That’s a thing about weather

Summer thunderstorm season is here.

When you fly this summer, remember that planes Do Not Go Near Thunderstorms. Remember that thunderstorms in North America form lines that can run from Winnipeg, in Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. When your flight is delayed, and you are stuck in an airport for six hours, remember that we are prioritizing safety above efficiency when a choice must be made.

In related news, planes intending to fly over Kansas do not like being re-routed over Minot, North Dakota.

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November 5 2012

1. The winter schedule at work is in effect! This is fantastic for me, because it means I am working four ten-hour days, and have Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off of work. \o/

2. Queers Dig Time Lords is really coming together. This has been a very different experience for me than working on Chicks Dig Comics. QDTL is a bit further from my zone of knowledge and expertise, there are some complicated factors regarding getting contributors, and this is a book that needs to find something new to say, in a universe that already contains Chicks Dig Time Lords and Chicks Unravel Time. I think we’re going to do that. I think we will contribute new value to the field, and I’m proud to be a part of the process.

3. I’ve been catching up on the Twilight movies, and noticed something. Alice Cullen essentially fulfills the same role in the movies as Pinkie Pie does on My Little Pony. I find this to be hilariously wonderful.

4. My kids discovered the Garfield cartoons on Netflix. I’d rather they watch more Phineas and Ferb with their discretionary screen time, but it is, in fact, their discretionary time. :shrugs:

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July 24 2012

1. At the south edge of the parking lot at work we have a wetland. Yes, and actual wetland. It’s about one square acre, maybe an acre and a half. Not very large. It’s inside the perimeter, its border patrolled by the guards.

This wetland is not, I think, a protected feature in anyway. But the air traffic control facility was built on a swamp, and this is part of what was left. In the summer the rain from the parking lots runs off into it. In the winter, the plows push the snow on top of it. It serves a purpose.

This scrap of swamp is home to extensive wildlife. In particular, it hosts a number of red-wing blackbird families. And one of these little blackbirds is a territorial bundle of feathers.

See, the path for walking laps around the parking lot is a half-mile loop, if one walks off the concrete and around the swamp. So, every day, five to twenty people walk laps around the swamp. And, every day, that blackbird dive-bombs us all.

I think about this bird. He must be the most successful, most accomplished bird in his swamp. He drives enormous predators away from his territory over and over again, every day. We enter on the west side, walk south, turn, walk across the south edge, turn, walk up the east side, and get back on the pavement heading north. Every day we leave his nest alone! What a triumph!

The fact that none of us care one whit about this bird or his nest isn’t evident to him. From his point of view, dive-bombing us every day is bringing security to him and his territory.

2. I finished what there is of the Canadian series Flashpoint of NetFlix this past weekend. Argh! I really like this show! Now I am out of new episodes to watch.

3. I read Lies of Locke Lamorra, by Scott Lynch, last week. Here’s the review I posted on Goodreads, spoiler-free:

There is a kind of geek wish fulfillment that I read sometimes. S.M. Stirling’s Islander books are a great example. In these sorts of books, the people who have been outsiders or under-regarded are revealed to be awesomesauce all along. Frequently after a catastrophe or apocalypse, when everyone who ISN’T their brand of awesomesauce is dead because, well, see the above Lack of Awesome.

I like these books. They are escapist for me. I like to pretend, for a while, that in the event of an apocalypse I would not be one of the slow, lingering dead, alive long enough to understand what is happening, long enough to hold terror for my children close to my heart. I *hate* that particular anxiety-obsessive thinking when it hits me. Stirling’s books are a balm on my soul at those times.

Sometimes I like a lie.

There is a different kind of wish fulfillment that I love, though. That I recommend to people far and wide. It’s the sort that tells the utter, no-bullshit truth, and makes that truth a banner to stand under without fear. Bujold does this in Memory, in which arrogance and insecurity and lack of self-knowledge are revealed to be double-edged weaknesses — they can drive a person into inadvertent villainy, yes. But know them, own them, and you can stop being afraid of yourself.

Stop lying to yourself and you have a place to stand.

As far as I can tell, with the *massive* presumption of a reader examining an author’s text, Lies of Locke Lamorra is that second kind of book. I am grasping at what the heart of it is, but what I can see from here, from where I’m standing, is that every character trait the characters have — all of them, heroes and villains and bystanders alike — is salvation and damnation at the same time. That is not only a truth about existence, it’s a massive fucking technical feat of writing.

Goddamn, Mr. Lynch. What a book. Crickets wept, that’s an astonishing accomplishment.

Nice work. Thank you.

June 26 2012

1. I took yesterday off work, hoping that if I didn’t talk my voice might recover. This seems to have not quite worked, as I have a persistent cough and my voice is still gone.

