Last night, with the magic of netflix, I watched The Day After Tomorrow. Gord what a shitfest that was! The only saving grace was that it was an unintentionally amusing shitfest and therefore worth watching while I put the cap on a space-race victory as the Romans on an 18-civ earth map. (For those who care, I finished having most of Southern Europe, West Africa, much of South America and all of North America. I launched the year after crushing a massive Russian onslaught in what is, I suppose Croatia or something.

Anyway, I am not sure what was worse: the utter scientific idiocy or the fact that we're supposed to care if one or two particular people survive when the whole fucking northern half of the planet is wiped out. I should go find that site where the physicist reviews movies for scientific accuracy.

This probably does get some sort of award for being the first movie to have the heroes outrun cold.

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I have a coworker...call him Fred or something, that I feel sorry for.

Years ago, when we were a young dotcom, out to change the world and hiring like mad, we hired Fred. Fred was straight out of college, a foreign student from one of those paternalistic cultures where people grow up thinking the way to success is to do what they tell you, work hard, don't rock the boat, and success will follow.

Like most, we turned into a young dotcom, bailing like mad, to stay afloat. First, some of the, to put it politely, "less skilled" people went. Fred, a hard worker, was not one of these. Then, we had "the day" where a third of what remained of the company was let go. The owners were basing success on engineering, so only a few engineers were let go. Fred was not one. He was evidently good enough to survive the cut. (I have had little first-hand work with him, so I can't say as to his skills directly but the fact that he survived the layoffs says volumes.)

The situation was odd. Fred was the only junior engineer left on a team of eight or so engineers. There was talk of mentoring and such, but I don't think much happened in the fast dotcom scramble.

Then we got bought by $BigJapaneseCorp and the situation changed. We went from mad scramble to not enough work. For years, we were in a situation where getting products required effort and where people had more than enough time to do what few tasks they had. So I don't think Fred had much to do. I'd see him most days reading asian comic strips. We shed a few engineers and hired a mid-to-senior level one, but things otherwise didn't change much. You could see the bad habits developing.

Then the parent division started to go down like the Titanic. Our boss lept to another division and took most of us with him. All but Fred and the guy we hired. Scuttlebut in the company is that the old division has a shaky future. Worse, the division was located in another city, and we were the only people in SF that were a part of it. The other guy, seeing the writing on the wall quit. Now there's just Fred, the one guy in SF that's a part of this group. I'm not sure the rest of that division even knows he's there. I don't know that he's pyschologically equipped to do what he probably should do, which is jump ship, and our history means he's essentially a guy who got maybe a year's experience in the last five.

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Since I know everyone's burning to have a diet update, I will report that after losing ten pounds during the first month, I've only lost a pound or two in June. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because work combined with some illness has kept me from getting to the gym as much as I should.

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The FoML has decided that he's going to do potty training now after nearly a year of stubborness. The pissing is going ok, but he still hasn't successfully shit on the pot.

Last night there was an accident just before I arrived, and there was some shame, apparently. (He first refused to see me, then clung to me.) I'm concerned...I don't see how that can be coming from us. I'm worried that his day care may be giving the kids a line that we don't approve of.

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Speaking of the kid, the FoML has informed us that My Neighbor Totoro is the best movie ever and wants to know when we're going to Japan to see Totoro in person.

I've been letting him play with GoogleEarth. It's hard to tell if he's getting the concept of geography or not. "I want to look at the planet on your computer, daddy!"