Servusamanu.com

I remade my portfolio website: RobertDrake.net.  For the last year or so there’s been nothing there; I’ve had a redesign on my list for quite some time, but it never happened.  With a few snow days trapping me indoors (and away from work), I finally got around to doing a few things.

Now, RobertDrake.net is not ‘finished’ per se.  I’ve got plenty of content that I want to drop on there, a growing list of design tweaks, but overall I’m happy to reintroduce it to the world.

As part of this redesign, I’m making a few changes to Servusamanu as well.  As you can tell, I’ve already done some design tweaks.  Now, I’m making changes to the ‘process’.

Back when I started this website, I was updating daily.  In theory, I was writing something new everyday, but in reality I was throwing up the first interesting article that appeared whether I had something to say about it or not.  I’d like to think that I spent a little more time on quality once I changed to three updates a week, but I’ve never been especially happy with the quality.

In fact, the website has at times been more of a distraction.   With that in mind, I’m planning on going down to a single ‘change’ a week.  Possibly a bit of content, possibly a tweak to the web-design.  I’ll be doing the same with RobertDrake.net so neither site falls into complete abeyance.  If something especially interesting crosses my path, I might still toss it online, but I don’t intend to update with quite the same regularity as I have.   Hopefully, with less emphasis put on meeting my regular quota, I’ll be a little more active in making things ‘good’.  We’ll see how that actually works out, but here’s to planning!

Cheers and thanks for reading.

While reseaching something else, I lost myself in a loop of Wikipedia articles detailing the various pay scales of the United States government.  It’s an interesting look at a process that’s been heavily codified, but in no way even the slightest bit simpler.

As I understand it, pay grades go something like this:

Blue-collar, non-military, workers are paid according to the rules of the Federal Wage System, which guarentees competitive saleries for positions.  There are no direct pay grades, but instead the hiring department calculates acceptable payment according to the local prevailing wages.  Pay grades are constructed through polling and salary research in the specific area and field that the work is being done.

Military members are, of course, paid according to the U.S. Uniformed Services Pay Grades This includes members of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Corps (the longest branch name ever.).  There are a number of special payments due to military members, which are briefly outlined in this article on United States Military Pay.

Most federal workers, non-military, are paid according to the general schedule, which specifies pay grades in a hierarchy based primarily on years of experience.  This general schedule accounts for some 71% of all federal employees, but does not include Post Office or Foreign Service employees, or individuals employed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which each have their own specific pay schedules.

Senior members of the foreign service and other top level employees are paid according to the Senior Executive Service pay grades.  This should not be confused with the Executive Schedule, which defines pay grades of the president, cabinet members, and other top level political appointees.

All of this is roughly summarized in this document from last year that includes the actual dollar amounts accorded each rank. However, it is worth mentioning that a number of departments have replaced the general schedule with new pay-band systems.  This includes, as far as I can tell, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Defense civil service positions, the Navy’s civil service positions, the Department of Homeland Security, and a number of other groups including most scientific or medical professions.

A little more information on general pay grades and schedules can be found here at the office of personnel management.  I’ve yet to find a definitive account of how members of the white house office are paid.  This document gives their actual salaries, but not what grade or scale they follow.  As far as I can tell, they fall under the Executive Schedule, but the payments don’t seem to align exactly.

Fascinating stuff these pay-grades, but it’s a terrible pain to actually track down.  It appears the trend seems to be toward removing the seniority-based pay systems and moving more toward incentive based pay bands.  With so many different systems floating around, I’d be surprised if that process manages to gain ground particularly quickly.  Either way, I’m dead sure that it’ll only make this research harder the next time round.

Beignets!  I cooked em for breakfast.  Not shown:  burning canola oil scars, powdered sugar debacle, or dough-gummed sink.  Oh well!  It made for a good breakfast, beginning to a hopefully even better day.  This evening, I’ll be seeing L’Italiana in Algeri  by Gioachino Rossini somewhere in New Haven.  (I’m a guest.  The arrangements have been made without me having to worry about it.)  I can’t say I know anything about the play (The Italian in Algeria…that means something I guess), but everything I’ve been treated to down there has been excellent.

