I'll be working for Teach For America, doing software development for a bunch of internal tools and intranet sites, and one extranet site. The organization is cool, and something I can be proud of working for, the team all seemed to be great people, and the work and development process/environment looked very good.

I start next week, and I'm really looking forward to it.

I was watching The Daily Show the other day, and there was yet another clip of Bush lying during one of the 2004 presidential debates. That got me thinking about what's wrong with the presidential debates, and the answer is "a lot". But some of this is fixable. I would like to propose the two following simple modifications to the presidential debate format:

1) Put the candidates under oath. A big part of the problem is that candidates can say whatever they want, and people believe them, so they can tell big lies to bolster their support. So let's eliminate the lies. Put the candidates under oath, and if they tell provable lies during the debate, prosecute them for perjury. A lot of people watch the debates. Very few people read the articles that point out the lies told during the debates. But if a presidential candidate goes to jail for 30 days in the middle of the campaign season for perjuring himself in a debate, I bet people would notice that.

2) Give the candidates off-stage teams to work with. Why should I care who can memorize the most factoids and sound bites? What I want is a candidate who will be able to govern well, and that includes his support structure. A president is going to have people to do his research for him, and provide him the information he needs, and so a candidate in a debate should have that same support. Set up a research team backstage, give the candidates a little screen on their podiums that will display information from their support teams. So when Candidate A makes a wild claim, Candidate B's team can do a quick search, come up with the facts to discredit that claim, and feed it to him for his rebuttal.

These are just preliminary thoughts on the subject, but after mulling them over for a day or two, I still like them. There may be some implementation details to work out, but I think they're both feasible, and I think they'd both improve the quality of the presidential debates.

Of course, I suppose I could try writing some new content some time. That would be an interesting experiment.

All did not remain good. A few weeks ago, I picked up my watch to put it on, and noticed that the time was wrong. Then I noticed that the second hand wasn't moving. I figured it couldn't be a dead battery already, and I was right. When I adjusted the hands, the second hand started moving again. So I set the right time again, and didn't think anything more of it.

A week later, it happened again. This time, I was looking at it, and I noticed that the second hand was at the same position as the minute hand. I wondered if that was coincidence. I fixed the time and it started again. A few hours later, it stopped again, and again the second hand was on the minute hand.

So my watch is not working properly. The second hand is catching on the minute hand, and stopping the whole watch. No problem, it's got a warranty, so I called Skagen. They explained to me that (1) the only way to get repairs to Skagen watches it to send it in to their repair center, and (2) I would have to pay them for shipping and processing costs, and I should expect it to take 4-6 weeks to get my watch back. I explained that 4-6 weeks was approximately as long as I had actually had the watch, and I thought it was unreasonable that I should have to wait so long for repairs to a brand new watch, not to mention pay for the privilege. The woman I spoke to agreed that this was unreasonable, but she would need a supervisor to expedite it, and her supervisor was out that day. She took my name and number, and told me the supervisor would call the next day.

The supervisor didn't call the next day. And then the next week, I was completely swamped at work, and never had a chance to call again. But today I finally called, and spoke to a supervisor, who told me to go take a long walk off a short pier. She seemed completely bound by the Official Repair Policy, and unwilling to even discuss any sort of exceptions. If I wanted a working watch, I was going to have to send it in, wait a month, and pay them for it. She even made the claim that if I was willing to have paid for one of their watches in the first place, I should be glad to pay the additional cost for the shipping to have it repaired, and argued that I should be grateful that the S&P costs were so low.

Fortunately, she did accidentally say something useful while she was yelling at me. She said that if she had bought a faulty product, she wouldn't try to use the manufacturer's warranty, she would go back to the retailer and ask them to replace it. So I did just that. I went to Amazon's web site, and I saw that their return policy on defective merchandise was 30 days, and I was over. But I figured that it doesn't hurt to talk to them; when I've managed to actually talk to a person on the phone, they've been very good with customer service.

First pleasant surprise: It's now possible to reach a customer service person by phone at Amazon. Or rather, to have them reach you. They have added a Contact Us By Phone option on their customer service page, which is a reverse phone support mechanism. You go to the page, put in your phone number and when you want them to call, and they call you. So I didn't have to go through the hassle of digging through old emails to find the link to the page that has their customer support phone number on it.

