Just a quick note

I just typed "chick" instead of "quick". What does that mean, Dr. Freud?

I've been busy lately...spent the end of last week working hard on menu updates and corrections and formatting, because we're about to publish the menu guide!!! :D Going to work on that this morning too.

We also had an office Christmas party on Friday :)

This weekend has been busy with Christmas stuff, too...I went to Wanda's house on Saturday and helped her with her tree, and then she and I and her daughter Beth went shopping: Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and JC Penney. At Penney's I met up with Cheryl and Reid, and we did our Christmas shopping for each other and Grandma Flo. Then they gave me a ride back to Wanda's house so I could get my car. We were out until after midnight!

Then yesterday I cleaned up, wrapped presents, and started my marathon of cookie baking. The peanut butter flavored Black Eyed Susans are done, and the spritz Christmas trees are just waiting to be coated in white chocolate :) I have three other types of cookie in the fridge waiting to be finished and baked, as well as those three balls of gingerbread dough I haven't used yet. I'm thinking I'll just make them into little men.

I also worked on Christmas cards...late as usual, and I'm still not done. Out of country people, expect yours very late. Others, you may still get them on time...if there's a Christmas miracle or something...

Well, I need to get to work on those menus! Happy Holidays, everyone!

What I want

I was trolling Hotjobs, as I'm prone to do, and I came across this entry:

Assistant Manager Vision Care Holdings, LLC Martinez, GA

You can't imagine how fast I clicked. Here's why, I think.

Assistant Manager: I would be in charge of stuff.
Martinez, GA: I live right near there! I can get there by walking ten feet that way!
Vision Care Holdings, LLC: This sounded unique. Like some great vision for the future. I wanted to know what kind of vision it was, and how this "Assistant Manager" would be a part of it.

Those of you with common sense will probably have guessed that it was not, in fact, an exciting, paradigm-shifting thought-position...that it was, obvious by the name, a retail prescription glasses store.

Eyeglass World, to be exact.

The sheer disappointment I felt--"Gah, retail"--really made me pause. What sort of job did I think it was going to be? Why did I assume it would be something other than hawking products? What do I want, what am I looking for, that makes me see groundbreaking, experimental management positions where none exist?

I want to be part of something--I want to be in charge of something--that is unique, exciting, dangerous, big, important, and highly rewarding. I want to be an idea person who actually gets things done. I want to be flexible, a troubleshooter, constantly growing and adapting. I want to face new challenges, to create challenges for myself that lead to the development of better things.

I was reading about Google's new Suggest feature (in beta) at the Google blog the other day. It reminded me of how I felt when I first looked at Google's employment page, and how I felt when I recently applied to a local company that seems more Silicon Valley than CSRA. Like I was on the verge of something cool, but I couldn't quite get there.

I mean, listen to this:

The project stemmed from an idea I had a few months ago, and since then I've been working on it in my 20% time, which is a program where Google allows their employees to devote 20% of their working hours to any project they choose. What's really amazed me about this project is how in a matter of months, working on my own, I was able to go from a lunch table conversation to launching a new service. In my opinion, this is one of the things that really makes Google a great place; that the company's systems, resources and, most important, people are all aligned to make it as easy as possible to take an idea and turn it into something cool.

That is the kind of thing I want to be doing--not necessarily as an employee, though that seems to be the only road for me right now, but just in general. I want to be doing cool things that change how other things work. I want to mess with stuff and make it better.

I'm not a programmer, though. I studied programming some in high school and college, but I'm not gifted at it, and I don't even particularly like it. It's a means to an end for me.

What I want is to be able to revolutionize within the fields I am interested in.

That, I think, is why I feel so lost when I try to figure out what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. I have no idea where to even begin.

Oh, speaking of horses...

UMAAAAAAAAA!!!

A horsey predilection

According to About.com's About Japanese Language, the Japanese would think the following of me if they knew I was born in the year of the Horse.

Horse (uma) --- Born 1990, 1978, 1966, 1954, 1942, 1930, 1918, 1906
People born in the year of the Horse are skilful in paying compliments and talk too much. They are skilful with money and handle finances well. They are quick thinkers, wise and talented. Horse people anger easily and are very impatient.

I really shouldn't laugh...but I did

Baggage screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport spotted - and then lost - a fake bomb planted in luggage by a supervisor during a training exercise.

[...]

In Tuesday night's test, a TSA supervisor secretly placed the bomb, which was designed to resemble the plastic explosive Semtex, inside a bag that was put through screening machines, [Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration,] said.

A baggage screening machine sounded an alarm, but workers somehow lost track of the bag, which was then loaded onto a Continental Airlines flight.

This really isn't funny at all. But I've got the giggles...I just can't get over the fact that they "somehow lost track of the bag"!

This headline is bad. Very bad.

(That title was sort of a nod to Guardian 452, my beloved Bob, because I have spent the past few days watching ReBoot. But that totally has nothing to do with the following.)

Look at the name of this article:

Japan Today: WWII Chinese sex slaves lose appeal

So, what, they got ugly?

Knee-deep in work, but I wanted to post this before I forgot

Apparently the only thing keeping me from a European vacation is the unfinished state of David's guest bedroom.

(What? Money? Okay fine, two things are keeping me from a European vacation...)

Running robot

Honda has unveiled a bipedal robot that can run at a leisurely 3 kph.