As for my own creative accomplishments, I finished another short story, this one entitled Hull Breach.  I’m planning on submitting it to…someone…today, but I haven’t decided who yet.  At the moment, Clarkesworld, looks like the best.  The online submission form makes life significantly easier.  Strange Horizons, an online e-zine (but a paying one), also has a nice online submission form that saves me a little stamp money.  Lastly, there’s the trio of big science fiction print publications, analog, SF&F, and asimovs.  I currently have a story out to Asimov, so that’s off the list and I just got a rejection slip from SF&F, so I’m not feeling the love there at the moment.  I don’t really want to submit this story to Analog just yet, because if my other story gets rejected I’d prefer to send it there than this one.  This story definitely isn’t as good…

That isn’t say I’m not damn happy to have it done finally.  Pain in the ass from beginning to end.  I wrote once it in full.  Hated it.  Started over.  2nd draft was terrible.  I took my first throwaway and merged it with my second throwaway to make it into a mostly complete draft that told a nice little story, but also bored me to tears.  In a pique of desperation I added a second viewpoint, which let me pull some of the text away from the first viewpoint and add a little extra color to the world.  By checker-boarding the viewpoints (1st view, 2nd view, 1st, 2nd etc) it made for a much more interesting read, and actually made the scenario a little clearer overall (the danger of tossing in two many disparate points of view).  Unfortunately, none of these drafts solved the fundamental problem: the story had no end.  It was never really a story in the first place, really just a premise explored (What would generic person A do if ordered to destroy Earth).

I’ve yet to figure out exactly where inspiration comes from, but during the last and final edit I managed to put in a few lines right at the end that provided an acceptable coda, if not an especially fulfilling finale.  In total, the story came out to some 4300 words, less than half the length of my last short story despite spending at least twice as much time on it.  Sigh!

I’ve got a few more stories on the docket, but for the moment I want to concentrate on taking what I’ve got and putting it out somewhere.  I’ve become increasingly of the mind that publication is less like sniping and more like a shotgun blast.  There doesn’t appear to be any good way to choose a publication and design something for them, you just have to write a billion things and figure someone out there will pay for something someday.  At least, that’s the theory that I’m currently working on.  Future updates guaranteed, I’m sure.

I won’t be leaving for New Haven for another 6 hours, so I’ve got sometime to get some research done, maybe start a story, keep playing Napoleonic Total War, etc.  I really do have too many hobbies, but really, what else would I do with my time?  Tomorrow is Tennis, possibly Minnewaska, probably some web-design upkeep.  Enthralling stuff I know.

Before I get to rambling on the nuances of freelance web-design, allow my to play myself off with a picture of my home-cooked (from a box mix) beignets!

The internet, for all its ability to communicate information, has become something of a haven for faux science and con-artistry.  Fake medicine, in particular, has become entrenched on the ‘inter-webs’ with real seeming advertisements being common even on otherwise legitimate websites.  Aside from a few stray websites here and there, there hasn’t always been a strong response against these sorts of harmless, but useless (at best) medications.

This infographic seems to be a step in the right direction.   Sadly, orange juice doesn’t seem to be as amazingly healthy as I would like, but I’ll probably still go for my daily vitamin C infusion.  It’s much more pleasant than fish oil…

Every time I go to Servusamanu to tweak something it gets logged like any other visit. Since I’m a unrepetent Opera user, my usage statistics get skewed. It turns out that most websites don’t get 80% Opera usage, which is a damn shame since it’s a great browser.

What’s more interesting is the Netscape values. The browser wars between Netscape and IE defined early internet age. We’re still dealing with all the random code tweaks that got put in to one up the other browser now, and as the graph shows, Netscape hasn’t had more than 10% market share in the last decade. Opera actually has more market share than netscape, and yet I can hardly see Opera propelling large waves of development in the big browsers. Oh how times have changed.

As a web developer, browsers only make life more difficult, each requires its own special handling. The sooner we can bump IE6 off the list, the sooner we’ll finally be able to write standards compliant code without the page becoming completely demolished. I look forward to double checking the graph in a few years.

http://www.physorg.com/news183231468.html

I’m pushing for the black circle in the top left.  That looks like a good one.

