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2003-02-27
Spam Spam Spam Humbug
Erik over at Intellectual Poison has started a new blog dedicated to ridiculing spam, otherwise known as unsolicited bulk email. And while I commend the attempt to extract some humour value out of that plague, I am, sadly, beyond the stage of bothering anymore. A few years ago, I regularly derived some hearty laughs out of reading n.a.n-a.e, the newsgroup dedicated to fighting spam and spammers, and, most importantly, to ridicule them (or let them ridicule themselves) to the greatest extent possible. I still like to read the brillian rants, pun cascades, or ridiculous discourses with what amounts to the lowest scum of the net, but there is now quite a bit of resignation and bitterness mixed in with the humour.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, dealing with spammers means dealing with a lot, and I mean a LOT of lying stupidity packaged into a single humanoid form, which is something I simply don't want to do anymore. The Rules of Spam, codified in above mentioned eclectic newsgroup, make that point quite nicely: - Rule #0: Spam is theft.
- Rule #1: Spammers lie.
- Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1
- Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.
And then there are several Corollaries to those Rules, like - Krueger's Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid.
- Russel's Corollary: Never underestimate the stupidity of spammers.
(And now tell me that the Shrub wouldn't make one fine spammer, he seems to fit right in, if you ask me... But I digress.)
The other reason is that despite a lot of intelligent people doing a lot of educating and fighting, spam has been on the incline for years, and shows no sign of abating. I have myself terminated several spammer's dialup accounts in the past, as well as reported a few open anonymous email relays, but the sheer volume of spam makes it impossible for me to do that even for a reasonable portion of the shit that's landing in by inbox now.
Consider for example my HotMail account. Now, I will admit that my email address lends itself quite well to dictionary attacks, but not even all of my other inboxen together get remotely as much spam as my HotMail account, which means that Microsoft is doing one shitty job of filtering spam: I have the HotMail provided spam filter set to one notch below "accept email only from white listed adresses", have 17 email filter rules running, although only 10 are allowed (don't ask!), and still get a pretty consistent 10-20 spams per day. A few years ago it used to be that much in a week, on all of my accounts taken together. Bah.
And don't even get me started on the rather bleak picture of mankind one must draw from the topics of those spam mails: According to them I am an overweight, sex-crazy, deeply indebted home owner without a credit card, who runs an internet business, has several erectile dysfunctions, lives in the US, is so stupid that he needs a degree from one of those unaccredited diploma mills, but can fluently read chinese. Or something. (And while I may be sex-crazy I sure as hell won't patronize the badly designed rip-off sites, or in fact anything, that is flogged via spam.)
Amazingly enough though, I never got a Nigerian 419 scam at that address...
2003-02-23
Slow Progress
No, it's not about sex this time. *g*
We've finally gotten the writ certifying our piece of land to be free of unexploded shells and other ammunition left lying around from WW II. Which, if all goes well, is the last piece of paper we need for the communal construction office to start processing our application and hopefully grant our construction permit in a month or two, or three, depending on the mood, whimsy, and laziness of the bureaucrats at said office. Which means that we may actually be able to make the move into our new home by mid-autumn, this year. Yay!
And high time it is, too, as living under one roof with my parents-in-law gets more stressful for us with every passing day - some point of contention or other is coming up now almost every week. The latest episode featured father-in-law transforming the attic, which especially after the death of my mother about a year ago is crammed with stuff we intend to move into our house, into absolute chaos. And only because mother-in-law was looking for one specific pressure cooker she insisted she absolutely needed for preparing something for her birthday party.
My wife and me are the only ones with any kind of orientation of what can be found where in the attic. But are they calling one of us to enquire after said pressure cooker? No, they rather plunge the whole attic into utter chaos, then phone up my wife, who phones me up because it turns out the thing is lying in a part of the attic where only I know what's where. I tell them, and they plunge the place into even more chaos in trying to follow my instructions.
The result: they found the pressure cooker, but left the place in such a mess that now absolutely nobody will be able to fetch anything from the attic without mounting a major search and rescue mission. And irony of ironies, of course they didn't really need the big pressure cooker from the attic, things would have fitted just fine in the smaller on which is readily accessible in a cupboard in their kitchen... Grrrrrrr!
