The rules don't apply to me

I'm watching parking wars while waiting for everybody to get ready to go to the store with me to get some missing onion soup ingredients. The onion soup will be awesome, but parking wars is hitting me with one of the major reasons I can't stand the Utah culture.
Sure, everywhere you go you have douchbags. It's part of living in society, but Utah, specifically the Salt Lake Valley, there seems to be a particularly high percentage of these people. The issue isn't that they're generally assholes. My complaint is very specific. These people expect others to live by the rules, but will find nearly any justification for the rules not applying to them. They don't want their kids in a car seat cause they're "just driving down the block," or, as a former boss of mine said, "why can't I pull my boat in the carpool lane? I can go the speed limit" after he got a ticket for doing just that. They think they can talk or text on the phone because they know how to drive while doing it, while the rest of the world seems unable to do it. Their idea of "freedom" is completely out of control. They think that they can do what ever the hell they want when ever the hell they want, and get away with breaking the rules because they had "a really good reason" to do so.
Pull your heads out of your asses and think. Yeah, you're free to do what ever you want as long as your actions don't infringe on the rights of others doing what ever they want. You're not alone in this world, assholes.

That part is over

We've moved across state lines. While packing we learned that the big truck just wasn't big enough...just the first of way too many very painful issues to occur during the past couple of weeks...and we got a very generous offer from someone to drive a second truck, stay with us for a couple of days, and then we'd fly the generous helper back home. Simple plan, then things really went sideways. Without going in to too much detail, we lost the house we had already rented, went totally broke for a couple of days due to money being tied up in bullshit, got stuck wearing the same dirty clothes for a few days cause everything was in boxes, and on and on and on. It was around this point that our generous help started bitching about being tired and dirty, continually asking to borrow clothes or razors (remember we're temporarily broke and everything is in boxes), wanting to take breaks and go out to lunch, missing work (I missed extra work as well), and on and on and on. Finally, just as things started to balance, our help started to come down with bronchitis, or something similar. Sucks, but our generous helper began to insist that there were chemicals in the air in the part of the house that contained not only the helper's sleeping quarters, but also my home office...btw, I'm not sick...
I guess the bottom line is that I was very greatful for the offer of help, and the initial help, but the selfish attitude of this person while my entire family was facing hell, put me off. It pissed me off, and rather than being greatful for the help, I've ended the week glad to be rid of this very uncomfortable burden that was keeping my little family from regaining center after a week of hell and a new start.
I dunno, I guess I just had to get that off my chest.
I'm tired, very disappointed for many reasons in our helper, and looking forward to a real weekend to rest and have a little fun with my family in our new home in our new city and state.

Kirkland

<p>So, we've finally moved. There is a whole adventure there that I'll talk about another time, but for now, I'm just trying to decompress. I'm out on the deck, having a glass or three of chianti, and just drinking it all in, and I'm struck by something. Back home the norm is to work to have the perfectly manicured yard. Time and money is spent on having the perfect shape around the shrubs, money is spent on consultants to choose the perfect shrubs in the first place. All of this to impress the neighbors, and show that you have the best lot in the neighborhood. Of course in utah you have to have automatic sprinklers because it's hot enough to kill the lawn and shrubs in a couple of days, so I can't really complain about that. Anyway, I'm looking out across my yard, and the little bit of those yards around me that I'm actually able to see, and I'm struck by the difference in realities. Nature is in control here. Sure, lawns are cut and watered, gardens produce some food, but give it a month with out fighting the over growth, and nature would take over. People seem to accept that. They accept that they are here for a short time, but everything around them was here before them, will be here long after them, and if nature became sentient and decided to take over, it would simply eliminate them. This place is alive, and in balance. I come from a desert, a place that you have to fight just to keep the lawn alive. Here, you have to fight to keep green things from taking over. I dunno. The reality of this place is amazing.

Can't wait to be there

So, we're moving to Washington. Hopefully for the last time this time.
We've sort of been in denial about the move, so we really haven't gotten as far in to the packing thing as we should have. That means we have a shit load of things to do before Tuesday. I'm starting to think that not only will we make it, but all of our stuff just might fit on the truck. I am not at all happy about selling our house and becoming a renter again, but there are two things that are making that a little easier to deal with. First, this is not where we intended to stay long term. I fact, we've tried getting out of here a couple of times, once going so far as to actually build a new house...our buyers screwed us, we lost the house we built, I'm still bitter. Second, our new land lady seems like she ia a very nice person who will leave us to our own business. Not all landlords are like that. Besides that, we expect to only be renting for the next one to three years while we figure out where we want to plant our next roots, so we won't have to do this for long.
Once we get there, sure we'll have to unpack, but we won't be on a deadline. We'll be able to do what we need when we need, and get our daughter and our dog back to a somewhat normal life.
Anyway, moving sucks.

#GoogleMusicBeta and Ratings?

