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Daily Archives: October 30, 2009
Books | The Man With The Golden Torc
The Man with the Golden Torc (Secret Histories, Book 1), by Simon Green
I’m about midway through this book, and although I’m enjoying it, it’s an exhausting read. I got on to it because of a review I ran across on NPR.org recently, which compared it favorably to the The Dresden Files) books by Jim Butcher. Both series feature male protagonists who walk between the mundane and magic worlds, but Green’s anti-ish hero, Eddie Drood, is British, somewhat of a Bond fan, and fully human and not really a magic user, although he has magic golden armor. Butcher’s guy, Harry Dresden, is a Chicago-based wizard who acts as a kind of magical private detective, and both have similar run-ins with witches, demons, murderers, and the undead. Drood is more like a secret agent-assassin, but in this first book, he’s chucked out of his large and influential family for some unknown reason, and is currently allied with old enemies in an attempt to survive and figure out why he’s become a shoot-on-sight target for everybody from his grandmother, the Matriarch, on down.
I liked the Dresden books at first, because I really liked The Dresden Files TV series with Paul Blackthorne (who takes amazing photos). But the books are quite a bit more violent and have more sex, naturally, than the old SciFi channel dared put on the screen. After about the 5th entry in the series, I was disinclined to read the next one, although my husband David has carried on with them as they come out.
I have hopes that these “Eddie Drood” books will continue to be enjoyable – like I said, “Torc” is pretty good so far, but exhausting. There’ve been a number of amazing battles, incredible escapes, and bizarre encounters all over and under modern London and the southwest of England… just in the first half of this book. It’s all a bit much of a muchness, but there’s enough interesting local color, intriguing character, and crackling dialogue to keep me turning pages. The sly nod-and-a-wink to the James Bond books (not to mention the fun magical gadgets and vehicles Drood uses in his escapes) are amusing, too.
I’m using a new plugin to pull in Amazon images and links, Amazon Reloaded. I already had an Amazon Web Services (AWS) key, secret key, and affiliate code, and although the plugin page warns that it’s not tested with my version of WordPress, it works fine, although the formatting on the buttons is a little weird. The search function is a little odd, probably due to inconsistent tagging on Amazon’s end, and it does seem to be missing an essential part of the link, the author’s name. I had to go look it up for both books I linked. In practice, it blends pretty seamlessly with the WP Edit Post page – it’s loaded into the center column, and can be dragged and dropped right under the edit form.
Like this:
See how the one button is floating on top of part of the text? I’m using Firefox with WordPress, but it’s probably a minor formatting issue that will be corrected in a later version. However, an author link with the title would be really useful. I had to visit the book pages to verify the author’s names, shouldn’t have to do that since the point of the plugin is to work from within the WordPress editing interface.
I used to do Amazon links a lot more when this blog was created with Movable Type, but the plugin I used after switching to WordPress was a bit flaky, and stopped working altogether after an upgrade more than a year ago. I’d tried something with shortcodes, but hated the way the result looked in my posts, so I’m really happy to find Amazon Reloaded!
Having An Off Day
Friday, that is! I’m home for the day, which I scheduled off… God, about a year ago now, with the vague idea that I didn’t want to be at work on “Halloween Friday.” In years past, we used to make a much, MUCH bigger deal about decorating for Halloween and competing as teams and individuals for best concept, and in fact we used actually start building stuff or putting up decorations a week or more in advance. Not so much this year… a lot has happened, we’ve gone through a layoff cycle, we’re effectively between VPs until the new executive moves to the area, and the people that were the most competitive (and the most psychotic about crazy themes and wacky, elaborate costumes) have all retired, been fired, or de-hired.
Hmm. Possible corollary there.
Anyway, it’s been interesting at work the last few weeks, and looks to get more and more interesting in the weeks to come (in the Chinese proverb sense of the word).
There’s a lot I can’t say about some of the pressures and tensions that we’re under at work. I’ll see if I can do a little wire-walking, in the interests of documenting my current mind-set.
Where I work, metrics are hugely important. We’re measured on how long we talk on the phone, how long we work off the phone before becoming available again to take more calls, and how productive we are (total number of reservations logged).
