good weekend, bad weekend

Last weekend was excellent. It marked two months of being with Dianna. We celebrated the event with a wonderful dinner at Mi Piace. Great food, fantastic deserts. In a small exchange of gifts she gave me a couple nice teas and a tea ball. Thus begins my journey into loose leaf teas. Sunday evening Dianna helped me give the house a thorough cleaning. In fact, she did the bulk of the work. Am I lucky or what? Today's picture is one that Shane took of us at Magic Mountain.

In contrast with last weekend, this weekend has started of quite badly. First, the rent was raised by $75. When I first moved in the landlords said they would only raise it every 3 or 4 years, but the've raised it 4 times in less than 4 years. Then today I got a call from the motorcycle driver who broadsided me last February along the Angeles Crest highway. Here are the basic facts according to me, my passenegers, an outside witness, and the police report:

• I was on HW2 northbound and slowed down as I approached the Charlton Flats parking lot.
• I signaled and began to turn left into the lot.
• When the car was about into the lot and half in the southbound lane it was struck in back, driver's side door by a sporty red motorcycle.
• The motorcycle driver is a flaming asshole.

Ok, the last one didn't really make it into the police report. Anyway, the police report states that the motorcycle guy was at fault. He was going to fast to realize I was turning and decided to pass on the left in a no passing zone. In addition he was uninsured and was probably racing with his friend who fled the scene as soon as the police showed up. He has spent the last year recovering from a broken leg and thinking up ways to get other people to pay for the damage he caused. I'm still not quite sure why he called me today other than to harass me and intimidate me. He threatened to tell the DMV that I was uninsured (which isn't true), to sue me and my insurance company, and to take me to small claims court. Then he tried to "remind" me of the events of that day and gave some entirely fabricated story something like this:

• He was driving very slowly and I passed him.
• I was driving along the shoulder on the left side of the road.
• I needed to stop to relieve my bladder.
• I threw the car into reverse and backed up onto the road.

And while this is complete bullshit it still doesn't explain what he was doing in the wrong lane. I can't imagine that he would get away with suing me or the insurance company. But, still, this is a pain. More than anything he sounds angry. And he wants to take it out on me. He has nothing to lose at this point. He's racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses and might as well be in debt to a lawyer too. In case he calls me back to harass me further, does anyone know how to record conversations on one's cell phone?

slightly different story

"The Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment"
President Bush, State of the Union, Jan 20 2004

"I don't think they exist."
David Kay, Chief US weapons inspector, Jan 25 2004

Kay did mention digging up a few old weapons programs that were used to make mustard gas, etc back in the 80s to fight a US-backed war. However, he pointed out that Iraqis had not moved toward production on any of these since they were banned back in 1992 and that there was no "large-scale production program in the '90s." And this is the man went into Iraq sure of the fact that he would easily uncover stockpiles of WMD.

is there an opening for Company Retard?

The last couple days have been rather trying and I need to vent. This rather frustrating experience began harmlessly last Friday as my boss sent me an email letting me know I'd be receiving a task first thing Monday morning that needed to be done by early Monday afternoon. No problem. Just a routine job of outfitting an Excel spreadsheet to run with our program. Monday morning I was up early and by 9am had received an email from my boss with the spreadsheet. The other thing I needed was the spec list for the inputs and outputs. This consists of a list of high, low an nominal values for each input and and a description of which values should be integers (1,3,200) and which should be floating point numbers (0.23, 1.5, 44.23243). My boss was supposed to send this along shortly. The spreadsheet contains chip production data for a chip manufacturer which I am not at liberty to name. Anyway, I glanced over the spreadsheet and did what I could with it, but received no spec sheet. By noon I was worried and tried to call my boss. No answer. I tried again at 2pm and 3pm. At around 4pm I was supposed to go play basketball with Giancarlo, but on my way out I got a call from the company financial guy saying that they weren't able to get the info from the client but they had a number for me to call and talk to the client directly. I bailed on Giancarlo and called the number. Little did I know I was calling the world's stupidest professional.

Chris. I won't forget him any time soon. Chris started off by explaining that he had only conceptualized the model but other people had created it since he didn't understand Excel very well. Or anything else for that matter. I would ask Chris direct questions and he would reply with vague talk about this or that module or the presentation that he made that had nothing to do with what I needed. Finally I figured out that by module he meant worksheet. I followed his instructions to find a set of nominal values but this only resulted in a bunch of important data being overwritten. Good thing I made copies. He gave up and promised to email the high, low and nominal values later. I tried unsuccessfully for several minutes to explain the difference between integers and floating point numbers to him. Oh, well, I'll just guess at it and we can fix it later. He called me back later that evening saying that he was unable to find the nominal values in his own spreadsheet. Nate had helped me find them early (the spreadsheet was very poorly organized) so I gave Chris careful step-by-step instructions to find them. This guy must have trouble putting his shoes every day. OK, fine, I'll just do it for you and email it to you later. The next morning I received the list from him. Not just once. Not twice. But, thirteen times. Damn, Chris, stop using a jackhammer to press send. He decided to stick the list inside the Excel model and moved over a couple columns to stick it in which broke several references. The list itself was almost funny. Several entries were simply question marks. A couple had multiple values, such as "200 or 300". Some had "n/a" written in them. As I read down through the list of numbers I realized that for several inputs the "low" value was higher than the "high" value. Others had a nominal value completely outside the low/high range. Hey, Chris, which is bigger 5 or 10? I'll give you 3 guesses. No, that's probably not enough. I called him again this afternoon. He said he had figured more of it out after talking with an expert. I presume he means a kindergarten teacher.

How does someone like this land a white-collar job at a technology company? I think a lot of technology companies suffer from poor hiring choices. Too many idiots are being handed technical tasks. And I have friends who went to Caltech and can't find jobs. This leaves me to believe that the collective intelligence of Human Resource departments is somewhere in between Britney Spears and a chunk of petrified wood. I'd suggest that whoever is in change of hiring be replaced by a chimp with a dart board. And then for a promotion you have to beat the chimp at thumb wrestling.