"PDS" for short, another way of saying "Employee Performance Plan and Review". A lot of employees hate these things. Even more managers probably do. In the many years I was self-employed, I never had to worry about being evaluated. With my prior employer, a fairly small company, a lot of times the reviews didn't happen. Here, in a company of thousands, they require it, and until everyone in a department gets one turned in, there's no annual bonus, or so they say. There's incentive!

Whether this sort of thing is necessary or not is a debate I don't plan to take up. There's a case to be made for just letting people do their jobs, but then the only time there's feedback is in exceptional cases, either when there's excellent work or a serious problem. Required annual performance planning ensures that employee and manager have a look at the past year and do a little planning. (Of course, there's no guarantee that either will take the process seriously.)

Because I've just filled out the "end-of-year" part of the form I started last January (print date: 1/21/2011), and because at that time I suggested some areas where I needed to improve, I can see that I've made a bit of progress. I still felt bogged down quite a bit during the year, but in filling out the "Results Achieved" boxes I realized that there were bright spots, too, things I just sat down and made happen, despite the "maintenance intensive" nature of the job that sometimes makes me feel like I'm just doing the same thing over and over. And those things are already making the "maintenance" part of the job easier, which can lead to more time spent on new things. It's actually encouraging.

Now, on to filling out the 2012 plan! (Okay, maybe the exclamation point isn't called for.)

Hokey. That has to be one of the hokiest slogans I've ever read.

According to this web page, it came about, well, the first part ("Made Like a Gun") in 1893. It seems that The Eadie Manufacturing Company Limited earned a contract to supply precision rifle parts to the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, Middlesex. The company had been making bicycles under various owners since the 1880s. In 1892 they came up with some new models, which they called "Enfields", and because they were also manufacturing the rifle parts they decided upon the slogan "Made Like a Gun" for the bicycles. To our 21st Century sensibilities, that's quite a leap, or just plain goofy, but apparently it was quite a hit at the time. Soon after, they prepended "Royal" to the name. The web page I referenced claims that was after the Royal Small Arms factory, but other things I've read indicate that you had to have permission from "The Crown", or perhaps even provide products for the government or royal family, in order to use the word "Royal" in your name. That being the case, I suppose that the manufacture of the rifle parts would have qualified them.

It's hard to know which web authors to believe, isn't it? Many sites on the marque claim that this was the same firm that manufactured Enfield rifles, but that was definitely the Royal Small Arms Factory, which was at the time government owned. The first model called the Bullet came out in 1931. I don't know whether this was because of, or the reason for, the "Goes Like a Bullet" part of the slogan.

I'm not about to change the subject, though it may sound like it.

I finished a book. This is the first time in years I've done that. (You may recall that I attempted, and failed, to read Don Quixote a couple of years ago.) The book I finished (took me 6 months!) was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book that has little to do with Zen and little to do with motorcycle maintenance. It's actually a book of philosophy, the semi-autobiographical story of a 17-day motorcycle trip that the author, Robert Pirsig, took with his son in 1968. Reading the book you'd have thought they were gone all summer, but that's beside the point. The book has a lot to do with quality, and ideas about how aesthetics and mechanics don't have to be opposed to one another. Not that I ever thought they did, but maybe my perception of things is the indirect result of this novel from 1974.

It also has to do with insanity. The narrator spends the days riding and thinking, taking the reader on a series of Chautauquas where they should learn the essence of Quality, with a capital "Q". I "got" a lot of what he was saying, but it seemed to me to be self-evident. It also made me think about my job quite a bit, and perhaps I can do my job better if I keeps some the ideas in mind.

When he's not instructing, the narrator is talking about his trip. For the first part of the trip narrator and son are accompanied by a couple on what he emphasizes is a BMW motorcycle. The reason he emphasizes it is that the owner of that bike bought it because he expected it to be problem-free, and he really didn't want to have to think about how things worked. He mentions that the fellow had once tried and failed to fix a dripping faucet, and that the drip was never fixed because he just didn't want to have to deal with things like that.

Throughout the trip, we see the narrator changing the oil, adjusting the valves, changing the carburetor jets so that his motorcycle will run well at altitude, and just generally showing us how we should be aware of things.

But he is haunted by having gone supposedly insane 10 or so years earlier, as a professor in search of a definition of quality, trying to show that the methods used to teach writing skills produced students who may have known some rules, some literary tricks, and names given to various styles, without ever learning to write well, to produce quality work. What made him crazy was trying to define quality, when part of his thought process was the idea that it couldn't be defined. It becomes clear that at some point, he had been institutionalized and given shock treatments without his consent. (In fact, this actually happened to Pirsig.)

