Technology: it means I don't miss…

Jaquandor waxes philosophic:

Lots of folks often wax poetic about things we’ve lost in our more technological age, like record stores and big, high-service department stores that take up entire city blocks, but what’s something that we’ve ditched in our techno-era that makes you think, “Yeah, I’m glad we don’t do THAT anymore”?

It occurred to me that I’ve seldom described what it was that I have been doing for a living for the past 22 years. The methodology has changed tremendously, and it’s all about the technology.

The New York Small Business Development Center, started in 1984, now has 24 centers across the state. The business counselors offer free and confidential one-on-one advisement to budding entrepreneurs and established small businesses alike. Since many of the counselors have been entrepreneurs or have worked in banks or other lending institutions, they know a lot of stuff about the business process.

For the things they DON’T know, the counselors contact the Research Network library, which has librarians with access to databases, and even – dare I say it? – books.

In the early days, we’d print out the research from the databases on something called paper.

Rhythm, or inertia, or whatever works

I always remember this conversation, over 15 years ago, with my friend Dorothy. She was suggesting blowing off going to church choir rehearsal so so I could hang out with her and my future wife. As tempting as that might have been, I declined. It is better for me musically to get as much rehearsal as possible. Moreover, it would easily become the case that if I blow off one rehearsal, to blow off another, and another.

That’s because I’m basically lazy, and would rather read all day, or visit with y’all.

For me, the rhythm thing

It's a big world, after all

Arthur@AmeriNZ said: Okay, I haven’t participated in awhile, so: If you could pick one thing to do that you haven’t yet done in your life, what would it be and why? It could be a single event (bungy jumping in Skippers Canyon), or it could be a project or process. I’m interested in what you haven’t done that you’d like to do/wish you could do.

Travel.

Next question.

OK, maybe I should expand on this.

Here’s a map I made in 2008, right after I visited Illinois, and your former city of Chicago, for the first time. It showed that I had visited 30 of the 50 states. Now, four year later

The "no time to blog" blogpost

This is how I know it was a busy autumn: this year will be the first in a decade that I did not donate blood at least six times, only five. To be fair, I DID actually go down to the Empire State Plaza (the Egg, for you Albanians) back in late October but could not get into the building. As it turns out the Governor was holding a booze summit and so I couldn’t get to the regular donor site, though I had time before my dentist appointment.

I seem to have taken off a lot of days from work in November, one for Hurricane Sandy, one to take the daughter to the ER, one to go see Wicked, two because my wife was having two minor surgeries

20 Years a Librarian

I started my current job as a business librarian on October 19, 1992. It’s the only librarian job I’ve ever had, though I was a page at the then Binghamton Public Library for seven months back in high school.

After I quit FantaCo, and spent a miserable year at Blue Cross, I started being nagged by not one, but THREE people, two librarians and a lawyer, insisting that I should go to library school. I didn’t want to; I had tried graduate school a decade before, in public administration; didn’t much like it. Having no better idea, though, I capitulated.

I found that I enjoyed it greatly. My work study project for the dean, the late Richard Halsey, included doing a demographic study of the students enrolled in the program. Of the 104 folks in the program, the average age was 37, which was MY age! This was extremely comforting.

My second worst job ever (or maybe the first)

I noted WAY back in 2005, my worst job; it was working in a box factory. But in some ways, that might be incorrect in that I quit that position after only two weeks. A real bad job would have equal parts suckiness and longevity. By that criteria, that would have to be working as a customer service representative at a major insurance for 13 months from February 1989 through March 1, 1990; I’ll call it Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Actually it started off well. We spent the first month in training, where I learned, among other things, a number of prefixes and suffixes relating to medical conditions. Early on at the desk, it wasn’t too bad. But

FantaCo memories and FantaCon 2013

I worked at FantaCo, a comic book store/mail order house/publisher for eight and a half years. But it was open 20 years from 1978 to 1998. For reasons I don’t quite understand, my friend Broome, who worked at FantaCo briefly in the 1980s, is in possession of a tractor trailer, sitting on his property, filled with FantaCo publication.

Going through the truck one day, Broome came across a notebook. It was a journal that I started on September 20, 1984; the last entry was June 19, 1986. However, there were earlier entries, written with such detail that I must have transcribed them from the personal journals I was keeping at the time.

Some examples:
May 17, 1980- Wendy and Richard Pini do a store signing of Elfquest 7

New vending machines – oh, bliss?

I’ve complained about boring old Corporate (frickin’) Woods. Be assured I’m not the only one who feels that way. How else can I explain the excitement, nay, the GLEE of getting new vending machines?

We had had a traditional candy/cookie machine, plus a a Coke machine and a Pepsi machine. But the new ones

The recovery, at least in my tribe

My sister Leslie was employed at a company when her workload virtually doubled, responsible for the safety at 51 drug stores, rather than 26. This is, unfortunately, a rather common scenario in corporate America; one is given so much work that the only way one could possibly fulfill the obligations is to work 60 or 70 hours a week, and get paid for only 40. Ultimately, her company was purchased by another company, and she lost her job a couple of years ago.

She survived primarily on short-term, part-time work, and the fact that she had one rental property, which at least allowed her to not end up on the street.

Earlier this year

Evil, President Romney, and my daughter's future

First, Chris, in answer to my answer, writes:

You bring up Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears. However, my husband is studying for a military exam, and the honors that his company won during the “Indian Wars” is considered part of their venerable history… And then I think of Hitler and Genghis Khan and I wonder, were they genuinely trying to do good by their own?

Which is why I picked him over the more obvious choice such as Hitler. History, at least the history most of us have read, has already assigned Hitler with the “evil” mantle; he doesn’t need me. Whereas Jackson’s place in history is a more of mixed bag. I have an ex who could talk your ear off (probably not literally, though I’m not sure) on the topic. I would submit that GWB’s war in Iraq may have been – OK, probably was, in his mind – initiated by “trying to do good” for his own people; didn’t make it right. I daresay most ethnic cleansing are done to “protect” one group from “the other” (see: Rwanda or Yugoslavia in the 1990s for recent examples). Whether the “good intentions” of mass murder is relevant inevitably will be written by the historians.

Maybe a better question is “What do you consider evil?” What is good and what is evil, really?