L.V. Gaudet's Blog, page 36
June 10, 2012
Book Review – Indian Summer by Dellani Oakes
May 13, 2012
It’s Mother’s Day and My Kids are Wonderful!
March 21, 2012
All Books Are Not Created Equal « Bertram\\\’s Blog
All Books Are Not Created Equal « Bertram\\\'s Blog
February 29, 2012
March Madness – I’m Going to Finish this Damned WIP if it Bloody Well Kills Me!
March Madness – I'm Going to Finish this Damned WIP if it Bloody Well Kills Me!
November 11, 2011
Helping Children Remember
It's that time of year again when we take a day out of our lives to stop and remember the men and women who made huge sacrifices fighting for others.
Ideally we wouldn't need a special day to remember.
Ideally there would be no wars to be fought, no blood spilled, and no atrocities inflicted.
Since that isn't the case, ideally we wouldn't need a special day to remember because we would remember every day.
But sometimes we need special reminders. One day a year obviously isn't enough or we wouldn't still have men, women, and children suffering at the hands of that terrible monster we call War.
It seems that Remembrance Day has less meaning to each generation.
The legions were started to help war veterans having difficulties fitting back into society after returning home from the First World War.
As more wars followed, the number of veterans grew and so did the need to remember the sacrifices they made as they fought, suffered injuries to both mind and body, and were killed.
But these days it seems the faces of the veterans propagated by the media around Veterans Day are growing older and fewer.
Some might even think the veterans' organizations and legions will become a thing of the past as the old veterans from WWI and WWII vanish into the distant memories of the history books.
Perhaps that makes it even more important now than ever to remember the men and women who fought for others, for their cause, for their freedom. It's more important because the veterans are not a vanishing breed. On the contrary, wars continue to be fought every day right now and more veterans are returned home injured in mind and body, or for burial, somewhere in the world each and every day.
The veterans of war are not vanishing or dying off; their faces are just becoming unrecognizable to us as new generations of them are created. They are not just the old grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. They are the sisters and brothers, the fathers and mothers, and the sons and daughters. Their faces are decades younger than the veterans whose faces are splashed across the Veterans Day advertisements and newspaper stories.
And, to the newest generation, as with the newest generation for generations past, Remembrance Day is about having a vacation. A day off from school with their parents home from work. A day for learning new songs and poems about stuff they don't really know with meanings they don't really understand.
Knowing the importance of it much more than the newest generation does, and seeing how the real meaning is vanishing over generations, I want to make sure my own kids know the significance and the importance. I try to explain it to them, and I know school does the same, and somewhere along the way they will eventually learn the deeper meaning of it all. The sooner the better, and maybe one day they can help the world evolve into a new world where war is a thing of the past.
It is not just about remembering that people died for us long ago, it is about remembering everything that war is. The cruelties and atrocities committed against the innocent. The loss of life, property, and the indignities forced on others. How war makes good people do terrible things and bad people do even worst things. It's about remembering the victims and the warriors fighting on their behalf.
This year, as my daughters eagerly planned for their day off holiday, I decided it would be a good idea to have them do something to earn that day off, the extra play time, and the extra movie night they wanted. To earn it by showing me what Remembrance Day is to them.
So, I asked them to write me a story or poem about what they think Remembrance Day is about.
This is what they wrote (for the sake of legibility I typed up what they wrote) …
As I'm sure you noticed, the six year old wrote "Happy Remembrance Day" and "Have a Happy Remembrance Day" on her poem.
Now what could possibly be happy about a day dedicated to remembering death and war?
Well, I asked her that. I asked her what makes a Remembrance Day a day to be happy.
Her answer – "A happy Remembrance Day is when you remember that the soldiers died for you."
Maybe she has a deeper understanding than I thought possible for a six year old.
Filed under: Blog About Nothing, Holidays, Random Ramblings Tagged: Blog, Children, Random Ramblings, remembrance day
April 13, 2011
Book Review – Jeffery Deaver’s The Blue Nowhere
Book Review – Jeffery Deaver's The Blue Nowhere
I just finished reading Jeffery Deaver's The Blue Nowhere. I should probably start by mentioning that this really isn't my kind of book.
"What do you mean?" you ask?
The simple truth is that there are a very large number of books being pigeonholed into a small list of broad category genres.
While I enjoy most genres including crime fiction and thrillers, they include a large variety of story types and I'm not going to like every story type.
The idea of the whole story revolving around a computer hacker just didn't appeal to me no matter how much the usual cover blurbs praised it. And, if you read my other reviews, you should know that I don't pay attention to those blurbs anyway. They strike me as being little more than an advertising gimmick and don't mean I'll like the book.
