Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 265

First contact…

One of the truisms of war is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Having successful spent my career not attacking anything more important than the boxes of doughnuts people bring to work, I’m just going to proceed based on the assumption that it’s a true statement. Maybe I shouldn’t think of the office as combat. Clearly it’s not quite a healthy thought process, but nevertheless it feels apt. No one should be surprised to find out that I start just about every day with a plan – whether it’s where I’m going, what I want to get accomplished, whatever. It’s a plan. And for as many weekdays as I can remember, that plan has been shot to hell no later than 8AM. I’m sure there are good and valid reasons for that and I remain exceptionally happy that I am in no way, shape, or form even remotely thought of as a decision maker. Still. Some days I sit in my cube and want to respond to every email with one word: Nuts!

If it was good enough for Bastogne, it seems like it should be good enough for me too.

A taxing case of hypotheticals…

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a fan of tax-free shopping on the internet. Of course I know that theoretically I’m supposed to self-report and pay Maryland state sales taxes due on the items I purchase, but… Yeah. I’m going to invoke the 5th Amendment and not discuss the particulars of what I may or may not do.

As a Republican, I should probably be up in arms about this “new” tax, but as a Constitutionalist, it’s pretty well established (i.e. expressly written) that the Congress has every right to fiddle with interstate commerce as it sees fit. As much as I wish it otherwise, my reading of the tea leaves is that the collection of state income taxes by internet retailers is going to become a fact of life sooner rather than later. Do I like it? No, of course not. Am I going to gird myself for battle against it? No, not so much. I’ve got limited brain power and limited time to dedicate to causes and this isn’t going to become part of the long list of the windmills I enjoy tilting at from time to time.

If I were a good patriot who disagrees with state and federal tax policy, I’d hypothetically vote with my dollars – and have as many hypothetical major purchases as possible shipped for in store pickup in Delaware, where at least for the time being can hypothetically continue to avoid onerous state sales taxes and excessive commercial regulation. Of course if I were really to take by business out of state, I’d obviously file the appropriate quarterly tax forms with the Comptroller of Maryland in accordance with whatever batshit crazy laws the legislature has passed.

Year three…

This rental house on the Elk Neck peninsula was supposed to be an expedient. It was available immediately and met my criteria of having a fence and room for the dogs. With a kitchen and bathroom that I can only generously describe as “dated” and with what I still think of as an oddball three-level layout, it was really the only option I looked at because it had the supreme virtue of being available. That’s a bit of a concern when you’ve driven halfway across the continent and every stick of your belongings are following along less than 24 hours behind you.

I never intended this place to be a long term commitment. The plan was to do a year and be out to something bigger, better, and more importantly, something my own. Of course the housing market continued to tank, the notion of taking on a 3rd mortgage got even more farfetched, and inertia set in. Let’s just say I couldn’t (and still can’t) muster much interest in packing everything up and just moving from Rental A to Rental B. If I’m going to jam everything back into boxes, it’s going to be to go somewhere with a little more permanence… and between pay freezes and impending furloughs that’s not happening in the immediate future.

Once I managed to get the asshat property manager out of the way and started dealing directly with the owners, at least the “retail” side of being a renter again got easier. That counts for more than you’d think… which is why I just renewed the lease out through June 2014. It’s not optimal and certainly not where I expected I’d be three years on. I’ve come to think of it as the blood sacrifice I’ve had to pay for getting my feet back on the good earth of my native state. At least that’s the story I tell myself to keep it from being too aggravating.

Stories from July…

Well, since you’re reading this, you should know that we’ve made it all the way to July 2007 in the latest round of updating posts from the archive. Based on what I’ve read this morning, it must have been one annoying month. Between going down with some kind of sickness, being accosted by traveling Baptists, and reaffirming my deep suspicion of those who drive minivans, it at least makes for some interesting reading. Since one of the posts was short (no, really – like two sentences short), I threw in a 6th post to this week’s update at no extra cost. You can thank me later.

I hope you’ll enjoy this little visit to 2007 as much as I’ve enjoyed making it available. Oh, and if you think our Defense Department are the kings of wasteful spending, take a look at Flock of Seagulls…, I’m pretty sure the World War I British War Office has us beat hands down.