Second pleasant surprise: No hassles. I explained the problem to the fellow I was talking to, and what Skagen was telling me I would have to go through to get it fixed, and I asked if Amazon would allow me to exchange it even though I was over the 30 day period. He responded that he would make an exception in their policy, and that he would send me out a return label to return the faulty watch, and in the mean time, he would create a replacement order, so that I wouldn't have to wait for the new one.

I was vaguely tempted to just get rid of the watch entirely, since it seems that Skagen doesn't deserve my business, after the way they treated me. But I picked this watch for a reason. I really like the mesh band that they have, and approximately zero other watchmakers seem to use this kind of band, so this was my only option if I wanted that band. And Amazon was extremely helpful, so I took a replacement rather than a return (and I now see in the confirmation email that they even put it on 2-Day shipping), and I'll hope that I won't ever have to deal directly with Skagen again.

I'm alive. I'm doing well. I'm working again. I've done stuff, gone places, seen people, had good times, and all that fun stuff.

This is a pretty sorry post, but hopefully it'll at least make LJ behave itself. I do actually intend to try to start posting here again, so maybe there'll be some better content soon.

For those of you who didn't know that she was sick, she still died this morning. The short story is that she got pneumonia about a month ago, and never really recovered her strength after that, and there were other problems, and we've known for a while that she wasn't really going to get better, and it was just a question of when, not if.

For obvious reasons, I don't really have time to write more now. Soon, I hope.

So is "private franchising" a codeword for pyramid schemes or some other sort of scam? Anyone know? It sounded to me like it had to be a euphemism for something underhanded or illegal, but I wasn't sure. I wasn't willing to give my contact info to him under those circumstances, and since he then wouldn't give me his info, I have no way of finding out what he meant.

Enlighten me, oh readers! Was I wise to steer clear, or did I just miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime? (Ha!)

Tuesday morning, I noticed that my machine was very sluggish, so I decided to see what was going on. A quick look found that there was somebody logged into my machine who didn't belong. Long story short, my server was compromised.

With much help from Chaos and Josh, I sealed off any problem areas so I could keep things running until I had a chance to wipe the drive and do a clean install. Then I got sick, and as long as I was home, I decided Thursday to use some of my time to do the reinstall. I wiped the drive, installed Fedora Core 3 (with some issues, but not too many), but by the time I got sendmail set up and working, and pine installed (mail being my top priority), I was completely beat, so I went to sleep.

Still sick today, which sucks, but at least I had more time to work on the server. I'm still seeing a weird error on starting MySQL, but it's running, so that's good. I figured out how to get Apache 2.0 running, and Tomcat 5.5 running, and Apache 2.0 forwarding the appropriate requests to Tomcat 5.5, so I'm back up and running.

Still sick, though. Wish my body were as easy to get up and running as my server.

While talking to Chaos, I realized something. Or rather, I came to consciously understand something I've probably already known for a while. I've been unhappy at my job for a long time, now, but I have not really made any progress toward finding a new one, so I'm still here. I've thought frequently about just quitting, and worrying about finding a new job afterwards, but I know that isn't a good idea. So really, to get out of here, I need to get off my ass, update my resume, find a new job, and then I can leave here.

What I realized is that I really don't want a new job either, and that's a large part of what's been holding me back. I'm tired, exhausted, completely burned out. I feel like I need a break. There are some companies where every few years, they give you a sabbatical, and I think that's a great idea. I need a month or two off, time I can just take to recover.

So where does that leave me in reality? I can't imagine finding a job now that would let me start in three months. I don't know if I can really motivate myself to find a job now that I'd have to start right away? And every day that I continue to come in to work here is another day that I'm miserable. I've been feeling sick a lot lately, and I think a lot of that is just an unconscious reaction to the fact that I'm still working here.

An ideal solution would be if I could just get a couple months unpaid leave from my job. Unfortunately, the way things are now with the project I'm on, I just can't imagine that being an option. If I leave my job, I'm going to be leaving them in the lurch, and there's no way they'd voluntarily let me just up and leave for a month or two at this point.

It seems that all signs point to "quit my job now, find a new job in a little while". And the fact is that if I wanted to do so, I have enough money saved up to be able to afford it. But I know that it's supposed to be easier to find a job when you already have a job. And I don't really want to eat away at my savings if I don't have to. And I have no idea how long it will take me to find a job in this market once I actually do start looking. So I continue to be very wary of this possibility, as tempting as it sounds.