ROBUST discussion
Rants: OT & OTT
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Found on the Net II
But being unbusy can make one very busy.
Found on the net:Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun (Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery #1) by Lois Winston
Sharon wrote: "Are we too busy scurrying around trying to accomplish this or that?I suspect many of us write partially to get away from the rat pack. I know I do.
Check out this long rant on the subject of b..."
OMG - that's me! Busy all the freaking time. I'm really trying to get stuff done. But s/he's got a good point. There comes a point where you need to yell 'stop' and do something different.
Especially marketing e-books. It may be more fun to see them at the farmer's market than online.
I find that making time for my f-t-f friends makes me feel so much better.
I drove all over Kentucky, but couldn't find you -- so I came back home.
Dakota wrote: "Found on the net:Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun (Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery #1) by Lois Winston"
Last year, I spent several hours trying to answer the question, "Is there some particular activity/hobby/profession that doesn't have a mystery series based around it?"
It wasn't an exhaustive search, but I was surprised at how many little mystery niches had been filled.
How about the body retrievers working for the coroner's office?Pest control workers?
Plumbers?
Fortune tellers?
Daycare operators?
Farmers?
Taxidermists?
I don't believe I checked all on your lists, but there were definitely fortune teller mysteries and farmer mysteries.e.g.:
http://www.amazon.com/Fruit-Evil-Farm...
http://www.amazon.com/Tempest-Leaves-...
Just on a giggle, I decided to check plumbers and the answer is yes:
http://www.amazon.com/Sink-Trap-GEORG...
"Former corporate drone Georgiana Neverall loves her new occupation as a plumber's apprentice, but is a bit surprised when she finds the favorite brooch of Martha Tepper, the town's former librarian, clogging a sink. Georgiana has a sinking feeling that Martha may have been retired permanently and suddenly it's up to a plumber's apprentice to flush out a killer. "
That Tempest in the Tea Leaves is too close to Kat's book...
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One of my wife's main instructors in college specializes in mysteries centered around a fly fisherman:http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_nos...
This is kind of a tangent, but when I was a teen, I had a short-lived computer consulting business. My first client was a retired guy who ran a business selling custom lures and supplies for fly fishermen (who did not solve mysteries to the best of my knowledge). He had a first generation Mac with some old school spreadsheet action. I can't quite remember, but I think it may have even been Lotus 1-2-3.
Fly-fishing mysteries? That's about a niche as you can get.
Lotus...LOL I made a buncha money on Lotus spreadsheets.
Mod
"Underwater rabbi!"
as in:
"Underwater Rabbi solves the Scuba Diving Moshel Murders Case!"
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Epson PX-8: A Clear and Comprehensive Guide to Business Applications
Currently selling used for between $159 and $401, presumably to collectors of old computers.
http://www.amazon.com/Epson-PX-8-Comp...
Back in the mid-1960s, I also wrote a book about the first desktop computer, the Olivetti 101, containing my programmes for operating a large business with it, and several of what must have been the first computer games that I wrote as training routines for the marketing staffs of clients. This was sold for $10K per copy, probably the equivalent of a hundred grand today, and in the confidentiality clauses of the contract with each buyer I inserted the words, "...or I'll take your firstborn" after the lawyers passed it. One of them, when he discovered this, got so purple in the face, he could only sputter wordlessly for five minutes, after which he fired us as his clients and damned me to perdition. We sold a couple of hundred copies.
Weird. Same seller, same condition, wildly different prices.
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I'm amazed at some of these prices.
Pretty funny - makes you wonder who is doing the buying and selling.
Andre Jute wrote: "My family has a saying for writers, especially on television, who try too hard to distinguish their detectives:"Underwater rabbi!"
as in:
"Underwater Rabbi solves the Scuba Diving Moshel Murder..."
Obviously I should write a series set in 1978 about a CP/M programmer who solves mysteries:
The Kilobyte Killer
Input, Output, Murder
Assembly of Crime
For good measure he should be into falconry and Civil War Reenactment...English Civil War reenactment. :)
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OH ARE YOU SERIOUS???? I love that book! It absolutely ROCKS!
Totally serious. I read it years ago, and now my Kindle is begging me to add it to my library.Note to Jeremy: Isn't right about now when you're starting your new job?
Patricia wrote: "Totally serious. I read it years ago, and now my Kindle is begging me to add it to my library.Note to Jeremy: Isn't right about now when you're starting your new job?"
Because of my hospitalization, things have been delayed. Among other things, I needed several medical tests* (TB, Hep B titers, et cetera) and a background check.
All of this didn't get initiated until last week. I'm hoping to start in the middle of the month, but it depends on how fast they are about this stuff.
My background check, in theory, should go fairly swiftly because I didn't move a lot in recent years and I've lived a very non-controversial life in recent years. Heck, I lived a non-controversial life before (I used to have a top level security clearance when I was in the military).
I finished up a TB testing sequence on Monday (surprise, I don't have TB!). So, in theory, just waiting on the background now. I filled out a rather lengthy form two Fridays ago. They took my fingerprints the Friday before last as well.
