From freakyzappo at yahoo.com Sun Feb 17 01:00:39 2008 From: freakyzappo at yahoo.com (Laszlo Panaflex) Date: Sun Feb 17 01:01:16 2008 Subject: [Cpaod-discuss] Meshes of the Afternoon Message-ID: <441454.15545.qm@web53601.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) http://youtube.com/watch?v=sbJKyLXoqXc [part 1, follow link to part 2, 14 min. total] "This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience." - Maya Deren on Meshes of the Afternoon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Deren http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshes_of_the_Afternoon http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=89283 Multiple viewings are definitely rewarding. At least it took me multiple viewings to get the vaguest clue. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping From freakyzappo at yahoo.com Sun Feb 17 21:59:14 2008 From: freakyzappo at yahoo.com (Laszlo Panaflex) Date: Sun Feb 17 21:59:21 2008 Subject: [Cpaod-discuss] Alphabets, Z to A Message-ID: <203067.35591.qm@web53605.mail.re2.yahoo.com> "Zorn's Lemma" is an hour long experimental film from 1970 that is a good 40 minutes too long. The description below from IMDb pretty well sums it up. Watch as long as you can stand. I made it through about the first five and last five minutes. http://www.ubu.com/film/frampton.html "This is an amazing experimental film from American avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton. It begins with a dark screen and a woman narrating from The Bay State Primer, an early American grammar textbook that teaches the letters of the alphabet by using them in sentences derived from the Bible, then the rest of the film is mostly silent. It presents us with a recurring structure that perpetually moves throughout a 24-letter alphabet via various signs in New York with words that propel the film along. Gradually other images are added to the loop, some of them themselves slowly developing as we arrive at them the next time around. It concludes with a man, woman and dog crossing a snowy field, while several narrators each narrate one word at a time read from an 11th century treatise, "On Light, or the Ingression of Forms", by Robert Grosseteste. Ambiguous, metaphorical and fascinating. A veritable masterpiece of structural filmmaking." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131149/ ----------- I had long heard of David Lynch's student film "The Alphabet" (1968), but I'd never seen it until recently. It's short and fascinating. Many Lynch themes and styles are already in place. This one you'll wanna watch many times. http://youtube.com/watch?v=daHY98a5cVo http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062653/ ----- ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping From rhowertonsprint at earthlink.net Sun Feb 24 08:35:30 2008 From: rhowertonsprint at earthlink.net (Ron) Date: Sun Feb 24 08:35:12 2008 Subject: [Cpaod-discuss] Yiour tax dollars at work References: <29777585.1201453962150.JavaMail.root@m03> <479E06EC.8010209@netonecom.net> Message-ID: <006201c876ea$21238560$6401a8c0@P4> I apologize for the length but I think it's worth the read. And anybody who knows me well knows that I tend to blather on. Hope you find this educational, if not entertaining, in the same way as a car wreck, that is.... ___________________________________________________ I have recently been subjected to new "protocols" that have been introduced at work to ensure that important assignments are promptly distributed, processed, and results returned in a specific format. This is not because I have been inefficient or dropped a ball - everybody is apparently required to follow these steps when requests for information are made from sources outside our little part of the agency. It's all very complicated and formal, and everybody at the receiving end of these requests acknowledges them to be largely a waste of time and agency resources. My supervisor actually told me it was simply a game to be followed and that I had better learn to play it correctly. I've had to do several of them, but none were quite as pointless as this: A request was sent out to the field from a group in headquarters who wanted information from regional developers about a centralized database system. They already knew the answer to the question: the service was universally shunned as inefficient, unsupported, and unmanageable. A whole group of us said exactly that to those responsible for this system at a meeting two years ago. The request even listed those specific issues. But they insisted on a formal answer anyway. Now, any reasonable organization simply would've spammed every developer, gotten a meaningless 10% return, and produced results that would've been roundly ignored. But this was "important" and therefore had to pass through formal channels. So, the request was first sent by the manager of the headquarters group to the top banana of our region. She then passed the request to the head of our department, who entered the request into a formal management system. (In a related, ironic aside, I had to write a new version of this management system two years ago because the current system doesn't work very well. My version is still not being used because I am so busy doing other things, like responding to information requests from headquarters, I don't have time to finish the implementation.) Our department manager then forwarded the request to our group's manager, who passed it along to my supervisor, who finally dumped it on me. I was told to poll our team even though I knew none of them used the system in question, compile the results, and write them up in an obsequious format that looks like our head cheese actually wrote it. She's apparently too busy to do so herself. Oh, and I was given two weeks to return my results. Anyway, I read the request, created a folder in Outlook and a rule to route replies automatically to it, and dutifully polled the team requesting negative replies. They ignored me, as expected, and I had to then add a reminder to Outlook to send out a nag letter before the due date. Still less than half responded to that, and none of them had done anything with the system in question, as I already said I knew. In the end, I was the only one who had anything to say, I'd already said it, and those who asked knew it. So the informal response was "No comment", and really, not responding at all would've been the most appropriate and efficient response. But, no! I still had to follow this silly protocol, write it up formally, and submit it back up the chain of command. It couldn't be sent directly to those who made the request because everybody who touched it on the way down to me had to approve my response on the way back up to justify their existence. What follows is the chain of emails from me all the way back up to our region's top management. Each of them felt the need to tweak the email slightly so they could claim to have contributed