One of my coworkers has decided to leave the company. His last day will be this week. Since his last day at our company would be just a few days before Christmas, I asked him if he would be able to take the holidays off and start his new job in January. Aside from needing the paycheck to support his family, he said, he needed to start his new job in December so that he would not have a month without health insurance.
In our industry, it’s common practice for companies to continue a quitting employee’s benefits through the end of the month and to start a new employee’s health insurance benefits on the first of the month after the employee’s start date. My coworker is using this system as designed to ensure he has continued health insurance through his transition.
After talking to my coworker about this, I realized that this same consideration has played a major role in two job changes for me as well. So much for ‘fringe’ benefits (I notice that in recent years, the ‘fringe’ has been dropped). If you think about it, it’s a somewhat crazy system.
Of course, I try not to take for granted that I work in an industry where good health insurance that starts soon after employment is a pretty standard benefit.

If you’ve made it to this blog, then you’ve probably also seen that it is part of my personal web site, which contains a lot of information about me. I love the contacts I get based on my personal web site. These have included:

• A woman who found my needlework page when searching for information about four-way bargello. Turns out, she runs a needlepoint shop just a few miles from us. I loaned her my old bargello book.
• A man who bought an antique he thought was a grain probe. He found my eulogy to my grandfather and emailed me to help identify his object.
• This morning, I got an email from a programmer in St. Louis whose mother works at a community library in Austin. She was concerned about the quality of programming work being done to their cataloging system. Her son found my resume when looking for software quality assurance resources in Austin. I offered to talk with his mother about her concerns.

I’ve long thought of myself as an independent thinker and a skeptic of conformity and consumerism. In the last few years, however, it’s occurred to me that much of what I thought of as my rebellion against conformity was, in fact, just a different type of conformity.
Go back to high school. For reasons that I do not fully understand, in the U.S. we tend to think of teenagers socially as falling into two groups: the ‘socials’ and everyone else. As a non-social, I thought of myself back then as a rebel against the conformity of that group. In actuality, I now realize, I conformed quite well and willingly to the norms of other groups: band member, speech nerd, etc.

Pet strollers: “On your next adventure allow your pet to safely join in-whether over grass, beach, bumpy city sidewalks, or forest trails”

Everyone who has a Tivo or other digital video recorder has told me how it has revolutionized their television viewing: they watch their favorite shows on their own schedule, never watch something ‘just because it’s the only thing on,’ skip commercials, pause live television, etc.
After waiting impatiently for several years (since TiVo came out), our Cable company finally started offering a digital video recorder. I got one this past week. Sure enough, in just a few short days, we’re enjoying the revolution of broadcast/cable TV on our own terms.

Detail from the arena where Hannah Beth takes riding lessons.

I took this photo at sunset while Hannah was taking her riding lesson the other day. I wanted, but was not able, to get in a position where I could photograph the horses without the fences in the foreground, but now I’m thinking that the foreground fences and flora add some nice depth:

For most of the year (the humid part), our dog Xena’s nose is very dark brown, almost black. But when cool, dry weather rolls in, Xena’s nose turns lighter brown with a dark brown/black border.

Tonight, Samuel’s preschool had their Christmas pageant performance. Since I planned on videotaping the performance for Katie who couldn’t attend, I volunteered to make the ‘official’ videotape. I set up my tripod and video camera at the back of the church sanctuary, right next to the center aisle. I wasn’t worried about being close, as my video camera has a very long zoom lens.
The church sanctuary was standing room only. It seems every family had both a still and a video camera, and some of them disregarded common courtesy in order to photograph their little angel My video was pretty poor, due to the large number of camera-happy parents who got in the way: standing to photograph their kids, holding their camera at arm’s length above their head, walking right down the aisle in front of me and others to photograph, etc.
I’ve always been a reluctant photographer at such events; I prefer to enjoy the moment, rather than spend my time focussing on the technology to capture the moment for posterity. Apparently, I’m in the minority!
To be fair, for many of these parents, it was their child’s first such performance–and for many, their first or only child. I’ve been through all this before. Maybe I was equally aggressive when Hannah Beth was small.

(via Kottke.org)