(signal-boosting for whumpdotcom)

Herein is an announcement from ace recruiter Lo Linden. Please share with your friends who are QA folks, and if you know people at EA who were recently let go, we'd like to talk to them:

Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) is having our FIRST Virtual Recruiting Event on Wednesday, November 18th for the QA Team. We are looking for SR. QA engineers, QA Managers and Automation Engineers for all of our locations!

HR and the QA team will be on hand to answer questions and show why Linden Lab is such an AWESOME company to work for! Our product, Second Life, is beyond cool. It's a 3D virtual world entirely created by its Residents that's bursting with entertainment, experiences, and opportunity. Second Life has a rapidly growing population of Residents from 100+ countries, and it's the largest growing virtual world where Residents create and inhabit a world of their own design.

RSVP and come check out what all the excitement is about. Please also forward this on to all of your QA friends

We will be providing a prescreen for all candidates RSVP'ing for this event- invitation with location information and event access will be provided post screen. To initiate prescreen email resume to 44680-CJB-0@lindenlab.hrmdirect.com.

DETAILS:
What: QA Virtual Career Fair
When: Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Time:10:00am to 12:00pm PDT
Where: Linden Lab Recruiting Center
RSVP: http://lindenlab.hrmdirect.com/employment/view.php?req=44680

Or email resume to: 44680-CJB-0@lindenlab.hrmdirect.com

(Feel free to link back to this post.)

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.

But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Usually I'm stuck with a cold for much longer, but I think my experimental regimen is working. I feel a lot better, so I'm going back into the Linden office today. Still sneezing occasionally, but I can breathe and I have more energy.

Summary of what I did at symptom onset:

- Consumed five oysters (for zinc and other minerals) on day 1
- Took echinacea/ginger/elderberry supplement 5 times a day for two days
- Took one dose of Sudafed when I awoke on day 2
- Took megadoses of Vitamin C (recommended by radiantsun, although I only took about 3,000 mg yesterday before my stomach protested) on day 2
- Rested for a full day on day 2, and got a great night's sleep

Today I'll do several more oysters at lunchtime and keep going with the supplements.

This morning, I began to feel the first signs of either a cold or flu-- too early to tell which.

Darrell was sick all of last week, so we both took 1,000 mgs of Vitamin C every day, starting from the onset of his symptoms, and we avoided kissing and holding hands. I don't have sick days so I was particularly diligent. However, with the onset of symptoms for me, I figured it was time to supplement the Vitamin C by other means.

So, as an experiment, I dropped by the local Whole Foods and asked the fish department to shuck me a couple of Blue Point oysters. They were happy to do so, placing the oyster halves in a container lined with shaved ice. When I mentioned that I was going to buy a lemon to sprinkle on them, the fish guy held up his hand, walked over to the produce isle, came back with a lemon and a lime, sliced them into quarters and arranged them artfully among the oysters in the container and handed it back to me, without charging for the fruit. He even gave me a free oyster to slurp down while I waited for him to shuck its companions. All for $5 - much cheaper than going to a restaurant for your oyster fix, and a lot faster.

I like oysters for many reasons. They're basically concentrated nutrition for very few calories. If you get them fresh, they taste pleasingly oceanic and feel good sliding down your throat. I don't care for them cooked - raw, please, all the way.

To boost their immune-boosting power, I grabbed a few additional supplements - garlic tablets (a known antimicrobial) and a blend of echinacea, elderberry, and ginger root in a liquid capsule. And of course there will be the frequent hand-washing, getting plenty of sleep at night, and general taking-it-easy, yet another benefit of a mostly-telecommuting career.

We'll see if this works!

It's nice to have picked up a hobby that has stayed with me.

I only started gardening in April-May, after I moved to a place with a front yard garden, a courtyard garden, and a relatively plain backyard that contains mostly grass, patio, and uninteresting large shrubbery.

I've since purchased a steady supply of flowers, plants, and trees. My widely varied inventory includes a dwarf key lime tree; a burgundy Japanese maple; draught-tolerant but showy specimens such as Mexican bush sage, fountain grass, and New Zealand flax; a fuschia; not-enough-succulents; azaleas; and almost a dozen dahlias.

I've had mixed success. My dahlias haven't been happy since spring gave way to a dry, hot summer, and they're now too cold to bloom. My beloved courtyard-dwelling Japanese acer has one leggy branch stretching to the sky, but isn't turning the promised brilliant-red fall colors or filling out much, but I'm trying to keep it protected from wind and sunburn. I haven't transplanted it to the ground since I don't know yet if the courtyard is really the right place for it.

