2009 @ 10:46 am
[info]quelonzia and I sat down to watch our recording of the premiere of V last night.

Fans of the original series will not be disappointed: it was completely faithful to the original.

The acting was wooden, the scripting was heavy-handed, the motivations were weak, the characters were unlikable, and the glaring Plot Stupidity of the original was wholly intact.

We didn't get past the first half-hour.

Pity. I had high hopes, considering the cast was packed with veterans of some of the best SF shows of the last decade.

Now I'm kind of nostalgic for the first couple of seasons of Earth: Final Conflict.


 
 
I feel: disappointed
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
07 November 2009 @ 10:15 am
I'm making my Xmas list -- anybody have any good reading material to recommend?

The only book I've got on there so far is The Revolution Business, by Charlie Stross. It's volume 5 of a 6-volume "hard fantasy" series: the classic fantasy "modern-day person falls into a medieval world" trope, cleverly concealing a solid SF what-if premise and a decidedly unromantic view of kings and princesses and wizards.
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
04 November 2009 @ 09:15 am
I woke up this morning with a headache, but in a far better, more positive mood than yesterday.

Now I'm afraid to take anything for the headache, in fear that the good mood will go with it.



Addendum, 10:23AM: Well, I took something for the headache. It hasn't gone away, but the good mood is slipping.


Tags: ,
 
 
I feel: better (ow)
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
03 November 2009 @ 10:22 am
Tags: ,
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
02 November 2009 @ 12:11 pm
Tags: ,
 
 
I feel: skreee!
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
01 November 2009 @ 08:36 am
I just read a BoingBoing article entitled "Heavy illegal downloaders buy more music", and felt compelled to respond. I'm copypasting my response here.

The particular passage that prompted my participation was in the final paragraph, where someone defending file sharing is quoted as saying:

"The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music," said Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research. "They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don't have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity," he continued. "You need to have it at a price point you won't notice."


Even Mr. Mulligan doesn't quite get it, when he says things like "We have a generation of young people who don't have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity". It still presents the Net Generation as somehow lacking, somehow qualitatively different in their ethos than those who came before.

My generation and my father's generation didn't think of music as a "paid-for commodity", either. All you needed was a radio. If you had a good-quality stereo with a tape deck, and a station with a reliable request line, poof! It was yours. The Net improved the quality, reliability, selection and simplicity of the process, but that's it.

And who went to that kind of trouble in the Eight-Track era?

People who really loved music, and also bought a lot of it.

Free music and free downloads, like free radio, are primarily "discovery tools", and always have been. They're the best advertising any musician could ask for.

When Napster first arrived on the scene in the '90s, I said, "this is the 21st century version of radio." When the record companies freaked out about it, and about MP3.com, it wasn't because of their products getting distributed for free, no matter what they said. It was because independent bands without big label contracts were getting just as much exposure as the indentured servants that the labels had put so much marketing machinery behind. People were getting music that wasn't being vetted by the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx.

That's the big threat to the music industry, and all this talk about "piracy" is just smoke and mirrors.

 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
01 November 2009 @ 07:53 am
After spending yesterday talking and laughing (and drinking) with family members, some of whom I haven't seen in twenty years, I'm feeling more positive about everything. The car? A setback and an annoyance. The job hunt? I've got prospects and directions I've never even tried before, because I didn't think I could do them.

I've spent far too much of my life not trying stuff because I didn't think I could do it. The only things I've ever done right were the times I dove right in despite that.

Joining the Coast Guard. Running off to Texas to move in with my Internet girlfriend. Going to a brand-new school that had only opened four years previously.

In the words of Virgil (and Scrooge McDuck), Audaces fortuna iuvat!


The secret, you see, is to
KEEP

SMILING!

 
 
I feel: awake
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
31 October 2009 @ 07:18 pm
After I showered this morning, we had water backed up in the sunken bathtub in the master bath. This has happened before, and usually limits itself to the master bath; we had, in fact, just had a plumber out a couple of months ago.

After [info]quelonzia and I had been at my stepdad's birthday party for, oh, maybe an hour, max, we got a call from Quel's daughter, informing us that EVERY DRAIN IN THE HOUSE was backing up.

We're home now, and can't flush.

This is gettin' ridiculous. Now I'm just starting to giggle.


Tags:
 
 
I feel: amused
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
Here's the full damage tally, as far as we can reconstruct it:

  1. Lexus comes tearing down our residential street at high speed, around half past midnight.
  2. Lexus impacts 1977 full-sized van, two doors down.
  3. Van is hit with sufficient force to hit the next-door neighbor's Toyota, in her driveway, and then rebounds off to TURN COMPLETELY AROUND and wind up on the sidewalk between next-door neighbor's house and OUR house.
  4. Lexus continues on its course, directly into my little purple car.


On the phone, my insurance company wanted as much detail about all of the accident as I could give them.

"What parts of the van were damaged?"
"ALL OF THEM."


 
 
I feel: astonished
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
31 October 2009 @ 09:51 am
To my great surprise, I have realized that I do indeed have a concept of the afterlife:

Just when you've settled down into a nice, well-deserved stretch of eternal oblivion, when you think all of life's nasty little jokes are, at last, over...

Rod Serling steps up and submits you for the viewer's approval, as you commence an eternity of thirty-to-sixty-minute doses of irony, forever, and ever, and ever.


 
 
I feel: numb
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
31 October 2009 @ 01:02 am
About 20 minutes ago, as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard what sounded like a distant accident.

My stepdaughter then pounded on my door and said, "Some one just ran into your car!"

