Asymptomatic

Abby has been home with me for the past two days because the teachers a Downingtown Schools can't come to an agreement with their administration over how much money they should be making. We're lucky that Abby is very low-maintenence and that I'm able to be "at work" with her at home so that there's someone to keep an eye on her. Still, this teacher's strike is absolutely absurd, and I'll be happy to wait out the full state-allowed 23 days of strike to see a reasonable agreement reached - one that likely doesn't assent to the teachers' demands.

The teachers are asking for raises over 5 years totalling 23.75%. The board is offering them 18% over 4 years. It seems like a large gap, but think about this: It's an 18% raise in pay. That's higher than the average cost of living raises here. It's more raise than I've seen in 8 years. It's more than generous, but apparently it's not enough. An opinion article in the Daily Local News expresses my sentiments quite well.

The DASD board makes some great points about what is reasonable in terms of what the district can afford. Primarily, the surplus money that the teacher think they should have access to is a capital surplus. It's a fixed amount of money that won't renew after it's all spent, meaning that salaries would have to drop back when it's gone or people will be fired. ...

I don't remember the last time I brushed my hair.

I mean, I don't remember the last time I brushed my hair with the intent of putting it in order. I admit to maybe trying to pull a brush through my hair in mild curiosity, but never with intent.

It's curious. It's not a deliberate thing, it's just that I can seem to tossle my hair into "good enough" positions that I don't need to arrange it with purpose - or tools. ...

I'm not confused, but I daresay that there are a handful of folks out there who are. Let me try to clear a few things up. There a couple of projects that you need to know about.

The first is WordPress. WordPress is software. Besides being the bane of my day-to-day, occupying much of my free development time and actually earning me freelance money, WordPress is the software that runs on this site to present this blog to you. (I'm being careful about avoiding this whole "Powered by" phrasing, which may become the topic of another post.)

You can download a copy of the WordPress software for free, and upon uploading it to a web host that supports WordPress' basic requirements, you can have a weblog up and running within minutes.

Another project is WordPress MU, from now on in this post called "WPMU" for disambiguity. WPMU is the Multi-User version of WordPress. It's a bit of a misnomer, though. WordPress itself supports more than one user. What WPMU does that WordPress doesn't is allow a central installation to control multiple distinct sites of WordPress. Kind of like Skippy's plugin. It should really be called WordPress Multi-Site.

WPMU is also released under a GPL license, which means (among other things) you can download an install it just like you can WordPress. After all, WPMU refactors the core WordPress code every so often so that it keeps up with all of the core version's features. But WPMU is being used for another WordPress project that is causing some confusion - WordPress.com. more

How many of you are tired of paying $40 per book just to keep up with our roleplaying habits?

An idea ocurred to me a while back about starting a new roleplayers wholesale club.  Basically, members would buy in to the club with an initial investment.  This might get them a share in the company, perhaps something like a country club.

Every year, members would pay dues to keep their membership active.  I'm not exactly sure what these dues would be, if they would exist, or whether not paying them would end your membership.  I like the idea of a pay-as-you-go membership, where your annual fee activats your membership for a year, then goes dormant, and if you want to use it again, you have to pay the fee for the year.

Anyway, all of this money would go toward overhead, mostly of keeping the web site online, possibly also for contributing toward shipping.  Here's an idea:  You might buy shipping fees for a "year", and as long as you have sufficient shipping fees in your account, you can place whatever order you want.  Each order would deduct a set amount from those fees.

After your membership is current, you could shop in the online database where you would find products of the kind that usually satisfy the gamer crowd - RPGs, Anime, and Comics.  All of these items would be at very discounted prices, something near wholesale.

You would select which items you wanted, and would place your order into the system.  When a qualifying total dollar amount of product has been ordered, all orders would be processed.  So if the qualifying amount is $300, then the system would hold all orders until there was at least $300 of product to get, then the order to the distributor would be placed.  This would be based on the net price, not the retail price, if there was any difference.

The club site might also be a location for auctions for old RPG supplies or custom gamer stuff, like old books, hand-made dice bags, and fake vampire fangs.  There might even be room for on-demand printing of PDF source files.  This might be cool to implement through a deal with the Kinko's network, with local output and delivery.

The idea isn't so much to make money (which might be interesting, I admit), but to stop from having to pay $40 every time a new D&D book comes out.  We might also be able to sample some of the other offerings out there since we're not paying so much for our core books.