I'm still trying to get used to the ratings feature.
On the surface it seems to do what it's supposed to do. You can give a track a thumbs up or thumbs down. Once this is set, the track is added to the Thumbs Up auto playlist. Cool, I guess I can get all the songs I like in to one list. The downside is that I share this library with my wife, and what I consider a good tune does not always match up with what she considers a good tune. I can live with that.
Once rated, you can also sort. It looks like you can either sort on rated songs, where thumbs up are sorted first, then thumbs down, or you sort based on unrated. I guess another way to order and view my collection, but still trying to figure out a practical use for this feature.

What threw me, though, was I started building a playlist this morning. I went through, added a few albums, and started playing. A song came up that I didn't want in the list, because not all albums are winners all the way through, and instead of removing the song from the list I gave it a thumbs down rating. The song stayed in the list, but stopped playing, and skipped to the next.
I don't really know what's going on here, if the song will be played again, or just sit there in the list ignored because it's got a thumbs down. The help docs didn't shed any light on what's happened. I guess I'll just have to keep playing the list and see what happens.

#GoogleMusicBeta and #iTunes playlists

When I initially installed, due to an installation bug, I was unable to choose a custom folder from which to upload. I chose iTunes Library for the purposes of installation, and after the installation was complete, I went back and chose custom folders. After an hour or so, I decided to go switch back to iTunes for the first upload pass because, although my music collection exists inside and outside of iTunes, I wanted to import my iTunes playlists. After about a week of uploading, and within the last 1,300 files in my iTunes library, I've noticed something a little annoying. I'm missing all of the playlists that I actually cared to have imported.
There are a small number of playlists imported. Mostly "On The Go" playlists, a couple of lists that I created for the purpose of burning CDs, and the "Party Shuffle" list. I've spent alot of time building custom rules for smart playlists based on ratings, others based on genre, and others based on custom details, and all of these lists are quite large.
There are other static playlists that I've created that are not quite so large, but they are missing.
Initially I thought that maybe Google Music couldn't import smart playlists, but that idea was proven wrong by the fact that I do have the Party Shuffle smart playlist. I then thought that maybe size was an issue, and Google Music couldn't import playlists beyond a certain size, but I believe that is proven wrong by a handful of small playlists that didn't get imported.
I don't really have the time or interest do really investigate why some playlists got imported while others got left behind. All I know is that the playlists that I really actually use did not show up.
Another point for AudioGalaxy. AudioGalaxy has given me full and complete access to all of my iTunes playlists while on the go, and without the need to sync anything.
In the end, it probably won't matter. Android, in general, is giving me a way to get away from iTunes while building a media collection that is portable across nearly any device, which means I'm working towards a world without iTunes, and likely works in a manner different from iTunes. Any iTunes integration is just a shim that keeps me in touch while the transition is taking place, but it's a feature that is a "nice to have" while making that transition.

Time to get back to work.

#TwitterGrader ? Really?

I just saw a tweet from someone I'm following saying that some employers are using TwitterGrader as part of an employee evaluation process. I went over there to check it out, and frankly I'm disturbed that anyone would use this kind of thing for such an important decision as to whether to hire a candidate. For reference, my grade is 82 out of 100. I think this would give me around a B or something like that, but what is this, really.
There are 6 criteria:
1 - Number of followers. Kind of meaningless, because on the one hand, I follow several public figures for various reasons. These kinds of people usually don't follow back. Other people, like me, just nearly always follow back. Totally arbitrary.
2 - Power of followers. Your score goes up if you have important people following you. It's a popularity contest, but really, because I happen to have a few famous people who followed me back, does that make me more employable? I don't think so.
3 - Updates. Really? I'm ADHD, and I use quite a few tricks to maintain focus. One of those is using twitter to direct a short distraction so that I can get back to the task at hand. I also use twitter to "yell at squirrels." Of course, I keep it more clean than my locked down Facebook account, but still, it amounts to little more than 140 character rants. Other times I tweet something that I see as worth while, but does this make me more employable? Personally, I think this makes me look more like a crazy person.
4 - Update recency. see #3.
5 - follower to followee ratio...Again, arbitrary. If I follow lots of public figures, my ratio will be quite low.
6 - Engagement - things like retweeting. Mostly retweets seem to be tweets that are particularly clever. I guess this might fall in to an employability category, because getting people to repeat what you just said could be seen as a leadership quality.
It's kind of a cool site. It lets you rank yourself against other twitter users, and see how good you are about being a citizen of the twitterverse, but to use this as a ranking for employability is absurd, closing in on offensive, and indicates an extremely shallow interviewer. I won't say I'd never work for someone who would do this, because you gotta work, but I think that anybody who would stoop to this level needs to seriously evaluate what they're doing. Employability should be about proven experience, what real people think about the candidate, and what a candidate can provide to the company.
Unless you're up for a job as a professional blogger or online public relations coordinator, a person's twitter persona is irrelevant.