Midpoint coming early this week
Got out of here fairly earlyish last night, having gotten a couple of policies printed during my time at the front desk so I could finally get this account off my desk that I'd been doing off-and-on work on for the last couple of weeks that kept getting interrupted by higher-priority data entry. So that was nice.
The plan was to come home and get on my computer, reburn a couple of my car CDs and then do some knitting-while-reading-online-comics until Mom got home and we watched The Borgias -- but I walked in to find her already there, having been sent home due to lack-of-work for the second time in two weeks. Not good, quite aside from the personal irritation factor of having her expect me to be ready to park in the living room with her as soon as I walked in the door. I wound up spending an hour reading, another couple of hours on Tumblr, and then finally got around to burning my CDs (took longer than hoped-for, since the program kept locking up when it tried to erase the second disk for its new burn). By the time I came out of my bedroom again, Mom had finished watching her baseball game and moved on to Dancing with the Stars, and it was too late to even suggest watching something else. Had dinner and lost some time reading that I should have spent getting ready for bed -- didn't cut the lights out till close to 1am. Absolutely no knitting took place for the day or evening, aside from a few shawl rows during my post-lunch front desk stint yesterday.
tilly_stratford is posting about Norse mythology, and The Fate Weavers includes a discussion thread on character names Tolkien lifted from the Eddas.
shezan provided this link: At 92, a Bandit to Hollywood but a Hero to Soldiers -- "After Mr. Strachman’s wife of more than half a century, Harriet, died in 2003, he discovered a Web site that collected soldiers’ requests for care packages. He noted a consistent plea for movie DVDs and wound up passing his sleepless nights replicating not only the films, but also a feeling of military comradeship that he had not experienced since his own service in the Pacific during World War II. 'I wouldn’t say it kept him alive, but it definitely brought back his joie de vivre,' said Mr. Strachman’s son, Arthur, a tax accountant in New York. Mr. Strachman has never ripped a movie from a store-bought DVD and does not even know how; rather, he bought bootlegged discs for $5 in Penn Station before finding a dealer closer to home, at his local barbershop. Those discs were either recordings made illegally in theaters or studio cuts that had been leaked. Originally, Mr. Strachman would use his desktop computer to copy the movies one tedious disc at a time. ('It was moyda,' he groaned.) So he got his hands on a $400 professional duplicator that made seven copies at once, grew his fingernails long to better separate the blank discs, and began copying hundreds a day."
The receptionist wanted to make up the time from yesterday's doctor's appointment, so she tried to cut her lunch short -- just long enough to duck over to the closest Subway and get something to bring back and eat at her desk, she said only about ten minutes. She underestimated the amount of time it takes to get food and bring it back (generally closer to half an hour in my experience), but that gave me time to get more policy printing done than I would have. (She should have just gone to the cafeteria downstairs, if she really wanted to be back in ten or fifteen minutes.) This may mean she tries to cut tomorrow's lunch short as well, which would be somewhat annoying. But if it spills over to Thursday and Friday, I won't be here to be affected by it. (And I'm going to stop and be pleased for a moment by the reminder that I only have this afternoon and then tomorrow to get through before my double-length weekend.)
There are lights coming up on my dashboard when I turn the key that really shouldn't be lighting up. I think I may need to get up Friday afternoon and take my car to Trophy Nissan and have them check it for anything newly malfunctioning, or at least see what the most pressing item on the list of deferred repairs is. There's a drive belt that was already failing when tested months ago, the rear brakes, the bearings, and now that it's warm enough for me to try using the AC I'm finding that it's not working (and hoping it just needs Freon rather than having leaks or needing major repairs). There may be some other things I've forgotten -- and I think there still are some oil leaks (or else it's just eating oil because it's such an old car).