I’ve been on vacation for a week. In lieu of a writing update, allow me to bring you along my travel itinerary of the New Orleans French Quarter.

March 14th, the morning:
Flight is delayed by about five hours due to heavy wind and backed up flights. The airport starts to look a little bit like the Super Dome after Katrina. A few more hours and roving bands of looters might have started to riot against the TSA.

Mid-afternoon: Our three and a half hour flight finally lands. We checked into the Maison Dupuy, a beautiful hotel on Toulouse streets on the north side of the french quarter. After perusing our room and getting settled, we go outside to start our vacation. The weather is a cool mid 60s, perfect for strolling the narrow roads of the old city.

Late-afternoon: We eat at Remoulade. I had a shrimp po’boy, my first taste of Louisiana cuisine. The bread is fantastic, a cross between a crumbly dinner roll and french bread. Afterwards, we got some beignets (fried dough suffocated in powdered sugar) from the famous Cafe du Monde. Despite my on again, off again, allergy to coffee, I had a cafe au lait for the experience. Very unnecessary. The fresh-squeezed orange juice is much preferable.

March 15th morning: We have breakfast at the Cafe Beignet near the statues of jazz musicians. I ahd the french bread french toast, an interesting take on a pretty standard breakfast item. Again, the fresh squeezed orange juice is an excellent choice.

We spend the mid-morning touring the city beginning with a stroll of the french market filled with the various sellers of dresses and watches and touristy crap along side local foodstuffs and similar offerings. We walked around Jackson Square beside the be-horsed statue of Andrew Jackson in mid gallop of his defense of the city. We listened to the tuba playing street musicians and took in the Mississippi air.

Our afternoon was taken up by a bus trip to the Oak Alley Plantation. Our bus driver was an encyclopedia of creative tense usage, an interesting taking on the usual rambling monologue. The Oak Alley Plantation is, itself, a gorgeous greek revival family house from the 1800s. The surrounding oak trees, each around 300 years old or more, form a shaded driveway of sorts, almost like statues. The house was equally ornate and gorgeous with some old rooms and period furniture in place.

On our return from the plantation, we stopped into the Meltdown Popsicle stand. I had a pineapple cilantro Popsicle. I’m not sure I would order that again…

After an afternoon nap, we had dinner at the Gumbo Shop, a popular and moderately upscale restaurant nestled amongst one of the old french courtyards. Our waiter was a jovial ex-navy seaman who was somewhat confused by my fellow traveler’s disinterest in cajun cuisine. I made up fr that by ordering the crawfish etoufee, chicken andoulle gumbo, and praline sundae.

Again we went to bed after some more gift shopping. We bought some beignet mix, some postcards, and a whole collection of shot glasses.

March 16th morning: My favorite breakfast in New Orleans was at the Court of Two Sisters. Their jazz buffet was well worth the $20 something per person expense. A trio of jazz musicians played while the waiters kept an endless supply of orange juice refilled between plates of crawfish salad, turtle soup, grits and grillades, bananas foster, and the best sweet potatoes I’ve ever had. The courtyard was itself a beautiful arrangement beneath a canopy of wisteria, sadly not yet in bloom.

Instead of spending our entire visit in the french quarter, we braved the New Orleans street car system, (about as inefficiently organized as it could be) to the Garden District. We toured six blocks of mansions and stopped into the Lafayette Cemetery to view the above ground tombs. Beautiful houses, beautiful cemetery. I’ve now got a running list of architectural features to toss onto any house I might build someday, starting with surrounding gardens, inner courtyards, and liberal use of second story rot-iron balconies.

Back in the french quarter, we ate at Johnnys, a famous po’boy shop on St. Louis street. I had the Johnny special: roast beef, ham, and cheese, and the sweet potato fries. Both were well worth the wait and health code violations it took to get the food.

In evening we got hurricanes on Bourbon street and toured that famous road a little bit further, but we were tired. Back at our apartment we watched lost and got ready for St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick’s Day: The streets were especially quiet in the morning, all the parties still sleeping off their pre-gaming. We ate breakfast at the Pere Antoine. I found the service uninspired, but my red beans and rice with andoulle sausage was quite good. Afterwards, we watched a film crew for the HBO series Treme filming in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

We had the option of taking a Katrina Tour (too depressing), a steamboat tour (I worked on a boat), or a swamp tour. We choose the swamp tour. It was touristy, I suppose, but we saw snapping turtles, plenty of alligators, and an assortment of birds along an old oil company canal that connected to the deeper bayou. Jean Lafitte’s swamp tours did a good job keeping the two hour tour entertaining even for the people less enthused by nature.