2003-02-17
Recovering
With Valentine's Day not having proceeded quite as planned (and my own damned fault, too, when I let my over-eager sex drive get the better of my proverbial rocking horse patience) and another bout of my Other Love on the rise, it was high time to air my brain out. So with my wife at work and the weather quite agreeable (27F, blue skies and only little wind), I took out my recumbent for an extended ride through the winter landscape, although in somewhat warmer attire than on the photo...
The three longer climbs of the somewhat hilly route I had chosen managed quite nicely to get my mind off its gloomy thoughts, making it focus instead on spinning my way to the top of each of those hills. And so the combination of bodily exertion, sun, crisp air, and a single minded focus on bicycling succeeded in somewhat cleaning up my mind. Unfortunately, the almost three months of winter rest meant I was a little rusty on the fitness front, even more so than I had anticipated. And so the last 6 miles of my ride were pure, unadulterated torture for my legs, which were shaking badly and seemed entirely unwilling to carry myself up the flight of stairs when I finally arrived back home.
The result? My mind is still in something of a funk, and my butt and leg muscles are sore. Gah.
But no permanent damage was done, and the same, I'm happy to report, is true of our love life. So I'll just try them again, the two best things I can think of doing while in a reclined position: bicycling and sex, in no particular order. :-)
2003-02-13
Customs
I made someone's day, today.
When I placed the order, I was somewhat sceptical whether it would arrive on time for Valentine's Day, seeing as the shop had posted a date up to which received orders were guaranteed a worldwide delivery before february, 14th, and I was already beyond that deadline. But yesterday the notification from German customs finally arrived. As the customs office is only a three mile detour from my daily commute, I went there after work to fetch the parcel.
When I arrived there, the portly customs officer responsible for imports was busy dealing with two grim looking russian truckers and an old babushka acting as their translator. These three, owing no doubt to the imperfectly bridged language barrier, took their time filling in the forms and answering questions. But in the end they were done and the harried but cheery looking officer turned to me and greeted. "Now how can I make you happy?"
I gave him the notification and he went to a small side room, rummaged around in it for a while, and then came back with the parcel in hand. He looked at it with a puzzled face. "Now what's wrong with that? Ahhh, yes, it's missing the invoice!"
I handed him the slip of paper which had arrived a week before, and which I had fortunately remembered to take with me. "Is this to your satisfaction?"
He gave it a short look that quickly changed from quizzical to suprised and satisfied. "Now, about the import duty. I don't know enough English, what is this stuff?"
I told him. He shrugged his shoulders, his face brightening for a moment before sporting a slightly overcast look. "This won't be easy, lad."
And had he been a more uptight, pedantic character, it wouldn't have been easy: apparently, whoever had made the EU import duty tariffs had inexplicably failed to properly categorize the contents of my parcel. "Hmm, what are the most expensive of those things made of?", he asked.
"Silicone and Nylon, mostly", I told him, and he started browsing the tariff tables in the Plastics and Polymer section. When I suggested filing it under sanitary implements, he wrinkled his face. "Nah, I wouldn't go that far."
He was obviously enjoying his little quandary, which became apparent when he stumbled upon an entry for polyurethane condoms. "See, they even thought of that. Now why didn't they think of your stuff? Ahh, natch, let's make this easy."
So we settled on me having imported "Miscellaneous Plastics, Other", and he wrote out the duty and VAT together with the account number to which to transfer the money. "Please pay this up", he said, his eyes twinkling. "Can't have the guys come to you, seize the stuff back, and then have fun with it when they find out what exactly they have in their hands."
I promised, and he waved me out with a cheery "Enjoy yourself!". Then, with a smile on his face, he turned back to the pile of paper detailing all the boring, normal stuff that still awaited his attention until he would be able to call it a day.
When I arrived home and opened the parcel, I found everything in fine condition.But one thing surprised me a little. I had never thought I would say something like this, but the Bobby Sue is one gorgeous piece of silicone! Now, here's hoping my wife likes it, too. ;-)
Happy Valentine's Day!
2003-02-10
Dietary Dilemma
As I've written here before, everything involving the preparation and ingestion of food in our combined households (parents-in-law and us) is under no small amount of stress, adding another reason for me to wish that our house building project would progress a little faster than, uh, glacially slow, thanks to the thorough German bureaucracy (which is another rant for maybe another day).
