April 1st.

It's f*ucking EVERYWHERE now, too.

Former presidential hopeful Michelle Bachman recently compared President Obama to Germanwings copilot Andreas Lubitz:

No, this is not an April Fool's joke. She really is that far disconnected from reality.

It sounds as though he's snorting the same Drano as some I could name here.
Yeah, one time some Heritage dudes said something semi-fungible, so I guess that lets the No-Talent Rodeo Clown off the hook for what's among the more expensive cock-ups in human history. Or something.
A cleaner non-argument would be that Republicans use the Roman alphabet, and all five reams of the PooPoo-cACA itself* were composed in the Roman alphabet**.
The broader point is that this country is an experiment in self-government, and the time has arrived to admit that Hayek is correct, and the Progressive Project (both Republican and Democrat flavors) just needs to be scuttled in favor of simpler systems empowering individuals in their liberty. You either support that, or I oppose you.

*To say nothing of the ensuing reams of regulation--would that they were reduced to nothing!
**For all it could have as well been a simple Klingon translation, for all anyone who cast a vote to hang this albatross about our necks actually read the Mike Foxtrot.

In order to get a better picture of DRI and related information for vitamins and minerals, i started a Google Doc: Vitamin and Minerals DRI and related

It's incomplete, may have errors, and only for Males, 31-50. Though, i would add more if it weren't so tedious. The source material for most of the information comes as separate documents, or one that has all the sheets together, albeit with a different orientation. This focuses on matching up the EAR/RI pair or AI (those are mutually exclusive) with the TL, if any. Plus, it makes the other units used more clear. IIUC, many labels misrepresent folic acid because they ignore the DFE. Having the IU as a number right by it also helps.

Then there's the little notes. Why don't we use D1? (It was a mistaken label. It was found later to be D2 and another chemical.) Why are Potassium tablets 99mg or less? (FDA regulation) What is the difference between Cartenoids and Retinoids? (Retinoids are Vitamin A, Cartenoids are Provitamin A, meaning they are converted to Vitamin A as required.) Little notes i'm picking up to help things make sense. Interests come in bursts, but if anyone else is interested, that would likely change.

The document is available to anyone with the link, but not editable. Please let me know if you are interested.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been addressed by the academic communities. Someone with a degree in English or linguistics or something like that should have though of this decades ago.

This word (actually more than one word) has various spellings, and I've probably used all of them at one time or another. The word is email, or eMail, or e-mail, or some other variation. They're all wrong.

It's a contraction of "electronic mail" and as such should be spelled e'mail. The same with e'books and other e'words.

So why hasn't someone with a PhD in English pointed this out to me? I have no formal collegiate training in this field. It's a mystery to me.

In his 1951 short story The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov has a boy who finds something really weird in the attic -- a printed book. In this future, all reading was done on screens.

When e'books* like the Nook and Kindle came out, there were always women sitting outside the building on break on a nice spring day reading their Nooks and Kindles. It looked like the future to me, Asimov's story come true. I prefer printed books, but thought that it was because I'm old, and was thirty before I read anything but TV and movie credits on a screen.

And then I started writing books. My youngest daughter Patty is going to school at Cincinnati University (as a proud dad I have to add that she's Phi Beta Kappa and working full time! I'm not just proud, I'm in awe of her) and when she came home on break and I handed her a hardbound copy of Nobots she said "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!"

So somehow, even young people like Patty value printed books over e'books.

My audience is mostly nerds, since few non-nerds know of me or my writing, so I figured that the free e'book would far surpass sales of the printed books. Instead, few people are downloading the e'books. More download the PDFs, and more people buy the printed books than PDFs and ebooks combined.

Most people just read the HTML online, maybe that's a testament to my m4d sk1llz at HTML (yeah, right).

Five years ago I was convinced ink was on the way out, but there's a book that was printed long before the first computer was turned on that says "the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated".

* I'll write a short story about the weird spelling shortly.

He already signed a law that gets as close to abolition of public-sector unions as any that has ever passed in this country. He has already gone back on his word to not be interested in attacking private-sector unions, in voicing his support for a similar bill for private-sector unions. He has also shown big support for "right to work" laws.

But none of that is really good enough for the Kevlar Kandidate, at least not when he's running for president. He has to out-conservative the likes of Rick Perry, so he has to really show he's willing to screw the working class as hard as possible for maximum enjoyment of as few as possible.

Well, this might do it: Could Wisconsin's Scott Walker now abolish the weekend?

Going on...

Things that were not explained adequately upon conversion from CW to ICE.

1. Bonuses- it was thought by my management that QPB applied to all blue badge employees including ICE. If I had known I wasn't going to get bonuses, I would have asked for higher base pay.
2. Vacation Time- MUST be taken while still an employee, and unlike what the recruiter who wrote my job offer told me, cannot be used to extend your final week. Any unused vacation time will be lost at end of contract, by policy. In addition, apparently you lose it at the end of the year, I really should have taken WW52 off, then the sting would not be so bad now.
3. ICE as a stepping stone to full employment at Intel is a lie. I couldn't get anybody, despite spending many hours on networking, to give my resume a second look. I even learned a new tool in this contract that is internal and can only be used at Intel and is completely worthless outside of Intel. No matter, I've had many interviews outside of Intel, and will land well, but I'll keep this in mind the next time I am tempted to take a short term contract at Intel.
4. Being a blue badge, if you are ICE, still means you're treated more like a resource than like a human by human resources. Many policies are used to reverse decisions that your manager, who is working more closely with you, has made.
    

