Excuse me, I didn’t vote for the idiots in office

Brief intro. I’m indulging in a rant about local politics. This situation has pissed me off, and I can’t let this one go any longer. Skip this entry if you like.

Work is being a pain.

I got the word yesterday. We’re going to be re-doing the salary schedules, since the state post-secondary board is revising the salary schedules. This is for the 2008 fiscal year. Which starts September 1, 2007. The state post-secondary board is making sure the raises that the legislature authorized are actually 7% across the board. In the past, the state post-secondary board played with the salary schedule numbers to make sure that the different grades and steps stayed basically in line and not too far apart. But that resulted in wonky numbers for some grades and steps that didn’t actually equal the percentage raises that the legislature had authorized. Oops. As I found out the year before last. So now the 12 salary schedules with 48 grades and 1248 steps that payroll entered last week are invalid.

I’m a cranky geekgirl tonight. This affects contracts and lots of stuff. Timing is everything. These salary schedules are published the beginning of June. Its a week into August, and three weeks from taking effect. The weather is affecting everyone’s brains. What brains they claim to have, at any rate.

Moar brainzzzzzz!

Music rant

I sing in the choir at church. Our regular practice was tonight. When I got to practice this evening, there were folks there who aren’t singing in the choir.

Let me back up a week. Last week when I went to practice there was a gentleman there who is getting married in a couple of weeks who came in and took over our practice with preparation for his wedding. While he was there, he invited all the choir members to come and sing at his wedding with other folks for chorale music. This week, actually today, he called the lady who is organizing us and basically invited the entire chorale there to practice for his wedding. So we spent the majority of our practice time on his wedding music. First, I’m not impressed with the person that he has organizing and leading his music. I’ve heard his work before and it leaves me cold. Second, its our practice time for what we are working on for church. If he wanted to organize it after our regular practices, that would be different. We don’t exist just for his wedding. I’m probably going to be working elsewhere that day. Auuggggh!

Hooray for July!

Or June is over.

Thank God! It has not been a good June. Its not the worst June I’ve ever had, but it hasn’t been good at all. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that July is going to be much, much better than June was.

I do hope that any celebrating that you may do this week is very fun and safe. The drought in the area here is going to keep lots of folks from playing with fireworks, but fireworks aren’t what makes the July 4th celebrations. They are a nice icing on the cake, but it isn’t the celebration itself.

June woes

What is it with June this year? The motorcycle, the laptop, and now the wisdom tooth.

I had my last wisdom tooth out this afternoon. The first two came out 22?!? years ago. Then the dentist said he was going to wait until the other two didn’t have to be cut out of my mouth, so the third one came out about 6 or 7 years ago. It was coming in sideways and cutting into my cheek. I was pleased to have it out.

Actually, I’m pretty glad to have the last one out. It was coming in sideways too, and starting to rip up the inside of my other cheek. It took longer for all the anesthetic to take effect than it took for the dentist to pop the tooth out of my jaw. I’m more than willing to wait for it. It was an upper wisdom tooth. My dentist was only partly joking when he said that the root went up to the eye socket. I’m going to wait for all that anethetic to take effect!

But my mouth is now sore and the local anesthetic is wearing off. I’ve picked up the antibiotic and painkillers that were prescribed for me. Whee, more drugs. Ain’t my normal thing, but tooth extractions are not my normal thing either. I only have a couple of days of the painkiller, but the antibiotics are a full course. Gaping holes in your mouth are not good things, except for special effects.

Thank goodness for modern dentistry. It makes these things so much easier!

Laptop update

Its dead, Jim.

And there are some interesting things that have come to light. With it not being under warranty, and the HP tech not able to do anything other than say send it in for more money, I had someone look at the guts of the machine to see if any of the cards had just wiggled loose. Nope, the RAM was firmly in its place. But wait, that’s a 256 M of RAM. How the hell was XP running on 256? I thought I had at least 512, if not a full gig of ram whenI purchased the laptop? I did know enough about the machine requirements of the software that I wouldn’t have purchased a laptop with that little RAM.

And the hard drive. When he pulled the drive out of he case, it said it was a 60 gig drive. I could have sworn we purchased an 80 gig hard drive, not a 60 gig drive. I knew that I was going to be using the laptop for my business stuff, with the website and pictures. I’ve got some major cognitive dissonance with my perception of my laptop and what was on it when we got into it. I’m going to be doing some digging to find out what I actually purchased. If what I actually purchased was not what was in it when it was returned from the service call, I’m not going to be a happy camper.

stupid machines

If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all.