I've already mentioned the cholesterol scare my father-in-law is on, and how it negatively influences our meal times. Things escalated to a new level this weekend with the (involuntary) involvements of our neighbours. In a talk with him they, trying to be well-meaningly helpful, had apparently mentioned in passing that frying food was bad for your cholesterol levels... Ouch! The resulting fight - there's just no other word for it - between my wife and her mother on the one side and my father-in-law on the other had to be seen, or heard as it were, to be believed. My wife gave up in disgust after a few minutes of heated discussion, but things continued for a good twenty minutes more between my parents-in-law.
You see, except for the occasional barbequeue, my father-in-law's cooking is limited to shoving ready-bought convenience meals (surely the epitome of healthy dining, NOT!), into the microwave oven. On the other hand, his wife has without any success tried for years to wean him of his potatoes-fat-meat likes and steer him to a more balanced diet, but now that he's on the cholesterol scare, he's telling her every opportunity he gets how unhealthy her cooking is and how she's literally trying to poison him!
Now, my mother-in-law's diet is a rant all to himself. She's been unsuccessfully trying for months to lose some weight, so when she's doing the cooking on the weekends, she reduces the caloric value of whatever she's preparing to as low as she can. On the other hand, she avoids any and all bodily exertion to the point where she refuses to even go for a walk with her husband!? Plus, during the work week she subsists on a lot of sweet, high-caloric snacks. Any of my or my wife's attempts to talk some reason into her have failed, so we've basically given up.
Compared to that, my wife's insistence that she should lose another 3 or 4 pounds when I think a good 5 or 6 pounds more on her frame would do her good, is a minor irritation that is easily defused with some compliments on my part, because she's basically only talking about it and not acting on it.
But all that trouble results in two things: I've lost a good chunk of my appetite, and whatever I get to eat is likely to be low on calories. Which again is boiling down to one simple consequence: I'm losing weight. And when you're talking about stretching 144 pounds over almost 6'1", it's time to act. (This perhaps sounds worse than it is, I've always been slim, so we're basically talking about getting to 150 pounds here - I don't want a belly, I want a few more well-distributed pounds on my frame as I'm sick of constantly freezing.)
I need to regain my enjoyment of food, and my appetite. And I may have to take up cooking afterall, an activity I don't exactly relish although I suspect I wouldn't be half bad at it once I got the hang of the basics, seeing as I have the most sensitive taste buds in the family.
Let's see, wasn't there a recipe for a "Heart Attack Quiche" buried somewhere deep in Layne's archives? If I can figure out the German equivalents of the ingredients, this sounds like just the thing to try. :-)
2003-02-09
K. D. Wentworth: Black on Black
I had originally wanted to do some personal blogging today, and I still may after hopefully getting some sleep, but I've just finished this book, and I feel like I need to get it out of my system first...
"Black on Black" is one of those all too rare books that had me turning the pages every evening until my eye lids would feel like lead, and a drowsy look at the alarm clock would tell me that it was 1 a.m., again! But five hours of sleep must be enough when the reading is as compelling as in this case. Because this one has it all: a twisty plot progressing in several independent strands, compelling characters, cats, a unique culture, science fiction, a few thought provoking ideas, and magic, sort of:
Heyoke was bought from a Flek slave market, then adopted and raised as a son by Ben Blackeagle, a member of the Oglalla nation who still lived the old ideas of man being a relative of everything that lives. After Ben's death, his 7 foot tall fur covered frame, 4 inch long retractable claws, and generally feline appearance sit too uneasy with the rest of the Oglalla, so he enlists with the military, putting that aggresive other part of his self to use. When an incident in one of the numerous battles with the insectoid Flek leaves him permanently wounded, he scours the federal databases until he finds his homeworld where the book starts with him landing, accompanied by his partner and friend Mitsu, the two of them trying to find his kin and his past, and in the process, trying to rescue a planet and a whole quadrant of federal space, although this is something they don't know at the time...
Apart from the somewhat weakly written ending (nothing really bad, it just felt weak after the rest of the book) and the fact that I just couldn't stop reading ;-), I can only find one flaw with this book: The action, as mentioned above, progresses in several (up to four or five) different strands, which is something I generally love, but K. D. Wentworth switches strands at least three or four times in each of the relatively short chapters. I found the frequent context switches this entailed somewhat irritating, as they resulted in generally only one scene per plot strand and chapter. This gave the whole book a somewhat hectic feel. which may have been intentional. But a slightly more sedate reading experience would not have diminished anything, in my opinion, and the less frequent switches between strands would have been easier on the reader. But let's not complain too much, it was a great read after all.