Also on the topic of things-I-can't-afford-to-deal-with, the scratch-resistant coating on my glasses is peeling. (This BTW is what drove me to get my last pair replaced -- my prescription was actually just fine, hadn't changed at all according to my optometrist, it was just the peeling coating making it like my glasses were eternally dirty and could never be properly cleaned. (There may have also been some damage to the frames that required replacement, or that may have been the pair before that.) I've been getting scratch-resistant coatings on my glasses for decades and only started having peeling issues on the last two pairs -- I suspect a new formula with planned obsolescence.) Some years ago I discovered that I can afford either dental work or glasses replacement in a given year -- and this year is the first time I sprang for the dentist since having my wisdom teeth out. So, unsurprising that my glasses choose now to start being an issue. (Actually, I was able to afford the dentistry reasonably well out of pocket -- it was really the series of car repairs eating my entire tax refund and most of what I'd have otherwise had in my savings over the last few months besides that's leaving me with a funding problem now.) Maybe later this summer I'll get my car to the point where I stop anticipating sudden catastrophic failure of several vital systems and can set a few hundred bucks aside for an exam and a new set of glasses. Might wind up having to come out of my birthday money, though, which is upsetting on several levels. (I'm aggravated enough with the blurred visual field now without the prospect of having to put up with it for another six months.)
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
Occupy Wall St and the taxation of high earnings -- "Now consider reasons for raising taxes on high incomes still further. One is that the ultra-high incomes may not reflect genuine productivity, but rent extraction. Top earners can extract rent quite easily, by manipulating corporate earnings or setting compensation in ways that give them the upside from excessive risk-taking, while imposing the downside on shareholders, other employees and taxpayers. Share option will do this, to take an important example. I would add to this a political worry. Historically, the emergence of huge inequalities in wealth and political power has destroyed democratic republics, turning them into entrenched oligarchies, instead. This is bad politically. It is almost certain to be bad economically, too, as the oligarchy uses its power to reduce economic competition. In sum, the assumption that the right thing to do is to lower top tax rates still further is very hard to justify. Indeed, the wealthiest people, who live off their capital, pay very little tax, relative to their true incomes. The case for reform has become overwhelming."
Hulu to require Cable TV subscription
On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik -- "In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)-only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones-over two times better, in fact. Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working - and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion. It adds impetus to minds that may otherwise be too busy or oversaturated to bother with the details. In other words, it ensures that those orders will stay in the waiters’ heads until it is certain that your food will hit the table as promised."
So, yes, closed out most of my browser tabs, and if I'd like to completely finish this account and walk out the door by 5:30, it would really help if I posted this and closed my browser entirely.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
The plan was to come home and get on my computer, reburn a couple of my car CDs and then do some knitting-while-reading-online-comics until Mom got home and we watched The Borgias -- but I walked in to find her already there, having been sent home due to lack-of-work for the second time in two weeks. Not good, quite aside from the personal irritation factor of having her expect me to be ready to park in the living room with her as soon as I walked in the door. I wound up spending an hour reading, another couple of hours on Tumblr, and then finally got around to burning my CDs (took longer than hoped-for, since the program kept locking up when it tried to erase the second disk for its new burn). By the time I came out of my bedroom again, Mom had finished watching her baseball game and moved on to Dancing with the Stars, and it was too late to even suggest watching something else. Had dinner and lost some time reading that I should have spent getting ready for bed -- didn't cut the lights out till close to 1am. Absolutely no knitting took place for the day or evening, aside from a few shawl rows during my post-lunch front desk stint yesterday.
tilly_stratford is posting about Norse mythology, and The Fate Weavers includes a discussion thread on character names Tolkien lifted from the Eddas.
shezan provided this link: At 92, a Bandit to Hollywood but a Hero to Soldiers -- "After Mr. Strachman’s wife of more than half a century, Harriet, died in 2003, he discovered a Web site that collected soldiers’ requests for care packages. He noted a consistent plea for movie DVDs and wound up passing his sleepless nights replicating not only the films, but also a feeling of military comradeship that he had not experienced since his own service in the Pacific during World War II. 'I wouldn’t say it kept him alive, but it definitely brought back his joie de vivre,' said Mr. Strachman’s son, Arthur, a tax accountant in New York. Mr. Strachman has never ripped a movie from a store-bought DVD and does not even know how; rather, he bought bootlegged discs for $5 in Penn Station before finding a dealer closer to home, at his local barbershop. Those discs were either recordings made illegally in theaters or studio cuts that had been leaked. Originally, Mr. Strachman would use his desktop computer to copy the movies one tedious disc at a time. ('It was moyda,' he groaned.) So he got his hands on a $400 professional duplicator that made seven copies at once, grew his fingernails long to better separate the blank discs, and began copying hundreds a day."