I bought the book for the price. Two books for ten dollars! Who could go wrong? Even if I hate the book, at least I paid only a third of the usual cover price. There wasn't much of a selection at the time either, so Blue Nowhere won by default. And, just because I can feel your curiosity, I'll let you know that the other $5 book I bought was a Stephen King short story anthology. No doubts there about whether I'll enjoy that one. Who doesn't enjoy a good Stephen King short story? I'm saving that one for summer camping reading. Nothing stirs the creative juices for a good late night campfire story than stories by a good thriller writer.
Now that that's out of the way, I'll let you in on another secret. My review is inevitably tainted by my personal tastes and preferences, which happen to not include hacker stories, and are likely very different from other's personal tastes and preferences.
In essence, this is a story about hacker vs. hacker. It plays on the simple internet truth that even our closest online friends are most often complete strangers who we really know nothing about.
Our main hacker "Wyatt Gillette" a.k.a. "Valleyman" is pitted against his ex-hacking partner "Phate", who turned from the dark side of hacking to the darker side of blurring the lines between violent online games with real life. Disgusted with Phate's deadly online activities, Gillette abandons his identity as Valleyman and turns on his online friend. It's funny how the lesser of two evildoers is the one who gets sent to the big house. Not funny in a "ha-ha" way, but rather in a "isn't that just the way things go" way.
When Phate's deadly online hacks and snuff games turn to real life hands-on murders, the fine folks of the Computer Crimes Unit need an expert matching Phate's skills in order to catch their killer. The bureaucracy springs Gillette from prison and he becomes our main character with an entourage of police officers leading him in the contest against his rival hacker.
Naturally, when Phate learns that his ex-faceless friend and now sworn enemy "Valleyman" is involved in the investigation, he changes the direction of his own online snuff game turned real life and makes his rival into his new main target.
Gillette is something of a geeky character and that pretty much fits my image of a hacker type. Sure that's stereotyping, but we're all guilty of that to some degree. I never really got a feel of that reader-character connection to any of the other characters. They seemed more like supporting characters to me.
I haven't read a bunch of hacker stories, and really know very little about the hacker lifestyle. As a reader not in the know, I really didn't buy the finger pushups thing. While it may very well be something they do and believe strengthens their fingers, it just seemed weird to me.
There were some events in the book, at the end, that were never explained. But, I think that was by design, a little reminder by the author that there will always be unexplained things in life and in stories.
The scariest part of this story is the reality that hackers like these are alive and well and living in large numbers across the globe. That, and the damage that could be caused at the psychotic whim and a few keystrokes of some anti-social loner who likely is unable to emotionally connect with real people and therefore is likely incapable of empathy. Of course that doesn't describe all hackers, but even one who does fall into that category is one too many.
While I wouldn't put this in my "I would read it again" pile, I was not disappointed with the read.
Jeffery Deaver managed to entertain me even though I had pretty much decided I wouldn't care for the book before I even started reading it.
The story dragged a little at times for me, but the descriptions are good and Deaver moves the story without a lot of extra unnecessary words. It isn't one of my favourite reads, but I certainly can see that someone who likes this kind of crime thriller would enjoy the story a lot more than I did.
While personal taste is relative, for the reader it means a lot.
Personally, I liked Jeffery Deaver's Roadside Crosses better.
Filed under: Book Reviews Tagged: Book Review, Jefferey Deaver, Reading, Roadside Crosses, The Blue Nowhere
April 11, 2011
Rambling about Job Hunting
If there is one thing that I learned about job hunting, is that you don't realize how it can affect a person (specifically yourself) until you are doing it yourself.
Sure, I should know all this already. Right? After all, it's not like this is the first time I've ever job hunted. In fact, I've job hunted no less than six times. Closer to ten really, since you don't include every job you've ever had on your resume.
I'm sure that at my age and experience employers won't care to read through the details of the one day I worked at the indoor miniature golf place when I was sixteen and got fired the same day for having an accident with the drink machine. You know the kind, those purple, red, and orange fluids forever turning in a machine that looks like they should be slushies but are really just a poor imitation of flat soda pops.
It's your first day of your first job ever as an inexperienced and very nervous (and outrageously shy) sixteen year old kid. And yes, the simplest of tasks, working a lever to drain liquid into a cup has suddenly become as difficult to your terror stricken mind as rocket science would be to a sea slug. A fumble and to your abject horror you are sprayed and your white blouse that you had to buy just for this job is now soaking wet with sticky purple juice. You want to crawl under that drink machine and hide forever. Instead, you put on your bravest face, clean up the mess (and yourself as best you can), face the manager's wrath, and finish out your shift trying to act like nothing happened while the customers snicker and make comments about your wet and sticky purple condition. When your shift is finally done, you hold onto that sigh of relief that you can finally skulk off home to shower and hide under the blankets in miserable embarrassment, wondering how you are possibly going to face your boss and co-workers again – only to be told on the way out the door not to bother coming back. You slink home in a ruined shirt that cost more than you made and thinking that this is the end of your chances of ever having a job.
