Danr Bjornsson

Danr Bjornsson Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "norse_danr" journal:

October 8th, 2009
10:50 am [Link]	Finally, some justice The unions and employees have been asking for it to die since Rumsfeld started it. The President promised during his campaign to kill it. And finally, it's going to happen: NSPS will be dismantled by 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/07/AR2009100704041.html?hpid=sec-nation The so-called "Pay for Performance" system had several problems that made it the opposite of what it intended, and promoted behaviors that has match the bad stereotypes people apply to government workers: 1. It made it easier for supervisors to hire "who they know" instead of "best qualified" candidates for any job. 2. It put the rewards system under the control of a secretive panel. Not even a FOIA* request can reveal how the board decided who got bonus money and how much. The employees were allowed to know only was who was on the panel, their final rating, and how much money they got, 3-4 months after the rating period ended. 3. The appeals process consisted of asking the same people who made the initial decision to reconsider their decision -- how often do you think that changed the result? 4. The rewards were entirely depending on who you know and whether your boss could write, and lots of supervisors I know in government write like 8th graders. 5. If a higher level rater did not like what the rater wrote, he could force the rater to change it. In the older system the higher rater can disagree, but the rater got his or her say without interference from above. 6. It was unconstitutional in its early years, taking money Congress had allocated for inflation raises and diverting it to reward those who were game the system under the #5. 7. It was complex, changed monthly, and full of "it depends..." language, such that only the people running it (CPACs, the government equivalent of HR) understood it. They like to keep it that way by refusing to answer questions, or delaying paperwork for people who asked questions. Yes, I can name names on the above points if requested by appropriate investigative authority. The only bad news here is that NSPS won't be completely gone until 2012. The older system has its flaws, but NSPS took a not-so-great thing and made it terrible. * see http%3a//www.usdoj.gov/foia for more info on what FOIA is (Leave a comment)
August 27th, 2009
05:51 pm [Link]	What's worse than Atlanta rush-hour traffic? Before you try to guess the answer, remember that Atlanta rush-hour traffic is best described as bumper-to-bumper traffic at 70 mph. But worse that that, I found out today, is Atlanta rush-hour traffic in a downpour. The contributing factor is that, despite 50 inches of rain a year, the roads have inadequate drainage. (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
July 28th, 2009
07:46 pm [Link]	IE8 hangs/crashes/failures continued I have IE8 to the point that it is working better. It's still slow but fails to load pages much less often. The solution was to uninstall the enhanced features such as SilverLight, anything with the phrase "Windows Live" in the name, and anything with the phrase "Add-In" in the name. So now it acts just like IE7, only slower. And that, as they say, is progress. Current Mood: cranky Tags: internet explorer 8 epic failure (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
July 25th, 2009
03:19 pm [Link]	Blackberry picking Isabel and I picked blackberries today. The farm had thornless (mostly) bushes, which I did not know existed. It was the start of the season so most of the berries were not ripe yet, but we got 1 quart each after about 75 minutes' picking. That should be enough for a really good pie. The farm also had some playground stuff for the kids, if you have any, and offers their facilities for other events. So if you're looking for a really classy wedding here is a picture from their web site: (Leave a comment)
July 20th, 2009
09:55 am [Link]	Just when you thought the military was environmentally unfriendly Let's face it, making large numbers of bad people stop doing bad things can, occasionally, cause incidental harm to God's other creatures who are unlucky enough to be nearby. This becomes more likely as the bullets get bigger, say the M16's .223 round versus the 500-pound bomb. But now, a robotics company has developed an experimental robot that ingests plant material and burns it as fuel. Don't worry about the safety of your pets or relatives, because the robot is a vegetarian. It prefers a diet of twigs, grass clippings, and wood chips: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,532492,00.html The robot's name is, appropriately, EATR (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot). (Leave a comment)
July 19th, 2009
09:32 am [Link]	For anyone who's been to Korea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCel2n7Rygo Warning! This song may get stuck in your head, so have some other music handy afterward. (Leave a comment)
09:16 am [Link]	IE8 is here: run away, run away! Microsoft slipped Internet Explorer 8 into the latest batch of patches. When conducting updates, I am in the habit of looking at the list they propose to install each time, rather than blindly accepting their suggestions. So when I saw IE8 in there, I immediately opened another browser tab to check the usual online product reviews to see if I really wanted it. They all had great things to say about it. IE8 followed in IE7's footsteps in that it has a lot of new features, where "new" is defined as features other browsers have had for years. Plus it claimed to load pages faster. But since much of the web is written to use IE's proprietary featues instead of international standards, few computers can live without it. So I allowed it to install. Since then, more than half the web pages I visit won't load the first, second, or sometimes third try. Other Internet applications don't have the problem. I am guessing that IE8's speed is predicated on the software expecting the web to be fast, and if the page doesn't come down the link fast enough, it gives up. So I searched for a setting to change that, and haven't found it yet. But that's just a guess. The MS support forums are full of people with this same complaint. The solution is a long process that basically reconfigures IE8 to be more like IE7. So I'm going back to Opera for my needs, because it (1) has all the features I want and (2) has less than 10% of the brower market. The latter point is what I call "security by obscurity." P.S. Now I have to check all the online software review sites and see which ones are owned by Microsoft, so I can avoid using them for reviews of MS products. Current Mood: aggravated Tags: microsoft ie8 problems (Leave a comment)
May 29th, 2009
06:41 pm [Link]	I heard that the President was on Facebook And here's the proof: http://www.slate.com/id/2217225/ Apparently, a lot of world leaders are these days: http://www.theatlantic.com/a/facebookhumor.mhtml (Leave a comment)
May 22nd, 2009
04:07 am [Link]	Never fly through Narita I wrote a long and amusing anecdote about why the Narita Airport in Tokyo is badly designed and made even worse by recent media mythology about swine flu, and therefore you need at least an hour to make a connection between gate 31 and 32 which are 50 feet apart. But LJ doesn't play well with secure (aka 3rd party) browsers, so when I went to post, it crashed. So that's another reason for me not to post very often. Bah. Current Mood: exhausted Current Music: what? (Leave a comment)
July 7th, 2007
12:39 pm [Link]	Our greyhounds aren't spoiled they are just classified, scientifically speaking, as liquids. So when Isabel saw this, she had to get one: "It's dog furniture that will look good in the living room," she said. I talked her into buying just one until we can see how durable it is going to be. Most dog beds last only a year before going irretrievably flat or being destroyed by Kelly's urge to dig. This one must last 4 years to be cost-effective. If it works out, we'll post more info on the source. Danr Current Mood: lethargic (Leave a comment)

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