Okay, so my old, exceptionally expensive laptop’s graphic cards blew up. Don’t work. Then my desktop died. Thankfully, in a pinch of spend craziness, I bought a sub-400 dollar netbook last year (MSi Wind, great netbook by the way)…and I used that to get myself a job. Had two offers on the table, one was East Coast, the other was here…with where I worked before…well, I took the latter despite lower pay because I just couldn’t bring myself to leave Oregon. I’ve been here for so freaking long, and it represents a rock of stability that I just can’t let go of.
Anyway, I’ve been working again…but I just didn’t have the blog linked on my laptop, and I had kinda sorta forgotten the password, so I had to do some data recovery on my old system to get all my info back. Took awhile, but here I am for my audience of possibly 1 or 2 readers.
Hated leaving it on that old blog, too. It was kinda personal and not a way I wanted to leave things on.
Well, back to political geekery. Seems we won’t have much of a public option with the Health Care bill. I’ll be fine with it, though, if we have a real, serious, jobs bill and I don’t have to keep working these 3 month contracts that skirt around having to get me employer based health insurance. Hell, if the exchange would let me come in and say “I feel that I shouldn’t have to pay more than 250 a month for insurance and that rate shouldn’t increase beyond the average cost of living increase”, and they can get me something, I’ll be satisfied. I think 250 a month is a very fair amount to have to pay, considering how I already pay into Medicare and other programs. If I had my druthers, it’d be Medicare for all and we’d leave it at that, and if you didn’t like the baseline that Medicare provided, you could hook up your own supplemental or opt for private insurance. If they had gone with that from the beginning, the current bill wouldn’t stink so bad and most likely it still would have passed…if older people were thinking that by killing “Medicare”, it would kill their lifeline, they’d put the fear into Republicans like you’ve never seen.
One can dream. Of a world where we think that protecting people from getting sick or hurt and dying is just as much a right provided by our government as protecting people from blown up by terrorists. When you put it that way, yeah, it sounds fairly reasonable regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum (I guess…unless you peddle health insurance…in that case, you better REALLY hope the jobs program hits it out of the park). Can’t quite figure out why no one says it like that, though.
As for techie stuff…well, I’ve been getting into more WPF development lately. It’s kind of weird, but Intel is finally sorta shifting into Agile, sort of step by step. I guess it’s probably because so many people who have been getting hired by Intel are pitching it to them on many different levels, and it must have struck a chord with enough people. I recall pitching it to my boss last April, and having it thrown back at me…but now my team is jumping into it as well. It’s kind of funny that both of the contractors in the team have multiple years of experience in that paradigm, and the guys in charge basically are just learning it for the first time. They’ll probably be in charge of the scrum, though, and most likely make us contractors suffer through the learning process because running the scrum makes managers feel like they’re “managing”. Well, been there, done that…so I better pick up my scrum certs and pmp cert quickly. At some point, I’d kind of like to be the guy running the scrum, rather than the exasperated contractor who can’t believe the ineptitude of the newbies who are trying to learn as they go.