I seem to have surprisingly terribly luck with bouganvillas. They're all over my neighborhood, but they don't seem to bract or even really grow in my particular yards.

My North-facing front yard came with a bunch of flowers and trees already - tall roses of many colors (sadly most of them dealing with rust diseases), poppies, some citrus we haven't yet identified, and a young, graceful jacaranda that shades our driveway.

I've had zero success with the azaleas. They died really quickly, or stopped blooming, so I'm thinking I just don't live in the right area to make them happy. I have a gardenia plant in the courtyard that's teasing me with bulbous bulbs, but has yet to bloom since I moved in. And no matter what, I can't seem to keep lamb's ear alive.

I have a mini herb garden with a shallot, dill, tarragon, and spearmint (for mojitos) but it isn't being very robust, probably because of the seasonal changes. We planted it in early fall.

The happiest plant I purchased and own seems to be the catnip. It grows quickly and fully and provides much entertainment for the neighborhood and household felines.

Understanding the light changes in my yards seems to be an issue. My South-facing backyard gets considerably more shade as the days are shorter this winter, but in the summer, all my south-facing windows bring scorching heat into the house that not even the tall shrubs and curtains can stave off. To try to solve two problems at once, I came up with an idea this morning-- creating moveable trellises that are the height and width of the floor-to-ceiling South windows and train some dense vines to fill them during the winter. A climbing bouganvilla might perform better if I trained it to climb a trellis placed flush against the south windows during the summer, providing shade to the house against the sun and drinking in the nutrients. I might try cutting back all my bouganvillas so they can strengthen their root systems over the winter and try again to encouraging bracting in the spring and summer.

I also dream about having wisterias, but they're brutal to structures and the bloom only lasts a few weeks in the spring. Perhaps I'll just enjoy them when I return to Hakone Japanese Gardens in Saratoga in the spring.

Another goal for my next phase of gardening is to grow my own produce. I love fruits and vegetables of all kinds and I spend a lot of money on them in grocery stores. But again, I worry about issues like sunlight, proper fertilizing, and keeping growing young edibles safe from birds, squirrels, and other critters that come into my yard.

I have a huge desire to get two or three Earthboxes, which are raised, self-watering, and inexpensive, and use these for the vegetables I want. I've only been resisting because it doesn't feel like genuine, bona-fide gardening to go that route. Part of the appeal of gardening, at least for me, is the intimate and attentive nurturing experience when pruning, watering, feeding, repotting, and observing my plants. Earthboxes, while wildly popular and tauted as a huge success story for beginning gardeners, feel sort of.... corporate. :)

There's an old man in my neighborhood who I sometimes see taking morning walks. Three times now when I've encountered him, I notice that as my car approaches, he'll stand on the sidewalk at attention and...salute my car.

I have no idea why. It's a white Civic, a Japanese make, no patriotic symbols affixed to it anywhere.

Thie morning as I was heading back from Safeway after picking up chicken corn chowder and vitamin C for Darrell (who's at home with a sore throat, poor dear), I saw the old fellow on his walk as I slowed my car down for a stop sign. He saw me, stood under the sign and brought his hand up to his brow. I stopped my car and locked eyes with him.

Reluctantly (because when I was 18, I was told by an Air Force recruiter that my salute is awful), I returned the gesture. As pecunium had told me, I held it there, because the senior officer is always the first to release a salute.

The old man dropped his right hand first, then extended his other arm with a light flourish to let me pass through the stop sign, bowing a bit at the waist, and his felt hat shaded a big craggy grin. "Carry on," he seemed to say. I placed my hand back on the steering wheel and continued home, rather delighted at the exchange.

Next time I'll get the etiquette really right and extend the salute first.

Can a cortisone shot make you fatigued? I've barely been able to keep my eyes open since I rode home from the orthopedic doctor's office - even the next day. I just want to nap, but I'm actually having trouble sleeping, too. I feel kind of slow.

Today I had my corticosteroid shot at the orthopedic doctor, which was a lot less painful than I had expected. I seriously thought that the needle was to be much longer than it was and much thicker around, but was a pretty minuscule needle. They used a numbing agent, and my friend Zoe held my hand, so it really wasn't so bad.

The shot is supposed to be an anti-inflammatory, and I think it's already taken. Which of course means that I have to be extra careful to not aggravate my injury even though my arm feels better.

Unfortunately I had to miss a hot tub outing with friends, because the doctor warned that there was a risk of infection when you get such a shot. Had I known that I would've scheduled to shot for another day.

Today was also the third session of physical therapy, which was a lot shorter than previous sessions. When I told him that I was having the shot done today, they rescheduled my next appointment for Wednesday. Apparently I need to take it easy for the next several days, which is fine since I've been doing so in many respects anyway.