The drunken son of a bitch hit the FULL-SIZED VAN that parks two houses down, hard enough to TURN IT 180 DEGREES AND LAND IT ON THE SIDEWALK, and then continued on to slam into MY car at high speed.

He hit his head in the impact, but was up walking around by the time I got out there. The fire department, police, and paramedics are out there now.

The front of his car is a crumpled mess. I've seen the rear or mine -- the left rear is about a foot or so in front of the right rear.

It's destroyed. It's fucking destroyed.

I can't take any more of this. I just can't. There's just been too fucking much, in too short a time.

Trick or fuckin' treat.


 
 
I feel: destroyed
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
30 October 2009 @ 11:03 pm
Last year, I misinterpreted "NaNo" as "nano" and wound up writing 5×10-5 words.


 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
30 October 2009 @ 11:02 am
We're moving at the end of the year, an event which has, heretofore, thrown a wrench into the jobquest, simply because of the need to revise and reprint resumes and so on. That's not going to happen this year.



Poll #1478509 Addressing the question of addressing the letterhead
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

We're moving at the end of the year, but the job hunt continues unabated. Should I...

View Answers

Leave the street address off my letterhead, and just have my email and cell phone as contact points?
4 (26.7%)

Use my current address on my letterhead, even though it'll be obsolete by the time anyone is ready to hire?
5 (33.3%)

Get a P.O. Box, and use that?
6 (40.0%)

I have a new and brilliant suggestion of my own! Here it is:

Should I have business cards made? Are they useful adjuncts to hardcopy resumes, or just pretentious?

View Answers

Yes! Being in a filing cabinet AND a Rolodex is twice as good!
3 (20.0%)

No! Everyone does everything electronically anyway.
4 (26.7%)

They're no good without a street address.
1 (6.7%)

Sure; just a cell number, an email address, and maybe a URL looks classy.
6 (40.0%)

Yes! and here's why:
3 (20.0%)

No! and here's why:
2 (13.3%)

...and here's why:




Note that I use the same letterhead on my resume and my cover letters.

Note also that I'm augmenting my usual "email shotgun" approach with personal visits and hand-carried resumes, which is why business cards may or may not be useful.

 
 
I feel: thinky
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
30 October 2009 @ 10:12 am
I just realized that I kind of left folks hanging after this post, so here's an update:




  • The Grape came back from the shop, a week ago Wednesday. The bumper is refurbished, the headlight replaced, and all is well. The hood kinda rattles a little when I idle, so I should probably give the body shop a call about that.
  • If you're in Silicon Valley, I highly recommend Kuykendall's Auto Body for body work. They were fast, efficient, and the car looks great.
  • Poppa spent two nights in the hospital as they ran a battery of tests. They offered to let him go home, but previous experience has shown that the same tests that get ordered immediately in the hospital will take a couple of months to clear insurance red tape if they're done on an outpatient basis. He's fine; the doctors gave him a relatively clean bill of health (the only anomalies were things they already knew about, and sum up to, "Dude, you're two weeks shy of turning 80!"). The surprise party is a go; my folks are already up there.
  • After getting the car back on Wednesday, last Thursday was spent with an early-morning doctor's appointment and a mid-afternoon dentist appointment. My cholesterol and related blood numbers are back in the target range, and I've lost a bit of weight, so I'm getting my health back on track.
  • Last Friday, I went ahead with the Santa Cruz Resume Run. I hit three places in Santa Cruz, and everyone was cordial. One civil engineering firm said that they'd actually been talking about getting a GIS guy in, in part to scan and convert old plans and records over to modern formats (something I've done in the past) -- of course, with the current state of the economy, they're not hiring at the moment, but they'll give me a call when they are.
  • I was thinking about heading out today and hitting some firms in San Jose and Santa Clara, but then I remembered what day it was. As amusing as it would be to say "Trick or Treat!" when I hand out resumes, I know people often dress up for Halloween in a lot of work places -- and sometimes even have active parties. The whole point of these hand-carry runs is to make personal contact; I don't want the memory of my First Impression getting lost 'midst costumed confusion. I'll spend the day emailing resumes and getting a better assortment of targets to visit before work on Monday.



 
 
I feel: busy
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
Your Obedient Serpent has no idea what he's gonna do to relax in the near future, because all the things he's frittered away his spare-and-not-so-spare time on over the years actively piss him off right now.

This is, in part, because he's frittered away so much of his life on them, and in part because, well, Busman's Holiday. One of his sources of stress is his low-paying retail job, selling all those time-consuming distractions.


 
 
I feel: aggravated
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
29 October 2009 @ 01:39 pm
Got this one from [info]leonard_arlotte, who in turn imported it from Facebook.



Leave a ONE WORD comment that you think describes me. It can only be one word. No more. Then copy and paste this on your LJ so that I may leave a word about you.


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I feel: curious
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
22 October 2009 @ 10:49 pm
I may have finally figured out why the current pop culture fascination with zombies does nothing but irritate me.

Ever have to hook a line to a three-month-old sea lion carcass to pull it off the breakwall where it shuffled off its mortal coil?

We had to do that several times a year during my billet at Coast Guard Group Monterey.

Dead, bloated, rotting things trailing gobbets of putrid flesh?

They don't faze me. They don't horrify me.

They annoy me. They represent an unpleasant-but-necessary task, and nothing more.

At the same time, I have a much clearer, more visceral understanding of what such a situation would be like. On an olfactory level, among others.

So, no, thank you, I won't participate in your Zombie Walk, and I don't wanna go see Zombieland.

 
 
I feel: bloork