Renewing My License

I had to go to the DMV this morning to renew my license. Picture, fingerprint, money and I was done. It just took 90 minutes.

The time was allocated as follows:

• Waiting to be called: 50 minutes (Under the G, 46. Oh, that's me!)
• Waiting to get my picture taken: 20 minutes
• Getting out of a parking lot filled with people who should not be allowed to drive: 10 minutes
• Taking the eye test, validating my information: 7 minutes
• Getting my picture actually taken: 2 minutes
• Parking when I arrived: 1 minute

I got to the DMV at 5 after 8am. This put me behind the overachievers and people who line up at 3am in front of Target on the day after Thanksgiving. They were all in there, numbers in hand. My number, which was G046, seemed rather depressing since they were on G002 when I got it. (They have letters for categories, A-J, and as far as I could determine, G was for people with easy renewal transactions.)

Then, about the time I got called, the dregs of humanity started in through the front door. Fortunately, I was ahead of that wave, so while I waited 20 minutes to get my picture taken, when I walked out I would have guessed that the line for pictures was at least 45 minutes long... probably longer given how many of those people seemed unlikely to be able to handle tasks like standing with their toes on a line drawn on the floor in order to have their picture taken.

Still, I've been through the system, I was pleasant to everybody behind the counter, and I could have passed the eye test from a good 20 feet back from where I actually had to take it. I'm free to be an idiot for a few more years.

Signs of the Times - 2

I got my W2 tax form from my company today.

As part of the pre-printed form there were ads. Ads for tax preparation, of course, but ads.

So it has come to this, ads on with my tax forms.

I just wonder who got the revenue, my company or ADP who does the payroll processing.

Sign of the Times

Traditionally, as a manager with a group that currently consists of 12 direct reports, one of my yearly performance goals has been employee retention.

I was measured as a manager by how few people left my organization for other opportunities.

Even through the last economic downturn it was recognized that keeping key people was important to the ongoing operation of the business.

Then we were acquired last year by a very large corporation, of which software development in general, and my part of the development in particular, were such tiny parts of the overall revenue stream as to be invisible on the balance sheet.

For this year, retention disappeared from my goals.

I was just given my goals for next year. I now have an attrition goal.

I will now be measured as a manager by how well I can drive a specific number of people to pursue opportunities elsewhere.

I suppose that takes the pressure off of my worries about morale in the software development group.

Grass Valley Police Blotter vol. CXIX

2:05 a.m. - A man from the 300 block of South Church Street reported his roommate had been drinking and was "disillusioned." He said the roommate believed he doesn’t exist and was in his room with a machete.

[So we're primarily concerned with the existence of the machete then?]

10:22 p.m. - A caller from the 14000 block of Nutmeg Court reported an ex-employee embezzled a vehicle.

[I think when they end up with a vehicle, it ceases to be embezzlement and moves more into fraud and theft.]

10:12 p.m. - A caller from the 14000 block of Pleasant Valley Road reported a Volkswagen Beetle was spinning doughnuts in a field.

[I'm going to guess it was one of the "new" Beetles and not your classic pre-1975 VW.]

7:48 a.m. - A caller reported a large amount of bullets had been spilled onto the roadway at Charles Drive and Grass Valley Avenue.

[Ammunition spills are pretty rare.]

10:06 a.m. - A caller from the 12900 block of Amber Street said a neighbor was outside screaming that he was going to burn down houses and kill everyone. The neighbor's wife was at the caller's residence. Responding deputies restored the peace.

[What gets a man that riled up at 10 in the morning? I can't get that worked up until at least mid-afternoon most days.]

1:24 p.m. - A man from the 12700 block of Brunswick Road said someone put on Craig's List that he was having an estate sale Sunday and he did not place the item on the Internet.

[The classic "and what do you want the police to do about it?" situation.]

9:49 p.m. - A caller from the 11700 block of Upper Circle Drive reported a golf cart went by his residence and a person was throwing lit matches out of it. The caller said he reviewed his surveillance tapes and recognized one of the people in the golf cart.

