Handy with a lot of things

Driving around the Valley They Call Silicon I came across a vanity license plate that pretty much takes the biscuit for droll appropriateness:

Ray—if I ever need handyman services, I know who's getting the call.

Library science

Remember how the Santa Clara County Library District was revamping its computer systems? Well, so far I’m not impressed.

Back pre-new-and-improved I got two kinds of emails: a “materials ready for pick-up at library” notice and a “materials coming due at library” notice. They were clearly distinguished by the subject line.

Well, since the installation of the new system, here’s what the former looks like:

And here’s the latter:

I don’t know how they could have made them less informative. (Unless they want to go down the route of my healthcare provider, who send out “new important stuff from us” emails, which require you to log onto their website to see what they designate as important.)

I’m particularly annoyed by the lack of link to the library’s site so you can actually renew the checked-out item(s). That used to be there. Perhaps it’s cheaper to send out emails without links?

Because I’m thinking that saving money is high on their list. Witness the self-service checkout terminals at the Cupertino branch:

There used to be twice as many in that row. I’m wondering if they sold the missing ones on eBay?

Pulled from the wreckage

It’s been one of those weeks—maybe the whole damned month. You know—you just can’t seem to drag yourself out of the Slough of Despond, and you start thinking that you’ll never get out because that Slough is endless.

So—I do what I can. One of my tools is music, and I’ll share one I’ve been listening to with you.

Here’s hoping it works.

All synched up

Oh, my—ordinarily I’m not a fan of synchronized swimming, or any activity that purports to be athletics while involving the use of fake eyelashes and the Tammy Faye Bakker style of makeup.

However, this example has come to my attention and I have only enough energy left to slap it up here because I’m laughing too hard.

I give them at least a 9.4, and bugger the East German judge.

Gratitude Monday: Vis et voluntas

Let me step away from the strictly personal and move into the realm of the universal for Gratitude Monday today. Because this month marks the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that first put words to parchment delineating the notion that people should be governed by something more reasonable and responsive than the vis et voluntas (“force and will”) of any crackbrained individual who happened to bear the title “monarch”.

Magna Carta did not bring democracy to the people of England (although that’s pretty much the way it’s explained to us in grade school). None of the signatories gave a toss about “the people”, and they all would have been horrified by the idea of “democracy”. But what it did was to limit the powers of the monarch, which (when you think of it) kind of put paid to the notion of the divine right of kings. It was essentially the thin edge of the wedge that cracked open the door leading to government by the consent of the governed.

I mean—once you’ve said “the king has donkey’s ears, and his brain’s no improvement on that”, it’s not so many steps to get to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Yes, King John signed Magna Carta under duress, and weaseled out of it as soon as he could. And the barons who exerted the duress weren’t a massive improvement on John, as far as the rest of the country was concerned. But that divine right horse could never be put securely back into the barn after that.

Yes—representative government has its flaws. I personally believe that if we examined the $250 haircuts on all 535 members of Congress (and most of the Executive Branch) we’d find a fair plurality of donkeys’ ears. But I’m a lot happier knowing that the asses are corralled by laws than I would be if it was just them running free-range.

So I’m heartily grateful for the power struggle between King John and his barons (which would make a pretty good name for a garage band) that resulted in Magna Carta.

Pay what?

I was walking around the Cupertino library/city hall complex the other day, when I noticed this:

Yes, smack in the civic center of the Home of the iPhone there is a pay telephone. Go figure.

But when I got up close, I saw that it’s not branded with any recognizable service provider; no Verizon or AT&T. The only thing written on it was Payphone.com, which is a manufacturer of equipment. I don’t know who provides the connection, and I didn’t drop a quarter into the slot to find out.

I was too bemused by the whole back-to-the-last-century-ness of the whole thing. Maybe people just use it as a prop for selfies. Yeah, that’ll be it.

