Late night ramblings

• Man, there are a lot of crazies out there in the world of blogging. Every so often, I'll go through the Feedjit link here on the blog to see what else is being written around the area or browse the Google blog search and just read. Maybe tonight was abnormal, but I found several blogs that just sounded like the rantings of paranoid schizophrenics in the midst of a meltdown - only the posts have been coming for months now! With some of the hatred and prejudice I encountered, it made me a little uncomfortable seeing the dark underbelly of the First Amendment. I'm not of a mind to want to silence these folks by any means, but wow there's some crazy shite out there on the Wild 'n' Wooly Interwebs.

• I hate upset stomachs. I went to bed almost 2 hours ago, and couldn't sleep, which led to my stroll through Blogland. I should know by now not to eat snacks before bed!!

• Anisa was so funny on the phone when I called home during my lunch break. "Daddy, we got the good cheesy poofs! Not the ones that taste awful, like at Jake and Jenny's!" I was glad I was stopped at a red light at the time; I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. We spent the weekend up in Columbia with our friends. Their daughter is about nine months old now and had some of the baby cheese poofs as a starter food. As you can tell, they were not a big hit with Anisa. Jasmine, however, LOVED them. I think she likes the "good" ones even better, though. It was a fun weekend all around, though. I just wish I'd been in a better frame of mind so I could enjoy it a bit more. Everything that came down last week at work was just weighing on my mind.

I mean, could I have picked a worse time to be promoted? Well, I'm sure there are worse circumstances than this, but it still sucks. I wanted to be playing with numbers and coding some stuff up for the web, not jostling job duties and telling people that, like it or not, you're going to be moving to some night shifts. Maybe it's just me, but if there are 4 fewer people working at putting out a product, shouldn't that product be reduced by something close to 4 people's worth of work? Instead, we get to "do more with less!" Sure, we're cutting our output a little bit, but I'd bet that it isn't even close to 40 hours a week worth, let alone 160. Instead, we focus on efficiency and workflow. Layoffs are a big enough hit to employee morale, but working them harder when they were already being asked to do a lot is not going to make things better. I just hope that three months from now, everyone at work can look back and see this as the low point.

• At least there looks to be some hope for an auto industry bailout. On an objective level, I'm not overly thrilled by it. There's a reason why the U.S. companies are in the position they are, while foreign auto makers are still thriving (though not without suffering in this economic climate). They've made bad choices for years - decades even - and didn't have a plan on how to survive if everything went in the crapper. So now, the taxpayers should foot the bill? Ugh, how crappy. I understand there is a bigger picture here that it affects and it's probably in the best interest of the economy as a whole to try and prop them up until things get better, much like bailing out AIG was probably a good thing for the long-term health of the economy. It doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

On a purely selfish level, I'm absolutely ecstatic about this. The one thing the print media industry can't afford is an even bigger loss in ad revenue from the auto companies. There's already been a big drop, and if any of the Detroit Three had gone under, that would have been a huge loss for us, too. We probably would have been looking at another round of staff cuts in our near future, and that's something I don't want to see again for at least another decade.

I keep hoping that the plan that was put in place factored in the projected troubles of the next year (and that those projections are either accurate or overestimated the troubles we'll face). I just want to be able to hold on to what we have, make it through this rough patch, and come out on the other side better for the experience. I don't want to be part of a company that goes through bankruptcy like the Tribune company has. I'm still shocked that the company that owns the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune is hurting that bad. I hope the commentary that they're the exception rather than the expectation for newspapers holds true.