Big news this morning in the auto industry: the United Auto Workers (UAW) labor union has called a strike at General Motors (GM) factories after failing to reach a deal with management for new contracts. I have predicted for some time that a real, knock-down, drag-out war between the UAW and the American auto manufacturers was coming (for many of the reasons discussed in my Fixing the American Auto Industry piece). I hope this is it, and that GM doesn’t give-in. Fire the union workers and rehire on a case-by-case basis with individual contracts like most every other modern industry. This is GM’s opportunity to break the unions and free itself to grow and improve in reliability, sales, and profit—which will ultimately help it and its workers (and chart a course for Ford and Chrysler to follow later). Go for it!
RSS & LiveJournal Feed Problem (Fixed)
Some of you may have noticed problems with my RSS feed, and the LiveJournal feed that runs off of it (I’m not using LJ much lately, so I didn’t find out about this until my sister brought it to my attention). Turns out there was a phantom character—known as a ‘gremlin’—in one of my entries, which caused the feed to be invalid XML. This caused a parsing error when attempting to use the feed with some feed-readers, including whichever one LiveJournal uses to parse and display the feed. I have ‘zapped’ the ‘gremlin’ and everything should work fine now. LiveJournal updates their version of the feed again at 2am tomorrow (Monday, Sept. 24), so everything should be back-to-normal then.
Tons o’ Stuff
As I’ve mentioned, we’ve been moving. We took care of the big bulk of things last weekend, but continue to shuttle an SUV-load of stuff to the new place after work each evening until we’re completely done (should be this weekend). Here’s a pretty representative load: mostly Melissa’s studio stuff, plus a dresser (buried and not visible) and other random things.
Moving Update
We got most of the really hard stuff done on Monday (big furniture, etc.), then moved a few other things (like the cat) on Tuesday. There’s still a bunch of stuff at the old apartment though, so we’re shuttling it over bit-by-bit in the evenings and will finish up with the last couple pieces of furniture on Saturday. I’m a bit miffed at Verizon though—I signed up for Verizon Avenue high-speed Internet weeks ago and requested a service date of the 17th (Monday), expecting they would follow up with whatever info I needed. They didn’t. I called today to find out they have to send a tech to set up the modem (!?). No Internet at the new place until tomorrow, I guess. ~Sigh~
On the Move; Busy, Busy
It’s a busy time for Melissa and me. Among a million small things, there have been quite a few big things happening—a wedding, an art show, and moving to a new apartment. These all pretty much happened this weekend (which we extended to four days so we would have time to get everything done). Friday we were off work in preparation for our move, got our new driver’s licenses (with the new addresses; they were about to expire anyway), and got our new Smart Tag/E-ZPass transponders for the cars (since we’ll be commuting on the Dulles Toll Road now), and did more packing.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.