to the effort somehow. As a bit of explanation before these emails begin, an "official" response consists of two parts: the top part is addressed to each manager up the chain, and includes instructions on how the response is to be routed when it has finally been through all possible managers along the way. The second half is the actual response which had to be written as though our regional manager had composed it herself. The names and phone numbers of the bureaucrats involved have been changed to protect my career. Here's the original draft of my response, cloned from a previous similar request (to make life easier for me), which I sent to my supervisor: Danna, Below is our draft response to ACT#99999999-9999999 Issues with the Shared Hosting Environment (SHE). The response needs to be sent to ******** once everybody in-between has blessed it. The response is that Denver has nothing to add to the issues already identified. Our experience has been very limited and negative, but I didn't think that worth mentioning. Please let me know if you have any questions. ___________________________________________________ Betty, Thank you for the opportunity to respond with our SHE issues. Denver concurs with the issues listed below and has nothing to add. Please contact Danna Nagle if you have any questions. Darcy My supervisor, of course, had to retouch it slightly so she could say she had a part in it. Here is the response she then forwarded to her manager, with the changes she made highlighted in red: Below is our draft response to ACT#99999999-9999999, Issues with the Shared Hosting Environment (SHE). The response needs to be sent from Darcy to Betty ******, with copies to *******, ********, *********, and Dick *********. The response is that Denver has nothing to add to the issues already identified. Our experience has been very limited and negative, but I didn't think that worth mentioning. Please let me know if you have any questions. ___________________________________________________ Betty, Thank you for the opportunity to respond with our SHE issues. Denver concurs with the issues listed below and has nothing to add. If your staff have any questions about our response, they may contact Danna *****, the ******* Team Leader, at 303-***-****. Darcy It's hard to argue with these changes as they clarify some contact information in case anybody has any questions about what exactly "nothing to add" means. You'd think she might've changed the wording of the phrase starting "but I didn't think that worth mentioning", since those were my thoughts and not hers, but she is only a GS-13, after all. I was also informed that I was supposed to list everybody who should be CCed on the final response in the opening paragraph. This is based on the chain of emails involved in getting the request to me to begin with. Now it seems to me that middle management should already be aware of whomever needs to see my response without me telling them, but this is not apparently the case after all. And I was told that feelings might get hurt if "staff" were not included in the invitation to ask for details, hence the addition of that phrase. Who knew so much was involved in answering a simple question? My supervisor's manager then modified it slightly further and passed it one step higher up the chain: Below is our draft response to ACT#99999999-9999999, Issues with the Shared Hosting Environment (SHE). The response needs to be sent from Darcy to Betty ******, with copies to *******, ********, *********, and Dick *********. Our experience with the SHE was very limited and negative, and they captured our concerns with it. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Liz ****** ___________________________________________________ Betty, Thank you for the opportunity to respond with our SHE issues. Denver concurs with the issues listed below and has nothing else to add. If your staff have any questions about our response, they may contact Danna *****, the ******* Team Leader, at 303-***-****. Darcy Evidently "nothing to add" wasn't clear enough after all! Adding the word "else" certainly strengthened our position, don't you think? I'm so glad my manager is there to protect me from the misunderstandings of upper management, especially since her boss apparently cannot be trusted to remember the point of this email between the first and second paragraphs (requiring the additional reference to the SHE). This may explain why I have been requested to distill a five page analysis into a three bullet point PowerPoint slide in the past. And that executive eventually forwarded this modified to our regional manager: Below is proposed response to ACT#99999999-9999999, Issues with the Shared Hosting Environment (SHE). The response needs to be sent from Darcy to Betty ******, with copies to *******, ********, *********, and Dick *********. Our experience with the SHE was very limited and negative, and they captured our concerns with it. Please let me know if you have any questions. ___________________________________________________ Betty, Thank you for the opportunity to respond with our SHE issues. Denver concurs with the issues as you have summarized them below and has nothing else to add. If your staff have any questions about our response, they may contact Danna *****, the ******* Team Leader, at 303-***-****. Darcy IMHO, "Below is proposed response" does not read as nicely as "Below is our proposed response", but I obviously don't know how to word these things properly for management or so many people would not have felt it necessary to rewrite a simple two line memo. I'm also not sure why I was requested to add the line "Please let me know if you have any questions" when he just removed it. I'd guess he's probably far too busy rewriting memos to be bothered with pesky questions, but now nobody knows who to ask should any internal issues arise about what "Nothing to add" actually means! And "summarized" is a longer word than "listed", thus demonstrating his superior vocabulary. Oh, and he had to close out the control created at the beginning of the process. So he certainly earned his pay! And here is the final response sent by our regional manager to the originator: Betty, Thank you for the opportunity to respond with our SHE issues. Denver concurs with the issues as you have summarized them below and has nothing further to add. If your staff have any questions about our response, they may contact Danna *****, the ******* Team Leader, at 303-***-****. Darcy The "else" added by my manager evidently still wasn't clear enough in her mind, so she changed it to "further". I sure hope that didn't take her away from something more important. So in all, more than a dozen people and two weeks of effort were required to route a request, research a question, and revise a response that said absolutely nothing. The horror! Now you know why it takes forever and costs so much for the government to accomplish anything!