This book has kept me awake far too long these past nights, so I'm off to bed to catch some sleep. Meanwhile, I recommend you surf over to the Baen free library and start reading!
2003-02-06
The Fall of the Wall
I originally wrote this as a two part email for Daintily Dirty but have now decided to publish it with a few minor changes and corrections. I will assume that you don't know a whole lot about this, so I'll start with what the situation was like before things started seriously changing. If there are questions or things you would like me to get into greater detail about, or things you feel I've glossed over or left out, ask!
OK, where to start? Probably with myself. I was born and raised in the former GDR, or East Germany as it is now mostly called, so my perspective is bound to be different from someone who lived in West Berlin, an enclave surrounded by a more or less hostile state. Also keep in mind that as far as emotional and intellectual make up is concerned, I am not AFAIK a typical (East) German, so my perspective is bound to not be representative and shouldn't be taken as such...
Anyway, the Wall had always been a part of life for me, one of the things you accept because there is basically nothing you can do about it. It was always a strange feeling though, to sit in the city railway, going along within sight of it, and idly wondering what life might be like on the other side. Of course, like every youth my age I watched West German TV and listened to West Berlin radio (the US-funded Rias mostly), but if there is one thing you learned growing up in the GDR, it was that life was not necessarily like what it is depicted as in the media (to put it midly). So I assumed (and mostly rightly so) that what we saw of life in the West in East German TV was mostly the bad side of it, while what we got from West German TV was mostly the good stuff, it being the time of the cold war and all.
The relationship between the two German states had always been understandably uneasy - for a few decades West Germany maintained that it was the only legitimate German state which didn't really help relieve the tension, while East German propaganda continued heaping bile and feces on the Enemy. In the late 70's/early 80's things started to look a little more normal: there was talk about cooperation, both commercial and political (mostly about maintaining peace in Europe, because both state seemd to have arrived at the conclusion that a war between the systems in Europe would probably hit Germans on both sides the hardest), the mutual defecation and defamation was toned down, and some acceptance of the status quo settled in (with the notable exception of some ultra conservative right wings in the West, some extreme left wings in the East, and some West German newspapers like "Bild" which up to the last days of the GDR wouldn't spell out this abbreviation without putting quotes around it, as in 'the so-called "GDR"'.
So about 1985 things looked calm and peaceful and unlikely to change in the political arena.
Economically though, the picture was looking bleaker every day, at least for those who went looking for the signs and could read them for what they were: The technology gap to the West was widening rapidly in all fields except for heavy machinery and high end optics. The only computers "built in GDR" you could buy even in 1989 were in the class of the Commodore C64 or Atari 800, i.e. several generations behind the state of the art (and they cost the equivalent of what an average worker earned in about four or five months). Food prices were rising despite all official assurances to the contrary (by making the packages smaller while maintaining the same prices, mostly).
And in this climate of political calm and economical depression that was prevalent throughout the east european countries, things started slowly changing. A new player, in the form of one Mikhail Gorbachev, was entering the scene, bandying about words like Glasnost and Perestroika. His words and ideas about reforming Socialism by replacing the monolithic bureaucracy with a more transparent structure resonated with a lot of people in the socialist countries, and lots of ears perked up. When he followed up his words with action and started, against the massive resistance of the old-school conservatives in the Communist Party of the USSR, to actually change that vast country, he had everyone's attention. Other countries, most notably Hungary and Poland, started following suite.
In the GDR, the old school conservatives were still powerful, so nothing much happened, and the unrest started growing. Quickly things arrived at a situation that must have been not unlike what it was like before the great unrest of 1953, when the demonstrations of workers protesting the steeply raised work quotas where violently and bloodily suppressed with the help of the russian army and their tanks.
