7 Things Meme
celliogave me:
G'kar: I recognized the name as a Babylon 5 character, but I had to go to Wikipedia to see which character he was. My wife and I didn't get into Babylon 5. It wasn't being broadcast in Buffalo. I've actually seen more B5 episodes in Cellio's house than anywhere else. :) So, if you were hoping for a deep character analysis, I'm sorry to disappoint you. My impression of G'kar was that he and Londo were basically comic relief. I think there was an episode where the humans convinced one of the aliens that he had swallowed a microchip when he hadn't. That was G'kar, yes?
Mike Jittlov: I remember his movies from the early 80's. I had to check Wikipedia to see if he was still alive because I haven't thought about him in years. I remember seeing Wizard of Speed and Time (both the original short and extended movie), the one in the department store, Mouse Mania, and the stop action one to Petula Clark's singing "I Know A Place". The latter was at a post-revel where I ended up sitting next to a blind woman and trying to describe what was happening on the screen!
troubadours: I is one. :) The East Kingdom Order of the Troubadour was the second award I ever got in the SCA. When I received it, the traditional token was a goblet, no scroll. There is no badge for the order, either. Over time, things changed and recipients started getting scrolls with an unofficial badge. I'm happy to hear things have gone back to the beginning and the honor is conferred with just a goblet again.
meat: My wife and I buy all our meat direct from the farmer, by the cow. Grass fed beef. We got a huge chest freezer from my MIL for our anniversary. We also get our chickens, milk, eggs, pork, and lamb from them as well. Veggies and grains from the food co-op and I can say 80% of my diet has never seen the inside of a supermarket. There's a difference in the taste as well. Grass fed beef vs. fast-food hamburger is like Mom's homemade meat-loaf vs. a frozen TV dinner meatloaf.
pointy-haired bosses: My current boss is not pointy-haired. There was a boss at my previous job who was. A brief description of the setup: Phone support is scored on Time (the average time you're on the phone with a customer), Customer Satisfaction (the customer's email is automatically sent a survey to grade you) and Quality Assurance (one call a week is randomly picked and monitored and scored) Every quarter you can get bonus money for excelling in any of these categories. In theory, you can get a 'super bonus' by excelling in all of them, but that doesn't happen. If, in the final week of the month, you have bonus-level Time, CS and QA, you will suddenly get a rash of 'random' QAs which lower your score until you finish just shy of bonus level. I've even seen an agent get a great Customer Satisfaction score and a miserable Quality Assurance score on the same call!
Every 90 days they compute the rank of all the agents based on these scores. They also list all of the possible 'shifts' for the next 90 days for agents to bid on. The shifts are all staggered so you don't get a group of people getting off the phones at once. Shifts start every half hour. Additionally, the shift bid lists the manager you report to and your 'weekend' Since there has to be one day a week that everyone is present for a team meeting, several of the shifts have split weekends where the two days off are not consecutive. Managers want to get the best agents on their shifts. If an agent makes $100 in bonus, the manager makes $10 in bonus without having to do anything. Solomon got his rocks off making his agents miserable. No praise, frequent criticism, insufferably rude. He also had the best possible shifts, Sat & Sun off, starting times 8AM, 8:30AM, 9AM. Every quarter, he'd get the bottom of the barrel, the agents who got last pick on the shift bids. And he couldn't figure out why no one wanted these great shifts. Needless to say, he got few bonuses.
programming languages: I know a wide variety of programming languages. I can pick up a new one in less than a month to the extent that I can write user manual's for programs written in the that language. In fact, that's what Flexovit hired me for. Their entire IT team was two people. A 'sys-op' who only knew how to make archives and load packaged programs onto a lap top and couldn't write a word of code to save her own life, and the IT Manager who wrote all the programs for the entire company in COBOL76. That's 1976. No programmer's manual, no user manual, no internal doc, nothing! I was hired to write ALL documentation for the entire system. When I went to Borders to buy books, they had nothing on COBOL. I asked a sales clerk who checked their online inventory. She confirmed that there was nothing. "It must be a brand-new language." I kept poker face. Then she decided to try back inventory. If they had a book before, but they were out now, the line would blink. The entire page blinked. She said she had never seen anything like that before. Finally got a couple of manuals off E-bay. I ended up re-writing programs as much as documenting them. They were horrid! Instead of using LOOP1, LOOP2, LOOP3, LOOP4 as loop labels, he used LOOP, L00P, LO0P, and L0OP. If the program asked the user a question, "YES" was the only yes response. Everything else defaulted to a no response, including the word "yes" (lowercase). All of the secretaries has stick-a-notes to remind them of this.