The pain isn't completely gone due to the shot, but it is definitely reduced. It's nice to feel somewhat normal, even if I still can't act normally get.

I got my new TENS unit in the mail, but haven't yet read the instructions. Seems like a good weekend to try it out.

And of course I'm writing this post with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. You can blame them for my somewhat stilted writing. :-)

(And yes, if you say "smiley", it will type :-))

Today was my second physical therapy session. I seem to have gotten a little stronger since the first time - I think the extra precautions, rest, and exercises I've been (inconsistently) doing are helping.

So far in both visits I've been the youngest patient in the place, the "whippersnapper". All around me are octogenarians working out their serious knee problems. I really do have to remind myself that I deserve to be there, too, that my pain is real and needs the assisted help.

When I first walked in, they had me use their paraffin bath on my hands. This was really nice - I actually have a loaner paraffin bath, but it's kind of small, and I have to contort my hands to get full coverage (which is quite painful given my condition). The one the PT had was a lot larger and more comfy to use. I watched TV news with my hands wrapped in plastic and warm towels, covered in paraffin up to my wrists.


They challenged me a little more with some new types of isometric stretches. I also did some reps on a lightly-weighted vertical rowing machine, and did more ultrasound therapy and another delicious round with the TENS unit while I read an issue of Sunset magazine and got more expensive gardening ideas in my head.

Physical therapy can feel kind of decadent at times. A lot of it is so passive.

Right after PT, I headed over to my primary physician, Dr. Tostado. She was the one who ruled out Carpal Tunnel and determined that I had some type of tendonitis, and I wanted to pursue more modalities beyond just physical therapy toward healing. I specifically asked her for occupational therapy and pain management referrals.

She wasn't familiar with OTs as a practice, but she offered to have me examined by an orthopedic surgeon who would be more able to recommend specific treatment plans. She asked if I had ever received a corticosteroid shot, and I told her I hadn't.

But now I'm getting one this Friday afternoon from the orthopedic physician at Palo Alto Medical Foundation.

When I got home after lunch and all that medical erranding, I bought a TENS unit from Amazon as well as a tube of BioFreeze, a cooling topical pain reliever that seems to be well-loved by Amazonian reviewers.

A downside is that PT makes me extra-sore for the rest of the day, but it resolves by morning. Luckily I had basically no work to do today - I'm waiting on some reviews to come back from WhiteHat people for the work I did over the weekend.

Back when I was a dyed-in-the-wool extrovert (a baseline state that has been tempered over time), I used to consider the problem of social anxiety. I viewed it as this thing that "other" people went through, telling themselves all kinds of stories that prevented them from achieving intimacy and trust with the world outside, or with folks outside of a tiny tightknit circle of friends. If only they could just shrug all that aside and go out and experience life and variety and energy!

I also used to think that those with chronic pain just needed to take a couple acetameniphin and shrug it off! Get some exercise! It's all so simple!

PTSD? Eight years ago it didn't exist in my world. Pseudo-science, I thought. Trauma is something people choose to hold on to. You just gotta let go!

Ah, hubris.

In 2002 I was involved in a car accident and suffered some minor internal injuries due to the seatbelt compressing my chest. It wasn't my first, but it's 2009 and I still have mini panic attacks when I ride shotgun - and they're considerably worse inside my own car where the accident happened. Oddly, I'm still a rather aggressive driver (driving my stickshift car puts me in a terrible mood because it hurts my hands) because I want to get it over with. Last week, a Mustang ran a red light as I was turning left in front of him, and he came within 18 inches of hitting me. But I handled it surprisingly well. I have never received therapy after the accident because, by now, I should just be "over it."

In 2006, I was driving home in traffic on a long commute when I felt my right hand just give out and start flaring up. It started out occasional. It's 2009. It's now a constant pain that fluctuates with intensity. I put off treatment because I've gotten jobs that are closer, and I have hired housecleaning help, and Darrell does a lot for me around the house, and a friend of mine endured and insurance nightmare with her physical therapy, and another friend of mine was reinjured while getting therapy for her knees, and I should be over it by now because I'm sure everyone thinks I'm lazy and uninterested in being social, when in fact I'm often grumpy from the pain of just ever using my hands for damn near anything at all, and my guitar collects dust.

