Month: February 2006

It’s interesting to see all the stories popping up across the internet about Edward Greenwood, who was caught playing solitaire on his computer at work in the offices of the city of New York. Mayor Bloomberg immediately fired him, telling the press “the workplace is not an appropriate place for games. It’s a place where you’ve got to do the job that you’re getting paid for.”

Cue the statistics about how playing an occasional game (or smoking a cigarette, or just reading the newspaper) for a few minutes here and there throughout the workday actually increases productivity.

Cue the bloggers who are outraged at this action and are urging Greenwood to (surprise!) file a lawsuit against the city.

Personally, I think the mayor’s action was extreme and unwarranted. On the other hand, he’s right. Technically the guy shouldn’t be sitting around playing solitaire when he should be working. But show me someone who actually sits at their desk for eight hours straight and does nothing but work, and I’ll show you someone who needs some serious mental help.

Many moons ago, when I worked at Hughes, the muckety-mucks delivered a company-wide policy stating that corporate e-mail accounts were to be used for work purposes only. No personal messages in or out, or you could be fired. It was pretty draconian. (Remember, too, that back then there weren’t free e-mail services like there are today– your work account was pretty much your only access to e-mail unless you paid for services elsewhere.)

However, after handing down the policy on a nice typed memo, my boss– and I suspect every reasonable boss in the company– said as an aside that we could certainly use the company e-mail for personal stuff, as long as we didn’t do anything obviously bad with it. The policy, it was clear, was more to cover the corporate legal position than to actually prohibit people from sending a quick note to a friend.

In that sense, the rules may sound harsh, but they’re really only there to allow the company a little legal room if an employee breaks the law via e-mail or sends kiddie porn to a friend or whatever. Playing solitaire at work may be against the letter of the law, but on the other hand it’s pretty unreasonable to expect nothing but drone-line labor for eight hours.

Now I have to go and play my game turn of Space Empires…

I’m on the phone with Comcast and they put me on hold with some cheesy music. I’m listening to it and suddenly realized what it is: it’s that one song from West Side Story where the girls sing about how great America is. Holy cow– I don’t know what’s worse: the song itself translated into Muzak, or the fact that I recognized it at all.

“If all the world’s a stage, I want to operate the trap door.”

— Paul Beatty

Woo hoo! Time to read George’s new budget!

Today is a real milestone for my web hosting company. My main web server has officially been running non-stop for an entire year.

That’s 365 days of “uptime”, meaning it’s not been rebooted and has been chugging away for 24 hours a day every day of the year. Amazing.

Last October I wrote about the discovery of two new moons around Pluto. The outer solar system continues to become more interesting, as a group of German astrophysicists report evidence that the “planet” Xena (technically named 2003UB313) is 30% larger than Pluto.

A few weeks ago Laralee and I taught our second-grade science class, and our topic was the solar system. The kids were fascinated to learn that there aren’t just nine planets– that in fact there may be quite a few more. They learned the names of three: Quaoar, Xena, and Sedna. Xena is way out there, taking 560 years to orbit the sun once; Sedna’s highly elliptical orbit is on the order of 10,000 years around.

There’s continuing debate in the astronomic community about whether these new objects can even be called “planets”, and the evidence that Xena is larger than Pluto– and we call Pluto a planet– makes the discussion all the more interesting.

I love this stuff. Indeed, we live in heady times.

Last night, President Bush delivered his State of the Union address. I didn’t watch it on television, so I thought I’d take a peek and read it online after it was over. A quick search on Google for “State of the Union” turned up the speech, and I settled in to read it. I was about halfway through it, chuckling to myself about things like his push to end dependence on foreign oil, increase scientific research programs, and fight the war on terror. At that point I ran across a long discussion of Saddam Hussein, which wasn’t too surprising either– until I noticed that he was talking about how Saddam was defying the United Nations and building weapons of mass destruction and so on… and I felt like I was in some kind of time warp.

Scrolling up the web page, I saw the date: it was three years ago! That’s right– I was reading Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. I’m not sure why that came up first in the search results, but oh well.

So tonight I found the correct 2006 address, and read it. It’s funny (or perhaps sad) that you could easily interchange the two speeches (minus the Saddam material) and never know the difference. All of his major talking points in 2003 were repeated ad nauseum in 2006. Fully a third of his speech this year centered on the war on terror and how swell it’s all going. I didn’t waste more time reading 2002, 2004, or 2005… but I suspect the similarities remain.

In other words, we hear the same tired diatribe from our president, but no real action is ever really taken. We’re still dependent on foreign oil– perhaps more than ever; we learn about continued oppression of scientific research; we’re still no closer to “winning” the war on terror. What’s changed in three years? Apparently nothing, including the creativity of the presidential speechwriters.

For grins, I counted the number of times Bush used certain words in his speech this year:

• terror/terrorist : 20
• free/freedom : 19
• al Qaeda : 6
• mass destruction/mass murder : 3
• September 11 : 2
• oil : 3
• “nu-cu-lur” : 3

I, for one, am shocked that he only used “terror” or “terrorist” a mere twenty times in his fifty-minute speech. And surely he could have thrown in a few more “September 11” references. He’s getting rusty.

This year, Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall in the same week. As Air America Radio pointed out: