and things went downhill from there

My stint as a contractor came to an end on the 31st of July this year. To be more accurate, it was supposed to end on that day, but somebody in IT accidentally rescinded my system access at the end of day on the 30th, so I showed up for work on the 31st and found out that I was locked out of everything. I walked over to the office of the Deskside Support guys over on the other building and told them to come collect my laptop, then handed my pass card to the receptionist and went home.

I billed them for an hour, so it was a pretty easy hundred bucks for me, but I'd have liked to say goodbye to the rest of my group over Teams.

Anyway, on to "the thing" that I did.

Now that I'm re-retired, I have been trying to make better use of my time than I did during the previous iteration of my retirement. At atara's prompting, I am giving myself at least one thing to accomplish every day.

We have some bottle lights that we bought from the front yard about ten years ago. We got them from a place called Jysk - which is a Danish chain that we liken to being a bargain-basement Ikea. They hang from the trees out front by strings, and other than having to replace those every couple of years, they've otherwise been reliable. Until this year.

When we put them out this spring, only one of them lit. And it was only working sporadically, flickering and blinking in the dark.

Somewhere in the shapeless morass of trivia I've managed to cram into my brain over the years is the knowledge that when a solar-powered garden light fails, the most likely cause is the power switch, followed by the battery. I suspected that this was the case with our bottle lights, so I picked up a remarkably cheap, 40-watt soldering iron last weekend. (Seriously, this thing was $7.95, so I'm not expecting a lifetime of service from it.) On Tuesday, I pulled down all of the bottle lights, disassembled them, and bridged the contacts for the on/of switches.

When I had them apart, I discovered why one of the had been blinking. The bottles are suppsoed to have corks to keep the rain out of them, but this one had lost its cork, and the bottom of the bottle had filled with water. As it swayed in the wind, the rust-filled water would complete the connection on the power switch and it would briefly light. Fortunately, I'd saved the base from a bottle that had broken earlier, because the circuit board in this one was badly corroded. I threw away the bad one and replaced it with the spare. I also sealed the top of the bottle to prevent more water from getting in.

That evening, three of the eight bottles lit. Barely. They had a wan glow that told of batteries that were on their last legs. The lights use standard AAA NiMH batteries, so I knew that they could be easily replaced.

But... when I shopped around online for replacements, I discovered that rechargeable NiMH batteries are not cheap. I mean, they don't cost a fortune either, but they cost more than I wanted to spend on these cheap lights. I finally broke my "no Amazon" rule and ordered a 24-pack of the cheapest ones I could find. They arrived today, and I swapped out all of the batteries this afternoon. As I swapped them, I took each bottle into garage to make sure it was working.

100% success. Our front yard should look much more merry and whimsical after sundown tonight.

I'm going through the long process of getting things set up again after experiencing a significant computer issue.

Once I've confirmed that this has shown up on both journals, I'll follow up later with more details.

I considered eggs and toast for breakfast, but decided to go for the vegan option of bannock.

It's just flour, water, salt and baking powder. Totally vegan.

I made a shaggy dough, tore it into four pieces and fried it in a hot pan. It was crispy on the outside and pillowy on the inside. And it picked up a heavenly flavour from the leftover bacon fat I fried it in.

Oh. Yeah.

If one is being pedantic, the bacon fat probably made it a bit less vegan. Still delicious, though.

More years ago than I care to admit, I was chatting with Mom when she mentioned that my late brother had stopped in town for a visit, and while he was there he whipped up a baked sauerkraut dish that was remarkably good. This was back in the days when one could not simply go to Google with a list of ingredients and say, "Gib me recipe plz"

I pressed mom for the recipe, but sine she wasn't the one to make it, all she could remember was that it had garlic sausage, sauerkraut, canned potatoes, onion, sun-dried tomatoes and an apple. All of the ingredients sounded flavourful enough to stand up on their own, so I just cut them all up, tossed them into a casserole dish along with a good pinch of salt and some toasted caraway (because it seemed like the kind of thing that would go in a bake like this). The caraway was the only thing that salvaged the dish and kept it from being utterly bland and inedible.

