Mary is going to kill me for this...
New from Kelvin Crime...


- posted by Josh @ 11:22 PM (0) comments

 
Some good news
Well, a small degree of uncertainty has been lifted from the saga that is the pending closing of our call center. It's still being closed, but I found an emergency exit.

They've opened 50-odd positions with customer service, and while many people in our office are not trying to move over, there are some that are -- myself included (I can't afford to be out of work, and I especially can't afford to lose our health insurance).

Yesterday I took the qualifying test to see if... well... I qualified for the position.

I did.

There's still a structured interview to get through, but I think that will go just fine. Training for the new job would start sometime in January, and the new job comes with a very nice pay increase.

There is still some uncertainty, of course. It looks like the sale of Verizon's land line service in northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) is going to go through, and it's safe to say that a lot of folks are nervous about what this means for us, the employees -- Fairpoint is required to honor Verizon's current contract with the IBEW and CWA, but that contract expires in August of '08 -- less than a year off -- and there is a lot of talk that Fairpoint will go to the negotiating table with the intent of cutting as much as they can from the next contract.

Much of this talk, to be honest, is coming from the union. While I don't doubt that Fairpoint would try and negotiate the best deal possible for them, the rhetoric being presented to the employees by the union is heavily influenced by their agenda (because they have one, and it isn't always 'putting the workers first'). Scare tactics, while the reasoning behind them may have some merit, do not impress me.

I guess that I find life itself to be uncertain, and I have never harbored the idea of working for a company for 40 years and retiring with a pension (or something). I've held a bunch of different jobs over the past dozen years, and I've always approached it with the thought, "This is what I have now, it might be gone tomorrow."

Certainly, it's a bit tougher now, with a family to look after and bills to pay (gone are the days when I could be out of work for a couple of weeks and be fine), but worrying about something I have no control over... it doesn't do anything but drain energy and focus from what I can control -- getting up, going to work, and doing my job to the best of my ability.

I'd like to keep my job (and benefits), but if I don't... well that would suck, but we would figure something out.
- posted by Josh @ 11:12 AM (0) comments

 
Update to Character Spreadsheet
As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been working on an Excel-based spreadsheet for creation and tracking of Earthdawn characters.

After some tinkering, I have a new version (v2.1) available for download. This version corrects a number of problems that were in the previous version. This version also includes the long-planned User's Guide with information about the sheet, and some guidelines on how you might modify it for your own use.

You can download it here. (275kb zip) The full-size spreadsheet is 1.03 Mb. Any comments or questions, please feel free to e-mail me.
- posted by Josh @ 10:13 PM (0) comments

 
"The Bare Bones"
I spent my November working on an article for RedBrick, looking at the Step System for Earthdawn and running a break-down analysis of the different parts of it.

This is an analysis that I originally did years ago, but I hadn't ever put it into a coherent, well-written essay before (with accompanying graphs, because we all know graphs are cool).

You can find the full article at the Earthdawn website.

PS -- RedBrick's latest Earthdawn release, the adventure Burning Desires is available in electronic format from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. The print edition should be available early next year.
- posted by Josh @ 2:11 AM (0) comments