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.

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.

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…

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.

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

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.

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!