Yeah, that's just bizarre, Sue. I'd think it would be completely appropriate for you to provide some notes, and for the new supervisor to frame his/her evaluation in terms of having only been there half the year, but it's so not your job to do the thing.

That's really odd, Sue. Say no!

Jesse, the USDA says throw it out: [link]

Bummer! It was the blueberry!

You know, the number of things I need to enter into a potential manual about the stupid fricking ancient software I support is approaching infinity, and I don't think the possibility of a bonus is enough for me to even contemplate this project. It's HUGE. It's like asking me to write the tech version of Gone With the Wind on top of my regular duties. I don't want to do it.

Sue, you could just send an email saying "it's been a while since I was there, and didn't even supervise her for the entire year. Here are some brief notes for you to incorporate into your evaluation if you wish"

Okay, to be fair, she just wants me to do the appraisal for the time that I supervised her for, but it's still weird. Shouldn't my old boss be doing that? She'd know about any issues I would have had with my minion. I'm going to say no, but offer some notes.

Sue, I think you're absolutely right.

Okay, I just received an email from the person who replaced me at my last position asking me if I could do the performance appraisal on my former minion. I have been gone from that dept. for six months, and was that employees supervisor for 7 of the 12 months of that fiscal year.

"Re: Appraisal of Minion X.

Eh. She didn't suck.

Signed,

Sue."

I'm not adequately caffeinated and people keep wanting me to do stuff that requires complicated thought. Does that seem right to you?

I opened up a jar of homemade jam this morning, and it had mold on it. Does that mean I have to chuck the whole thing, or can I just take off the top layer?

Alton Brown in his jam-canning ep had a great sequence of when to throw cans out. "If the lid has bubbled out, discard. If there's foam on the top, discard. If there's mold, discard..." etc.

Whoa. Dude.

Researchers say we can all see into the future

Those geniuses at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have figured out something profound. If you think about it, this makes sense: It takes a tenth of a second for visual information to get from your eyes to your brain, so everyone has the ability to predict what’s going to happen a tenth of a second into the future. That’s what you’re actually seeing, is that prediction. If you weren’t, everything would look like it was recorded a tenth of a second ago.

So this makes all of us somewhat clairvoyant, just so we can experience our world in real time. This also explains how lots of magic tricks are done. In his research paper, clear-thinking scientist Mark Changizi mentioned 50 types of visual illusions that work because your brain is attempting to predict what will happen 1/10th of a second into the future. This is weird, and changes everything in a small one-tenth-of-a-second way.