The receptionist wanted to make up the time from yesterday's doctor's appointment, so she tried to cut her lunch short -- just long enough to duck over to the closest Subway and get something to bring back and eat at her desk, she said only about ten minutes. She underestimated the amount of time it takes to get food and bring it back (generally closer to half an hour in my experience), but that gave me time to get more policy printing done than I would have. (She should have just gone to the cafeteria downstairs, if she really wanted to be back in ten or fifteen minutes.) This may mean she tries to cut tomorrow's lunch short as well, which would be somewhat annoying. But if it spills over to Thursday and Friday, I won't be here to be affected by it. (And I'm going to stop and be pleased for a moment by the reminder that I only have this afternoon and then tomorrow to get through before my double-length weekend.)
There are lights coming up on my dashboard when I turn the key that really shouldn't be lighting up. I think I may need to get up Friday afternoon and take my car to Trophy Nissan and have them check it for anything newly malfunctioning, or at least see what the most pressing item on the list of deferred repairs is. There's a drive belt that was already failing when tested months ago, the rear brakes, the bearings, and now that it's warm enough for me to try using the AC I'm finding that it's not working (and hoping it just needs Freon rather than having leaks or needing major repairs). There may be some other things I've forgotten -- and I think there still are some oil leaks (or else it's just eating oil because it's such an old car).
Also on the topic of things-I-can't-afford-to-deal-with, the scratch-resistant coating on my glasses is peeling. (This BTW is what drove me to get my last pair replaced -- my prescription was actually just fine, hadn't changed at all according to my optometrist, it was just the peeling coating making it like my glasses were eternally dirty and could never be properly cleaned. (There may have also been some damage to the frames that required replacement, or that may have been the pair before that.) I've been getting scratch-resistant coatings on my glasses for decades and only started having peeling issues on the last two pairs -- I suspect a new formula with planned obsolescence.) Some years ago I discovered that I can afford either dental work or glasses replacement in a given year -- and this year is the first time I sprang for the dentist since having my wisdom teeth out. So, unsurprising that my glasses choose now to start being an issue. (Actually, I was able to afford the dentistry reasonably well out of pocket -- it was really the series of car repairs eating my entire tax refund and most of what I'd have otherwise had in my savings over the last few months besides that's leaving me with a funding problem now.) Maybe later this summer I'll get my car to the point where I stop anticipating sudden catastrophic failure of several vital systems and can set a few hundred bucks aside for an exam and a new set of glasses. Might wind up having to come out of my birthday money, though, which is upsetting on several levels. (I'm aggravated enough with the blurred visual field now without the prospect of having to put up with it for another six months.)
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
Occupy Wall St and the taxation of high earnings -- "Now consider reasons for raising taxes on high incomes still further. One is that the ultra-high incomes may not reflect genuine productivity, but rent extraction. Top earners can extract rent quite easily, by manipulating corporate earnings or setting compensation in ways that give them the upside from excessive risk-taking, while imposing the downside on shareholders, other employees and taxpayers. Share option will do this, to take an important example. I would add to this a political worry. Historically, the emergence of huge inequalities in wealth and political power has destroyed democratic republics, turning them into entrenched oligarchies, instead. This is bad politically. It is almost certain to be bad economically, too, as the oligarchy uses its power to reduce economic competition. In sum, the assumption that the right thing to do is to lower top tax rates still further is very hard to justify. Indeed, the wealthiest people, who live off their capital, pay very little tax, relative to their true incomes. The case for reform has become overwhelming."
Hulu to require Cable TV subscription
On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik -- "In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)-only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones-over two times better, in fact. Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working - and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion. It adds impetus to minds that may otherwise be too busy or oversaturated to bother with the details. In other words, it ensures that those orders will stay in the waiters’ heads until it is certain that your food will hit the table as promised."
So, yes, closed out most of my browser tabs, and if I'd like to completely finish this account and walk out the door by 5:30, it would really help if I posted this and closed my browser entirely.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.