This brings to mind an additional feature:  We could use some of the membership fees to keep stuff "in stock".  Basically, we would include extra things in our order from the distributor that would not be part of the original order.  We would keep these things in stock for people to order directly from.  We could also read through and write reviews for these books online, then sell them at a used price.

Everyone I talked to about the wholesale idea seemed to think it was a good one.  I wonder what it would take to get this business going.  I looked over a credit application at Alliance Distribution, the guys who do most of the distribution of RPGs in the US, and it didn't look too complicated, but they did insist that you be a retail store in order to place orders with them.  I don't think this would be a problem if I submitted the appropriate forms to the state.  In all, it could cost a couple hundred bucks, all of which I could make up with my first round of membership fees.

After the first batch of members were added, they could recruit additional members and so on.  It could work in a pyramid scheme- As long as you had a certain number of paying members under you, you wouldn't have to pay your shipping dues.  Just thinking aloud here.

Advertising would be pretty simple apart from the word of mouth.  There are a few key sites online where gamers hang out.  Several web comics and specific RPG news sites could be the target of a banner campaign.  Just enough advertising could go up to bring in enough people for subsistence, then the rest could work off of referrals.

If the job of handling shipments eventually got to be a full-time job, there would be enough incoming money to support a full-time worker to handle reshipments and site maintenence.

Maybe it's all a pipe dream, but it's a pleasant one.

Wow, there really isn't anything to say this week.  Let's just go over a few random things...

The basement people are starting work in the basement on Monday.  I am pretty sure we told them we didn't want them around until Tuesday, and even at that, we're not going to be ready for them unless we rush around moving furniture this weekend.  This is going to be a pain, considering the other events that are already planned, for instance...

Brigham and Trish are bringing Kiria over on Sunday.  Anyone remember the Bentley's from Random Enterprises?  Yeah, well, Berta works with Brigham (at the same company, not necessarily on a daily basis), and we normally see each other at the Christmas party, but we got their late or something this past year, and so we didn't get to make the usual suggestion that "we should get together sometime".  Strangely, not mentioning getting together has worked out more in favor of getting together this year than it has in previous years.

So we're hoping that Kiria and Abby get along, and that we can come up with something interesting to do besides tour them around the disarrayed house, which they have never seen.  Berta said something about tacos.  This sounds like a good idea.  Everyone likes tacos.  Except vegetarians.  Maybe we should enlist them to help move furniture.  Then that would get done.

Saturday night, I have my weekly D&D game.  Dave is going to run our regular characters through something trivial on the side.  So I'll be playing Thomas the paladin.  Yay.  Bask in my joy.  Not.  For some reason, I'm just not feeling the fun in anything these days.  Maybe I need some vitamins or a nice jog or something.  That probably couldn't hurt.

Anyway, last week was Bob's week to run the Jen week, and we played the Rokugan.  I'm not thrilled with Rokugan, but I guess it's what we've got.  After all of the preaching of "we should all get together and make characters that get along", we all went and did our own things.  Way to go.

Saturday, tomorrow, morning, Berta has some scrapbooking thing to attend.  She has taken some pictures of Abby at school, and better drop them off at a photo place to print them before she has nothing to take to this party for use in making scrap books.  If Berta wants this as an outlet for creativity, that's fine, but I'm not entusiastic for having albums of stuff around the house that nobody ever looks at.  No, strike that.  Only relatives that are never around and want to waste time looking at photos rather than being with us ever want to look at those photos.

Tonight is the outing for Adam's birthday.  I must admit I just don't feel like going out.  On the other hand, I would otherwise be at home moving furniture.  Our dinner reservations are at a place that I don't know the location of (I made the reservation, so this is pretty strange), but the food seems reasonably priced on their web menu.  Chinese.  Dave said Adam has been there before, and I guess he likes it. 

I think I've been eating too much at lunch since I haven't been particularly hungry for dinner all week.  Gotta lay off the donuts.  Seriously.

Abby's going to stay over Mom's tonight, which will be interesting.  I suppose that there might be movie time suggested for this evening, which is fine, but this has several things going against it:

1. It's out in King of Prussia, so the later we stay, the even later we get home, and who knows when the snow they called for today might actually arrive.
2. Out dinner reservations are for 7, so any movie we see will probably start showing late.
3. No movie worth seeing is currently being played.  Maybe there's something I don't know about.  Maybe next month.

