Are We Havin' Fun Yet?

Spent all day on Serious Skunk Works work. We have now reached that stage of things during which everyone (except the boss -- he's a carrier, naturally immune) gets more white hairs: with completion in sight, suddenly all of those things which could be put off for later, can't. Hilarity ensues, Gordian knots are sliced and everyone suffers diresome attacks of Ausperger's.

Wish us luck!

Why You Should Not Take A Village To Get Your Child Raised

I did promise it, didn't I? Fair warning: it's not real to me until I see it in print; final editing occurs after blog entries are posted. This is a difficult topic. I plan to get one version done and posted, go do other things, then come back and see if it wants adjusted. It's not fair but that's how it works.


I watched a good portion of Gattaca tonight. I love that film. It's a pretty movie with a marvelous cast (look, having Ethan Hawke as a Christmas present is not really all that much to ask for, it it?) and the soundtrack is exceptional, but that's not why I love it.

See, I'm probably not supposed to be here. And not just the "Midwestern chick with almost no college holding down a seriously tech-y job" thing, either. I had rheumatic fever, a serious case, when I was 4 and 5 years old; spent most of a year in bed, in pain. I was dreadfully nearsighted as far back as I can remember and concealed it (I didn't know any better!) until I was in third grade. Until I was an adult, I got strep every time we vacationed and not just a sore throat: scary high fevers requiring medical intervention. Two serious car accidents in my teens and twenties and another bout of rheumatic fever in between: the odds are that, like Vincent in Gattaca, I should have been dead a few thousand heartbeats back. I'm not. In fact, thanks to luck and hard work, I'm in excellent health. My heart's unharmed.

We are not just our genetics; we are not just the product of what happens to us. We're fixable.

But nobody owes it to us to fix us. I believe that forcing our fellow citizens to carry that burden is immoral.

Let's consider a family with a very ill child. They cannot afford to give this child the help it needs, so they go to the government.

Governments, interestingly enough, do not create wealth. They cannot conjure money from the air; when they try, they make the money they issue worth less and less until eventually, it is worth nothing at all. This functions exactly as a tax does: value which you have earned is taken from you. This is usually too much bother for governments, so they get "their" money more directly, by taxation.

Taxation is most usually universal; everyone, or nearly everyone, gets tapped. It may or may not be progressive, asking a greater percentage of persons with greater wealth, or it may be based on consumption of all or some commodities as a sales or value-added tax. But usually anyone with any money is made to contribute.

This includes the vast bulk of the population, a group which is generally just scraping by. Near the lower end of the fat middle of the bell curve, we have single-parent households of modest income and large families with two wage-earners and at the upper end are the semi-professionals and skilled trades with smaller familes or none at all, but the middle, the biggest group of taxpayers, is a group without much to spare and plenty of problems of their own. They set their own priorites and the vast majority of them do not rely on public assistance; they have probably got very basic insurance coverage for emergencies.

Now our family-with-sick-child comes along (multiplied by their hundreds) and thanks to a Government Program, picks the pockets of, mostly, people who had little if anything to spare. Your Tiny Tim, with a chance of survival even worse than mine as a child, counts for more than the machinist's son with a broken arm? Counts for more than the widow's ability to pay her gas bill? --Maybe to you.

Look, if you'd like to ask the people of your "village" for help, most of them would, as much as they could actually spare. That's not the same as having money -- an amount they have little control over -- taken from them to help you.

Worse yet, your own need will be weighed-- by some panel or board or bureaucrat -- against the needs of others. It may be denied or restricted. They don't care a fig for your child, only for whatever rules or ideals they have been given to follow. In the interest of "fairness," most are given little discretion.

If the help you are freely given by individuals and voluntary associations is not enough, I'm sorry. I am deeply and sincerely sorry. But our world is neither perfect nor is it pefectable. It is not acceptable to harm others to improve things for you and yours. Not even a little harm.

Rumors Of My Exaggeration Are Greatly Dead

....Yes, dear reader -- no, wait! counting the search 'bots, there are three of you! Okay, --readers: I am still blogging, just not much yesterday or a lot today. Maybe tomorrow!

