Carrie (?): Jessica, Text me right now its Carrie BTW!!!!!!!!!
Carrie (?): Jessica, Text me right now its Carrie BTW!!!!!!!!!
Me: Sorry, Jessica is no longer at this number.
Carrie (?): Really?
What do I say to that?
BTW, this is the first contact from a non-male Jessica has received, and possibly the first contact that didn’t come after 9pm.
I get the feeling a lot of people have Jessica’s number, if you know what I’m saying.
No blood for oil! No blood for oil! Oh, we’re not doing that anymore? Drat.
I can tell you there are some really huge resources sitting around right now nearly literally burning through cash waiting to get out into the Gulf of Mexico and drill baby drill.
Budgeting for this is interesting, because you are losing real money keeping your drilling rigs idle, but you are “saving” fake accounting money because you don’t have to write off any failures, since you’re not allowed to try. So, it’s all green in our books!
I feel bad for BP having to deal with these power outages at Texas City. I have a lot of bad things to say about the previous big trouble there, but it sounds like the drought just let some gunk build up on their lines. You are definitely going to flare if you lose power, no matter how good your plant is. That sucks.
It’s a pretty awesome sight when the flare comes up while they’re firing up the hydrocracker’s hydrogen compressor.
I don’t really know what’s going on with the tax breaks for oil companies. I’m actually all for removing all the loopholes from the corporate tax system and agreeing on a fair and economically rational tax rate for everyone, but when I heard Republicans use “fair share” I almost choked. Let’s not make taxes a moral issue, oh Party of Big Business.
realclearpolitics to me is one of the best, but as the name says it is mostly concerned with political issues. I like being able to read a Mother Jones and American Spectator article about the same subject using adjacent links. I just wish there could be some more standard news. realclearworld misses this mark as well, and realclearnews redirects to a cyber-squatter.
Reuters often takes a more subtle but similar approach to Fox Business when they report on disasters and the like, basically quoting changes to a fertilizer company’s stock when a militia guy detonates a bomb. At least they don’t change the S’es out for $’s in their headlines.
You have to change the CNN “edition” to International to avoid reading funny cat stories and iReport crowdsourcing all day, and then they force your sports section to cricket and “football” just to spite the Americans trying to find a decent news source. The Kate Middleton stories also become even more annoyingly omnipresent at this point.
I try CNNMoney, which gives another similar-to-Reuters feel at times (and is solely financial news, or whatever fresh dung they rake over from Fortune), and I also bear the cost of having to imagine bashing Paul LaMonica’s face in with a croquet mallet, which can’t be heart- or brain-healthy on a long-term basis.
FoxNews.com really seems alright, but, ironically, I try to shoot for a more balanced news slate. Not to say they don’t basically report the straight news (especially online), but I would rather get my information from a place any hypothetical ideological opponents would not roll their eyes over.
Local news is awful…
Our corporate intranet search utility is not very popular:
In Excel, there is a difference between a blank cell and a cell with no value. It is impossible to force a cell to be blank via a formula, because the presence of a formula makes the cell not blank.
This might seem like an asinine thing to worry about, but blank cells can be important when doing certain gambits like special pastes that avoid writing over labels on rows and columns, or values that come from another source and should not be destroyed. These non-blank empty cells steamroll anything standing in their way, contrary to the perceptible logical state of the spreadsheet.
If you put the formula =“” into the cell, that’s saying, “This cell should be blank.” If you copy and paste values only (destroying the formula) into a new unused cell, despite having nothing in it (no detectable sign you did anything in that cell, unless you just remember), Excel still sees this as a non-blank cell… because you pasted nothing from a non-blank cell. It’s tainted. The only way to clear it out is to press the delete key while on top of it.
So, it’s basically hopeless. You’re squarely in macro-land to solve that problem. And you don’t want to be in macro-land for such a dumb reason.