And now, in 2009, the extrovert who was clinically fascinated with social anxiety is now suffering from it herself. I attend a lot less parties. I have fears I thought I'd never had. And as I alienate myself more and more from friends who believe that I'm not able to be consistently present and initiatory and participatory, the problem compounds. I can't meet the needs of people I care about and even as I struggle to reach out and try, it's not enough, they fall away, and I am helpless to watch. Incredibly, had I made better decisions as to my priorities a long time ago, I might not be in this position today. Socially isolated, mildly agoraphobic, moody, with invisible injuries that leaves me broken in mind and with hands that deceive me and the world by looking altogether normal, yet are only functioning at 40% capacity. Most of that capacity is dedicated to my career, making money so I can at least be independent in some respect.

Perhaps that too will go before long.

Comments disabled because it's just a sad rant, directed at myself.

I'm a worrier. I worry about one thing or another every single day.

Frankly I wish I could snap my fingers and just STOP. Worrying interferes with my quality of life. And I value a high quality of life, so why do I fret so much?

It makes me tired.

Oh, and I would like to stop being in pain every day. That would be outstanding.

Having seen some beautiful pictures and paintings from Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe today, I have a powerful and completely new urge to go visit New Mexico.

Kind of embarrassing that I know nothing about New Mexico apart from what I've seen in those iconic photographs, but I think it would really appeal to me, especially now that I've gotten far more appreciative of plants and architecture in my old age. I've tended to spend most of my travel time in metropolis-level cities (Boston, Miami, Seattle, New York, Chicago), and not nearly enough in plains and craggy mountains and caves and white sand dunes.

I checked-- it'd be a 15-hour road trip to, say, Santa Fe. It's so tempting to just get in my car and just go, take advantage of the fact that I have time on my hands and see the southwest at my own pace.

Except for that whole tendonitis thing.

And the fact that I may have a job even sooner than I would have guessed back when I got laid off (only a month ago today).

But I think if I ever get to go, I'd probably have willing companions at least in djdigit (who says he would really love to see the Carlsbad Caverns) or pecunium (nature photog and budding geologist).

Strangely, though, I think I'd even enjoy traveling there alone, taking it all in.

Here, we have James Earl Jones, reciting the entire alphabet. Slowly.



Not geeky enough for you? Fine - here he recites pi.

I need a word that means "can be animated" (like as a cartoon, by an animator) that isn't animatable.

Even if that is an industry word, I don't like the way it looks in print.

Help?

So here's a silly question.

I was a full time employee, and I am qualified for unemployment. I filed for unemployment last week and am awaiting a response, which I figure will be 10-14 days incoming. For the sake of argument, let's say I start getting unemployment checks next week.

A lot of the jobs out there for tech writers are contract (1099) positions.

Let's say that two weeks from now, I get hired for a contract position as a tech writer, so I report that to the EDD and I stop getting unemployment checks since I'm now slated to get income.

Let's say I start work on that contract, and two weeks in after I've gotten my first paycheck from them, all of the sudden they lose venture funding and have to dump all their contractors. (It happens a fair bit.)

Does that mean I'm now ineligible to reopen my UI claim since I started a contract position, then lost it (which isn't covered by unemployment insurance)?

It's amazing how much more I enjoy life when I'm not spending the majority of it in front of a computer. :-)

I went to the Russian market to get a nice dinner for Darrell and me tonight. Called ahead on their amazing cabbage rolls, and added a spicy beet salad, two farmer's cheese pancakes (made fresh today), a bottle of kefir for myself, and a batch of thick sour cream.

And what did I say to the owner as I left?

"¡Спасибо, Señor!"

Figures.

I was around 18 years old when my brother, Rick, took me with him on a business trip to Washington D.C. for my first time. While there, one of my major goals was to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, and so we went together. It was a crisp early winter weekday as we walked across a stretch of green, hands stuffed into our overcoats. Tiny American flags fluttered from cheap plastic staffs stuck on the outside of memorabilia carts run by vets and vets' wives.

I was drawn to view the Wall not because I would have any known connection to any of the names sandblasted into the granite, but because throughout my teens, my strongest and most well-formed political stance was an anti-war one. Being passionately against the concept of war was almost a romance in itself for me, a railing against the establishment, the wasteful arrogance, the senseless violence and the ripping apart of families en masse. I hated war, and because I hated war I read about it, and seethed and winced and wrote about it. I was no expert but damned if I didn't have an opinion!

I was anti-war on an emotional and moral pulpit, incensed by the broadest strokes of statistics (Vietnam saw nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers felled, 2,000 missing, and over 300,000 wounded, to say nothing of foreign/civilian deaths), and I thought of the Wall as a structure representing the sheer immensity and reach of the casualties that, at least, shared a common citizenship.

As Rick and I continued our walk toward the Wall, we came across a podium with a thick book where one could locate a name memorialized on the stone using grid numbers. Curious, I paused there and started flipping through the book while Rick waited, talking to a frizzy-haired woman selling brass bracelets nearby. It was like a somber phone book, I noted, flipping page after page almost mindlessly. It occurred to me then that it was the first time I was seeing real names of the missing and the dead of Vietnam...