Heap big doings here at the Skunk Works, upon which I would love to dwell in every-polished-bolthead detail, but not even the sleepiest of you need that much sleep. Also -- and here's some kewl "inside dope" on the exciting world of Bigtime Professional Brawdcastering -- we are on the very threshold of "sweeps," which is not the badly-needed stem to stern dusting and vacuuming this place cries out for but The Ratings Period! For you-the-home-viewer, this means plenty of fine and dandy new episodes (All New! In Choler! Er, "Color!") of your favorite shows, plus chat shows with truly attention-grabbingly vile and creepy content; for me, it means All This Junk Gotta Work Right Or Else. Or else we'll get crummy ratings and I won't get a nice raise or even new fun toys. Plus, our competition, evil, conniving slugs that they are (Hi, Tom!), would just love to get even a tiny peek at our Stunning Improvements which are sure to lead to either glory or at least attention, and I'm not gonna be the one t'spill the beans.

So I shan't say much, and that at great length. It's a gift.

Yikes!

I'm hopelessly behind today. The Skunk Workers called up about midnight* with heap Big Trouble; met my boss at the North Skunk-Working Campus, did some in-the-dark-and-cold tower-climbing and infrared camera work and ultimately concluded it was just an unusual glitch. Fog, full moon, cold, I really hope we didn't miss evidence of a jumper. It could well have been a wriggle on the power line or a settling-in thermal adjustment on the recently-replaced sections of transmission line.

But whatever else it was, it was A) Time-consuming and B) Worrisome.

So now, I must dash off and do heavy lifting. The end was in sight on moving out. The finish line tape just got moved. It does that.

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* rinnnggg!
Our heroine lifts receiver, says, "Telephone?"
Long, long pause, slight snicker, "What? Umm, it's Hal. At the station? We have some kind of problem with the transmitter..."
Ever feel both happy (Ooo! Overtime!) and annoyed (Aw, overtime) at once?

I Am Wondering

Does it count as "saving the earth" if you are keeping said earth in quart Mason jars in your basement? I mean, if one were maybe so doing....

A Link...

Y'know, they did start out as "web logs," as in "places I have went." While I have Some Thing percolating in my noggin about Why The Village Is Not Obliged To Raise Your Child No Matter How Sick He Is, I don't know if the brew will be fit to post; it will make me look even more heartless than I am, which is sayin' a lot, and won't address the useless tears I have shed over other people's tragedies and things I cannot fix.

So try this, instead: an essay on a different sort of topic (or is it?) by Geek With A .45. An Excruciating Truth/"The Lightning"
I am not entirely comfortable with his angle of attack or his conclusions but I can't find any really big holes in it, either. Well, maybe two: I dunno if keeping America free is an inevitable result of the US of A havin' hold of The Lightning [and neither does The Geek. My apologies, sir] and I believe anarchy is the real state of human affairs; "civilization" is merely a game most of us have agreed to play and power in the hands of the State is most often the opposite of freedom. But granting that, the boy's not makin' stuff up. Read it an' see for yourself.

...While you're at it, go have a look at The Lawdog Files. The link is right over there at the right. He's a genius of the heart -- and no fool in other ways, too. Wish there were more like him.

Now That's Eatin'

There are all manner of awfulnesses 'pon which to comment, including yet another chapter of the modern revival of a custom once common among the pornea of old but I have elected, at least for now, to leave that to others in favor of mentioning something near and dear to me: dinner.

The local Sunflower Market, a sort of hippie capitalist supermarket in the long-ago A&P building where my Dad worked during his High School years, is proud to offer local marvels and their most recent find was a trove of brilliantly-red cherry peppers, the kind usually found only pickled in glass jars.

Fresh cherry peppers offer their own unique heat, slow-building, long-lasting, not as sharp and annoyingly persistent as a jalapeno while both stronger and smoother than pale-green Anaheim peppers. It's a bit much to eat one by itself, though they could work well on an antipasto tray. You could cook with them; properly treated, they'd add a nice bite to home-made chili. Tonight, I cooked nothing. I was lazy. Here's how it works:

Start with:
1 or 2 Cherry peppers, finedly diced
At least a half-dozen kalamata olives, chopped (vary to taste) (I love these and used about a dozen).
2 or 3 slices of Jarlsberg or other light Swiss cheese, chopped
1 can of tuna in olive oil, drained
Mix everything in a bowl, let it sit a spell in the fridge if you have time, and enjoy! It needs no other spice or dressing. You could use tuna in spring water but the oil helps keep the cherry peppers from overpowering the other flavors. A fresh herb salad -- the bagged-up ready-made kind -- makes a nice side.

It won't cure the ills of the Federal Government or make the hostile, backwards rats of the world love you, but for a little while, those things won't matter as much!