2. I did read two and a half books yesterday.

3. This is the History of Rome podcast I’ve been mentioning. One hundred and seventy-nine parts, around two hundred episodes, each between fifteen and forty minutes in length. I love it.

4. J and I have been working through the Sherlock commentary tracks, and thoroughly enjoying same.

5. I am grumpy about the new schedule software work is using, and the various stipulations the union agreed to regarding said scheduling software. To complain about it would bore you all to tears, so I will leave my grumpiness at this juncture.

6. It’s been a pretty good few weeks, no, possibly even months, with the kids. I keep thinking that each age they are at is my favorite, and then the next age comes along and I like that even better.

June 11 2012

1. Work was very work-like this weekend. Not enough people, lots of weather, lots of busy traffic.

It can be frustrating, working when it’s busy. There are a lot of people who all want something from you right now. It could be easy to forget that they don’t hear or see all the other people asking for your attention at a given moment. They’re not being irritating on purpose.

I say that to my son a lot, who has some trouble with attributing motivation to others. “They’re not doing anything to you on purpose!” I tell him. “Things happen, that you don’t want, and no-one is out to get you.” It’s a downside of human self-centeredness. We are at the center of our own narratives, after all. Why should we not be the center of eveyone else’s?

But, we’re not. The three pilots who all called on different frequencies at the same time wanting clearances, they are not out to get me. They are just people flying home after a weekend at the cabin up north, with their kids and their dogs and their dirty laundry and their fishing gear. I don’t know what sort of weekend they had, whether the fish were biting or they bickered with their spouse or their kids got into a fight as they were loading the plane. I can’t give the pilot who is calling me a good weekend all by myself.

But I could certainly make the trip home unpleasant, if I wanted to. I could be snippy and insulting, I could make the three hour flight home in gorgeous sunshine something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

I could, but I try to avoid it.

If I do my job right, the pilot doesn’t think about me in the slightest once they have landed. If I do my job right, they don’t think of me again. If I do my job right it’s not personal, not petty, not mean and vindictive.

I tell my kids that every time someone does something irritating, you have a chance to either make things better or worse. When three pilots call at once, and they talk so damn slowly, and they have bad radios, and they have tons of questions, I become irritated. But while I can’t control what they do, I can control what I do. I can choose the sort of person I want to be. I can choose to make things better or make them worse.

I don’t always make the choice that I respect later. I’m not some paragon of virtue. But I try to be pleasant, to be calm, to be helpful and clear and maintain a good tone. I think about the pilots and their passengers and what I would want were I in their place.

It doesn’t make the work any less complicated. But it sometimes makes it less frustrating.

2. The gasps and cries of pain in many animated shows sound rather … sexual. I notice it more in anime. I don’t know if that’s because there’s more of this sort of … ambiguity … in anime, or if I merely notice it more there.

3. To the people who put Chicks Dig Comics up on the internet, and to the people who are downloading and reading it illegally —

I am so glad you love the book. I am so glad you love comics, and you want to read more from some of the women who love comics the way you do. If Chicks Dig Comics is not available where you are, I understand your frustration. I, too, am irritated when I *want* to spend my money on something and am not able to buy the thing in question.I hope that you love the pirated copy you are reading. I hope you tell your friends how great the book is.

And I hope that, when you are given the opportunity to buy a copy of Chicks Dig Comics, you do so. Buy a copy for your local library! Or send a copy to a friend. Buy a copy and write “LENDING COPY” in really big letters on the back cover and leave it in your local coffee shop.

I hope that you spread the word and encourage people to buy copies of Chicks Dig Comics.

4. In other news, I am watching Sailor Moon S for the first time. See point 2, above. Erm.

At any rate, the English dub and the English subtitles do not match AT ALL. There are two almost entirely different stories going on, here. (I’ve read up on the situation on TV Tropes and various wikis, and I understand this is A Thing with Sailor Moon. But, SHEESH.)

Also, we can put this in the same category with Seventh-Doctor-and-Ace Doctor Who in the sense that, if I had seen this when it originally aired, I might have come out sooner. I didn’t see Ace until a couple years ago, but she is exactly what I would have had a raging crush on when I was younger. Ditto Sailor Uranus.

5. I have gotten up to the rise of Augustus in The History of Rome podcast (which I am still loving.) And it’s making me want to re-watch HBO’s Rome series. Despite the historical inaccuracies of the show.

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Greasy, shedding things

I listened yesterday to the Fuzzy Typewriter Podcast regarding the movie ALIEN. In light of the forthcoming movie Prometheus, Paul has decided to watch the four Alien franchise movies and discuss them with friends. This podcast covered the first movie, Ridley Scott’s Alien.

I’m not going to talk about the movie. I am going to talk about a feature of science fiction. Namely, that humans are dirty.