I’ve been doing this, mostly on SABRE, American’s reservation system, for lo these 23 years. I’ve been with my current company for about half that time. Within the last couple of years, my company decided to mandate use of a different required tool (it’s kind of like a GUI) for making and modifying reservations, which is capable of handling most (but not all) of the tasks I need to do in a typical day that I now do with regular SABRE. We’re… pretty much required to use this tool as much as possible, and many of the quality metrics start off with “Did (did not) use required tool.” We’re coming up on the end of the year, and there are numeric goals we are supposed to hit, having to do with “call quality” and “technical quality.” It is not possible to make the minimum goal if the required tool is not used.
I’ll just say that my original distaste for this tool was entirely due to the poor quality of training we had the first time. An outside trainer was brought in, turned everybody in her classroom inside out and backwards for a week, and after 3 months, everyone had been trained… but almost no one was using the tool. The year after that, we all had to go through re-training. It was better, but only when it became a mandated part of the technical quality scores did most of the office resign themselves to using it. There were a few pockets of resistance, but I really started using it when I was assigned the new account – it was actually helpful since I didn’t really know the account that well and it added some of the required documentation. It’s been a bit bumpy in the year since my formal transfer to my current account, for various reasons. But I think I’m on the right track now.
I’m OK on “call quality.” I’m just under the wire on “technical quality,” but my “trendlines” are pretty good. I’d have been better off if I hadn’t stopped using the required tool as much the first half of this year out of peer pressure.
NEWSFLASH: It’s not that bad. It’s improved a lot. And it’s not going away, in spite of all the molly-coddling.
And then there’s various kinds of coaching. I absolutely hate, hate, hate having to trail off to a little cubicle in the back office to be coached. Even if my most recent score was above 90 (which is very good), I still hate it. It is as the tortures of the damned, to me. It makes my toes curl back on themselves with embarrassment to hear my voice talking to some traveler, knowing exactly where I messed up on the call with perfect hindsight. I will never stop hating it, because I see it as intrusive and slightly offensive. I try not to whine and grumble (but fail miserably), and lately I’ve adopted a rather faux-cheerful, yet tight-lipped aspect, because complaining about the tool’s shortcomings is useless (as is resistance). Fortunately, we are not required to listen to our own calls – it’s optional now. I always demur when offered a chance to listen, preferring to sit through the recap from the scoring PDF (that I’ve already read for myself).
It makes my skin crawl, and I don’t know exactly why.
Since I stopped complaining and learned to love the Bomb started using the required tool more consistently, my scores improved. In fact, I actually prefer to use it to start a new reservation now. It’s fine for that sort of thing. It’s just frustratingly slow off the mark and it takes a long time to resolve between screens, and I can’t really start to work until the fourth screen because I have some required marks to hit before getting there. With certain high-powered, VIP-type secretaries and travelers, I can sense their irritation and impatience while they wait for me to get where I can do something. Fortunately, now that I’ve used it more, I’ve learned to cover this part of the process with a bit of happytalk (which also hits some of the quality marks early in the call).
Probably the most irritating thing about having to use this tool, though, is that not everyone is using the damn tool. We’re also required to “import” everything we work on into the tool, if it wasn’t created there; this normally doesn’t add more than a few seconds to the process. But if the traveler was not profiled, oh! misery! Because the tool requires a faux profile be filled in, so that an “unprofiled” but otherwise perfectly formatted record can be imported.
And of course, there are those who will not use it at all, so every time I catch a call from someone booked “old skool” as an unprofiled traveler, my stats suffer because of the extra time that must be taken to do this “faux profile/import” process.
