Well, we’ve made it here.<\/p>\n
Wherever the fuck here is.<\/p>\n
Between our un-elected president and our shattered remnants of what was to be the ‘new’ economy, a lot of us are feeling a little cynical about that right now, but that’s not really what matters. What matters is that we’re here. We’ll likely never be here again. We’ve never been here before.<\/p>\n
And that’s probably just as well.<\/p>\n
I have a little question for those of you in the audience – is it perhaps possible that we’re being lied to about the current unemployment rate? Or is it just that I have a unusual batch of friends?<\/p>\n
I mean, let’s think. Everyone I know, from my 65-year-old ex-landlord to my friends from the last three dot coms, are unemployed. Everyone except my parents, who both work in the severely underpaid teaching business, so they probably don’t have much to worry about jobwise.<\/p>\n
Food service is doing a booming business – and yes, they’re still hiring. As soon as you swallow enough of your pride, you can go flip burgers with the rest of them and lament never going to college, or whatever – but that’s not the point. The point is that we’re not seeing a little tiny recession here. The Dow keeps threatening to drop like a rock if it gets hit one more time – the only thing that’s propping it up is all the people frantically yanking their money from tech stocks to jam it there. The NASDAQ – well, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m one of the lucky ones – I’ve only lost like 10%.<\/p>\n
And I still can’t get my 401k money back from my old job – making it more like 60%. They sent me a nice polite little note saying they’d sent me the money. Funny, I never got the money. I think I’d know…<\/p>\n
Okay, so the financial sky isn’t really falling – but from my keyboard, it sure feels like it is.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the packets still zip around my home LAN, searching for some kind of meaning. They haven’t found any yet, but that doesn’t stop them from searching. I’ve been spending the last week or so porting a piece of software that took me a day to write to Windows. It’s been _real_ educational. In some ways windows is a pretty cool widget kit, and sometimes I even get excited about programming for it. In other ways, it’s just dumb, dumber, and dumbest – a crash waiting to happen.<\/p>\n
The thing that irritates me the most about windows, more than anything else, is that it exists and that I use it.<\/p>\n
The thing that irritates me the most about life, more than anything else, is that it exists and that I use it.<\/p>\n
Wait, no, that came out wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, we’ve made it here. Wherever the fuck here is. Between our un-elected president and our shattered remnants of what was to be the ‘new’ economy, a lot of us are feeling a little cynical about that right now, but that’s not really what matters. What matters is that we’re here. We’ll likely never be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}