At least that’s the way it feels right now. I obviously have not been sacrificing properly to the computer gods. I got my laptop back from HP and had it for a week. Then it died again. I now have vertical green lines that run up and down in a square in the center of my laptop screen. It doesn’t boot at all. I don’t get either the HP screen or the logon screen. And Hp wants to have it sent off for service again, to the tune of another $400. That’s on top of the 325 that it cost for the previous trip.

WAAAH!

At this point, its probably time to look at a new laptop. Yes, the 325 is sunk, but to add another 400 on top of it to a 2.5 year old computer is probably not the wisest idea. I just didn’t want to get a computer with vista on it. I’ll have to blow away that and re install xp over it. At least I only lost a week’s worth of emails. Everything else is backed up.

Is the Government trying to kill Internet Radio Broadcasters?

A warning heads up here. I’m on my political soapbox now.

It appears that the entertainment industry has gotten to the folks who make regulations about what broadcasters should pay. The Copyright Royalty Board has set the new royalty rates to levels that will bankrupt most if not all of the different internet broadcasters. They have set these rates to be retroactive to 2006. It increases the licenses fees and royalty rates astronomically from where they had been. The Copyright Royalty Board set these rates with no regard for the broadcasters, it simply set the rates as requested by SoundExchange, the mouthpiece for the RIAA. I listen to Radio Margaritaville and Pandora online. Both broadcasters provide music online for free. Pandora offers listening without ads for a small ($36/yr) fee. Radio Margaritaville is broadcast on Sirius Radio and on Dish Network. Both of these broadcasters would be hard put to make the requisite payments that the new ruling would require.

There is an Internet radio web site that has links to things that you can do to help keep the internet streaming music! The Live365 website has a page that gives contact information for the Copyright Royalty Board, the various US senators and representatives, and a few other places. This page lists the royalties as they stand and the increases and percentages that the current ruling sets. You can get your senators and representatives contact information online at Thomas. It is best to pick up the phone and call their offices or physically write a paper letter to them. They have a tendency to write off any email communication from their constituents.

This declaration is BS. And you can help influence it by talking to your elected representatives and advocating for small broadcasters. The retroactive $500.00 license fee per channel and the rates that increase at 20% to 40% per year are ridiculous.

Get the word out about this stupidity! The broadcasters pay license fees and royalties, SoundExchange and RIAA just want more. And it will affect the quality of what is available online. But they don’t care about the quality of the music available.

Can you smell something burning?

Its my hard drive at work. Yesterday it crashed and burned. Its less than a year old. And there’s no backup for it. I lost about a year’s worth of programming. And its my fault for not moving those scripts to the network drive with the backups.

ARRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

There’s problems with the file to send to the state of W2 information. The HR system that we have didn’t format the files like they should have. I had a good start on a fix, and its gone. It wasn’t a good day. It isn’t going to be a good week or next month.

I’m going to investigate some local data recovery options, but I’m not particularly hopeful. So I’m one stressed geekgirl tonight.

I’ve learned one very important lesson, though. I’ll be keeping all my code on the network drive from now on.

Valentine’s Day 2007

Is going to be pretty much like most every other Wednesday here at chez geekgirl. That’s ok. DH is thinking about a menu for us, and we’ll avoid the craziness that the local restaurant scene is bound to be. I have no wish to wait 1.5 hours for a table at a local restaurant and get harried service while trying to enjoy a nice dinner.

And forget the weeds for Vday too. Have you looked at the price of flowers in February? Its nuts! So skip ‘em until they are in season and it isn’t so outrageously expensive. God bless the florists and delivery folks who are working major amounts of overtime right now. It is really going to be a bad day for a co-worker of mine. His mother passed away over the weekend and the funeral is tomorrow. The office is sending flowers. I’m scared of what that bill will be.

A fairly quiet night at home is on tap.  And it will be good.  Good company, good food, a cat on the lap, and that’s what I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

What is on tap for you?

Panic, everyone, there might be frozen precipitation tonight!

OK, now it is reaching the ridiculous here. In the state of Alabama, if there is the remotest chance of frozen precipitation, people panic. And they are panicking right now. The local news shows are broadcasting their versions of the panic buttons and their lists of closings and postponed openings for the morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Waah! I want some snow to fall here! We haven’t had a measurable snowfall in years! We’ll be waiting longer for snow here, none tonight.