Software Project Management At Intel in non-software divisions

1. Brooks Law is almost unheard of at Intel. Hardware Managers think that all software projects can be completed in less than six months, and therefore throw contingent workers at the project. Since software estimates, in general, are 75% engineering and 25% new science, they are wildly inaccurate. When the project inevitably fails to be complete in the first six months, the temptation is to break Brook's Law by adding more contingent workers. The time to ramp up CWs on the project of course exceeds the time to complete the project if you kept software engineers working for more than 18 months at a time.
2. Agile or Waterfall- Pick one and stick to it. This crazy combination used on software projects in hardware divisions is ridiculous, as is the general lack of written requirements.
3. It's hard to hit a moving target- input data integrity must be respected. If you don't have input data integrity, then there will be bugs. Bugs add complexity. Bugs make software estimates inaccurate. Lather, rinse, repeat.

On the new diversity initiative

1. There is no link between surface appearance and how a person thinks, or how capable they are. None at all. While this makes the apparent racism of the past a mistake, this also makes modern affirmative action programs equally racist and invalid.
2. There is no link between religion, sexual orientation, or disability and how a person thinks, or how capable they are. Such factors should not enter into hiring or promotion decisions at all, and when they do, that is what Intel needs to eliminate from the system.
3. There IS a link between certain forms of mental illness and the ability to innovate. Since mental illness affects the brain directly, having somebody with a well controlled mental illness on your team increases diversity of thought, which leads to innovation.
4. I believe that the uncertainty surrounding the diversity initiative was a part of my failure to convert to FTE. Not necessarily outright discrimination against a white male, and due to my autism I fall into one of the protected groups anyway and HR is well aware of that. But I believe the way the diversity initiative was announced, and the weeks of confusion surrounding it before BK finally clarified his position, coming at the same time I was trying to convert to FTE, meant that I had a harder time of trying to get my resume noticed and find open, externally advertised jobs for my skillset.

Final Thought and contact info

While my search to convert to FTE at Intel has failed, my external search has succeeded. I have at least one, maybe two job offers in hand; I will likely be back to work sometime between March 25 to March 30. This posting will be crossposted to Inside Blue before I leave Intel. Comments section below is open.

 

Last night, as the calendar shifted to 27 Adar, i became 42. My birthday is actually in Adar 1, but not being a leap year, there's no intercalary month, so its just plain Adar.

42 is cool and all, but as each year passes, i care less and less about birthdays. It's not more than just getting older. It's about understanding things, realizing how stupid young people are (like i was, back then) and just a general non caring. Life simply is.

In other news, slashdot is changing styles again and overall is slower and looks clunky. I feel some odd attachment to writing JEs once in a while, perhaps to justify my almost two decades since first checking it out. has it really been that long? I wonder if i would attend a slashdot meetup. Probably not. It's sounds great on paper though.

You're not still reading this, are you?

Jeb Bush is the candidate for Republican Primary Voters who want to vote for a less masculine version of Hillary Clinton.

Speaking of Hillary... KFC has a new "Ready For Hillary For Lunch!" promo - you get a box containing two huge thighs, two small breasts, and a left wing. You have to bring your own server though.

Barack Obama completed his NCAA bracket. Joe Biden completed the NIT bracket. In it, he has the Dallas Cowboys beating Manchester United in the Final game.

As many of you know, I'm an avid reader - books, blogs, even the cesspool that is comments on news stories.

One thing that I've seen a lot of lately is the typical canard that "the Spirit of God left the Catholic Church centuries ago".

If that were true, my dear protestant brethren (and I'm not being sarcastic, you guys are dear to me, I just want you to come home to the Catholic Church), then please explain to me how:

The Episcopal Church, The Anglican Church, and now the Presbyterian USA church, along with some Lutheran Churches and some Methodist churches are coming out and blessing same sex "marriage".

This completely flies against Scripture.

It's a little ironic to me that the "Sola Scriptura" crowd is ignoring wholesale chunks of Scripture to be politically correct.

The Great Apostasy has begun.

This is great news! I'm totally serial. No, really, I'm super serial you guys.
I know he needs to keep looking for Manbearpig, but c'mon, he's already tried and failed to illegally overthrow the Government once, why not again? I'm super-duper serial.

EXCELSIOR!

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7116021&cid=49280403

Someone just introduced themselves in one of my journal entries, and the way he writes you could be brothers separated at birth. I thought you were quick to move the goal posts, but if you two teamed up I'd never even see them!

Take a look at the humor starting here. To make it even better he has a much higher UID than my own and over 5,000 comments to his credit, so I would bet the hits just keep rolling!

You know who you are, peddler of filth. And if I'm incorrect, I won't know short of Eternity, for this is pretty much what I think of you: a dirty diaper that, despite the best efforts, continues to spew crap in all directions, contaminating everything.
I think you false, diabolical, and unworthy of dialogue. Return to your pit.