February 2005 Archives

You know, the Internet is a wonderful thing. The World Wide Web is a spectacular thing. It's a medium for the creative process that is available to many people far and wide. Diary sites like this one is a testament to that great fact. All of us on here can express our innermost thoughts, our most outrageous opinions, the fruits of our research on our favorite topic, and even our favorite cake recipe. I wouldn't trade that for the world.

The problem is, that's also the greatest weakness of it all. The truth is, any slob can write something and throw it up on a webserver for the world to see. It doesn't matter how ill-informed his opinion is, how disturbing his thoughts are, how uncritical his research is, or how disgusting his idea of the perfect cake tastes. Reasonably intelligent people figure this out quite quickly.

So why the hell is it that when a newbie wants to find out about Paganism and Wicca, the first thing they do is use this dubious resource as their primary -- or worse, sole -- source of information on the topic? Why is it they're willing to accept whatever someone who learned how to submit a link to www.witchvox.com says without a second of critical thought? Oh wait, I know! Because Wicca and Paganism is comprised of "anything goes" philosophy. I say "Phooey!" And that's being polite!

I'll be honest. Half the crap out there is just that, crap. Half of the sites are put up by someone who read one or two books (and I'll get into how crappy some of those books are some other time), decided they had it all figured out, and decided to share their "wisdom" with the world. Of course, half of them are really just sharing the "wisdom" some other author (book or web) already shared, often by copying their exact words. (We won't go into the number of times I've found certain things online that were copied directly out of one of Scott Cunningham's book without so much as a citation.)

I'm sorry, but if you're too cheap to actually go out and buy a book on the religion you're interested in (or here's a crazy idea, see if you can borrow a copy through a library), you don't have nearly enough dedication to follow it. Pick up a hobby instead, and start looking to explore your spirituality when you can put some real work into it.

Today was a pretty good day. I didn't get a lot of work done, but I did enough to keep myself from getting overwhelmed with guilt. Primarily, I rewrote all of my PCI-X code for the new processor. That was quite an adventure, as I had to handle three different PCI-X cores on the same processor. I hope that all works when I get a chance to finally test it. Of course, that won't be until the middle of next month, by the look of it.

I spent more of they day putzing around online. Particularly, I spent a good deal of time getting highly annoyed at the one topic on one of the religious forums I visit. Someone started a thread called "Ask a Pagan," for people to ask all kinds of questions about Paganism. Unfortunately, while a few people have asked some interesting and probing questions, most have taken the opportunity to ask pointed questions to prove why Paganism is "wrong."

That just annoys me. Why is it that some people have to be such jerks? Why is it that any opportunity to learn about another religion has to be used as a way to "trap" that religion in some way to disprove it? Why can't more people be like Stace, who sincerely asks questions to better understand others and their viewpoints? But I guess that takes maturity. And my experience, maturity is something that's severely lacking in our society today. Instead, everything has to be turned into a penis-measuring contest of one sort or another.

Of course, I have to admit that I found a lot of the Pagans' answers trite, boring, and annoying, too. For starters, they let themselves get dragged into the whole "how can all paths be valid" argument, though "abyss that pretends to be an argument" might be more accurate. Truthfully, I'm not sure I care for the whole "all paths are valid" model anyway. I think there has to be a decent middle ground between saying "I have a monopoly on truth" and sayng "well, everything anyone wants to believe is true." Of course, this gets into bigger questions as to what constitutes "valid" and whatnot. And while I could probably go on a lengthy ramble abou that, I'm not sure I care to at this time. Let me just say that I think it's time to say, "Truth is a very complex thing and I think that people can have equally accurate and yet distinct perceptions of truth, but it is not my concern to determine or comment on the 'validity' of any particular claims of truth." But that probably only makes sense to me, and that's subject to change.

I haven't been online for a couple days, so I have a handful of events to talk about in this entry. We'll start out with the fun news from Dr. Lee. He had someone in his office call my house yesterday. He's instructed me to discontinue my glyburide over the weekend on an experimental basis. I am supposed to take my blood glucose readings as normal and then send them to him Monday mornng. He'll check them and determine from that whether to make it permanent. Last night, my blood glucose was roughly 110 and this morning, it was 89. So by the looks of it, I may officially be done with one of my medications! How awesome.