On the advice we overheard from one of our fellow swamp tourists, we ate at the Mona Lisa pizza place on the East Side of Royale street almost outside of the old city. The pizza was averageish, but the bruschetta was excellent and the atmosphere was very cozy. It seems more like a pizza place for natives than a tourist facade. Fair warning, their music selection was highly eclectic — Alanis Morissette and Mame right after each other.

After dinner Bourbon street started to liven up. By midnight we had seen a half a dozen live entertained including a street corner jazz band seemingly assembled from nowhere, a New Orleans parade in its resplendent bead-enthralled glory, and a good experience of what Mardi Gras must be like. The St. Patrick’s Day parade is seemingly a bit less indulgent and there’s definitely less college kids walking around, so probably the better experience if booze-besottedness isn’t on the itinerary.

Our last day, the 18th, was basically a day of rest. We ate at McDonalds in the morning, walked along the boardwalk, toured the Mint, and finished up our exploration of the old streets.

For dinner, we ate at Broussards, one of the old high cuisine restaurants snuggled in beside routine bars and tourist trap gift sellers. In a fun bit of irony, our quiet and mild-mannered busboy had been a dancers from jazz band the night before. The food was less explicitly Cajun than the other establishments we went to, concentrating more on routine french preparation and haute cousine standards. Predictably, we walked away a hundred dollars lacking, but the old style formality was a nice coda to a vacation that saw everything from 12 ounce rum drinks to Who Dat shirts to old french antique stores.

On the 19th we came home. The week was a thoroughly enjoyable adventure down south. Any longer and we would have likely gotten board, but four/five days in the quarter let us experience pretty close to everything they had going. It’s a pretty great vacation spot especially if renting a car isn’t an option (or undesired). There are plenty of hotels within walking distance and it’s nice relaxing experience. I’ve managed to get a few pictures off my camera. Enjoy!

I’m pretty sure that I’m almost done with my first place through.  I’m a soldier, no special biotics for me, but I haven’t gotten bored and I’m looking forward to going through again once more before passing the game along.

As a sequel, they avoided the usual problems.  The story is still good and a natural follow up from the first one.  They didn’t dumb down the main character to make him weak so that he could build up again.  Sure, you have the same options as far as learning new skills just like a brand new character, but I never felt like Shepherd was some newbie.   As far as controls and the world, they kept the best things, removed some of the annoyances, but stayed true to what the game was.  A lot of games either take no chances and make the same game twice, or go too far making something new and lose the essence of the game.  Mass Effect 2 remains a space opera story with a first-person shooter / RPG hybrid.  It’s pretty, polished, and a lot of fun.  Mass Effect 2 is a worthy member of an RPG lineage that started back with Baldur’s Gate and company some fifteen years ago (yeah, it’s been that long).

That said, I am starting to take umberage at these Day 1 DLC releases.  I understand the reasoning, but making me download content on the first day is just annoying.  Mass Effect has at least done it fairly well by making most of it free with the initial purchase of the game, but require purchase for anyone borrowing the game.  That’s a little less egregious  than what Dragon Age pulled with $10 expansions out practically before the game was.

I miss Rome.  (The HBO series).  It was supposed to go for a few more seasons.  Watching the second season, you could see they were opening up the story for the war with Marc Antony and the Jewish Rebellions.  The series had a lot of potential in it before it finally got canned.  I read somewhere that HBO was surprised by the numbers they received on the second season, but by the time they had the final count, the scenery and props had already been destroyed.  The delay and the cost was too much to continue on.

Since the series ended I’ve read Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of Rome and few sundry things.  I still miss seeing the history enacted using more modern media.  The stories are just as timeless as anything Shakespeare had going for him and the history has a strange way of seeming apropos.

I Claudius came across my path sometime in the last few weeks.  I still haven’t read the books, but the miniseries (staring a young Derek Jacobi)  was found easily enough.