...and my hand stopped, somewhere in the 'B' section.

Each of these names had a story, anywhere from around two-to-several decades of life, growth, discovery, and valor. My eyes stopped looking at the sea of letters and focused on one random name, one random stranger.

Thomas William Bennett.

I'll never forget that name as long as I live, because his name - relatively unremarkable in itself - was merely a label applied to someone with a story who served the country and died apart from it. It could have been any kind of serviceman - cadet or high-ranking officer or corporal - but it was this one name who pinged my immediate attention with such a visceral jolt, just inside a moment of recognition of the lost individuals of the war.... and my eyes welled up and my heart hurt and it was as if I knew him.

I looked over at my brother, who sort of rolled his eyes and grinned at the frizzy woman he was chatting with. My melodramatic hippie sister, his knowing look said, but there was an affection there. I walked over to join them and he put a hand on my shoulder, and I looked at the cart and saw that the bracelets were engraved with names.

I asked the woman if I could buy a memorial bracelet with the name Thomas William Bennett on it.

"Why?" my brother asked outside my field of vision, genuinely puzzled. I ignored him for now, and requested steel instead of the more standard brass or copper.

She gave me a piece of paper and asked me to get his rank and date and the military branch he served in from the big book I'd been leafing through. While I was at it, I also wrote down Thomas Bennett's location on the Wall. We waited around for the engraving to be done, and minutes later I handed over a several worn dollar bills. Soon I was back on my path to the Wall, a warm stainless-steel memorial bracelet around my wrist with a name on it that was heretofore unknown to me, but had made me cry. As we resumed the walk I'd regained composure fully, a little sheepish.

The Wall itself was about what I'd expected - unsettlingly postmodern, highly reflective, tapered, overwhelming yet intimate. It was a quiet place, the grounds immediately before it strewn with flags and flowers and stuffed bears and Hallmark cards, and you carefully navigated around them. The sounds I remember were camera shutters, inquisitive peals of children, a few sniffles from women, the leather-against-metal creak of wheelchairs, and the incredible reverent silence around the occasional weathered veteran kneeling before the wall, touching gnarled fingers against a beveled name, head bowed.

I took some touristy snapshots of families peering at specific names, and I felt the thin steel resting gently against my skin and the paper in my hand with a name and a grid number. I moved closer toward the Wall, looking down at my scribbles to check the number, and squinting back up at the Wall again.

So many names, trailing and blurring together again as I took my careful steps around intermingling tourists and mourners.

But I did find Thomas William Bennett's name. It was luckily within reach of my mittened hands, and I did borrow a pencil and a separate sheet and rubbed the pencil over his name in Optima typeface (coincidentally, my favorite font for work e-mails today - I find it distinguished and calming), which emerged as a white san-serif ghost haunting the graphite remains. When I got home to Florida, I tacked his name to my bedroom wall.



I wore his memorial bracelet for a long time, telling its story to various puzzled friends, and eventually I probably stopped because a sufficient number of people made me feel silly for it. I've long since lost track of it, not being the packrat type. (And then there was my half-hearted attempt to join the Air Force after I graduated high school, which is another story for another time.)

But hey, the combined powers of long-term memory and modern technology fuse nicely, and now I know a little more of his story.

It turns out that Thomas William Bennett was a posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor by President Nixon. Born in West Virginia, he was a medic for the Army who died a few months short of his twenty-second birthday in the central Vietnam town of Pleiku, on a battlefield thick with weapon fire and mortar while bravely giving aid and comfort to his wounded, dying comrades. He was special, a hero. He's one of around 1,000 Army medics etched onto the Wall today.

How do I know? He has a Find-A-Grave page, with a picture. Handsome fellow, that Cpl. Bennett. There are personal tributes at the Virtual Wall, too.

And if wanted to, without needing to even go back to D.C. again, I could get his bracelet redone. Memories of those perplexed looks give me some pause, though.

So clearly I haven't changed much since I was eighteen. I'm still a pacifist idealist romantic melodramatic sentimental passionate hippie little sister, who prefers stainless steel to brass, who never forgets a powerful first impression. It's only lately, some fifteen years after I 'met' Thomas Bennett, that I'm making meaningful connections with present-day veterans. Well, one in particular anyway. :)

(Two if you count my ex-roommate unseelie23.)

So thank you, men and women of the military, for serving this country. I wish I had less trite words, but insomnia robs me of eloquence. Nevertheless, you've my love and respect.