Monthly Archives: January 2005

Banished

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It’s 10:39 pm on MLK Day, and I’m sitting in my basement surrounded by piles and piles of crap.

The relocation of my office to a corner of the basement is almost complete; I still need to run phone lines in here, so for now our DSL connection and my office phone base station are still sitting up in my former office, where Kevin is sleeping (or. perhaps, IM’ing now that he has bedside bandwidth).

While I got my desk down here and reassembled on Sunday night, the real work of moving all of the detrius that had accumulated in my office over the past 7 years was left for today. Kevin and I moved bookcases, filing cabinets, and piles and crates of stuff up and down two flights of stairs. By dinnertime, we had finished with the cleanup and the installation of the major elements of his room, as well as the reconfiguration of what is now Jonah’s exclusive domain.

Jonah arrived home from a visit to a friend’s house, and we found he had still not finished watching a video (“The Secret Garden Revisited”) that he was supposed to watch as homework for some “character education” mini-unit that his teacher is doing. During the course of trying to get him to sit down and watch the damned thing, he became increasingly petulant and whiny.

During the course of this episode, it was revealed to us by his brother that Jonah had in fact been lying about the events of the previous weekend and had in fact called my ex a bitch. Precise words and context–she was trying to break up a “fight” between them, and Jonah, who is almost 11, said, “Don’t touch me, bitch!”

So, that led to some more catharsis, as you can imagine, I’m sure.

By the time all had blown over, and the kids were all in their respective bedrooms, I was aching tired. But still, there were these piles of crap all around my desk….

I guess I know what I’m doing during conference calls tomorrow.

Looking for people with ink (or byte) stained fingers

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Every now and then, karma turns around and offers you a chance to help friends or make some new ones. That’s happened to me at work recently. In the course of an aqcuisition my employer made, I ended up being handed a bit of a gift–I’m now in charge of restoring the once-proud brand of Publish.

Publish was once the magazine for people who used computers for graphic design and publishing. But it fell on hard times, and now it’s just a website of questionable utility.

So, I’m looking for people who are power users of graphic design, page layout and web design tools to help me make Publish better again. And knowing how many people there are like that in Baltimore (and who are bloggers in Baltimore, for that matter), I figured I’d start off by announcing that fact here. Comment here if you’re interested in finding out more.

Of Barbie Bondage

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Yesterday, Zoë unearthed a Disney Princesses Sparkle Ariel doll that Paula had bought for her 4th birthday (just a few weeks away). Paula tried to recover, saying, “Oh, I bought that for the little girl of one of my friends.” But Zoë went off into a corner with the box to sulk.

So, naturally, we had to surrender it to her

Having unboxed all of Zoë’s burgeoning Barbie collection (the Ariel, while from Mattel, is not technically a Barbie, though it can wear Barbie’s clothes), I found that the packaging for Ariel was a little less like some whacked bondage fantasy than how Mattel usually packages Barbie: hair sewn to the back of the box; tape, plastic tab ties, and a half-dozen wire ties holding limbs in that perfect store-shelf pose; a variety of clear elastic bands holding jewlry and accessories just so to the doll’s body. Unboxing a Barbie is usually at least a fifteen-minute project.

Ariel had just one wire tie and a clear plastic “belt” holding her body in place, and a pair of plastic tab implants (which needed to be yanked out of her scalp) holding her head to the back of the box. Unbox time: 3 minutes.

Can’t Keep Teachers? Import Them

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With a spouse who’s about ready to enter the teaching profession (and as the son of two retired educators and the parent of a city middle-school student), I’ve been following the adventures of Epiphany in Baltimore with some interest. His recently-deleted diatribe about how bad things are getting for Baltimore City teachers has convinced Paula that perhaps she should look elsewhere for a job. Too bad for the city.

But the city schools apparently have a solution to that problem. Yesterday, I was glancing at the Baltimore Sun and spotted a dual-byline story about how the city is using a recruiter to import as many as 45 teachers from the Philippines. Amused, I alerted Paula to it when she got home from student teaching. She looked at it online, and did a quick Google on the recruiter’s name–something they still can’t do, apparently, in the Sun’s bullpen, because the results were interesting.

Last November, KGO-TV in California reported on how the same recruiter was charging Filippino teachers $3,000 each for placement–and then Oakland was firing them, and going back to her for more teachers, after only a few months. Some of the recruited teachers were left stranded, without enough money to return home to the Philippines, because they had paid their way to the US on assurances that the jobs were long-term.

This article from a Georgia paper from last June suggests that the recruiter was under investigation by the FBI, and a school district in Georgia had severed its ties to her as a result.

Then there’s this article from SF Weekly, published four years ago. While still an employee of the the San Francisco Unified School District, Ligaya Avenida had apparently violated a number of Filipino laws and US labor regulations.

But, no matter. Just think about how those highly-qualified Filipino teachers will feel when they show up for their first day of school in an uncontrollable classroom in West Baltimore somewhere…that alone will be enough for them to file a human rights abuse.

Down the Rabbit Hole of Home Employment

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A quick shout-out to seadragon , who’s discovering the joys of working at home. Welcome to the fold of those marginally in touch with the outside world, girl.

I have now been working at home for over 10 years. Now, for two of those, I was spending a week of every month in the company office (in Palo Alto), so it was really only 3/4 working at home, and 1/4 living at the Palo Alto Sheraton from July of 1999 to August of 2001. But still.

I started working from home under less than ideal conditions. I was in the middle of a divorce, living in a one-bedroom apartment and sleeping on a broken-down sofa bed (shared with my two kids three days a week at that time) when I was offered a gig with a national technology magazine. The chance to make something approaching what was at the time real money to me, and ditch the hellish commute to Silver Springs every day from midtown Baltimore, was pretty appealing. There was only one problem: I was going to be running a review lab out of my one-bedroom apartment.

I got a bed, got bunkbeds for my two- and five-year old sons, and got my lease transferred to a basement two-bedroom apartment. The living room became my office, and the “master” bedroom became the living room/bedroom. I only met Paula because I put a personal ad in CityPaper; she affectionaly refers to the dwelling she found me in as “The Pit.”

Then I ended up having the kids full-time, and the rest is social studies.

Working from home dramatically reduces the opportunities for interaction with other humans. Mine is mostly with co-workers over the phone or by IM, or in person with other parents and the teachers at my kids’ schools. I used video conferencing for a while, but then I realized that people I worked with could actually see how pathetic my office looked, so I stopped doing that :-P .

Dressing for work is important. Especially if you take deliveries from FedEx and UPS as much as I do. It’ s bad form to sign for a package after 11:00 am in your…er…sleepwear.

Business trips take on new meaning–they become almost like vacations. The boundaries between the domestic and the professional dissolve…there’s no commute home to clear your head of the BS of the day, so your spouse and family get you back still fully enraged. And there’s the lack of actual physical activity.

But other than that, it’s great.