I work in a high-tech job. I’m an air traffic controller. The walls of my workspace are 3.5-meter-tall racks of specialized computer equipment, each rack mounted on a raised floor that jets cold, dry air up into the workroom. There are, if I remember the tech tour correctly, over a hundred miles of cable — computer, electrical, telephonic — in my building. The system I work on is triple-redundant. Parts can and are hot-swapped out in under ninety seconds should a component fail.

My workspace is really quite dirty.

It’s dirty because the cleaning contractors do not touch the equipment. This is right and good and proper — I don’t want a stray shot of Windex taking out my scope, and I don’t want my frequencies turned off by a Swiffer. But it means the consoles never get clean.

Occasionally large wafts of grey … stuff … comes floating down from the top of the consoles, the parts of the racks we can’t see. The stuff is, frankly, us. It’s human hair and skin and sweat. It’s the stuff of dust bunnies, writ large. It’s there because we humans effluviate. We shed, we smear, we streak.

We shed our skin every forty-five days. Where do you think it goes?

Just because the future is technologically advanced from right now doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to be cleaner. Particularly if the tech involved is a set piece of important gear used by multiple people. If it belongs to no-one, no-one is responsible for cleaning it. If it’s important, then no-one will be allowed to mess with it. When one shift knocks off and the next one comes in, no-one takes the time to scrub it all down. You pick up the pen at the station, you sign in, you adjust the volume knob, and you start touching things. You get to work.

And you get your self all over everything.

I love the Nostromo. It looks right to me, it looks familiar. The old control room floor, the one I worked in for three years before we moved to the new floor, everything on the old floor was beige. Almost nothing in that room had been beige originally. It was beige because cigarette smoking had been allowed in the control room for over thirty years. The crew of the Nostromo smokes. They sweat, they exercise, they work, they sit around. They clean the galley, certainly, and I bet they clean the head. but they don’t clean the console, or the door handles, or the corridor ceilings. And those things are grimy, as they should be.

The place I work looks totally awesome. It’s full of touch screens and swivel arms and lots of HD monitors and blinky lights and there are voices calling out from speakers and people talking in assured quiet voices constantly. It is, frankly, kinda badass. I love it. But the lights are very, very dim. It is a badass high tech environment coated in a thin layer of human.

February 17 2012

1. I was going to come up with a more thoughtful post of substance for today, but yesterday got away from me and I didn’t. I actually … have a bit of stress about that, but it’s my blog, and using for a diary is one of the functions of same. And any defensiveness you detect, Gentle Reader, in this paragraph, is aimed at the critical voices in my head, not at you.

2. Instead of thoughtful blogging yesterday afternoon, I took a lovely walk with my elderly hound. The weather is still unseasonably warm, and Jake and I walked about a mile or so in the neighborhood.

At some point I am going to contemplate a walk and I will remember that I enjoy walks now. That they are not horrid slogs through a fog of exhaustion and pain, as they were a few years back when I was hideously anemic. (The first walk I went on after I’d been taking iron pills four times a day (and omg that was unpleasant in other ways) I felt like Peter Parker after the spider bite. I felt like I could leap over cars, I felt so damn good.) But these days I am not in need of surgery and massive quantities of iron. These days, I regularly work out. These days, strolling with the elderly hound through the neighborhood is downright pleasant. But there’s no telling that to my head. When I sit in my house and think, “do I want to go on a walk?” I imagine the exhaustion of past years and am disinclined. When I actually get out there with the dog, it’s nice.

3. I am really enjoying the editing work I’m doing these days. I was explaining to a friend that it’s a combination of herding cats and being nibbled to death by ducks. But it’s an incredibly rewarding herding death. I like the things to which I contribute. I like the people I work with. I like the contributors whose writing I am privileged to wrangle.

I am finding that I think I have a decent attitude for the job. I am certain I would not have, seven or ten years ago, but I am older now, and am both calmer in some ways and much more of a hardcase in others. But air traffic control has taught me that any day that does not contain a plane crash is a good day. Editing is very laid-back in comparison.

Productivity meaurement

So, a question for you all. Under what circumstances do you feel most productive?

“Feeling productive” can be measured by any means you like. It’s about how you feel, after all.

What makes you feel like you are getting things done? Do you make lists? Schedules? Stack up the finished products? Get paid? Win awards? Measure gains or losses? Do you count how much free time you have, or time in meetings, or time spent staring into space?

What makes you feel like you are getting things done?

Kids, CONvergence, and fatality aviation accidents; things in a list

1. Re-entry from the kids having summer camps last week, back to having normal routines, this is going about as well as you’d expect. J tells me that both children appear to have forgotten all math-related skills in a week. I’m not looking forward to my school-teaching days this week.

I hold my breath, leaving M at summer camps. He loves them, but situations where he has to negotiate interactions with his peers are awfully tricky. Unpredictable. Liable to end in punching. Yet the past week seemed to go okay.