Antarctica: Long ago, on one of the SCA chat boards, someone jokingly said that AEthelmearc should annex Antarctica and claim it as ours. There'd be nobody to argue our claim as there's nothing down there but ice and penguins. A one-line response was posted: "I am not a penguin". It seems one of the research scientists down there was an SCA member. :)
G'kar: I recognized the name as a Babylon 5 character, but I had to go to Wikipedia to see which character he was. My wife and I didn't get into Babylon 5. It wasn't being broadcast in Buffalo. I've actually seen more B5 episodes in Cellio's house than anywhere else. :) So, if you were hoping for a deep character analysis, I'm sorry to disappoint you. My impression of G'kar was that he and Londo were basically comic relief. I think there was an episode where the humans convinced one of the aliens that he had swallowed a microchip when he hadn't. That was G'kar, yes?
Mike Jittlov: I remember his movies from the early 80's. I had to check Wikipedia to see if he was still alive because I haven't thought about him in years. I remember seeing Wizard of Speed and Time (both the original short and extended movie), the one in the department store, Mouse Mania, and the stop action one to Petula Clark's singing "I Know A Place". The latter was at a post-revel where I ended up sitting next to a blind woman and trying to describe what was happening on the screen!
troubadours: I is one. :) The East Kingdom Order of the Troubadour was the second award I ever got in the SCA. When I received it, the traditional token was a goblet, no scroll. There is no badge for the order, either. Over time, things changed and recipients started getting scrolls with an unofficial badge. I'm happy to hear things have gone back to the beginning and the honor is conferred with just a goblet again.
meat: My wife and I buy all our meat direct from the farmer, by the cow. Grass fed beef. We got a huge chest freezer from my MIL for our anniversary. We also get our chickens, milk, eggs, pork, and lamb from them as well. Veggies and grains from the food co-op and I can say 80% of my diet has never seen the inside of a supermarket. There's a difference in the taste as well. Grass fed beef vs. fast-food hamburger is like Mom's homemade meat-loaf vs. a frozen TV dinner meatloaf.
pointy-haired bosses: My current boss is not pointy-haired. There was a boss at my previous job who was. A brief description of the setup: Phone support is scored on Time (the average time you're on the phone with a customer), Customer Satisfaction (the customer's email is automatically sent a survey to grade you) and Quality Assurance (one call a week is randomly picked and monitored and scored) Every quarter you can get bonus money for excelling in any of these categories. In theory, you can get a 'super bonus' by excelling in all of them, but that doesn't happen. If, in the final week of the month, you have bonus-level Time, CS and QA, you will suddenly get a rash of 'random' QAs which lower your score until you finish just shy of bonus level. I've even seen an agent get a great Customer Satisfaction score and a miserable Quality Assurance score on the same call!
Every 90 days they compute the rank of all the agents based on these scores. They also list all of the possible 'shifts' for the next 90 days for agents to bid on. The shifts are all staggered so you don't get a group of people getting off the phones at once. Shifts start every half hour. Additionally, the shift bid lists the manager you report to and your 'weekend' Since there has to be one day a week that everyone is present for a team meeting, several of the shifts have split weekends where the two days off are not consecutive. Managers want to get the best agents on their shifts. If an agent makes $100 in bonus, the manager makes $10 in bonus without having to do anything. Solomon got his rocks off making his agents miserable. No praise, frequent criticism, insufferably rude. He also had the best possible shifts, Sat & Sun off, starting times 8AM, 8:30AM, 9AM. Every quarter, he'd get the bottom of the barrel, the agents who got last pick on the shift bids. And he couldn't figure out why no one wanted these great shifts. Needless to say, he got few bonuses.
programming languages: I know a wide variety of programming languages. I can pick up a new one in less than a month to the extent that I can write user manual's for programs written in the that language. In fact, that's what Flexovit hired me for. Their entire IT team was two people. A 'sys-op' who only knew how to make archives and load packaged programs onto a lap top and couldn't write a word of code to save her own life, and the IT Manager who wrote all the programs for the entire company in COBOL76. That's 1976. No programmer's manual, no user manual, no internal doc, nothing! I was hired to write ALL documentation for the entire system. When I went to Borders to buy books, they had nothing on COBOL. I asked a sales clerk who checked their online inventory. She confirmed that there was nothing. "It must be a brand-new language." I kept poker face. Then she decided to try back inventory. If they had a book before, but they were out now, the line would blink. The entire page blinked. She said she had never seen anything like that before. Finally got a couple of manuals off E-bay. I ended up re-writing programs as much as documenting them. They were horrid! Instead of using LOOP1, LOOP2, LOOP3, LOOP4 as loop labels, he used LOOP, L00P, LO0P, and L0OP. If the program asked the user a question, "YES" was the only yes response. Everything else defaulted to a no response, including the word "yes" (lowercase). All of the secretaries has stick-a-notes to remind them of this.
Antarctica: Long ago, on one of the SCA chat boards, someone jokingly said that AEthelmearc should annex Antarctica and claim it as ours. There'd be nobody to argue our claim as there's nothing down there but ice and penguins. A one-line response was posted: "I am not a penguin". It seems one of the research scientists down there was an SCA member. :)