And Firefox ate my bookmarks.

The above was to be the title of the diary I was writing this afternoon when the power to my computer suddenly went out. Along with the lights, clock radios, AC powered electronic devices, traffic signals, 7-11's, and downtown office buildings throughout the city. (That is not a solecism; although Los Angeles does have an official downtown, only a fraction of its office buildings are located there.)

If I recall correctly, the priorities for surviving some sort of emergency (plane crash, flooding, lost in the woods) are:

1 - Positive Mental Attitude (PMA): This doesn't mean you have to say, "I'm so happy that my house and all my personal belongings have been destroyed," but you should say, "I/we can get through this."

2 - First Aid: Treat all life-threatening injuries if you can. Bandage wounds and splint fractures to prevent further damage, but do not attempt full treatment without:

Part 1

There is an old Fremen saying: we say things which are taken as wisdom, but wisdom is not a thing which can be spoken. This is also true of the desert.

The Big Book of Fremen Sayings

I wish I had been chronicling my adventures as a database engineer for the past 16 weeks, but if wishes were fishes we'd all end up in the drink.

I could have regaled you with stories of abandoned cron jobs that had been sending perl compilation errors to an unused mailbox every ten minutes for the past six months.

I could have frightened you with a database schema designed by either a madman, or a committee, or a committee of madmen.

And now, I could make you rage against the "startup" culture which secretly takes the rest of the team out for a company drink on a Friday afternoon while I get fired.

You are a good friend.

It is the most dramatic and unusual die variety to come out of the Mint in 50 years. Two different dies with extra design elements: extra leaves on the left side of the corn husk on a select few of the 2004 Denver Mint Wisconsin Quarters. They were both discovered at the same time and apparently were struck at the same time.

Many still await the rice, sugar, noodles, milk powder and biscuits stacked in warehouses. The government has blamed bureaucratic bungling and incompetence. Survivors blame corruption.

I didn’t watch the State of the Union. Why bother? Bush has nothing to say that won’t be reiterated in the talking points of the evening news, pro and con, for the next 48 hours. After that, it’s back to the Michael Jackson trial, and Iraq.

I skimmed the speech, or at least the official text. It doesn’t include any “boos� from the Democrats. It’s all pretty much lame duck stuff, a gripe here about the appointment of judges, a paragraph there about heterosexual marriage. Some very muted remarks about Iran, and some very blatant lies about Social Security. The same administration that spent the Social Security surplus last year is now concerned about the system going bankrupt?

The following diary may contain technical inaccuracies.

About two weeks ago, okay, actually, it was December 28, there was a bit of an electrical storm in the neighborhood. Understand that these are very unusual in Southern California, like every five or ten years. All the computer equipment seemed fine, except one of the cable boxes (digital cable) was having trouble with certain stations, oh and the cable modem was intermittently unable to connect to the gateway.

The next morning, I go to turn on my laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 4090xDVD I bought in 1999, and I get the message:

<quote>Insert system disk in drive.
Press any key when ready...</quote>

For the past two years or so, my primary employer has been a small company that develops computer technology for government projects. These projects are not so much about software engineering as they are about gently massaging various technologies into shape for occasional demonstrations, and of course writing lots of reports about what the project will do, what the project was supposed to do, where the project is today, and where all the money went. As a contractor, I fortunately don’t have to spend a lot of time filling out those reports -- someone does it for me.

That’s the specific case; the general case is that I’m an internet consultant who has outlived his usefulness. The California freelance market has shifted, the relationship between exploiter to exploited has been reversed. There is an excess of “talent�, and I can’t compete and keep my rate at its modest level.