Following a pretty pointed heart-to-heart I had with my boss last week, today brought the formal announcement of my promotion to Development Manager. Yay me. 
I figured I’d mention it here given my [not unjustified] bitching about it last week.
(Not to be confused with the New Jedi Order book series)
Revenge of the Sith was quite a good movie, though I haven’t figured out if that’s based on its own merits or merely in comparison to the crapfests known as The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.
After Episode II came out, I was one among many who wondered how Lucas was going to get us from the burgeoning clone army to the rise of the Empire in two hours. Here’s how he did it: He cheated — RotS runs almost two-and-a-half hours. Pacing’s pretty good, considering.
Performance-wise, the movie belongs to Ewan McGregor. Hayden Christensen’s got some nice moments playing Anakin, plus some cringe-inducing ones, too. My feelings on Palpatine/Sidious (Ian McDiarmid) bounced back and forth between delight at the return (emergence) of the Emperor and wondering just how over the top he could take things.
And I’m not sure how he did it, but ol’ George managed to pull a totally limp and listless performance from my sweet Natalie. Curse you, Lucas!
More later, including the details of my evening’s theater-going experience (the movie started with a cheer and ended with a melee).
Downtown Oakland, at least what I could account for within a 3-4 block radius of my office, was without power for ’round about an hour.
Not sure what caused it; it’s been rainy here today, but not excessively. Didn’t smell smoke in the air — nor did I hear any distant boom — that could’ve indicated some sort of power center crisis.
Fire crews got scrambled to the area, though. In the early minutes of the outage I walked downstairs to play investigator and learned from a newly-arrived-on-the-scene firefighter that they were out en masse because, in his words, “there must be a hundred stuck elevators in the area.”
In the absence of anything better to do, a lot of office workers hung out at street level, milling about, hunting for passers-by with new, fresh answers to the “Do you know what happened?” query.
I saw several of the buildings a block over being evacuated very calmly, very methodically. Many of the people looked curious about the goings-on, but unwilling to look the gift horse of a prolonged break in the mouth. A few unfortunates were visibly bristling at the enforced respite, as if the delay was some sort of personal affront.
The BART station was dark, save for what little light bounced in. The electronic gates were stuck open (as I’d imagine they’re designed to do) and the lone security guard/BART cop looked strangely like he was a little nervous about his lot in life.
The straw that broke the camel’s geek’s back
Just found out that despite assurances for the past few weeks that my promotion from mid-January would be announced (finally!) two weeks ago today with the title I’d been pushing for (Development Manager), TPTB at work are apparently no closer to an announcement today, two weeks later, than they were then. Further, the title of Development Manager is now, apparently, being removed from consideration because “it would put [me] above” the other two non-managerial team members.
This despite the fact that I’m the one everyone comes to for answers when my boss is out.
This despite the fact that the one or two new people we’re about to hire will be reporting to me.
This despite the fact that this question had been resolved weeks and weeks ago.
But what do I know? Clearly, not how to pick a winning situation.
I’m angry, hurt, and betrayed. At every turn, it seems, the company finds new ways to fuck me. And I’m getting shitty pay while I’m here, doing the stuff that needs to be done and being a fount of strength and stability amidst the dysfunctional chaos, getting my ass up at o’dark early five to seven days a week to do content updates.
Why exactly am I still here?
If anybody has any job leads, feel free to send ‘em my way.
I thought this was interesting discovery, ATIUBS:
Thanks, Mom
What’s in a name? Possibly the key to future success, says a researcher who found that children with exotic names like Da’Quan tend to score lower on tests than their siblings with traditional names. “When you see a particular name, like David or Catherine, you internalize it in a different way than a name such as LaQuisha,” said David Figlio, the University of Florida economics professor behind the study. Perhaps teachers expect less from students whose names contain certain sounds (prefixes like “lo” and “ta,” suffixes like “isha” and “ious”), since poorly educated black women often bestow such names, Figlio theorized. That negative response could help explain the “black-white test score gap,” Figlio said. The kicker? Students with Asian-sounding names are more likely to be tabbed as gifted.
— Lewis Wallace
A little more information is available in the press release announcing Figlio’s findings.
Today’s PvP comic is worth checking out.
A word of advice to my fellow Browncoats awaiting the release of Serenity:
Avoid all spoilers.
I freely admit that I’m normally a guy that likes reading spoilers. However, I recently read some about the cinematic version of Firefly that really, really made me wish I hadn’t.
It’s nothing that’s going to keep me from being there for the first possible show on opening day, mind you — the movie still looks to be nothing short of spectacular — but I now know things I wish I didn’t.
And there are somethings that, once learned, you can’t unlearn.