I found one workaround, assuming you leave the =“” (or more complicated derivative) formula in place. If you highlight the area, do a Go To Special, select Formulas and only check Text, it will highlight all the non-blank blanks (assuming all other values are either hard-coded or numbers), which you can then just press delete to clear. That’s a very risky workaround, though. It would be pretty easy to delete something you meant to keep in this scenario. If you had a desirable =“HELLO” function, it goes away in this method.
I can stomach that a formula returning “” should be considered a non-blank. I do not agree that a pasted-values “” cell should be non-blank. That’s a bug in my view. Maybe if you split the concept to Values-Blank and Content-Blank, where a “” cell would be Values-Blank only, and a totally cleared cell would be Content-Blank. But that’s definitely busting core functionality and logic for a silly edge case. It’s a pity.
The job is going very well. I realized toward the end of Turkey that my job lacked stability on a lot of vectors. A lot. This job basically has stability on all vectors. This means the job can be very challenging and busy and still not be the kind of gut-twisting strain you would see in a volatile environment. Just being back home with very like-minded and highly qualified individuals makes everything easier. The state of things currently is very similar to what I inherited at the refinery, maybe even in better shape. So, it’s kind of a smooth glide into a moderated challenge. Things are organized.
An “easy hard job” was the concept I formed up this morning. In Turkey, even an easy job would have been hard for many reasons.
As of Sunday, March 6, I will once again become a Comcast sucker… I mean, customer. The little “online chat” they make you go through at the end took almost an hour this morning, and the most interesting part went like this:
Marian > That is fine. The dual tuner Cable Card is for $8.50/mo.
Brandon_ > I understood the first cablecard should be free. And, also, it needs to be able to tune 4 channels.
Marian > To verify, you only need the one free Cable Card for the main TV, correct?
Brandon_ > That’s correct. I will not even use the cable box.
Marian > Perfect!
That takes some nerve, right there. I don’t know how their lawyers would spin this, but it’s FCC regulation that every subscriber is entitled to one free CableCard. I read online that some people are charged a spurious $1.79 or so, but this $8.50 is a slap in the face. Kind of scary, in a way, that all it took was to question this to knock off $100 of cost per year.
I plopped down on the bed this evening to do some computer work and was startled as the second to last functional handmade slat (the original cheap-o ones failed long ago) cracked in half and sent me hurtling down at a 10-20 degree decline toward the floor. Building and setting them up was tricky, but trying to fish them out in pieces without disassembling the room was harder.
In addition to the rest of the emerging packing chaos, we now have a scrap lumber pile.
We just set the box spring directly on the floor inside the bed frame. This is a solution that will have to last at maximum three nights more, so no reason to take any further action. That’s the basic attitude right now for most stuff.
The logistical timing dance is set now. I’m definitely finding that the trick is to make a careful inventory of the items to abandon. We had to go to the store tonight, for example, to buy two throwaway blankets to use on the inflatable beds, which are also now throwaway. We by no means will have suitcase room for bedding, so anything that stays past Friday has to be left behind. We will donate everything to the refugees, so that nullifies the waste element.
There are now blue Post-It notes marking the items that should not ship. We’re doing a really good job this time around. Our handling of the embarkation was quite successful, but this one has the greased feeling of experience. I still don’t know how we will structure the air shipment, but I assume it will be heavy on clothing and semi-essential tech items.
Apparently, technically, some contractor has not yet approved another contractor to start packing our stuff on Thursday. We’ll see how all that goes. Nobody will authorize my purchase of our return tickets. Other than that, I think we’re basically okay.
The move-out coordination guy comes tomorrow to plan the nail-hole patching. It’s starting to come to a close.
On Sunday we receive our last house guest, who is now humorously invited to my farewell party at work. That should be a hoot.
I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned here that the Nescafe container here has a permanent resident spoon for offloading to a cup. The poor spoon is actually corroding due to the acidity and general filth of Nescafe.
I was hoping I wouldn’t get all the way to mid-morning without knowing how my day would go, but it’s looking that way. My system changes were approved Friday night but are a bit uncertain as to whether they went into the system as promised.
