Strike out

Feb. 15th, 2015 11:08 pm
plonq: (Dashing  mood)
After ignoring the application for quite some time, I started using Instagram again fairly recently. I am not a big fan of their terms of service - though I don't know if they modified them after their "we own every picture you post here" blunder a couple of years back. I decided at one point that since the bulk of what I ever put up on Instagram was just crappy snapshots from a mediocre phone camera with lots of filters applied, I don't really care if they decide they want to use any of those pictures in their ads.

If they can make money from something like this, then more power to them I suppose:


They have also made it very difficult to actually link to any of my pictures on their site. Their web interface gave me a single share option, that created about 2k of garbage that did not work here. I finally right-clicked on the picture in Chrome and inspected the page element to find the link to the picture itself.

This was my breakfast on Saturday. [livejournal.com profile] atara and I stopped at a local restaurant near the museum on the weekend before walking over to take in the Salvador Dali exhibit while it was still in town. This was their "Mexican" breakfast, with a corn tortilla, refried beans, eggs, salsa, guacamole, a sour cream-based sauce and cubed potatoes. I ordered it with the optional chorizo. I had their vegan option of this breakfast on an earlier visit, and I think that I like that one a bit better. I think the next time I order this, I will order the vegan version with the optional chorizo, if only to see if they will do that.

The exhibit was good, but we had to take two passes at it to see it all. As we were about to enter the Dali part of the museum the first time, the fire alarm went off and they evacuated the building. Well, technically they were supposed to evacuate it, but they let most of us hang around down in the building lobby since it was almost -30 outside.

It seems that it was a false alarm, rather than something more serious like, say, a chlorine bomb in the stairwell. Within ten or fifteen minutes they had cleared the alarm and they allowed us all to go back up stairs.

This picture served as a gateway to the exhibit. I have seen pictures of this picture, but the life-sized version of it was very impressive. This shot does not do it any justice.



On the work front, it is starting to sound like I probably will not be sent out on Strike duty. The union representing the car mechanics signed a tentative deal four minutes before the negotiating deadline. I cannot remember any time when a union at my company has voted no on a contract that their leaders signed, so I suspect they are good to go for the next four years. The running trades guys walked out, but the news today said that the government already has legislation written and ready to pass first thing on Monday. That comes as a surprise to nobody.
Here's looking at you.
plonq: (Destructive Mood)
First, thanks to everyone for the well-wishes about Jaws. We knew she was getting on in years, but she was active, happy and personable right up to the end, so it came rather suddenly for us. It was a rough week.

We finished training on Friday, and we were issued passports with stamps showing that we are now qualified car inspectors. I don't feel particularly qualified, but I guess if I can catch the majority of things, that's all they can really expect of a replacement worker. My thinking is that we just need to ensure that the car is safe enough to get out of our yard, then it is somebody else's problem.

I discovered that my little Canon does not like cold weather. I was packing it around in my coat pocket and it refused to work the last time I removed it for a shot. I powered it up, and it immediately flashed a message and powered down again. When I finally got it to power up again, I saw that it was grumping at me to replace the battery pack. I removed the battery and wrapped it in my hand until it felt more like a batter than it did like an ice cube. When I put it back in the camera, it was magically back at full power and working happily.
Lunchtime

I was chatting with one of the other trainees as we were loading our cold weather and safety gear into our cars at the end of the week, and we were discussing best case and worst case scenarios in the upcoming weeks. Obviously the best case is that the union and company sign a contract, and we all just keep doing our regular jobs. A bad cased is that they cannot come to an agreement, and the union walks out on the 15th (which is their earliest strike date).

Worst case is that the company locks them out. Usually that happens if the union starts working to rule, or doing other things to cause delays. Under the new regime though, there is a good chance they will just pre-emptively lock them out at the earliest possible strike date as a show of force, and to prevent any kind of work-to-rule shenanigans. We both agreed that a lockout would likely drag on the longest, and be the ugliest in terms of picketer anger.

DSC_4297
The above is one of the pictures I took during our late-spring vacation.

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