I'm also down another pound or so, too. According to the scale at work, I'm somewhere between 275 and 276 pounds. Considering I started this trek at 311 last November, I think that's fantastic. My coworker, Mike W., saw me at the job fair (I'll have to write about that too). I was wearing a pair of black pants, a red dress shirt, and a burgandy sweater over top it. He said that with the wait loss, I looked absolutely incredible. I thought I looked darn good in it too, but it was nice to hear someone else say it. I was going to post a picture of it, but Mom didn't get home until an hour after I did on Thursday, and by then, I was ready to change into something different. The sweater was just a tad bit too warm in the house.

Yeah, I went to a "job fair" (and I use the term loosely) for Lockheed Martin. They were mainly holding it for their Owego facility (though they did have their Syracuse facility represented too), since they're looking to fill over 700 new positions. I'm not sure I want to work for Lockheed Martin (and after yesterday, I'm even less sure), but I figured I'd check it out. I learned exactly one thing while I was there. I was way underprepared. I might have gotten more out of it if I had spent a few days scouring their website and printing out and reading specific job listings they have posted. That way, I could have asked questions about specific jobs I was looking at. As it was, I had about four or five general questions to ask. They didn't even have project descriptions or anything there. I was expecting it to be much more informational on their part, and it was quite obvious that they were expecting to collect hundreds of resume and spend between thirty seconds and two minutes chit-chatting with each person. I tend to agree with Mom when she heard about it and commented it didn't sound like much of a "job fair" to her.

Of course, the thing that really got me was the one manager from the software engineering department I spoke to. He asked me what my GPA was. Now, I will be the first to admit that I haven't done a lot of inteviews in the last seven years. But the few interviews I did five years ago when looking for my current job, I didn't have one single person ask about my GPA. By that time, most of them were interested in the three years of in-field experience I've had since school. I would've expected that eight years later, any potential employers would be even more interested in my experience. So to even be asked about my GPA seemed weird.

And then when I told him that I got a 3.06 GPA, he commented that "made the cut, but just barely." And then he told me that I'd have a lot of competition. If I would've been thinking more clearly at the time (I was a bit shocked by this time), I probably would've told him to fuck off at that point. That probably would've been a bad idea, so it's just as well I was too shocked at the time. But it sure makes me want to go with my first instinct to find a job that isn't with Lockheed Martin.

My company dropped the big bombshell on everybody today. At 11:00am this morning, everyone in the office was gathered up for a meeting, where the big wigs from the main office announced that our office in Ithaca would be closing before the end of the year. I was one of the 50% of the office's staff that was not offered an opportunity to relocate to one of the offices that will remain open. That means that as of July 1, I will need an alternate source of employment. I wasn't really planning on moving anyway, but the fact that it's not an option came as a bit of a shock.

To be honest, I'm not totally surprised by this. I've suspected since ADIC bought out Pathlight that they would eventually decide to close the Ithaca office, forcing all of us to either relocate or find other jobs. I've expected it at every "office-wide" meeting we've had in the past four years. But for some reason, expecting it didn't really prepare me for it. I'm still finding mysef shocked. I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed by it. Granted, I'm not the emotional wreck some of the others were (it helps that I didn't just buy a new house like some of them), but I'm still in a bit of a state of emotional disarray.

I suppose in the great scheme of things, I can just take this in stride. After all, for the past year, I've been thinking about getting a different job, one that's closer to Mike so that I can eventually move there too. This incident just provides me with a strong motivation to do more than just think about it, I suppose. And I can be thankful that if I want it, I still have a guaranteed job until July 1. That's almost a full six months where I can look for a job without having to worry about how to pay bills in the meantime.

Part of me wants to run right out to the job sites. Part of me wants to fire up Word and start my resume right now (I don't think I have an old copy of it anymore). And I'm proud of that part of me. I'm glad that I have that "never say die" spirit somewhere in me and that I'm willing to keep going. But on the same hand, I don't think I'm going to do it quite yet. Taking the bull by the horns is good, but reacting is bad. And I think that if I started these things now, I'd be doing it reactively. And that could lead to mistakes. For now, I think I'm going to instead make a decision to give myself time -- at least until the end of the week -- and let the emotional impact and reactions of the announcement to work their way through my system. Then I can channel my desire to act more wisely.