News of the week
Wifey and I emailed our absentee ballots on Monday. On Tuesday she received an email acknowledgment that her vote was accepted. I did not get any acknowledgment. Oh well-every candidate I voted for won anyway.
On Tuesday I got a promotion to Team Leader. The *fifth* person I've tried to hire as an underling accepted the job. On Friday he sent in his work for the week. I wrote back that it was "not the correct solution" and went into considerable technical detail as to exactly why his program doesn't do what is needed, ending with "you did a great job on everything I didn't complain about!" We'll see if he comes back next week for more punishment. Hey, in today's economy, a job with an obnoxious boss is better than no job at all-right?
If he does come back, I guess I'll refer to him as ‘Я’ on this blog. The letter ‘Я’ appears frequently in English parodies of Russian text because it looks like a backwards ‘R’, but it is actually not a very common capital letter: the ‘Я’ section of a Russian dictionary is very short. But IRL, both Я’s name and mine contain this letter. (Actually, I've never seen his name in Russian, but I *think* it has a ‘Я’ in it.) A millennium ago, the letter now written as ‘Я’ represented a nasal vowel, perhaps like French "in", but this fact might not have anything to do with the history of my family's name, where the initial sound might have been the same as today's palatal approximant back when Slavs were writing Я as Ѧ and sounding like Frenchmen when they pronounced it.
So, how about them Team Democrat folks, eh? Some of them still can't believe they actually won for a change. President Obama gave a press conference where he announced that he is NOT THE PRESIDENT yet-meanwhile Harper is already trying to get Obama to do a North American deal on global warming so Canadian firms don't get penalized by the new US cap-and-trade system. Even Dictator Chávez of Venezuela is saying that it's a new day and maybe he doesn't have to hate the USA anymore. Did you know that Obama is the first-ever US president whose name ends with ‘a’? It's true! All previous president's names ended with a consonant or a silent ‘e’. Also, he's the first-ever US president with a living grandmother in Kenya. Some pundits have already started using the word Dholuo when referring to the president's family-in-the-Old-Country, while the more idiotic pundits use the word "Swahili" which is the official language of Kenya but is spoken by a completely different group of black people in that country.
The John McCain we saw making his run for the presidency (unlike the real John McCain, who gave his concession speech) was utterly unqualified for higher office, yet 47.5% of American voters pulled the lever for him. That's like 70 million Americans doing something that no reasonable person should ever do, no matter what their positions might be on abortion and gays and whatnot-you should not hand over the football to a man who is willing to pretend to be a spineless hack! So no, I will not be moving back to the States any time soon.