Sick bastard

The "Nara schoolgirl killer" needs a new nickname. May I suggest "friend or close relation to the Ariyama family"? After all, now he's targeting Kaede's 2-year-old sister.

I want this terrorist murderer caught, tried, convicted, and punished to the full extent of the law. You watch, though. When he is caught, he'll thank the police, saying, "I'm glad I was arrested. I couldn't stop myself."

I've been thinking about highly-structured communities and the effects they might have on people. Yesterday I was musing fondly about how it might be to go to a Catholic church--I would know what I was doing far more often, due to the rituals and the guidance from the Pope. But people who grow up in a more rigid culture seem to end up wanting to break out of it more than anything.

So I'm wondering if this killer has broken free of whatever societal constraints held him--"I was a mere salaryman, scraping for cash, drunk every day, living in a shoebox, but now I'm a murderer"--and is now searching for a way back in. Having grasped the "freedom" he wanted, he just kept going until it got out of hand, and now he doesn't know what to do other than grow so radical that the system finally stops him.

(Please bear in mind that I have never even attended a psychology course.)

Carving oneself up with beer

Here's the original article on how a man in Australia lanced through his stomach with a jetstream of beer, but I prefer how Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing explained it.

This is the best thing I've heard all day.

Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough - Taxi Driver Shoots Man in Bin Laden Mask

Leonel Arias, 47, told police he was playing a practical joke by donning the Bin Laden mask, toting his pellet rifle and jumping out to scare drivers on a narrow street in his hometown, Carrizal de Alajuela, about 20 miles north of San Jose.

Arias had startled several drivers that way on Monday afternoon. But when he jumped out in front of taxi driver Juan Pablo Sandoval, the motorist reached for a gun and shot him twice in the stomach.

Go Sandoval! Too bad it wasn't really Bin Laden ;P

Seriously, if Osama Bin Laden jumped out in front of your car waving a gun, what would you do? (Since I don't have a gun, I'd probably just run him over.)

Police declined to detain Sandoval, saying he had believed he was acting in self-defense.

Damn straight he was.

Come to the U.S.! Get fat!

Yahoo! News (UK Reuters): Oddly Enough - Thin immigrants get fat in U.S

This isn't really surprising, but it's good that a study like this has been done. It underlines the inherent problems in our dietary culture.

Now we just need to understand more completely what they are, and how to combat them...

Let's perform a completely unscientific, sloppy study of our new drug, then conveniently forget to tell the president about the bad results

MSNBC: Officials warned of concerns about AIDS drug
But U.S. sent medication to Africa anyway, documents show

Weeks before President Bush announced a plan to protect African babies from AIDS, top U.S. health officials were warned that research on the key drug was flawed and may have underreported severe reactions including deaths, government documents show.

The 2002 warnings about the drug, nevirapine, were serious enough to suspend testing for more than a year, let Uganda's government know of the dangers and prompt the drug's maker to pull its request for permission to use the medicine to protect newborns in the United States.

But the National Institutes of Health, the government's premier health research agency, chose not to inform the White House as it scrambled to keep its experts' concerns from scuttling the use of nevirapine in Africa as a cheap solution, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

It's nice to know we've got fine, ethical people working at the National Institutes of Health.

Jesus.

Also, isn't it nice how drugs with potential side effects are okay for Africa, but not for the US? Nice little double standard there.

[T]he German-owned company [Boehringer Ingelheim] no longer is seeking FDA permission to use nevirapine for protecting U.S. infants because better treatments have emerged, [Dr. Patrick Robinson, a top Boehringer AIDS specialist,] said.

I guess our babies are more important than African babies.

What a load of shit.

Here are some news items.

Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough - Retiree Duped by Naked Invitation

An 81-year-old German dropped his trousers and lost his wallet when two young women asked him to join them in a nude photo shoot but they fled with his belongings as he stripped, police said Monday.

All I can think of is when that happened to George in Seinfeld. (Well, I can also think about what a horrible sentence that is. But you should expect that from me by now.)

Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough - U.S. author Wolfe wins bad sex award

American author and journalist Tom Wolfe has won one of the world's most dreaded literary accolades -- the British prize for bad sex in fiction.

The prize is awarded each year "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel".

Maybe someday I'll win that!

(But yow, read those example passages...they are uniquely horrible.)

Organisers said Wolfe, who is based in New York, was the first writer in the 12-year history of the competition to decline his invitation.

Awww...he's probably pouting.

Here's a really nice (and amazing) piece:

Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough - After 233 Kids, Foster Parents Quit

"We had been married 20 years, and life was good," Imogene Gorsuch wrote in a diary, describing the decision to start taking in children in the late 1950s. The pair also raised three sons and a daughter of their own.

"Blessed with a comfortable home, adequate income and everything we needed, we had a desire to share this with others less fortunate," Imogene Gorsuch wrote.

What a great couple. I really admire them. Being a foster parent is one of the hardest things you can do. You'll see an example of why in the article.

The horror of "round robin" Christmas letters

Yahoo! has a funny story today about those Christmas letters you get from friends and relatives chronicling the past year. I'm of two minds about the practice--on the one hand, it's nice to know what everyone's up to, but on the other, as the article points out, they often seem like gloatfests. I sent a small letter with my Christmas cards last year...I'm not sure I'm going to do anything of the kind this year, simply because I'm so disorganized. I haven't even bought cards yet (doing that today, hopefully).

What do you think of these "round robin" letters, readers? Have you ever gotten one? Have you ever written one?