2. We’re cleaning the basement. Slowly, painfully, clearing things out of the playroom that don’t get used or that the kids have outgrown. We pawned off an ancient and decrepit hide-a-bed couch. Getting it out of the basement resulted in only superficial injuries, yay.

3. There was a fatality crash this weekend. Not my immediate area of control. It’s fascinating, watching the consensus narrative be constructed. The pilot had been in a crash eight years ago, in which he was flying and his wife and two daughters were killed, leaving him and his son alive. This crash the pilot killed himself and his second wife, leaving the same son, now sixteen years old, critically injured. The narrative we are constructing here at work is that the pilot was at fault both times, killing his family twice. I do not know if that is true; the local news where he died is saying that the previous crash was attributed to pilot error, but I haven’t seen the NTSB report. I asked our Quality Assurance guys, and they haven’t seen the NTSB report from last time, either. We don’t know. Eyewitness reports from the field at this current crash seem to indicate the pilot was doing things in a non-standard and hazardous way.

It is easy to blame the dead guy. It’s easy to say he’s killed his family twice. That narrative fosters the belief that the accident was preventable, and that if WE were the pilot, WE would not have done whatever he did, and WE would have kept our families alive. It’s so easy to be afraid of the unknown and uncontrollable, and so easy to say that it must have been his fault. I know I’m not immune to this sort of thinking. I want to believe that the hazards of the world can be mastered by me, if I am vigilant and responsible and work hard and do the right thing.

Fatality accident statistics beg to differ.

Only half of aviation fatality accidents are attributable to pilot error.

4. I started watching the British tv series Misfits on Hulu. Teenage criminal offenders accidentally get superpowers. It’s a … It’s a weird little show. Dark, gritty, not funny or light-hearted. I really am enjoying it.

5. Work is still busy.

6. CONvergence! I’m going to be at CONvergence this coming weekend, Thursday through Sunday! Thursday and Saturday I will be there with my kids, doing family things. This happens to include running the party circuit Saturday night, collecting snacks and free junk from semi-drunk cabana parties. My kids love doing that way more than I do. Friday and Sunday I will be at the con doing Sigrid-things, like being on panels. Hope to see a number of you there!

why I don’t post so much in the summer

When work is busy, I have less to say about it. When work is slow, I can tell you all about the tv show I watched on my breaks, or this podcast I listened to, or the book I am reading, or the projects I am working on. When work is busy, there’s just work, and it is difficult to explain to people what I am doing all day.

Talking to planes.

Talking to planes with just one guy and a bunch of boxes, packages being hauled from the main depot to the small North Dakota towns, packages full of books or clothes or mail order sex toys or magazines or dvds or the bacon of the month club. Talking to planes full of passengers halfway between Dusseldorf and Los Angeles, sleeping or stretching their legs or wishing they’d put more music on their mp3 player or eating peanuts or trying to keep the baby from crying. Talking to planes with a family and two dogs heading up to the cabin for a week, with their fishing gear and the bickering teenagers and no cell phone reception once they get there. Talking to planes with the coworkers whose turn it is to have the co-op’s plane heading up to the company retreat, with their suitcases and the radio catching WCCO out of the Twin Cities, talking voices warbling in and out of reception as the lakes float by underneath. Talking to the commuter pilots we talk to every single day as they fly back and forth between company factories, a round-robin of parts and V.I.P.s that never ends and never seems to wreck their good mood. Talking to pilots carrying dead bodies of military personnel to their homes. Talking to pilots carrying body parts on ice in a race to get them to the person who needs them. Talking to pilots who speak seven languages, one of which is English. Talking to pilots who speak three languages, one of which is supposed to be English, and maybe is on a good day. Talking to pilots who are bored. Talking to pilots who are nervous. Talking to pilots who are fighting with their husbands when they get home. Talking to pilots who are trying to get next weekend off. Talking to pilots who have just started their careers and have something to prove. Talking to pilots whose only goal is the cold beer waiting for them at home.

And the pilots all need something.

They need a clearance out of the airport. They need a clearance in. They need to know what those clouds up ahead are doing. They need to know how long they’ll get delayed. They need to know where the air is smoother so the flight attendants can serve the drinks. They need to deviate, move to the right about thirty miles, so they don’t get too close to that iffy-looking thunderstorm. They need to climb, to descend, to practice that approach a couple of times before their exam, to turn, to slow down, to speed up, to take a re-route, to avoid those storms, to avoid these winds, to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing because that is flying.

There is another next thing, until the pilot and the people sleeping and talking and eating and crying and working and humming and reading behind them in the plane are all on the ground safely.

That’s what I do, on these work days I don’t post much. I talk to planes. I tell them where to go, I tell them what to do, I tell them what they need to know so that the pilot can make smart decisions about where they will fly. And it’s a bit tiring. And that’s why I don’t post.