*I'll be working for a VA hospital, but not actually in the hospital itself and not with any patients, but because this is the VA the rules are rather stringent about things like TB.
I didn't take an IT job in a hospital here because of TB in the population. (Prisons are full of it.)Decided I rather stays home than risk TB that doesn't respond to antibiotics - also in the Prisons around here. Hard to be believe it came from Russia.
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I've never been in a hospital, even to visit someone else, that I didn't come home with a cold, just for starters.
Doctors' surgeries are the same, Andre. And aeroplanes.
J.A., while they're checking your background, I hope they don't stumble across Robust and see the crew you hang out with. Would hate to ruin your career.
RE: TBFor the opening of my graduate school application essay, I quoted, sardonically, the US Surgeon general in 1967:
"The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases. We have basically wiped out infection in the United States.”
This attitude was so prevalent in the late sixties and early seventies that some schools got rid of their microbiology programs and just sent their micrbiologists to the biology program to handle less high profile (and less well-funded) research. The idea was at the time that it was somewhat a waste of a career to worry about micro, and everybody would just be concentrating on cancer and heart disease. I found one period article once where this guy had this timeline about how we'd clear infectious disease from the developed world in ten years and then clear it from the developing world in twenty. Guess he went to the Paul Ehrlich school of bad prognostication.
Yale, for instance, had to totally reconstitute their micro program and thus has a somewhat weaker program than many equivalent schools.
Incidentally, there's no current strain of TB that is completely antibiotics resistant. There's MDR and XDR. MDR is resistant to a a few front-line drugs and XDR is resistant to more, but they can still be treated.
This isn't to minimize concern over them because even non-MDR and XDR TB treatment is very long and expensive (6 mo-year) and typically involves a lot of injectable antibiotics, but we're not at a point where we can't treat even the worse cases of TB as long as there is treatment compliance. It just sucks. A lot.
In addition, usually the drugs they have to resort to have more side effects, so it's considerably less fun than even normal TB treatment (and treatment can take upwards of 2 years in XDR cases).
The increase in MDR and XDR strains though is a matter for concern and the subject of active research and antibiotics development. We didn't close the book. We wrote several sequels!
RE: Hospitals
Iatrogenic infection is a very strong concern in many hospitals and among public health people. Some, of course, is an artifact of concentrating sick people and another big issue is just that hospitalization for serious conditions often involves the use of in-dwelling medical devices, that by their very nature, raise the risk of infection. It's kind of that eternal trade-off though.
I will note that in the US, for many years it wasn't taken as seriously as it perhaps should have been (for many reasons) and due to certain regulatory changes, it's being much more aggressive dealt with in the last decade or so. I haven't a clue about the infection control practices past or present of other countries though.
Though other than aggressive infection control, it's hard to think about a way to concentrate resources and personnel in a way that doesn't also concentrate patients and raise the same issues.
RE: Background check
I'm reminded of a funny story from my military days.
When I first got out of basic, I was rooming with this brooding fellow.
We were discussing our security clearance investigations one day and he was a bit worried about his. It turns out when they asked him to list several people as character witnesses, he listed a family friend.
This family friend, however, was a bit of a roughneck and, among other things, had some felony convictions and had once been charged with attempted murder of a police officer (not convicted though)
He did get his clearance eventually, though, showing that as long as you personally keep your nose clean, you can make it through.
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Kench!
My hero is the late Julian Simon, who did science by simply opening his eyes and using his brain, and exposed those clowns as wishful catastrophists by backing them into betting on their foolish predictions. Erlich, true to form, welshed on the bet when he lost.
I once told someone, "You sound like Paul Ehrlich."They thought I was complimenting them. :p
J.A., I once passed a background check -- despite everything.
You didn't try to kill any cops, did you?
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I like Andre's version of my life far better than mine.
Patrica - Yeah - print that out to make sure you have a copy. J.A. - Thanks for that - I was under the impression those strains were incurable. (shudder, shudder) I still won't work in a hospital...a drug rehab was bad enough.
I needed a background check for my last job. There isn't much for them to find in the last 20 years. My most questionable association is with a couple 12 Step programs. Small potatoes in the garden of intregue.
When I filled up my apartment lease form, I laughed because one of the questions was something along the lines of, "Are you a member of State Department-designed terrorist organization?"And then it had a little, "If you answered yes, please explain."
Kench indeed!
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And then it had a little, "If you answered yes, please explain."
What's to explain? I'm a registered Democrat.
You could have written: "Yes, but I didn't inhale."
Meant designated not designed, but you get the idea. :)
I knew what you meant, but I like the idea that State Dept. designed them....
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I inhaled, fell in love with it and didn't come down for 5 years. I have no idea what happened between 1980 and 1986. I hope I had a good time.
I was there, sober, but don't remember those years either.
They called me just now to tell me I start on the 12th. So nothing freaky in my background that disturbed them. :)
I suspect many of us write partially to get away from the rat pack. I know I do.
Check out this long rant on the subject of busyness from the NYT: http://nyti.ms/Mxfabd