I have thought about that dish a few times over the years, and recently I decided to give it another try. To that end, I bought some kubasa, spicy sauerkraut, a can of potatoes, a jar of sun-dried tomatoes and an apple.

Then I left it all in the fridge for so long that the sausage went off, and I had to buy replacement. I vowed to use the ingredients this weekend before that happened again, so this is what I made for breakfast today:



I looked up a recipe this time, and found one that included everything except the tomatoes. I figured, "They can't really hurt the dish, can they?"

The recipe called for a cup of apple juice and a quarter cup of brown sugar to help offset the sourness in the dish. We don't have apple juice, and I wasn't convinced that this fancy sauerkraut I'd picked up would be as sour as the cheap stuff that comes in the jars, so I substituted beef bouillon¹ for the apple juice.

The instructions called for it to be cooked in a skillet on the stove top, but I was determined to follow in my brother's footsteps and bake it. But I started it on the range.

I cut up half a ring of kubasa (the recipe called for garlic sausage, but you use what you have) and threw it into an oven-safe skilled with some olive oil and a tiny pinch of baking soda to help with the browning. While that was doing its thing, cut a medium onion into wedges and then set the oven to 190C. Once the sausage was nicely browned, I tossed in the onions, and then poured in the oil from a small jar of sun-dried tomatoes when things looked like things were threatening to stick. At the time, I was worried that I'd added way too much oil to the dish (it was a bit too much, but not excessively so), but the oil was such a flavour bomb that it ended up being a smart move on my part.

I cubed up an apple and tossed that into the mix once the onions had started to soften a bit, then I drained the can of potatoes and halved/quartered them as needed. Once the potatoes had picked up a hint of browning, I tossed in the sun-dried tomatoes and stirred it all together while cut up two strips of bacon into another pan. The recipe didn't call for bacon, but I thought it would help make up for the fact that I was using kubasa instead of garlic sausage. When the bacon was about ready (I'd tossed some water into the pan with it to help it cook without crisping too much) I dumped the satchel of spicy sauerkraut into the skilled along with the bacon. I seasoned it with a good pinch of kosher salt, smoked paprika, and garlic powder (again, because the kubasa was not as garlic-forward as garlic sausage would have been).

I mixed together a cup of beef bouillon and a quarter cup of brown sugar before pouring that over the mix and letting it simmer until the oven was up to temperature.

Finally, I transferred the skillet to the oven and let it bake uncovered for 30 minutes. This gave a nice browning on top and reduced the liquid to an exquisitely flavourful glaze. I will never know if this was the same recipe that my brother used (I doubt it), but it doesn't really matter in the end. This was as good as advertised, and I will happily make this again.


¹I've become a convert to Better Than Bouillon brand. Seriously, it's worth the extra price.

A few years ago I spent an appreciable amount of money on a good keyboard. It's not one of those super expensive life-changing ones, but it's got a good key weight, makes a satisfying click, and has LED lights behind the key caps.

Since I bought the keyboard, I have spilled water on it twice. Both times it killed the keyboard to the extent that some keys did not work, some repeated themselves when tapped, and others returned the wrong characters when pressed. The first time I killed it this way, I swapped it out for an old IBM mechanical keyboard and let it think about what it had done for a few weeks. When I hooked it back up, it worked.

This time set it aside for a few months to dry out. I'd been meaning to hook it up again several times over the past few weeks, but I'm lazy. I finally got around to plugging it in again today.

And it works just fine. While I am not without complaints about this keyboard, I certainly can't fault its ruggedness.

After reading a post in the sub-Reddit bearing the same name as the title of this post, I was reminded of something that happened before I retired the first time.

I was sitting at my desk engaging in my usual activity of counting down months, days, hour and minutes until retirement when a co-worker who was engaged in similar activities came over to our building to ask me for help. He worked in the unionised part of the office, and they'd been coming under tighter scrutiny of late as management cranked up their adversarial leadership style to 11.

He was one of the most senior and experience workers in his group, having forgotten more about how the business ran than the people managing in were likely to ever learn. Because of his knowledge and experience, he was usually the one given work that was too complicated and problematic to task with the less experienced employees. I'd known this guy for years, and he was a conscientious, hard-working person who took pride in doing a good job.