This was a rather disturbing part of the story line. Part of what disturbed me is that I saw some of his tendencies of thought in myself. I can get wrapped up in things, almost to the point of obsession, and begin to wonder what's wrong with me. What's wrong, I'm certain, is that I'm human.

Without some compulsive tendencies, a person can never learn much. That idea of getting really interested in something, interested enough to learn it, or to become good at an activity, is the idea of compulsiveness. You'll never learn to golf if you don't spend hours and hours just hitting golf balls. You'll never learn to play an instrument to a level that a listener wouldn't want to scream until you become obsessed enough to practice for hours upon hours. You'll never become a doctor unless you go through a sleep-deprived residency. And while you're doing those things, you are borderline insane. You actually lose sleep because you have a hard time shutting the thoughts off. You've been there, haven't you?

Sometimes the quality of a thing is a lack of quality. The lack thereof is described as the thing's "character". That Royal Enfield has some character. I wonder how many people in the world today lubricated a speedometer cable? I did.

When did I become so busy?

And someone still has be blocked, so I can't read the last 43 of her entries. Just punishment for my absence, I suppose.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, those of you who wished me wishes. For whatever reason, I chose not to publicize the event this year. Fifty-one was weird enough. Fifty-two is beyond weird. I think it'll be okay when I hit 60, just like it was when I hit 30. Not that I want 8 years to come and go!

After all, it's a new year. I don't have a calendar on my wall at work... gonna have to look for one. I had a "Classic Trains" calendar last year.

We took a 2.5 week trip to Germany. I have LOTS to say about that, but no time to say it. I'll say a little: We saw a walled city from the 13th century (Rothenburg), and a Roman city from the 1st century (Trier). At Trier, we saw the arena, the baths which had been excavated, and the city gate, which was built in the 2nd century. We also went to the city of Saarbrücken and visited a museum of, as best as I can recall, "ancient history and older than ancient history". Or maybe it was "ancient and near ancient". It seems that the Celts lived in that part of Germany before the Romans took over, so there were Celtic artifacts from 100 BC and earlier, and Roman artifacts from 100 BC to 400 AD or so.

We also managed to add 4 countries to our list of "been there" places, tripling the total. Before, we had the U.S. and Mexico. Now we also have Germany, Austria (ventured into Salzburg for an evening), France (visited Strassbourg, a 2 hour drive from Jesse and Amber's house), and because Trier was just across the border from Luxembourg, we drove across the border and got out to take a picture. I can't recall the name of the town.

Okay, there's your entry! I'll have to work on pictures sometime. We took over 300.

Oh, and one day while Jacquelyn slept and Amber worked, Jesse and I drove to Stuttgart and toured the Porsche museum. Those pictures are in my phone. I may have uploaded them to Picasa.

Right now I need to get back to work. My computer died while I was gone, and I've felt bogged down yet rushed ever since I got back.

One Pleonast user has me blocked. Guess that's my punishment for disappearing for months.

Adam and Ashley celebrated their third wedding anniversary on Tuesday. THIRD! Congratulations to them. THIRD!

There's a woman at work whose husband's family are from the Athens, Texas area. A few years ago she was browsing through some books that her father-in-law had about the area, and ran across some folks with the name "LaRue". She later asked me if I might be related to them, and I said that my grandfather was born in Henderson, and I knew that there was an Athens connection, so most likely it was family.

They were up there on Thanksgiving, so she borrowed the book so that I could have a look. I went to the index looking for my great-grandfather, Squire B. LaRue, and his name was there, page 105.

On page 105 was the story of his parents, my great-great-grandparents. They were married in March, 1852, in Tennessee, and moved to Texas with a very large group. (Family stories say there were 100 wagons.) They crossed the Sabine river into Texas on Christmas day, 1852.

The most amazing thing, to me, was that there was a picture of them... their wedding picture! I know that there were a lot of photographs taken during the Civil War, but I thought it was very, very new, and so it surprises me that a couple had a wedding photo taken almost 10 years earlier.

Here are Joseph Marion LaRue and Mary Frances Oliver LaRue, parents of Squire B. LaRue, father of Fernond C. LaRue, father of Fernond Paul LaRue, my father. Joseph was 26 at the time of the wedding.