[This seems amusing, unless you live in Grass Valley and it is fire season. I was surprised to not see an additional report about teens stealing golf carts to joy ride again.]

10:58 p.m. - A caller from the 14000 block of Torrey Pines Drive reported a golf cart had rolled over. A person was arrested on unknown charges.

[But no theft report.]

9:31 a.m. - A caller from the 100 block of Cornish Lane reported a large tool theft at the residence the prior evening. The caller said a neighbor heard a vehicle around the home between 10 and 11 p.m. Officers took a report for theft.

[And how large of a tool did they take? Ambiguity, a humor essential. Plus there is potential sexual innuendo.]

3:45 p.m. - A person in the lobby of the police station reported a possible fraud by AT&T. The person was urged to contact AT&T to clarify the charges on their bill.

[I bet this person is even now complaining how the police are totally in the pocket of the phone company.]

12:58 a.m. - A caller from Nevada City Highway reported seeing a mountain lion. No mountain lion was spotted, but a dog the color of a mountain lion was seen.

[A big dog presumably.]

8:45 a.m. - A caller from the 11000 block of Alta Sierra Drive reported a man sitting in a vehicle for several hours. He was out of gas.

[And hadn't realized it? Being out of gas is a problem solved rather easily, but you have to leave the vehicle.]

11:55 a.m. - A woman from the 13000 block of Wood Rose Way reported a toddler loitering by the mailboxes the day before.

[Can a toddler actually loiter in a legal sense?]

8:42 p.m. - A caller from the 13000 block of Blank Court reported people were firing shots over a wheelbarrow. A person threatened to shoot the caller earlier in the evening over the wheelbarrow. The suspect was leaving in an SUV with the wheelbarrow on top. The caller agreed to put his gun away and would wait for a deputy. Neither party wanted to be "the victim."

[I hope that wheelbarrow was worth it.]

Source: The Union (http://www.theunion.com/)

Fake Steve Returns!

Now that Fake Steve has his new iLiver installed and running, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is active again and telling the truth about Apple, its competitors, and the valley in general.

Welcome back Steve!

Dame Edna Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets

I have a subscription with Audible.com for audio books. With my subscription I can download any two audio books a month.

After nine years I have fished all the gems out of their catalog and now have to scan the new releases every month. Fortunately they have quite a few new releases on a regular basis.

To facilitate search the list, I subscribe to their new releases RSS feed which allows me to go through the titles and a brief description.

My eye caught and read one of the titles as, "Dame Edna Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets." As a concept, that made my mind stumble and I had to go back and read the full entry.

At which point I read the title correctly as, "Dame Edith Evans Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets," and was slightly disappointed.

Not that I am down on Dame EE, but she was reading Shakespeare back when Kaiser Wilhelm II looked like he still had a long and glorious reign ahead of him. Plus the picture they chose to represent her has more than a bit of the "air of dried prune" about it.

All of which brought me around to thinking that Dame Edna reading Shakespeare might not be such a bad idea after all.

United Breaks Guitars

The tale of a musician who has a bone to pick with United Airlines. They broke his guitar and gave him the run-around, so he promised their rep that he would write three songs and create videos for them about his experience. This song is the first.



The full story is available here.

The French: Arrogant, Cheap, but Nicely Dressed

At least when they leave France, according to a recent survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world.

The French, said at least one self-proclaimed expert on the subject, find their country so wonderful that they rarely leave, thus they never bother with foreign languages and customs. So leaving France causes them to become stressed, making them seem arrogant and demanding.

I guess I could buy that for most of the country, though I suspect a certain percentage of the population of Paris must be stressed even within France.

Anyway, I am jumping on this excuse. Living in California, which must be comparable in wonder to France given how many people keep showing up here uninvited, explains my arrogance, cheapness, and tendency to add avocados to just about everything.

It certainly explains my not being well dressed.

That Old Email Joke

We've all heard the one about the IT department sending out an email to all users announcing that the email server is down.