So he was understandably upset when his (comparatively new) manager started giving him grief over having low productivity compared to the rest of the group. He tried to explain that his output only looked lower than the others because the work he was doing often required a lot more investigation since he was handling the especially complicated tasks. His manager simply said that her numbers did not back up his claims of being a productive worker, and she went as far as to threaten an investigation and demerits. She represented the new style of management that was taking root in the company, and an example of the growing toxicity that encouraged a lot of us to retire early.

His purpose in coming to me was to ask if I had any insight into how they were tracking productivity. I admit that I was also curious as to why they'd be coming after inarguably the best employee in their department for his numbers, so I did some digging. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the dashboard where they had the productivity numbers ... and I was appalled. I told what they were tracking, and he was also taken aback.

"I've worked here for a very long time, and this is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard."

"Welcome to the new style of management," I said.

To boil it down to its simplest terms, they were effectively measuring productivity by the number of transactions a user submitted. They didn't look at the complexity of the transactions, or the volume handled by a single transaction, just the number of times that the person hit "enter". Not that it was my place to tell a person how to game the system, I dropped a couple of hints that he took to heart.

When he went back to his desk, he started breaking down his job into smaller pieces. Rather than handling 150 things in a single transaction, he would handle fifteen of them, then sip his coffee and work on a crossword puzzle for a couple of minutes until his next action would be counted as a new transaction. When they processed the productivity numbers the next week, he'd gone from the bottom of the pack to their most "productive" employee by a large margin. Sadly, the message that his manager took away from it was that her threat of demerits was all that it took to make him work harder.

The irony was that he was working far less. He confided in me after that the experience had made him care far less about doing a good job, and more focused on how close he was to retirement. He just couldn't bring himself to care any more about doing a good job for such stupid and petty management.

I guess the moral of this story is to be careful who you promote, because you typically get the product that you deserve. Bad managers will produce bad results.

My Twitter feed is private, and I keep it tightly curated, so I'm not really affected by the site's current spiral into becoming even more of a cesspit. I'll keep posting and reading there until it implodes.

That said, I created a profile over on Mastodon some time back that has mostly been languishing, but I've started slowly ramping up my presence there in anticipation of the Twitpocalypse.

plonq@mstdn.social

The title of this post is inspired by the song that just came up in my Tidal queue.

When somebody posted their Mastodon ID on Twitter today, it reminded me that I have an account over there. As I hopped over there to add them, it occurred to me that I have my fingers in a lot of different social media platforms, but I'm really only active on a couple of them.

I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and even Pillowfort.

Having said that, the only ones that I'm actually active on are Facebook and Twitter -- and to a lesser extent Dreamwidth (which I mirror to Livejournal).

I am aware that Facebook and Twitter are utterly wretched platforms, but I'm still on them and active for many of the reasons that Cory Doctorow touched on when they had him on CBC earlier today. That's where all of my friends and family are, and until those platforms fail and implode, there is little likelihood that any of them will follow me to other platforms. When those spaces are your touch points for people whom, quite honestly, you are impressed had the technical prowess to even figure out those simple sites, it makes it hard to move wholesale to a different platform.

What also doesn't help is when the alternate platforms are clunky, awkward to use, and counter-intuitive. Mastodon feels like something developed by Linux geeks who don't get out much, where robustness and up-time trump intuitiveness and usability. I mean, Mastodon isn't terrible, but in some ways it kinda is. Its a fractured platform, with people getting into small, exclusive, invite-only servers that they wear like the blue check-marks in Twitter.

I'll probably migrate there entirely once Twitter implodes (or becomes pay-to-use), but for now I'm only keeping it around as a fall-back.

I want to like Pillowfort, but the only way to access it is through its web page, and the tiny handful of people whom I know on the service aren't active there anyway.

So I find myself being active on the bad sites (Facebook and Twitter) for the same reason that other people are. Like me, some of them have moved to the good sites, and like me, none of them are active on the good sites because nobody else is either.