Knowing enough of the history, I should hardly be surprised, by the sheer scope of the miniseries is impressive.  It follows the titular Claudius, a stammering gimp, from a few years prior to his birth to his death some seventy years (and four emperors) later.  It encompasses everything from Sejanus’ revolt to the jewish rebellions to Caligula’s delusion.  The family plots and betrayals almost become tiresome, they’re so numerous, but despite the moving history and revolving door cast, there is a humanity to the series that was impressive, even more so than Rome.

I cannot attest to the overall accuracy.  The scenery in particular seems wooden and cliche.  The political nuances are sometimes lost and there is no action whatsoever, but Claudius place in a horrific world is even more pronounced  than Octavian’s awkwardness in Rome.  The cruelty and debauchery is much more visceral.  To be truthful, it’s probably a far less accurate depiction than Rome, but I found myself oddly moved by the stammering Claudius trying to survive amongst a panoply of death, madness, and abject bestiality.  I, Claudius makes Shakespeare out of Rome and does a better job than he did.

It’s a rare sort of story and I found myself startled quite frequently.  It’s actually quite profane.  There’s a small bit of nudity and lots of implied violence, but very little is actually seen.  In place of more visual conclusions, the characters react to events that are almost always mentioned in passing.  It only works because the motivations are explored so throughly whether it be madness, greed, or ambitious and because the reactions of those involved are given just as much play.  The intensity of the characters and the lengths they go to furfill their aims is incredibly offputting.  I don’t need to see Caligula disembowel his incestuously impregnated sister.  The event is shocking without it, more so infact, because he manages to rule for quite a while afterwards.  The seemingly endless injustice of the world is perhaps what makes it so different from a modern story.

Further, there is no physical action.  At times it makes the plot plodding, but it also forces the characters to…well…act for one, but also the plot has to be constructed to make everything fit together.  Too many modern stories tell a loose story, but hide the cracks in action sequences.  It’s not that the action sequences are especially unpleasant; I can actually enjoy them sometimes, but they are used to hide grievous plot errors.  In a verbal drama, but those tricks aren’t available.  The character’s have to have motivations and their methods of acting have to have purpose.  The continuity of purpose shows more craft than I’m willing to give more movies I’ve seen credit for.  I might still be reeling from Avatar, as big a block of swiss-cheese as I’ve ever seen, but it seems to be a reoccurring complaint of mine.

Mostly and lastly, the movie took itself seriously.  I suppose this is always my complaint.  There seems to be a certain brand of flippancy and I’m not sure when it started.  Plenty of movies are gritty, but that doesn’t make them serious per se and I’m not using serious in quite the normal manner.  A movie like The Dark Knight is serious, in a sense.  It is a ‘gritty’ remake in that it’s meant to be realistic and plausible, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s about a man dressed like a bat.  And that’s a good movie.  Something avatar is basically just CGI porn with a story tacked on, but the stories it’s serious in the slightest.  The character’s are not made plausible in the slightest and the whole thing hangs on a few lines of motivation given at the beginning of the film.

I don’t miss visual or logical seriousness, but emotional serious seems so terrible lacking.  The movies that go for the more introspective angle always seem to flop on wasted melodramatics or postmodern humor.  There is little room for drama, which I will define as a realistic appraisal and reaction to an event, which does not necessarily have to be plausible.  Dark Knight is actually quite close in that sense, but somehow I just can’t make it fit.

Rome and I Claudius fall more in line with Band of Brothers in that character’s react and respond based on their reactions, but they are more constrained.  The victim does not therefore have the motivation to become more than they really could.  No one is so smart or rich or powerful than they can bend the realities of a world built to be intrinsically unfair.   Good does neither wins nor loses on any grand sense, but a story is told, with both the good and the bad being rewarded as it fits the story.  Moral engagement with moral neutrality.  That is my final definition of seriousness and it is a startling thing to see on film.

No more babbling from me.  I just hit 1000 words and that’s morally devastating.  No reason to right half so much.  Until next time, adieu!

This is a special kind of horrifying.  I can’t wait for network engineer barbie, complete with an ethernet cable necklace and blade server accessory…