Not yours, lunch, NAVSEA update, unban?, and LJ problems

Hehe.. Not yours.

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Tomorrow, lunch with Aunt Alice and cousins Daniel (12) and Riley (5) plus my mom and maybe a sister or two. :)

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Earlier, I checked voicemail to find a call from Dr. Gehman that was somehow missed. It seems that procedures on resume referrals and whatnot with NAVSEA have changed, so there's little he can do to help. Official procedure is now to just apply through USAjobs and look for "near Dahlgren, VA" for NAVSEA's openings--they don't want emailed resumes or paper resumes, just electronic ones through the site.

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Emailed the co-moderator of atheist to pass on a message to the maintainer, who banned me around May '03 for a disagreement on community policies and apparently summarily blackholed my emails after that, to see if I could get unbanned.

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status says that yes, there are problems with email, and with the Green cluster, but they're being worked on. (Link)

It's just a Duff morning--no, not the beer.

From michaelduff:

Give Lower-Skilled Workers a Chance; or, Why raising the minimum wage is bad economics.

The terrible price of Wal-Mart's success: Consumer service!

Cosby; or, Why historical oppressors shouldn't be parroting the historically oppressed.

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities."
-- Alan Bloom

Afternoon with family, lots of stuff brought back

Got to Manassas around noon, to find that my aunt and cousins a) had left late, and b) were stuck in traffic south of Richmond, meaning they'd be quite a bit later than "lunch"--since they were still at least two hours away in light traffic. Hung around the house for a while and visited neighbors Tom and Melody (who blamed my job loss on the Republicans) as they got closer, until finally they got lost in the 95/234/PW Pkwy changeover, and eventually Steph and I went to meet them across town to lead them back. Had a delightful time hanging out with Aunt Alice (dad's sister) and cousins Daniel (12, going into 7th grade, played Age of Mythology for most of the visit, showing it to me and chatting about games and movies) and Riley (female, 5, going into 1st grade, and adorable), plus mom/dad/Steph/Shauna/Brendan, with a tasty dinner of barbecue around 1830, and an hour of Whose Line Is It Anyway? after the relatives left, preceded by half an hour of Jeopardy starring Ken, resident god of trivia--something like 18- or 28-day champion for over $860,000 in winnings. (We like Ken.) A good handful of photos taken, of course, to be uploaded later. (Also learned that one of my cousins is now divorced, and this is noteworthy because no one mentioned this previously to anyone in my immediately family. Hm!)

I brought back the fuse box from the old bike (to sell to a fellow motorcyclist), two cucumbers (fresh from Charles & Anita's garden), a baggie of cookies (leftover from the Kirkland box-o'-cookies), and two sidecases full of the books formerly occupying a paper grocery bag in my old room's closet. 56 of them, an assortment of sci-fi, fantasy, fiction and non-fiction, majority in the first category. Most of them are entirely unread, with a few partially attempted many years ago.

Man, it's hot in my room. Something about four ferrets, a heat lamp and heat pad, a laptop, and a partly obscured A/C vent might have something to do with it.

Soon, off to Alchemy! (And later, LJ catchup--there's an even 90 new posts on my friends page since noonish, and there'll be more a few hours from now.)

Ooh, also of note: Email and voicemail from a woman with Telos/Xacta, inquiring about my interest in a position dealing with physical security at the Pentagon. Still not in my field, but could be a good job for a while.