Is it one of life's most embarrassing moments? Absolutely. In the long term do employers really care or need to read about that job in your resume? Only if you are going back to that same employer in the following weeks to ask for another job.
Ok, so enough reminiscing about 'the good old days' and flash back to today.
There are two type of job hunting really. Most of the times I job hunted it was of the more passive job hunting. You look at the job ads once or twice a week, maybe less, and you send out resumes. If someone bites then great, but if they don't then it's no biggie. You're not in any hurry anyway.
But this times it's pulling out all stops, full-time aggressively job hunting. This time the clock is ticking, the calendar is turning, and the daycare is devouring the savings like a Least Shrew the size of the empire state building (a tiny animal that has to eat non-stop). And let us not forget those gas prices that make you cringe every time you start your car these days.
Job hunting has proven to be a bit of a roller coaster. One day you are sending out resumes to every employment agency you can find that deals in full time placements, finding all kinds of job ads in the paper and online to apply for, and you are thinking, "Wow! This is going great!" Flash forward a few days and the jobs seem to have completely dried up and you are wondering where all the jobs have gone.
Sure, there's still plenty of jobs in the paper, but let's face it, I really don't know anything about operating a drill press, installing paving stones, or building windows. I probably wouldn't be the best professional driver (just ask my seven year old about my parking skills), and I'm really not interested in becoming an apartment caretaker or professional pooper scooper. And let's be honest with ourselves, those lowest paying entry level jobs are exactly that. It seems that all the jobs listed are either completely out of my comfort zone or well above or well below my experience and skills. So yeah, I won't be applying for that job as a mechanic either. I'd be looking for something akin to a sink plug to change the oil. And I don't think anyone would want to see me trying to park a forklift.
In the past, every time I job hunted, the paper seemed to be filled with ads for office work and accounting clerks of all levels. In fact, I'm pretty sure I remember the entire jobs section being much bigger, sometimes with pages of ads just for one section alone. Now, the entire jobs section seems to have shrunk drastically, fitting in less space than the 'General Help' used to. Of course, a lot of employers have moved into the technological age with online listings instead of the old tried and true dead-tree listings, but searches for those are coming up with pretty small lists too, and most of those aren't even in the region I list in the search criteria.
At this point you're thinking to yourself, "How am I ever going to get a job if there aren't any jobs to get?"
And then the phone calls start. The employment agencies you sent resumes to are calling to interview you and they all seem to already have the perfect opportunity lined up for you. You do the meet and greets, do their tests, and some of them even call you back about that perfect opportunity. You even get some interest from the other job ads you applied for.
You go for interviews, you keep scouring the paper and internet for those elusive job opportunities, and you sit by the phone waiting for it to ring. Ok, I did the interview and thought it went all right, now will he call me back? It's worse than waiting for that call after a first date.
Things are happening, people are showing interest, and you are hopping! This is going better than you ever imagined it would after staying home raising your kids for six years!
And then the phone calls stop. You've had interviews, you're waiting to hear about possible interviews for those perfect opportunities from the agencies, and you've spent hours searching for every possible position you can send a resume for. It may have only been days, but in your mind it feels like weeks.
Now you're wondering, "Where'd everybody go?"
When you do get those calls (or emails) it's to give you the old "It's not you, it's me." In job hunting it sounds a little more like this- "We decided to go with someone who was a better fit for the organization." In other words, you're nice and all, but the chemistry just wasn't there.
Now you're thinking, "I must be nuts. Who's going to hire me after I've been unemployed this long?"
You know you can do the job, but how can you hope to convince someone else to at least read past the unemployed for six years bit, and actually look at the resume based on just your short impersonal cover letter?
Of course, taking upgrading courses would have helped, but it's not easy to find free childcare and large sums of extra disposable money. Heck, if I had that I might almost be a CGA (Certified General Accountant), minus the required work experience while learning.
And just when your hopes are starting to slip, the phone rings again. The opportunities trickle in, interest in what you have to offer trickles in even more slowly, and sooner or later all of it ends in rejection because that's just the way the it goes.
So you sit by the phone waiting for that call while scouring the ads, Googling random companies for addresses, and wondering just where all those pages of job ads from years ago have gone.
Sooner or later that right chemistry will happen.
Filed under: Random Ramblings Tagged: job, job hunting, job search, life as a working mom, new job, working, working mom, working parent