Cat Update

Tommy the cat, for those who have wondered, spent two nights in the Animal Hospital, where they found nothing too awful except his teeth. He came home Monday and went to his regular vet Tuesday for dental work. He had one tooth pulled and has been doing very well, happier and more active than he had been in months. What a relief! He's quite elderly and very dear to me.
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TEOTWAWKI? Unlikely.

If I seemed to be waxing apocolyptic previously, blame the times. I consider most of the "crash" scenarios to be low-probability. If things do go all wonky, a slow slide is a lot more likely than a sudden fall. This is not to say we might not some day find ourselves in a bad way -- but I expect to have a chance to push back and I expect your shoulder to be against the wheel, too. Modern Civilization offers us too many good and useful things to give it up without a struggle!

Other things, we just get, free for nothing. Leaving the Skunk Works Wednesday evening after a hard day of coping with the sad loss of Something Very Important (see previous entries) and the increasingly-faint hope of that device ever working again, I was greeted with an impossibly pink arch of fluffy clouds against a brilliantly blue sky. Colors so intense that if an artist had painted them, no one would find it realistic! It lasted perhaps ten minutes, tops, and then faded away. By the time I turned down my own alley, neon extravagence had given way to a determinedly inky Autumn evening, punctuated by the same low clouds reflecting the city's lights and the moon trying to peek through them.

If human civilization or just Western culture does manage to go belly-up, one with the-glory-that-was-Rome, the sun and sky will keep on producing such shows, each one different. Might as well look up and savor them!
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About 67.6% Dead

I spent today at an all-day series of seminars connected with whatever it is I do -- if you're guessing something along the lines of media engineering, here's a nice gold star! Hang onto it, you'll want comforting later and that's about the best I can do. I am usually happy-silly but even I get whacked in the face by reality every once in awhile.

There is -- always -- something about the EAS system at these gatherings and for all my extreme leeriness of Big Gummint, EAS, warts and all, is a low-cost, workable system. The basic structure is a multiply-interconnected "tree" and it's pretty hard to break. The "Amber Alert" is one of the cheapest, most effective and least-intrusive of the citizen snitch programs and has proven itself remarkably resistant to abuse; and storm warnings are promulgated about as rapidly as possible, either via the National Weather Service tripping EAS alerts, or stations working directly from NWS releases trying to be even faster than EAS. --In the event of an actual emergency, good effing luck: all the system can do is tell you stuff and if you're not ready to react properly to bulletins like, for instance, "The radioactive cloud is over Little Rock, heading North-Northwest at approximately 25 mph," then you're gonna die.

Seriously -- if things really go to pot, the future belongs to that LDS family down the street and the crazy survivalist guy a block over who has a basement shelter stocked with food and water, if it belongs to anyone at all. It would belong to me except I'm either going to be hard at work engineering media, or pitching in at the Red Cross (etc.), a decision I came to a long time ago. I haven't much family and I'd rather go out helping those who do rather than slink away to save my own lonely hide. (So that's why the Objectivists won't have me over for Christmas! Dang!)

One of the speakers was, for want of a better term, a Homeland inSecurity wonk. He seemed like a pretty good guy; like most workin' bureaucrats, he's no strutting brownshirt, just a man trying to do a difficult job. I have serious qualms about some aspects of the job but darned few about the man.

And that, at long last, brings us to today's topic: the National Strategic Stockpile. Do you know what that is? It's big ol' piles of useful meds, prepacked for rapid deployment and stationed so a supply is never more than 12 hours away from any major population center. What's in the boxes now is mostly antibiotics that can hack known forms of what we'll call "weaponized enthrax," plus items to deal with a few other known bio-threats. Sounds pretty good, right?

You bet it is -- for the lucky 324,000 who are first in line, assuming what is politely known as "civil unrest" doesn't break up the calm and orderly distribution. That's how many doses are in one standard package, period. We can hope there's another 324K doses on the way, and if the agent happens to be enthrax, the highest probability is there's a 48-hour treatement window, plenty of time...again assuming people don't become a tad, shall we say, over-excited.

Quick sidebar: I consider this to be a very low-probability event. If you don't think every crop-duster in the States has already been vetted six ways from Sunday (and has become more than a bit watchful him or herself), or that any ijit fool enough to overfly a crowded city, especially during a big event (auto race, rally, whatever) won't get waved off and receive a fighter escort if they don't comply forthwithly, you've been asleep. Restricting airspace during big events was SOP even before 11 Sept. All it takes is one klutz with engine trouble to mess up nice Pan-Am Games.

