Well for some of us...

We went to bed on the late side of things (4am), well it’s a long weekend right? Next long weekend off will be labor day. Most likely it’s a typical day as far as the evening shift goes at the office. As for me, I’m going to try and put in an afternoon shift this week to make up for Saturday but for the rest of the month, I’m working all 6 days and then some until labor day weekend.

I’m going to see what the boss does with these “new changes” after September 30th. If this is going to turn out to be a boiler room operation (more then it already is) Space isn’t at a premium in the office as far as evening work goes. Out of 78 work stations a lot of those space are just spaces with only a computer case on them and broken equipment. Out of 78 stations, we’re lucky if we have 12-15 people working after 7pm. I like this because it means that I’m an "important part" to the operation even though the boss has told me I’m not worth much to the company  I don’t care, as long as the cheques don’t bounce and I have work.

It’s the lousy way this company pays their staff me included. Starting wage for most people is $9/hr. I’m not at the top of the food chain with my wage but I’ve seen people getting paid the same as me and they’ve been here for only a few weeks for the same hours. Of course if your from another country you get a bit more but not by much. Put it this way, the place I work at one can not pay a mortgage unless you work all shifts from 9-9. It’s hand from mouth existence. At the same time, nothing is keeping me there. The economy is as good s it’s ever going to get but that could change. I remember in the old office, I got sent home (working nights) because I had $40 bucks or so on my tally sheet/recap. This was I think March of 2004. At that time we had a full room.

The economy here began to pick up in about 1999/2000. And Jessie moved me over to taps after my stay in the hospital. Since then I’ve been working taps for the last 4 years (donars that gave before are taps.) I’ve seen 5 room managers come and gone since we moved into our current location. So when the end of September rolls around and the evening shift is packed because of this proposed 3-10 shift most of the tap dialers will be spoken for. The room will be full again and here comes Jimmy in at 5pm looking for a tap dialer. The business section leaves at 4pm anyway so there may be spaces open ther for me. But if it's going to be tough for me to find a dialer, then I'm changing my jobs.

Ok, enough of that. I took some photo’s last night about 7pm after taking out the garbage. Of course they won’t be displayed on this site. You can see them here, when I post them Tuesday.

Robert J Sawyer has a revamped blog, which is in keeping with his website. I like the new look and I think I’m the first commentator on the new site. Not that I got a reply. Not that, getting one is important to me.

Still no sign of that Cockatoo-like bird or whatever it was I saw Saturday morning. If my home office window was fully opened, he would have flown right in and I would have closed the window immediately. The cat’s would have gone crazy.

Elizabeth Bear has mentioned on her Blog that “Shadow Unit” is under a Creative Commons license. I think this means that “almost anyone” can contribute to it. I haven’t read any of the stories yet but from the brief excerpts I’ve read, some of it seems YA'ish to me. Not that there is anything wrong with that it just isn’t up my alley. The first EB book I read was “Undertow” and I thoroughly enjoyed that one.

Before bed I had just finished half a beer and then I took my insulin and did the cbi thing enjoying a couple of waffles. So lets take s bsl reading. At 2:35pm this afternoon, I’m sitting at 9.5. A bit higher then I’d like it to be. For me, the best bsl reading should be between 6-8.

The LHC is just 3 days and 20 hours away from being activated. If this thing can rip holes in the fabric of space and time as CERN physicists predict it will then it won’t be long until they will be able to create traversable wormholes. I always thought that it would be really cool to create one of these things say the size of a front doorway the size of my apartment door and then the other end say a thousand miles away (opened of course at each end.) and have someone at one end bounce a ball through and somebody at the other end catch it within seconds. You might be able to even see the other person in real time even shake hands with them through the wormhole itself. So imagine sending the other end of the doorway to say Alpha Centauri 4.37 Light years away. We wouldn’t even need a space telescope to see whats going on within that solar system. We could look around it right here. Same with any star system. Closer to home if the LHC does find wormholes and can open them up longer and larger in my scenario above, we can land a person on Mars simply by walking through a door. I know it all sounds like Science Fiction but this could become a reality sooner then later. I think when the LHC is activated this week, we will have a lot more answers to the wormhole question, maybe not right away but within the lifetime of the LHC itself (15 years).

Still tying to do some FTP but according to what Markus discovered my FTP connection might have been sabotaged due to some firewall that I might not be aware of. I searched my system and found 8 possible culprits. I took a screen shot and sent this over to him. Maybe he can figure out what’s going on.

Anyway Bloggers, that‘s all for now

e. Jim