OT

Ten hours of OT this week.  My co-workers are schizzy and are taking sick leave and annual.  No real bother, the greater bulk of the work can get done without them and I need the money.  But boy, it is hard to gather energy toward the end of the week.  When I was a younger, 50-60 hour weeks were no problem.  Hell, in the past I even threw out some 80-100 hour weeks without even missing partying after work.  Those days are gone.

So, I'm awake and sucking down a coffee and writing in the journal.  The reason that the co-workers are pissy is because the agency that writes the paychecks has figured out (years too late) that the folks in my position are overpaid.  During the go-go days of the 90's and early 00's, the folks within the VA padded up the job descriptions of a group of folks to build little empires and pay them more.  Considering what this group of folks does, the pay scale is wayyyyy generous for a fairly substantial group of the folks who are getting downgraded.

 So the guvmint is doing the right thing and downgrading all of the positions.  Even at the downgraded scale, the folks will be paid as well as similar positions in the private sector (hell, I even argue that the downgraded position is fairly generous).  But the federal workers have some kind of consensual mass hallucination that they are underpaid and work really hard.  I can't say as either of these thoughts have any particular merit.

We do some pretty good things where I work.  There are a lot of folks who work hard and we provide good service.  I think that fixing the government system to provide fair pay to and ensure hard work from it's employees is paramount.  The current process I am personally participating in is a decent first step.

Now if we can just figure out how to get the lazy bastard tenured employees off their ass and contributing, we will be on to something

Pity the fool

The former corporate shitheads sent a nastymail today. Seems that anything that I know is now their property.

Leave it to say that everything that they currently do was stolen wholesale from someone else. Apparently, their argument is that they stole it fair and square and so it is theirs now and no one else can play.

Sitting Home at Night

A good night. Cooked dinner, baked an apple pie, went on a bike ride with the boys and cleaned up the place.

Now they are busily battling Pokemon and I am working out the kinks of switching over to Linux as an operating system for my computer.

I'm being a little weasily about it. I really cannot stand the way that Microsoft does business, but the cold reality is that sometimes it is very difficult to do business without having Microsoft apps loaded on the box.

So right now I'm playing with SuSE 9.3 and I am starting to get hopeful that I may be able to purge the microsoft shit off my computer soon and stop doing business with the beast. The web-systems are identical to the windows based stuff. I have been running through some fairly heavily defended commercial sites to see if the system breaks there and so far no glitches.

Now I am going to try and get the e-mail system and the VPN systems up and running. If I can work with an exchange server transparently that will be a big step. I think that the Office-style programs are already there.

The big project for this summer is to create a high-tech/low-tech solar oven. I am going to start posting the design parameters for it soon.