A Time To Reap

I was at Whole Foods tonight around 7 or so. I figured that most people would be done shopping and that it would be relatively uncrowded. Generally I go there late and there's no crowd. It was really busy tonight though.

The girl who was scanning my items said 'Thanks for your patience'.
'It's a little more crowded than usual for Saturday night isn't it', I said.
'Yeah. I think it's because it's going to be really cold tomorrow. It might snow and people, whether they are aware of it or not, are stocking up for a storm.'
'Hmm. Good point. I'll buy that. It's nice outside right now though.'

It did seem like a good point. I did notice the seasonal Fall/Halloween stuff and it is, well, if we lived in agrarian communities, it would be the end of the harvest season. I think she might have had a point.

A Word For Our Sponsors

Watching the baseball playoffs, I have been treated to the Chevy commercial with Bob Seeger, no, uh, Bruce, uh, no, uh that Little Pink Houses dude singing over a montage of Americana, including, I think, Mt Rushmore, various construction sites, the great plains etc. I get a few seconds of it before I change the channel or put the tv on mute.

If I was in the mood for a truck, or any auto product, I would skip Chevy just for making this commercial.

This seems to be a popular opinion. From post:

"Q: I can't believe John Mellencamp wasn't listed as one of your "25 people to watch in AL playoffs." He needs to go into the witness protection program because I am ready to snap and go OJ on him and everyone at Chevy for ruining another postseason. TiVo and all the DVR makers need to get involved and find a way to block this commercial from broadcasting on TVs.

--Silvio, NYC

SG: Lord knows the "This is ourrrrrrrrrr country" joke has been beaten to death ... but don't you find it fascinating that an ad campaign has annoyed America to the degree that one of my readers just threatened to "go OJ" on the star of the commercial? Isn't the point of an ad campaign to build up confidence in your product and get people to like it? Since these particular ads confuse and enrage viewers, I'm going out on a limb and saying there's a problem here. If Chevy was smart, right near the end of the commercial, they'd have a new Chevy run over Mellencamp as he's singing, followed by the slogan, "CHEVY: WE'LL BE THE FIRST TO ADMIT WE SCREWED UP.""

IT Worker Shortage.

Here's a link to a Business Week article on the supposed shortage of labor in the Tech Market.
Here's a quote: 'With a B.S. in computer science, an M.A. in information systems management, and 20 years of experience, Rennie Sawade would appear to be a strong candidate for a job as a software development engineer. But all the 44-year-old can find these days are short-term, temporary jobs -- like the 15-month contract he's currently on at a Seattle-based medical device company. '

They then go on to quote a Microsoft guy saying they can't find enough qualified people for the jobs they have. I don't believe them. There are plenty of people in the IT world in Denver that I know who have been underemployed over the past few years despite their excellent qualifications. I think companies don't believe they should compete for labor resources, especially if you can get some guy from India who's happy to get a US visa and won't make any waves as long he doesn't have to go back home.

I make my living selling my labor. Cheap labor isn't good for me.

Rudy VS. Hillary 2008.

Fuck. If it's a choice between these two, I guess I want Hillary. Giuliani has an adviser named Norman Podhoretz who wants to start a war with Iran. He strikes me as just another shill for lobbyists, Republican interest groups, though he is pro-choice and relatively socially liberal, and his administration did preside over a significant decrease in crime.

Still, Hillary strikes me as being more likely to promote the working people of this country. I agree with her, that there should be a big overhaul of the way health-care is financed. Mostly you get insurance through your job and so employers are footing the insurance bill, which puts them at a competitive dis-advantage and discourages them from hiring people and promotes temp labor, which I really dislike. Plus, I don't see how the system covers people who are ill already, insurance companies don't have to take people with existing problems. So how do they get treatment?

I don't really want another Clinton in the White House. As much as I liked Bill, and prospered during his tenure, I don't think you should have the two families, Bush and Clinton, controlling the US for the past 20 years or so. We have to have other candidates out there. But, I guess I'd pick Hillary over Rudy still.

'Everything we have said here needs to stay in this room.'

Huh?

My project manager said this at the end of a meeting we had last week. To be honest, I am not really sure what the meeting was all about. The fact that we were asked not to discuss it bothers me though.

According to the Boss's Boss, the Director of IT, we have only completed 8 pages this year between 3 developers and 'you make your own bed' (whatever that means). This isn't a very good way to account for our productivity. We generally fix bugs on existing pages, or add new features to existing pages, or occasionally add new pages within the existing architecture, but now we are beginning a re-architecture of our application and only a few pages have been modified to use this new approach. To me, the real issue is that we are not getting anything out of the 're-architecture'. No performance enhancements, nothing. Boss's Boss hated the old architecture, but the new one doesn't make development easier, despite what he says. Plus, the UI looks worse. When we release this, I am pretty sure it's going to be buggy and the users are going to complain about the new look and feel, which means we have spent all this time and effort Going Backwards. And now I am hearing that we are doing terribly and we should hide this from management, which I guess means the General Manager, Boss's Boss's Boss. I told my manager that I am not going to lie to anyone, and I don't really know what I am supposed to be hiding anyway.

I don't like the sound of this. When we do have the release, we are probably going to have a postmortem, where the GM is going to ask what went wrong.

I am in a tricky position. This new architecture is the way the head cheese wants to go, even though I strongly feel it's going to make our product worse. If I say anything, and I have, to my manager, I am going to be considered, I don't know, not a team player, to put it nicely. But it is fucked up and to be honest I have to say it (in correct business terms though). And I don't want to get blamed for what is the Director's fuck up. Sigh. Need to take a look at my resume again.