Category: Rant

Even *I* recognize this as overuse of the passive voice

I’ve been yelled at by English teachers, co-op work term report markers, and Microsoft Word for overuse of passive voice. Mostly I look at the sentence or paragraph they’re yelling about and say “what? I don’t see what’s wrong with it”. But even I recognize this as too much.

From a job ad on Monster.com:

System design, based on the requirements and the development of diagrams along with implementation of the computer language will be part of this Software Development position. Determining testing requirements followed by unit and regression testing will be performed in this role.

NRA assholes

I got a phone call from the NRA. They’ve been persistent about it – evidently they called a couple of times and asked for me when I wasn’t there, so somehow I got on their list as a gun owner, even though I haven’t owned a gun since long before I moved to this country. They made me listen to a recorded message from the president of the NRA with a bunch of bullshit about how Barack Obama wants to team up with Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton to steal your guns. Then they asked me a couple of questions:

The first one was “Are you a proud gun owner” – I said yes, even though I’m not, just to see where they were going with this (as if I didn’t know).

The second one was an incredibly leading question about Obama, something about being worried about his “anti-gun ownership agenda”, and when I said “Absolutely not”, the questioner was utterly flat footed, like she’d never heard anybody answer the wrong way before. She thanked me for my time and hung up.

Do the Wolf Cubs count?

In anticipation of an Obama victory, I’m filling out a N-400 (Application for Naturalization). One of the questions asks me to list every club or organization I’ve ever belonged to, anywhere. Ok, I think I’ve got most of the ones I belong to now, and I remember belonging to the Wolf Cubs (sort of a junior Boy Scouts) back when I lived in Schomberg, but I’m a little hazy on what I belonged to in between.

Does the stamp collecting club at my public school count? How about the Strategy Gamers club at my high school. (Yes, the nerd die was cast early.) Oh, speaking of die… Oh wait, our D&D group never called itself a club. Never mind then.

I used to have a ski racer’s “card”, which I needed to race in local cross country ski races, but I don’t remember who issued it.

Oh, I think I have a card in my wallet that says I belong to the Subway Sub Club, does that count? Probably not since I didn’t actually give them my name, just money and little stamps.

I thought about adding PFLAG, even though I’m not technically a member, just to see if it would raise any alarm bells.

Sigh. I can see this is going to be a long process.

Blind. Sided.

I renewed my aviation medical today, and while it was relatively painless, I failed the vision test without my reading glasses, and so now I have a restriction. Which is stupid, because I have no problem reading things at the distance of my charts or GPS, it’s only really close up and in dim light that I need my glasses. Also I still appear to have some twitchiness in my right eye, the one that was having problems, due to lack of sleep and I have no doubt that I’d pass the test on a normal day.

Oh well. It sucks getting old.

Maybe I’m a little stressed out

My impending job change has me stressed out so much that I’m having trouble sleeping. But maybe I’m letting it get to me more than I should. Today I used the word “asshat” in a problem report resolution. Mind you, I was referring to whoever at Sun is responsible for changing the name of the Java Runtime Engine from jre to j2re and then back to jre (and a whole bunch of other gratuitous naming convention and numbering scheme changes), so it’s a very appropriate adjective, but in retrospect I don’t think my cow orkers would quite understand my sentiment.