But fine, let's say it happens; Badguy duJour has a really good day and dusts my population center during something like, oh, a 500-mile automobile race. There's a good chance over a million people will be exposed (or think they have been). 1,000,000. If everything works out really well, 324,000 of them will get treatment likely to save their lives, and perhaps only as many as 15% will die. If people become vexed at the situation, that first 324,000 could well be the only ones to get dosed -- politicians and public-safety workers first.

That leaves over two-thirds on their own. Maybe dead.

That's your government, lookin' out for you, 'cos they care. Sure makes me feel good about where my taxes go!


My advice? Same as it's been for years: avoid targets (I live in one but I'm not all that clever, as described above). Avoid target-rich events. If Bad Stuff happens, move with alacrity away from the area and seek treatment elsewhere. (This last would be a bad idea if you have been exposed to something infectious. Your call). Riots are the biggest danger once the initial exposure is past.

In the discussions at the seminar, the notion of civil unrest in this connection never came up. It's not our job. The speaker did suggest we needed to "avoid producing panic" but offered no suggestion as to how to do it.

I guess not panicking is up to you. Okay?
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Mondays! Mondaze!

Yeech. Showed up at the Skunk Works this ayem -- fifteen minutes late, thanks to traffic and an innate lack of any time sense -- and discovered Something Very Important had failed. Well, more like "augered in short of the runway with all four engines on fire," probably unrecoverably.

This should not be a problem, as we have had nearly a year of fiddling with Something Very Cool (SVCool), which is to replace Something Very Important (SVI), not to mention most of the other systems that SVI works with. That is, it would replace it, if certain very critical parts of it actually worked. They don't. We bought vaporware. It was not represented as vaporware (what a surprise!) but that's what it was.

So, whilst various other members of the Deportatation of Train-Driving* did A) crash recovery or B) short-term workarounds, I got to string wires and do other hardware-y things to make, maybe, a corner of SVCool that does work be a kind of sort of back up to the workaround that is filling in for SVI.

Oh, yeah, and it poured down rain all afternoon.

Some fine Monday! The workaround for SVI is going to take up a huge amount of all our time until we either get the broken gadget running again (holding one's breath while waiting for that a very bad idea) or come up with some brilliant and unexpected fix. What we're doing for now is a crude expedient.

...As ever, I'd love to go into great and complicated detail about this stuff, except for two little problems: first, it is staggeringly dull when closely examined and second, this is stuff my paycheck runs though, critical stuff for my employer, and I'll not give up even a tiny detail that might give the competition an edge.

Oh, the excitement and drama and broken fingernails!
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* If I have to explain this, it will take all the fun out. Read it slowly, sideways, if it didn't make sense.

Moving -- Or Trying To

I don't mind taking time out to see to my cats; but it was time lost and when the wrecking company called to say they were running late, it was a mixed blessing. I had time to get to the vet, but lost time on the move.

I did make some progress. The MGB is moved and fits well in the garage, which has become a mini-biography: (Ooops! Bit of a cock-up at Blogger, no pix upload today. I have posted the photo in my old blog at http://www.myspace.com/robertaindy)

Anyway, it's my life story told in artifacts: my prom dress (still fits. Fear me), my "little black dress" from when the Skunk Works did way-formal holiday parties (dude, they served quail eggs and caviar on the buffet-- and it was good!) and a couple of nice cloaks hanging with the other closet overflow above the MGB, bicycle, scooters and Accent; gun-cleaning stuff and ancient, cool-looking electronic gadgets on shelves along the walls, and a few boxes of books still to get taken into the house. Along with a zillion boxes containing everything else!

The guy that moved my MGB (on a huge flatbed wrecker) had better not be reading this blog: oh, he was handsome! About the right height and build, too -- over 6' and well-muscled. Little grey at the temples, also a Good Thing. Plus, he was very, very good at his work, which -- as I have admitted -- is kind of a toe-tingly thing for me. But I was good, I refrained from bein' forward an' he called me "Ma'am" and was properly respectful. Got a decent price, too, considering the amount of finagling and force it took to get the MG out of where it had been for a decade and into its new home.

There was gonna be a cute picture of me in my "alpha geekette" T-shirt but not today, not on Blogger. (You can find it on my MySpace blog). I'm sure they are hammerin' on the stuck data-pipes this very moment and it will all be better by and by.

(And so it was!)



Another day of moving is in store for me tomorrow, so I'm off! Way off, if that's T-shirt's any indication. Wish me luck, there's a lot left to be hauled out.
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