The trouble with being a vegetable…

After the better part of 12 hours of not doing much more than was absolutely necessary to sustain life, the only thing I can really say is that being a vegetable isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be… mostly because it’s 4PM, there’s no laundry done, dinner isn’t started, the floors haven’t been swept, and the whole house has a vague tinge of “disaster area.” We’re going to continue to ignore the odds and ends outside that still need tended for the time being. As it turns out, I’m apparently not a vegetable kind of guy. I’m not a run out and sign up for a triathalon guy either, but sitting around doing nothing clearly isn’t my speed. Apparently I just need a handy day-long reminder of that from time to time.

So, the rest of the weekend is going to be about triage… prioritizing those things that actually need to get done and doing them, while putting off whatever random tasks and odd jobs fall somewhere into the nice to do category. As you can see, blogging was clearly job one on the “must do” list for today. Once that’s settled, it’s on to the “start dinner” task – also highly rated in the must do category. Once that’s settled, the priority of the remaining items falls off sharply. If I had to take a wild guess, the rest of the day will involve some combination of reading and writing. Come to think of it, this day would have been greatly improved if I’d have lead off with those and eased into some of the other stuff. Now I know. And that’s half the battle or so I’ve been told.

On the desire to be a vegetable…

No, I don’t have some oddball dream of becoming a radish and I don’t want to suffer a catastrophic brain injury that leaves me lying in a hospital bed drooling on myself and peeing through a tube, but I the idea of spending the weekend being a vegetable has a certain appeal at the moment. It’s been one of those weeks without much of what felt like down time. Those weeks seem to be happening more and more often lately. Not a complaint, a statement of fact. My natural response, of course, is to want to spend the weekend knocking around the house doing my best to avoid the world and other people as much as possible.

I don’t know how it is for other people, but my style of introversion makes dealing with people, especially large groups of them, a seriously exhausting experience. I do my best to be civil because that’s what polite society expects, but during every interaction I’m suppressing my natural avoidance instinct. When a week has been nothing but external inputs, by Friday it has a tendency to feel like I’m just barely holding it all together. Under the circumstances retreat into a good book, a handful of movies, and a quiet house is the best elixir. It’s not running away to a private island, but it’s what I can manage on short notice and more importantly, it’ll be enough to make sure I get through the next week without bitch slapping some poor unsuspecting extrovert who tries striking up a conversation.

And yes, as always, I recognize the bizarre counter-intuitivity of the introvert that keeps two Facebook pages, a blog, and semi-active Twitter feed. You see, the difference is at any point when I decide I don’t want to deal with that stuff, I can just minimize the page and it goes away. People, by comparison, are notoriously butthurt when you try doing that to them in the analog world.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Like so many others in recent memory, this week could be a laundry list of annoyances from the great to the petty. As always, I tried to drill into the beating heart of the three that annoyed me most this week… but ask me again in five minutes and the list could have easily changed again.

1) Hiring freeze. One of the fun aspects about a hiring freeze is that although people go away and are not replaced, the things that they were doing while they were working never go away. They just get shifted around until they find someone who can do a half-assed job of getting them done. It’s the old standard philosophy of “doing more with less.” It’s a perfectly find concept when applied as a stopgap measure lasting for a relatively short duration. As a permanent part of the business model, it’s somewhat more problematic. At some point the system comes collapsing down under the weight of its own absurdity and the lords of creation have to accept one of four options: 1) Call in reinforcements; 2) Accept that sometimes they’ll just have to do fewer things with the reduced number of resources; 3) Fire everyone and hope a new crew can do it better; or 4) Continue to do everything as usual with a consequently lower level of quality. What you can’t do over the long term is keep taking on additional work while keeping up with business as usual.

2) 216 miles. Having driven or flown across most of the country at some point over the last ten years, I’ve never given much thought at to distance. It’s always just been ground to cover. Lately, though, I’ve been thoroughly, thoroughly annoyed by 216 miles. I guess perspective, and motivation, change everything.

3) The Pinterest-ing of Facebook. I like Facebook. Or I like the concept of Facebook. I’m not sure I’m a fan of how it’s evolving, but that’s another post. I like Facebook as a tool for delivering pithy updates, comic pictures of cats, and generally keeping up with friends and family. What I‘m not so much a fan of is how recently my newsfeed has been taken over by recipes, chain posts, and all manner of corporate ads. I can’t do anything about the ads and I’m not going to de-friend anyone, but you can bet your sweet ass I’m exerting extreme editorial control over the “Change What Updates You Get” function.