Yeah. This seems like a good place to stop, or I’ll have to set a password for this post…
More Tepid Than Intrepid
I’d like a mystery heroine to be less of a Mary Sue and more like Harriet Vane. Not like the protagonists in the first two “Aunt Dimity” novels. #fb
Amazon.com: Aunt Dimity’s Death (Aunt Dimity Mystery) (9780140178401): Nancy Atherton: Books
From Publishers Weekly
Despite its buoyant tone, this blend of fairy tale, ghost story, romance and mystery proves a disappointment. First novelist Atherton creates a potentially appealing heroine in bewitched and bewildered Lori Shepherd, but never places her in danger, thus sacrificing suspense. Recently divorced and newly bereaved by her beloved mother’s death, Lori is scraping by as an office temp in Boston when she receives a letter from a Boston law firm informing her of the death in England of Miss Dimity Westwood. Lori is shocked because she had thought adventurous Dimity was her mother’s fictional creation, the star of made-up bedtime stories. Courtly lawyer William Willis and his attentive son Bill inform Lori that Dimity left instructions that she and Bill go to her Cotswolds cottage to prepare a collection of “Aunt Dimity” stories for publication. They find the cottage haunted by the ghost of Dimity, who blocks their efforts to trace the secret of her WW II romance with a gallant flier. That all ends happily comes as a surprise to none but Lori.
I’d have to say that the review above, from the Amazon product page, is fair. Based on the other reader’s reviews, Atherton’s Aunt Dimity series is either loved or panned by mystery readers. I admit to giggling a few times as I read it, but also shook my head at how the main character came off as a total Mary Sue. It’s a wish-fulfillment story and then some; the setup is that all kinds of people have been conspiring to keep the protagonist, Lori Shepherd, in the dark about people who have her best interests at heart until long after they’re dead. She spends a lot of time grubbing around for answers when she’s been given the writer’s dream commission: free use of the most charming, yet cozily haunted cottage in the Costwolds while writing the foreword to a collection of “Aunt Dimity” stories culled from Dimity’s letters to Lori’s mother, to be published posthumously. And also, free use of a handsome young lawyer who seems to be unusually interested in her and the “Aunt Dimity” mythos. A childhood toy rabbit gets repaired, too, and is part of how Dimity communicates from beyond.
Although the story picks up a little once Lori gets to England and starts asking questions about Dimity Westwood, her mother’s wartime friend, it remains a frothy puff-piece to the end. There’s no physical danger or conflict to add suspense, and the romance is a big dud; William, the young lawyer (who lives at home with his stereotypically crusty father in their stereotypically grand Boston mansion), turns out to have known about Lori all her life, because he got his own version of “Aunt Dimity” stories as a lad. To him, she’s a dream girl, and he struggles with the reality of her as a defensive, cranky, wet mess. But still he loves her, as this is a Mary Sue story, and she must be loved no matter how unlovable she appears to be at the beginning of the book.
There are some rather engaging ancillary characters who become Lori’s fast friends; they’re almost like human agents of Dimity Westwood’s, after her death. Before she died, the husband restored the cottage to a lavish degree, and the wife redesigned the back gardens into a most un-English paradise. They’re the most fully realized of all the characters, and in fact the second book in the volume I bought concerns their first meeting, and their odd experiences in a Cornish chapel. They never actually meet Dimity in the flesh in that novel, but she’s seemingly just offstage in London.
Somehow, Dimity Westwood controls everything in the first book from beyond the grave, making astonishing repairs, moving things along, locking doors to unwanted intruders, and even communicating with Lori via a ghostly journal that writes itself and answers questions. The only mystery is what it was that broke Dimity’s heart and caused a breakdown during WWII, because she refused to talk about it to her best friend, Lori’s mother, and still refused to answer questions about it via the journal.
It’s all ridiculous and silly, and I was more than disappointed; I was irritated that someone could write something like this (and a number of twee-sounding sequel installments) and get published without resorting to fan-fiction websites and Lulu.com.
I originally started this post in August, and eventually finished the second book sometime in September. I actually liked that book better than the first one; more after the “jump” as I’m not going to put this all on the front page.
Will I Be The Biggest Loser?
Weighed myself yesterday, and am at 225. From here it gets harder as I’ve probably lost mostly water but also gained a bit of muscle mass. Fortunately, a “Biggest Loser” contest at work starts Monday. Lifted weights twice this week, worked out Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. The contest runs for 6 weeks, until just before the Christmas juggernaut. Wish me luck!