This was the time when the Monday Demonstrations started, which to me are at least as important and significant as the actual fall of the Berlin Wall, if not in fact more so: Dissidents and lower church functionaries started organizing demonstrations which were to be held every monday in prominent places of the bigger cities. The largest and best known of those were the ones in Leipzig, where every monday literally hundreds of thousands of people carrying candles and banners gathered for peaceful protest. What few people dimly felt, and what only came to be officially known years later, was how close to a catastrophe things came then: Like in 1953, the state leaders were of a mind to quench the protest in blood. It was only thanks to a level-headed russian general who declined their request for assistance, and an even more level-headed chief of the Leipzig police who did not give the order to interrupt the demonstrations when at one point they looked like they might turn ugly, that bloodshed was narrowly averted.
Slowly those demonstrations started having an effect: the old political leaders resigned, the new leaders promised change and started the Round Table Talks between the leaders of the protest and the ruling politicians to determine what to do and how to do it. The demonstrations continued, but in a calmer, less frantic mood: people felt that their peaceful protests had accomplished something, and the feeling of empowerment this left them with after years of suppression was something that cannot possibly be understated. Most people thought that they would get what they still wanted at that point, a better, more open, more economically stable GDR. (Yes, there was at that point, not a majority for reunification!) But things progressed much too slowly for much too long. And then something else happened, something that at once completely changed everything.
Hungary opened up their border to Austria.
The mass exodus which then started is probably unprecedented: in the following weeks tens of thousands of East Germans stuffed their belongings into their cars and trunks, drove to Hungary and crossed the now open border to Austria to continue on to West Germany. I never really understood what motivated these people to leave everything behind and flee their country, but then, I never had to personally deal with the state's oppression, the awful machinations of the Ministry of State Security (which weren't all that different from what that awful US Office of Homeland Security is attempting now - a sickening thought if there ever was one), or the arbitrary decisions and almighty power of the Party. Who knows, maybe if I had, I would have been among those who made their way to Hungary and Austria. As it was, I stayed - this still felt like home.
People were now also trying to go to Prague in the hopes of getting into the West German embassy there, which was guarded much less diligently than the one in East Berlin. Soon, the embassy there was packed with people, and the tension was again building up to dangerous levels when the Czech police tried to stop people from entering and leaving the embassy on request of the East German leaders.
Then, a few days later when the tension had built to the point that the relationship between the GDR and Czechoslovakia looked poised to turn into enmity, the miracle happened: from a balcony facing the court yard of the West German embassy in Prague, Günther Schabowski, a leading politician of the GDR, told the throng of people below him that they could legally leave the GDR and emigrate to West Germany. Then he went on to surprise everyone there (and not least of all the soldiers and police officers in the guard posts along the German-German border who had had no advance notice of this) by saying that effective immediately the border between East and West Germany would be openend up for all East Germans, without the need for a passport and a visum. The outburst of joy this caused is impossible to describe with mere words. I still have tears in my eyes now that I am writing this more than a dozen years later. For many East Germans this date marked the most important day in their life.
9th November 1989, the day the Wall came down.
(I can not until this day shed the irking suspicion that Mr. Schabowski added the bit about the opening of the border at just that moment and without prior permission from the Powers Above. I can't substantiate this, it's just a gut feeling.)
All the spontaneous fireworks and festivities that happened later that night and throughout the following day still pale in contrast to the feelings which were caused by that simple announcement from the balcony of the West German assembly in Prague.
At the time I lived in a small city a few miles south of Berlin. Getting into Berlin became increasingly difficult during the following days as seemingly all the people of East Germany who hadn't yet left the coutry tried to get to Berlin to visit the western part of the divided city. I first went to West Berlin about a week later. Foolishly I decided to visit a department store and came home with a raging headache - the worst I've ever had - overwhelmed by all the new impressions, colors, smells, things, and thronging masses of people everywhere.
Things quickly progressed from there when it became clear that maintaining a separate East German state would be impossible. Most of the original dissidents (and people like me) hoped for a true reunion, a synthesis between the two states with a modern body of law to replace the old prussian laws that Bismarck had installed more than a century earlier. But when Helmut Kohl took the reigns in his hands, it quickly became clear that this was not to be, so not even a year later the GDR ceased to exist and the Federal Republic of Germany was 108.000 km² and 17 Million people bigger.
As for the changes this has caused in the lives of the East Germans, they are indeed a mixed bag, as would be expected of any changes of that magnitude. Life has changed in so many ways it's impossible to detail everything, so I'll limit this to a small selection of things off the top of my head:
The economic foundation is of course totally different. Before, we lived in a state-directed economy where literally everything except for basic food and clothing was either in permanently short supply or incredibly expensive, or both. Now, the economy is not so much different from what it's like in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, although there are minor issues, like anything service-oriented still being harder to get and more expensive than in the US.