The nightmare scenario…

Here in ‘Murica, we have a tendency to think in terms of big disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemic flu, and briefcase nukes. Those are the kind of events that get big attention and the corresponding big dollars poured into planning what to do when one of those things happens. For years, the nightmare scenario has been a hurricane slamming into the Big Easy (been there, done that), a mid-west earthquake that cripples transportation across swath of the country from Chicago to Memphis, or a non-descript dirty bomb left at Union Station our outside the Smithsonian. Those are still the official nightmare scenarios, but they’re not my personal nightmare.

Compared to radiological bombs and the weather, my personal nightmare is decidedly low tech. It’s ten suicide bombers in ten separate cities walking into ten coffee shops at 8:30 in the morning of a random Tuesday and blowing themselves to hell. It’s the kind of improvised devices we saw in Boston – easy enough that just about anyone can manufacture one with stuff they already have around the house. It’s not the kind of terror that’s going to bring down entire buildings, but let them start going off in shopping malls and restaurants across downtown America, and watch how fast the public clamors for something, anything that ratchets down the body count. How long would it be before we nationally agree to be searched at any time for any reason or to having our cars inspected before being allowed into a parking garage or to give up any number of our essential freedoms?

Suicide bombs and improvised explosives have become a way of life in places like Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adopting a bunker mentality when you spend every day under threat is a perfectly natural response to those outside forces acting on you, but I don’t want that for America. I don’t want to live in a garrison town where I’ve traded a lot of personal freedom for a nominal amount of safety. That’s my real nightmare scenario and one that we can only avoid through eternal vigilance. That’s the price we’re going to have to pay – the price we’ve always paid – for liberty.

Introduction to Smashwords…

So over the weekend, I realize that I may have not done a very good job explaining one of the retail channels I selected to do business with. Being the biggest in the business, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are pretty much self explanatory. They’re forces of nature that you just accept you’ll do business with if you want to write and publish a book. Sure, you can work around them, but why would you want to?

The third retailer I opted to work with is Smashwords. Unless you have a deep abiding hatred of the big e-retailers or are a serious fan of independent writers, chances are you’ve never heard of them. Hopefully I can turn you around a bit on that, because I’ve found Smashwords to be a fantastic platform for the indy writer (translation: the author gets to keep a much larger percentage of every sale than they do with sales through other retailers).

Although they are a retailer in their own right, Smashwords biggest claim to fame is that they are large and growing ebook distributor. That means their primary mission in life is making indy works available to a wide variety of other retailers like Apple, Sony, Kobo, and others. This is a good thing because the goal, really, is to have your work available in as many places as possible in addition to the Big Two. More distribution channels means more opportunities for someone to see and hopefully buy your ebook… and that makes for a happy author.

From a reader’s perspective, Smashwords has a lot going for it too. Primarily, that’s because once you buy an ebook from them, you can download it in all of the major ereader formats. Whether you own a Nook, Kindle, or iPad, a Sony reader, something from Kobo, or you just want to read on your laptop or desktop, you can download your book in a format best suited for what device you’re currently using. It’s a great way to make sure your ebooks are not locked in to a specific device or proprietary format. While the e-reader market struggles to sort itself and its industry standards out, you’re safe from the impacts of format change and obsolescence. If you happen to be a voracious reader with a large e-library, that’s a very good thing.

So that’s my pitch by way of introducing everyone to Smashwords. If you’re looking for a read that’s not on the best seller list or have a itch for some of the great independent work out there today, give them a go. I’ve been very impressed with them as both a writer and a reader for the last year. If you’re in a clicking mood, feel free to check out The Cynic’s Guide on Smashwords and take a look around the site.

On Boston…

Boston, the cradle of the American revolutionary spirit was attacked this afternoon by nameless, faceless cowards. Brave Bostonians did not cower under the cannon fire of the worlds most powerful empire and I have the greatest faith that they will not cower in the face of these craven assaults. My thoughts are with the good people of Boston tonight where the spirit of America is again tested by those who would do us harm.