Adding Understanding

Round Table Pizza still has jobs listed in Boise. However for employees of the west-coast pizza chain the unemployment notice came in the form of a note posted on locked doors.

While I can understand businesses choosing to change directions and models this way of doing business deserves to have major repercussions for Round Table Pizza. Imagine for a moment if it were your rent check that was due on Monday and you found out on Thursday that you're out of a job. A couple of times a year we would frequent Round Table but not any longer. The unethical business practice of giving employees no notice that they are out of a job is just inexcusable. There are at times unfortunate situations where companies go dark overnight but those are associated with really and truly going out of business. This was apparently not related to a bankruptcy or dire situations. Rather it was a calculated well-planned move that was intentionally designed to catch employees off guard. How do I know this? Well things like this don't happen overnight. Sometime back, probably months back, they started looking at how to save some dough. They produced charts and looked at markets. Had meetings and analyzed the numbers. Between the time they closed stores on Wednesday night and the time employees came to work on Thursday they closed up shop.

Today was a conference day and then a travel evening. Stopping through the time zones across the country some of those pesky little nits about the way rude people travel come to mind. Leaving Baltimore the plane was fairly full but not completely. In the exit row we had an empty seat and we're taxing towards the runway. As the flight attendants make their sweep through the cabin to ensure we're all tabbed-into slotted and fastened low and tight across our laps they notice a seat in the row behind me isn't in the upright and locked position. Turns out it doesn't go up. So the solution is to have the shoeless passenger move up to the empty seat.

If you haven't flown a lot it may not be immediately clear than when somebody moves into the seat next to you by passing their shoes up first it will be a long flight. As the captain came on to explain the weather-related delays, both in departing and en-route the seat was filled with a book-reading passenger. In fact the book seemed so good he couldn't take his eyes off it, even while moving. Now I should be thrilled to see people reading more. The thing is I prefer those cases when they read in their seats and not so much in mine. Airplanes are small and cramped these days for sure. But when the large person next to you chooses to read their book by taking up the whole row it gets annoying.

Perhaps when it comes right down to it my annoyance was furthered by having read in an in your face sort of way.

When pilots go to fly a plane there is a pre-flight check before each and every flight. This is a wise practice for many things including driving and bicycling. As a case in point the story of my evening will illustrate. About 45-minutes ago I left the house for a bike ride. Planning to ride for an hour or so. The story actually starts a couple of weeks back when I picked up a new pair of bike shoes at a REI garage sale. The shoes were just a bit larger than those I had before and were much more comfortable.

This week I got around to putting the cleats on them and tonight I took them for a ride. Everything went well, for a while anyway. With the garage door closing behind me I pulled down the driveway, turned on the bike computer and heard the reassuring click, click as my left-foot and then right-foot clicked into the pedals. Things went quite well for a longish while. Riding around the neighborhood and down some of the local streets and through the park all was well. Fortunately I decided that before hitting the state highway I should make sure the new shoes released from the pedals properly. A flick of the ankle and nothing... more wiggling tugging pulling and nothing. The realization that the cleats weren't tightened down enough floods the mind at this moment.

The sad news of Tim Russert's passing comes today. Since I posted a video this morning here's a video of one of Tim Russert's great interviews on Meet the Press.

It is so very sad to see someone so young pass so early.

While working on some ideas for interactive media sites I came across PBS Engage which is a Drupal site working to engage viewers in the stories on PBS. Chapter 3's portfolio lists some of the cool things they worked on including a super-duper administrative interface for the backend of the site.

The picture at the right, showing some 520 unread email messages comes courtesy of the combination of the import_node module, Organic Groups and a successful import.

Note to self and others: when you're importing a whole bunch of Organic Groups you might want to turn off email notifications before proceeding with the import.