Is it sweeps week, or what?
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Since I seem to have a few minutes tonight, I guess I'll mention this:

I almost never get a chance to watch the network national news (not that I would anyway, but that's because I generally prefer comedy that's supposed to be comedy to comedy that's supposed to earth-shakingly serious). I happened to be in an eating establishment this evening during said news and caught the "news story" about Congress being outraged by "indecent" material on TV.

I lamented last week about not having seen the "Great Breast Escape" during the Super Bowl. Well, friends and neighbors, that situation has been remedied by the kind folks at ABC news. In the course of telling the story about Congress being outraged (and when have we ever heard of politicians being outraged in an election year) ABC managed to show the offending footage 4 or 5 times (albeit with a strategically placed video scramble, but I got the point).

Gosh Sparky, I sure am glad that the network news people don't have to stoop to titillating their audience (sorry, I just couldn't help myself) to drive up ratings.

Apparently my sense of humor is further outside the mainstream than I thought. While watching the footage of Congress being outraged, I saw a Congresswoman (Ms. Bono, maybe? I didn't really catch the name) being especially outraged to find out that Janet Jackson has a new album coming out. She went as far as to suggest that "IT" (get this) was a publicity stunt designed to sell records (gasp!).

Well, I'm glad Congress has finally caught up to the rest of us (even those of us who didn't see "IT" live). Of course it was a publicity stunt. (And, I might add, as publicity stunts go, it will probably sell more records for Janet than her brother's stunt of getting arrested for allegedly sleeping with little boys will for him. Michael should probably fire his publicist and hire Janet's.)

So I'm sitting in this eatery waiting for my dinner, laughing out loud at the Congresswoman being Outraged and all the conversations in the joint stopped. I looked around and everyone was staring at me like I had grown a second head or something. Given my generally paranoid outlook on life, and my desire to be invisible in public and never draw attention to myself (since I never know when I'm going to run into a family member of someone I sent to prison who remembers me not so fondly), I made a tactical decision to make it a carry-out order.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, February 11 2004 08:23:10 PM

And I thought I had problems...
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I had a couple of good nights last week where I actually got some writing done. Since then, I've kind of been feeling sorry for myself. <whine>There is so much going on at work. It seems I get up, go to work, come home, eat, go to bed, get up and do it all over again. I guess I'm spoiled, but I start getting real cranky if I don't have a little time to just sit and think.</whine>

I should be used to it by now. I've been in corrections for 24 years as of this month. The heavy workload goes in cycles. We will have a particularly difficult group of clients who can't get along with each other or anyone else, who have especially bad addictions issues, who have serious mental health issues and the workload goes up. I spend most of my time going around putting out fires (figuratively speaking, although I have dealt with one arson and several trash can fires in my career) and trying to calm things down so the line staff can do their jobs. And that's nothing special. All the administrators do it. Clients who are bordering on being out of control respond better to people that (they perceive) have the power to make their problems go away. (Sort of the same principle as asking to speak to the manager of a restaurant when the food and/or service is bad.) We are just in one of those cycles where I'm doing a lot of that.

The cycles aren't regular. It will be bad for a while (or maybe a long while) then things will lighten up for a while, then we are back at it again. I'm convinced it isn't random. I believe that if I could collect enough data about the types of clients, types of personalities, types of problems and staff performance, I think I could predict when we are going to get one of these bad periods. The problem is that I wouldn't begin to know where to start collecting data. Then there is the additional problem of how to maintain a database. And there is always the issue of how to quantify staff behavior (and the related issue of whether staff behavior is causal or reactionary to the client behavior). This all begs the question of how I would find time to do all of it. It's probably just an intellectual conceit of mine anyway and I'm not sure knowing we are in for a rough time would be a good thing. There is always the issue of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So anyway, I was just settling down for a nice round of self-pity when I ran across this article in The Register. As bad as my day may have been, at least my TV hasn't blown up.

(by the way, if you are going to check out The Register, take a chance and introduce yourself to the Bastard Operator from Hell in this week's BOFH and the Coffee Machine.)

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, February 11 2004 08:17:04 PM

New Stuff
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Mozilla has released a new version of the browser I'm currently using, now called FireFox. I read about it in The Register today. They also released the 0.5 version of Thunderbird, the e-mail and newsgroup client I'm using. I really like both of them because 1) they are free, 2) they are not Microsoft, and 3) I just like playing around with stuff like this. Firebird (now Firefox) only gave me trouble on one financial web site I visit regularly and only because the pop-up blocker was working too well. Once I told it to allow pop-ups from that site, everything was fine. The new version is supposed to have a built-in download manager. I've tried some other non-Microsoft e-mail clients, but Thunderbird allows monitoring multiple e-mail accounts like Outlook Express, unlike some of the alternatives.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you like tinkering with stuff like this, I will probably recommend both of them as soon as I get a chance to try the new versions. The Mozilla servers are getting hammered tonight, so I probably won't get a chance to download them until later in the week.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, February 09 2004 08:51:54 PM

Life of Leisure
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Apparently I am soon going to be able to quit my full time job and devote myself to writing this nonsense full time. It appears that one of my long lost relatives has been working for Shell Oil in Nigeria and has died, leaving me exactly $20 million dollars.

Actually, I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me. I surf the odd corners of the web. I visit bizarre web sites. But I had never gotten a Nigerian 419 scam e-mail until a couple of days ago. Now I have joined the big leagues!

I intended to write a bit Friday night, but Rat Jr. put her car in a ditch after spinning nearly 180 degrees at a stop sign on a slope on the ice. When I got there, the front wheel was hanging over a culvert in mid air and a rear wheel was 2 feet off the ground. Two hours, one policeman and one tow truck later she was home and dry and none the worse for wear, except for the whining about how she blew most of her check on the tow truck. This is her first winter to do a lot of driving on the ice.

I was watching the German Bundesliga this morning and heard Allen Hopkins refer to the recent Super Bowl as "Super Bowl 34C". I don't know if that was original, but it was certainly better than my "Great Breast Escape."

I guess that's about it for now. I've been too busy working on some projects for work to really think about anything else, so I'm going to go take a mental vacation and watch the English Premier League match that comes on in a couple of minutes.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, February 08 2004 12:51:45 PM