I'm getting tired of looking at Field Trip at work.  It's a nice project, but I have not peer review.  It's kind of disturbing to work on something exclusively - Exclusively.  I'm the only one writing it.  I'm the only one consuming it.  If the typical product lifecycle happens, the product will be completed, features will be offered by salespeople that existed on spec but not after design (as a result of cutting featuers to make deadline), and I'll be left to frantically code features in to meet the spectre of demand.  Cough.  Cough.

Other things on my mind at the moment:

• Spend more time with Abby.  Hopefully the spring (which starts tomorrow, officially) actuall starts showing itself.  This snow and cold stuff sucks.
• Abby and I need to get over our illnesses.  I've had this cough all week, and she's had hers for longer, it seems.  Warm weather (again) and getting outside would probably do us both much good.
• Reserving time with GCI.  I fear that if I keep submitting Mom's requests, our first year of reservation fee will go down the drain with thirty denied requests.  I've already cleared a trip to the Poconos this summer with Berta, in hopes of using my telescope.  We can drive up, set up, and come home at will, and only use two star credits.  I wonder if other people might like to go with us.
• Getting Field Trip done would be nice.  I would like to have time to include some of the features that we had originally spec'ed, like the forum and gradebook.  That would rock.
• Sacrificing virgins to keep our house from requiring any more contractors, or at least forcing them to yield to our will/schedule.  Nuff said.
• Random text generators.  You know, I've been stewing on this for a while, and I'm really intersted in trying to rewrite my BNF engine with some actual language guidelines.  Something like rmutt, but with parameter procedures and objects with qualities.  I'll have to write out the language spec before I begin this time.
• Telescopy is cool.  I got my new eyepieces and lens in the mail from the Discovery Store.  Using Berta's Discovery Passport bucks, I got the three of them for only $9 shipping.  I got an 18mm, a 5mm, and a 2x Barlow.  Now all I need is a compass/level, and a solar filter, and a new focusing mechanism...  Sigh.
• Speaking of telescopes, I'm going to try to enroll in an Astronomy class at WCU this summer.  There is a lab that takes place in the planetarium.  That'll be sweet.  The professor gets good ratings at RateMyProfessors, too, so that might be a good thing.
• Pepsi bottles look so much larger than Coke bottles, even though they both hold 20oz.  Why is that?
• A device that would allow us to stream video around the house would be very cool.  Why can't anyone create a Linux box that connects to systems via Samba, so that you don't need to run proprietary media server software?  Can it be so hard to configure?  And why can't I hook the DishPVR 721 to the network to pull the videos off of there?
• My next phone (in 2-3 years?) will have a camera, PalmOS 5+, and Bluetooth, assuming Palm lives that long.  It will also probably not be a flip-phone, like the one I have now, just because that's what I predict will have the features, not that this is my preference.
• I'm not allocating enough of my time to school.  I really want to do well, but I'm probably not going to do well in this managment class if I don't devote a little more time to it.  Passing would be nice.  Getting an "A" would be better.  I'm not really worried about Philosophy because I enjoy that class.  Weird, huh?
• My nation state, Abertica, is not doing well economically.  I wish that the system would send more directly economic issues my way so that I might fix the income tax rate, which is currently 18%.  It seems that every time I implement a decision on an issue, my taxes shoot up.  How is that fair?  It would be nice if the game explained how my decision caused te tax hike.

Oh, and one more thing...

There has been a new guest in our house over the past week.  Berta noticed him when we were moving things around in the basement for the last time the basement guy showed up.  Our guest skittered out of the Bilco doors into the back yard.

She set out some glue traps with the intent of getting the mouse stuck and either starving him to death or suffocating him in glue.  A day went by with no effect, and Berta loaded each trap with a tasty graham cracker of death.  When the mouse finally caught himself on one of the little pads of glue (the one I selected as most likely for him not to touch) trying to obscond with the cracker, he managed only to catch his back feet.  So he was scraping the bottom of the trap around the basement floor for a little while.

Berta suggested that I do away with the mouse/trap, since I am the man and this is my duty.  Very rarely am I tasked to do "man things" around the house in a maintenence capacity.  Anyway, waiting for the mouse to suffocate on glue (which he didn't seem to into, either) or die of starvation didn't seem like the prudent thing to do with my time, so I knocked him on the head with a pipe wrench and wrapped his carcass in newspaper for deposit in the trash.  A job well done!

All of this writing has failed to improve my mood, but has kept me busy for 10 minutes.  Woo, yeah!

Have a great weekend, if you don't hear from me, although I may wish to rant after each passing second this weekend.