Unordered list

[flexagon]

• We found out today that Zillian is closing three engineering offices and getting rid of 100 recruiting positions. With a lead-up like that, tomorrow's engineering all-hands meeting ought to be a doozy. Perhaps it's time to opt out of this stupid recession like Laurie is doing.


• I lost my Mooncup. It actually was missing last month too, but I managed to block that out as I hoped it would reappear somehow. How, pray tell, does someone do this? Where could I have lost my Mooncup? And please don't suggest that snarky thing you are thinking, because it's not up there (and yes, I'm sure). Oh man... every time I think about this I want to cringe, because there is no scenario I can think of in which something squicky and weird didn't happen.


• In other news, I've lost five pounds since we bought our elliptical machine. I hadn't weighed myself in a long time. I was tipped off that maybe I should, by the fact that I used to be able to do level 9 on the machine without using my arms on the handles and now I cannot. Actually, for a while I thought maybe the resistance level wasn't remaining consistent over time -- it took me a while to think that maybe I weigh less now and that's why my weight can't turn the pedals as easily. Duh.


• Those of you who are blogging your books should definitely read Woman's World: A Novel by Graham Rawle. It's a pretty amazing read and will make good blog fodder for you... amazon isn't letting you look inside the book, but the entire thing is a collage, done ransom-note style, constructed out of 40,000 text fragments cut from 1960s British women's magazines. You really have to see it to believe it. And the amazing thing is that, though it's gimmicky, by the end you feel it was the only way for the book to be written, because it's exactly appropriate to the theme. (This book also wins the award for Least Reliable Narrator Ever.) I'd go easy on reading that Amazon page though, as it kind of gives everything away. I had the good luck to read this book "blind", because I was given it as a gift.


• Oh yeah, the Noid sent me an email today asking, since we are working together again, if I thought a one-on-one meeting would be useful to "get the interaction started on the right foot". Gaaaaaah. No. What would be useful is if we could work together to get one of us moved so we are NOT working together again; second most useful is for him to leave me alone like I've been leaving him alone. A no-mutual-sabotage pact, perhaps. Make that a tacit no-mutual-sabotage pact. Oh, I know I'll have to talk to him -- but maybe I can at least get him to tone down the painful formality, morph it into "let's go out for coffee and talk" or something.


• Ideally I'd have been asleep 25 minutes ago, but I was hungry after acroyoga and also really wanted to post some of this.

Comments

[figmint.livejournal.com]

Yep, I'm all about opting out of the recession too. And, I'm afraid, a lot of other world events.

[a-kosmos.livejournal.com]

I'm all there with the opting out of the recession thing, although I suspect that it is easier to do here than in metro areas.

Wonder where your mooncup disappeared to. It seems like an unusual thing to lose.

[flexagon]

The best thing I can think of is that I could possibly have left it all wrapped up in tissue in the work bathroom, or something. This seems very improbable since I generally take it out for the month when at home, but clearly something happened. Sigh.

Have you not seen any recession stuff personally? I have seen a couple small businesses go under lately and some people I know get laid off...

[a-kosmos.livejournal.com]

A lot of it is an issue of scale and niche. Lubbock has about 200,000 people here and there are a lot of little bitty communities scattered around. I'm in kind of a unique situation because practically everyone I know here is part of the university community in one way or another. We've lost a few businesses, but they're the business that everyone has lost, like Linens 'N Things and some sort of a toy store. I heard yesterday that a denim plant in Littlefield was going to lay off a shift. It's not like it doesn't exist, it's just that we're sort of... insulated?

We didn't have a lot of the issues that a lot of other places have had because the housing market has always been really reasonable here, so we didn't have the wave of foreclosures at the beginning of all of this.

[flexagon]

Hmm. I feel like I was kind of insulated from the wave of foreclosures, because I only know people who can do math. :P There must have been some of it in Boston but I didn't see it.

As of yesterday, though, I personally know 5 people who've been laid off in the last little bit, and that's more than I've ever known of before. Three of those are from last week.

[webrat.livejournal.com]

There's an interesting article over at TechCrunch of why people quit Zillian. I'd link it, but I think you want your privacy.

[flexagon]

Thanks. I'm not too worried about backlinks -- I have my journal set to not be crawled and I know that zillianbot is a good netizen.

Anyway, someone emailed me a link to that article (post?) last night, and I read it. Nothing particularly new to me, except maybe the number of folks who felt their salary was offensively low.