This contract work is knocking me on my ass. Oddly, it's when I have the most to write about here that I write the lease. I intend this to be my first in a string of trying to get back into updating this thing regularly.

I noticed a bit of distortion in my vision while taking a shower Thursday morning, and my first thought was, "Oh, great, my retina issue has come back." At first, I only saw it when I shut my eyes, and  I hoped it was just a result of a bit of errant shampoo. Over the next couple of minutes, the distortion got noticeably worse, though.

Then I recognized what it was and realised that it was not a retinal issue - it was an ocular migraine. I don't get these very often, in fact, it's been a couple of years since my last. As soon as I got out of the shower, I took an aspirin as a precaution that this might want to turn into a headache.

Like previous times when I've had these, over the quarter of an hour, the distortion slowly danced and jiggled its way into a larger and larger crescent in my vision until it escaped my field of view, leaving things wavy and indistinct in its path for a few minutes.

For many, these turn into full-blown migraine headaches, but I'm fortunate to have never suffered one of those. In the wake of this ocular event, I was left with brain fog and a strong feeling of detachment. My head felt like a headache wanted to happen, but couldn't quite pull it off. It cleared up after a couple of hours, just leaving me feeling somewhat wiped.

In other news, atara and I got notified on Tuesday that we'd been exposed to somebody with COVID on the weekend. We spent much of Saturday with him, including spending a lot of time together in an enclosed car. Fortunately, between all of us being fully up-to-date on our boosters, and him not being symptomatic at the time, I think we dodged a bullet. We both tested negative a couple of days after we'd have expected symptoms to show up from the weekend, and so far we're still showing no signs.

One of the steps I had to take in incorporating myself to be a contractor was to create a corporate bank account. Presumably this means that in order to get paid from this gig, I will either need to put myself on the payroll of the corporation - which gets into the messy realm of payroll taxes - or pay myself dividends from the corporation. Either way, the tax implications are going to be a bit intimidating.

But this is all predicated on me actually getting paid.

The fun thing with this bank account is that because it's a corporate account, the bank naturally needs to take a service fee out of it every month, so each time I checked on the account to see if I'd been paid, I just watched it in the process of going more and more overdrawn. I finally transferred $40 into it from my personal savings account just to stop from being killed by penalties. And I'll probably have to report that as taxable revenue, even though it came from post-tax money that I transferred. Ugh.

Well over a month into my contract, I still haven't been paid, and I began to wonder if I had accidentally signed up to do charity work for my former employer. I mean, I'm enjoying the work, and I get along well with my co-workers, but I've been pouring a lot of brain power and hours into this project, so I was kinda hoping for some kind of compensation.

I started digging around some more - pouring through the terms of the contract, and sifting through other documents on the placement company's website, and the best I could find was that pay day was on the fifteenth of the month. So I waited. The fifteenth came and went with nothing going into my account. They had a lot of "the Monday following" rules, so I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and wait until the first Monday after the fifteenth. I checked my account on Tuesday; nothing.

I had been submitting my hours faithfully, and I'd been getting correspondence back from the placement company advising me that my hours had been processed, so I began to wonder if there was an issue with the transit number, or bank account number I'd sent them for my account. I also started sifting back through all of the early correspondence I'd received from my boss at the railway to see if there were any clues or gotchas hidden in there.

I looked through one batch of forms he'd sent me, which was mostly to do with confidentiality agreements and the like, and guidelines that were actually for him. In among them was a PDF that may as well have been entitled "Principles of Quantum Entanglement" for all the bearing it appeared to have on me. Its name made it clear that it was for the employer, and not the contractor, but I decided that I should probably give it a read so that I could say that I had exhausted all of my options before sending an angsty email to the placement company.

It was the pay day schedule. There was no hint at all in the name of it that it had anything to do with remuneration, but there it was. It was like somebody had gone out of their way to purposely obscure the purpose of the file.

And when I read the file, I was no more impressed. Any work done in a given month would be paid at the end of the following month. I started at the beginning of last month, but I won't get paid until the end of this month - nearly sixty days before my first cheque. I'm glad that I wasn't depending on this pay cheque. If my account is still sitting at ~$30 at the end of the month then I'll start raising heck.