Terms & conditions

I must say that I found this rather cherce—I was downloading a mind-mapping app, and had to click that I agree to the end-user licensing terms. You always do. And I’m betting that you—as I—pretty much never actually read the agreement. You check the box and click.

Well, this time, I clicked on “read”. And here’s what I got:

Good trick, no?

Yes—I went ahead and checked the “agree” box and downloaded the application.

Rolling the Dice

I got a giggle out of this tweet from Dice this week:

You know: Dice, the technical jobs portal, which has become your one-stop shop for being spammed by contract labor job shops for cut-rate no-benefits “contingency” positions that result from massive layoffs by Fortune 50 tech firms.

I can’t recall the last time I was contacted by a recruiter for a full-time position with an actual direct-hire company via Dice. But recruiters based in India with US addresses and VoIP phone numbers? Yeah.

Only occasionally are they for anything I’m actually suited to (clue: I’m not an architect, network administrator or developer). And apparently there are no maps of the United States in India, because Kentucky, Texas, and Ohio are not within commuting distance. Even Los Angeles is a deal breaker for someone in the Bay Area.

Also—thanks for the offer of helping me get an H1-B visa. But no.

(As an aside, many of these companies are 8A certified—meaning they are designated as “small, minority-owned” for purposes of Federal contracting and therefore receive preferential consideration in procurements. And many of them are gold or platinum partners of companies like Microsoft and Oracle. As another aside, Microsoft is one of the companies that is pushing for more and more H1-B visas because they claim there aren’t enough qualified technical prospects already in this country.)

However, I realize I’m spitting into the wind here. Dice doesn’t give a monkey’s about what kind of spam its users receive as long as the spammers are paying their subscription fees. Therefore, this little advice graphic is particularly amusing. They must have needed to meet a tweet quota.

Make way for ducklings

Following on yesterday’s post about the therapeutic effects of ducks, here’s a video that really appeals to me, from Norway:

Because there’s nothing like seeing armed police escort a family of ducks along a highway and across town.

(BTW: am I the only person who thinks those ducks are totally booking? I mean, for not being built for land travel, they are definitely moving at speed.)

According to a Danish friend, at the end of the video the cop tells the journalist that they got the call earlier and walked the ducks all the way home. And that it makes him feel good and he would do it again.

Well, yes.

My Danish friend says that this sort of thing happens with some frequency in the Nordic countries and that motorists do not get their knickers in a twist over yielding to ducklings.

I contrast that with what the scene would be like here in the Valley They Call Silicon. Scores of self-important ninja rock-star thought leaders in Priuses and Teslas would be turning both the air and the Twitterverse blue with their indignation at the hold-up in their commute, for whatever reason.

Of course, they’d do that in the rare instance when it rains, too.

Gratitude Monday: Nesting instinct

You may recall last year that I told you about a pair of ducks that annually raises a clutch of ducklings in the atrium of an office building in Mountain View. I think they developed that as their brooding destination because of the faux pond/stream environment that seemed like the thing to spend space on in the 1980s, when that building was built.

What with the drought here in California (which is turning from the Golden State to the Brown and Dusty State), the building’s management company turned off what little water it had allowed to go stagnant there over the past months. I therefore thought that Mama and Papa Duck would have to find another location for their family activities this year.

However, I was wrong. Early last month I was pleasantly surprised to discover Mama with a trail of five ducklings scuttling about the walkway.

I mean, for raising your spirits, it’s hard to beat ducklings.

But the next week when I went back looking for them, I was told that they were gone. The building holds a number of startups (of the 13 guys and a dog variety), which come and go with some speed. Apparently someone from one of them (who hadn’t been there in previous years) ratted them out to animal services, who came and scooped them all up.

I don’t know where they’ve gone. No doubt it’s some approved duck sanctuary, but how will Papa Duck find them? The high tech hotshots broke up a stable family with their meddling.

Even so—I’m grateful I got to see them again this year, and I wish Mama and babies all the best, wherever they may be.