Where travel anywhere but within the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, or the USSR, was next to impossible, I have in the mean time been to Southern England and London, Malta, the Canary Islands, Mexico, Madeira, China, and twice the US.
I'm a computer scientist, and I'm working with hard- and software that would have been impossible to get my hands on in the GDR.
Despite the proliferation of porn and the official existence of the sexual service industry, the society as such has become more prudish. Casual nudity, such as topless women - commonplace on the beaches throughout the GDR - has been confined to designated nude beaches and is now again generally frowned upon, more's the pity.
Western economy is in its essence based on egotism, which is reflected in the society as a whole. Solidarity within families, as well as between friends and strangers is markedly diminished, intimate friendships have become a thing of some rarity when they weren't before.
Despite the ever-present Ministry of State Security and the more than 100.000 people who worked for them as informants, there was still a measure of free speech. But what you can say to whom has changed: In the GDR, criticizing the government and its politics was heavily frowned upon. Even joking about it was only done in a whisper. On the other hand, finding flaws in the work process and fixing them, criticizing your co-workers and even your superiors as long as things didn't get personal was welcome and even expected. Nowadays, criticizing your boss is often a good way to lose your job, and criticizing the government is basically only OK as long as you keep it to the talk, as soon as you start *doing* something about it, you can quickly find yourself in deep shit, as activists throughout the country can readily attest.
Most women worked and were fully emancipated in most areas of society in the GDR. Child daycare was commonplace. One of the worst changes: there was basically no unemployment in the GDR, while now the unemployment rate in East Germany is a whopping 20% and rising. There is of course more, and especially for the 50+ generation, the transition was often traumatic, but I'll leave it at that for now.
2003-02-04
.us vs. .de
A few posts ago the topic of cultural differences between the US and Europe/Germany came up in the comments. This is an issue that fascinates and interests me quite a bit, so I kept my eyes open for more information. Today I stumbled upon this comparison of quite a few aspects of every day life in the US and Germany. It is written by a German who spent eight years living in the US, and at least some part of this time in Minneapolis.
Although there are a few things about both Germany and the States in there I don't really agree with, it makes for interesting reading. What I find most fascinating is the number of differences in small, every day details as well as the generally completely different philosophical outlook on a great many things in both countries.
2003-02-02
Familiy Ties
When dad called on Tuesday, asking us whether we would come to his birthday on Saturday, my loving wife wore a pout for the rest of the day. And I can't fault her: dad isn't exactly an easy character, his intellectualism can be grating, and he is often rather brusque even when he doesn't mean to. In other words, he's a lot like me, but even more so, what with me being at least somewhat tempered by my empathy.
I usually enjoy my time with dad as he is the only one in the family who shares my passion for languages, their history and development, as well as my penchant for intellectualizing about a diverse range of topics. But yesterday was mildly frustrating and disappointing for me, and even more so for my wife. We knew beforehand that dad's wife's oldest son and his family would be there as well, so although we had some problems and successes we wanted to share with everyone present, we were ready to make lots of room for discussions of their branch of the family, mainly about dad's step daughter and her kids.
The frustrating part was that talk circled almost exclusively around them! Every time we tried to steer things so we could talk about what was on our hearts, we were quickly shoved away by someone else's talk. And there were things like the recent events surrounding my sister (who has emailed me that she's missing her boy friend and wants to visit him in France in March!?) that I felt needed tending to by my dad. But for some reason they don't take her emotional problems seriously, and while they frequently help dad's step daughter, they never ask how they can help us, and don't even do the things we specifically ask of them (most of them dealing with my sister and not even with me and my wife) with some modicum of urgency.
All of this wore us down a lot, so much so that today my wife declined my invitation to a nice, long walk through the falling snow, opting for an extended nap instead. Since I had no inclination to traipse around in the snow alone, I stayed home as well. Which ultimately means that I will start the next week with a lot of pent-up frustration inside, with my job promising to heap more frustration on me in the course of the week: I hate being project manager, but with the economy and job market being what they are it's the only way to advance beyond my measly programmer's salary. :-(
Bah.
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