The other system I busted Friday afternoon was checked by a certifiable doofus this morning and cleared for new usage, but there’s like a 5% chance there’s something bad-wrong that I will find out about soon.
I am a tremendous pain in the butt about the latter system, as I don’t trust it and have seen so many failures and glitches in it I am generally neurotic about using it. I try to delay asking Manila to check for failures until at least 30 minutes after the system’s consumption of the file, but normally I break after 10 minutes and they have to check way too early and see “In Progress.”
I rig up an SAP transaction that checks for success. Failures are not announced this way, and I don’t have permission to check for failures the normal way. This is life in this system’s security policies. Read-only access is considered a controls risk.
I used to think Manila was crazy to be so scared of it, but now I’m mortified. That’s what I get.
Moving prep is going well. We’re in basically a constant roundtable discussion to try to decide when the ocean shipment leaves. Sleeping on the floor is no biggie for me in the amount of time we’re talking about (basically any time after this week is fine with me, even though that’s really early).
I am pushing for plane tickets. The pre-move inspection is this Friday, and after that we will probably start taking down the curtain rods and prepare for a pre-move-out inspection by the guy who would help us patch holes and possibly repair the damage I did to the miserably cheap drywall hanging those curtains!
The pre-move inspection should give us ideas on the limits of the moving timing.
I can’t imagine what Lebanon would look like if we had gone there. We have left a wake of political instability nearly any exotic place we’ve gone, it seems.
The picture in this article labeled “Fury” actually features our hotel, the tallest building pictured in the distance on the left. We used the metro entrance in that square; it’s very near the Egyptian Museum. It’s amazing to see that many people around, as it was nearly deserted most of the time when we were there.
Really makes me wonder if our hotel in Tunis took down the picture of the president they had hanging up at reception. How things change in such a short period of time…
I remember an MBA class where we did a supply chain simulation. We were pushing product from a factory to a distributorship to end customers. You play a role in the process with varying levels of cooperative information (i.e., perhaps the factory tells you when they forecast a production run or you get demand information from the retailer).
This was competitive within the class for grades (not my favorite method), and the bounded nature of the scenario drove up the incentive to essentially run yourself dry on product right before the end of the simulation.
The professor tried to forbid this, basically telling everyone we should run the business steady-state to the end rather than pretending like there was going to be a shutdown.
I have thought a little about this scenario as we begin our preparations to leave here. A lot of stuff around us is completely falling apart. The worst offenders are probably our bedsheets (where we would be better quoting a nub count rather than a thread count; they were wedding gifts), ice cube trays fatiguing severely down the center support, soap bottles requiring heroic pumping to get anything out, trash can lids stuck shut, and towels edging toward that mild-permanent-funk zone.
We have special issues around liquids, which we can ship in neither of our major shipments and would only be able to carry home in checked bags on the plane.
Plus, a lot of stuff just simply sucks here (at least at price parity with the US equivalents), like towels and kitchen products. Not to mention electronics. We don’t need ice trays in the States (this is a subtle thing that will be much appreciated when it’s back to automatic production), and we’ve already caught a few things on sale that are waiting for us at the house when we get back. There’s not much point in going on a shopping spree right now for much of anything.
There are some big decisions to make around 220V-only small appliances we’ve purchased and the mostly-PAL television and the mostly-A4 printer. Most of these have designated homes chosen already. We might throw in a few complementary half bottles of various cleaning and cooking liquids to anyone willing to take something big off our hands.
The simple timing of the two shipments (air and ocean) will be a prickly subject. As opposed to expatriating where you need everything, we don’t need a whole lot immediately upon arrival. The sheer accidental genius of leaving the guest bedroom suite intact in the house saved us from urgent furniture scarcity.
I will probably win the “relo employee of the year” award for my responsiveness (just a little eager!). I just did an inventory of the different parties involved in my move:
It’s quite a deal. But the ball is starting to roll…