I've not only heard it, I've lived it. Some times IT has an excuse. We had an email from them recently that announce that email access at our Sunnyvale office was down. That at least informed people why we're not responding. Of course, the email itself seemed directed at the Sunnyvale staff, but maybe IT thinks that joke is funny still.

But today my hosting service one-upped IT. They changed the default settings for email access and followed it up with an email explaining how to adjust your settings to get your email.

Seriously, I checked the times. They did the change and then they sent the email.

Fortunately (?) my hosting service has screwed up email in the past, so I have it set to forward all email to another address that I can access, just in case. So I went and found the email, made the updates, and everything was fine. But if I had not had that I could have used the web mail service they offer. That service is somewhat low key however and I only knew about it because of past screw ups by the hosting company.

So I am going to bet that the support team at my hosting service has quite a busy day today. Well, I bet the phone guys did. The email guys probably had a pretty quiet morning.

Grass Valley Police Blotter vol. CXVIII

2:44 p.m. - A woman from the 15000 block of Washington Road reported she paid a man to do yard work, and now one of her plants is missing. He frequently stands at the front of her property and yells obscenities at her.

[I can see why you hired him. I mean, if he's already going to be there yelling obscenities, you might as well put him to work.]

11:26 a.m. - A caller from the 10000 block of Rancheria Court reported someone was dismantling a metal building to steal it.

[That sounds perfectly brazen! I wonder how big of a building we're talking about?]

1:52 a.m. - A man from the 10000 block of Boulder Street reported he "wants the people out of his house."

[On how many holidays have I uttered those very words? But I've never dialed 911 to do anything about it.]

2:09 p.m. - A caller from the hospital reported a man was in the emergency room, saying he was going to shoot everyone if he didn't receive medical attention. He did not have a gun. The man was arrested at 5:56 p.m. on suspicion of violating parole.

[That seems like quite a long time to go from threatening to kill people to actually being arrested.]

9:21 p.m. - A caller from the 700 block of Freeman Lane reported a man in a white four-door vehicle kept ducking down when someone drove by. A woman was cited and released on suspicion of having an open container while driving, possessing fireworks and possessing a tear gas container after being stopped on Freeman Lane.

[She had a busy night planned I guess.]

12:48 p.m. - A caller from the 13000 block of Tervetuloa Lane reported an argument with the neighbors about peacocks running loose. The neighbor said the initial caller verbally assaulted her and the other party's donkeys are running around and her peacocks have nothing to do with it.

[Issues that big city police departments rarely face.]

2:13 p.m. - A caller from eastbound Highway 20 at the Washington overlook reported finding six to seven bags of marijuana on the south side of the roadway. Upon contact, law enforcement determined the material was "leftover shake."

[At first I thought this referred to roofing material, but Google informs me that "shake" is "The cruddy end bits of a large bag of weed." That was my educational moment for the day.]

1:16 p.m. - A caller in the 200 block of Rockwood Drive reported a maroon sedan was parked near the person's residence, and people were trying to sell it.

[They were trying to sell it? Maybe I'm not clear on what the police are supposed to do here.]

1:58 a.m. - A caller on the 200 block of Dorsey Drive reported a children's video was playing in an upstairs apartment. The caller said the song continued to play unabated. The caller was advised to call the apartment management.

[How can you determine, at that hour, that you are not actually in hell?]

7:30 p.m. - A caller from the 15000 block of Sunny Hill reported the neighbor's television was very loud. The caller said the neighbor has a scanner and will turn down her TV if she hears the call.

[I like that sort of efficiency.]

12:23 p.m. - A man from the 18000 block of Message Place reported an ongoing issue with his neighbor yelling and screaming obscenities at him. He said he also has vehicles trespassing on his property. The neighbor said he was upset that the man was raising llamas on the property. The neighbor admitted yelling at the man, including calling the llamas (expletive) camels. They were advised to resolve the issue civilly.

[I am going to bet alcohol was somehow involved as well.]

8:24 p.m. - An elderly woman from Swallow Court called 911 and wanted to know if 911 was the correct number to dial in an emergency. She did not have an emergency.

[Just, you know, making sure.]

Source: The Union (http://www.theunion.com/)