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I keep reminding myself that my recent distressments are quite minor compared to, say, what people in a lot of the world are dealing with (every time I turn on the news it gets more depressing). And at least my bedroom ceiling isn't filled with bees.

And at least my job hasn't yet moved to India, although I can see the writing on the wall—there's some question in my mind as to why a company would pay a writer to write documentation at all when they can just leave it to third-party publishers (the Missing Manual series and the like) to do it for them; and for those companies that do continue to do their own documentation, there's probably no good reason for them not to have Indian tech writers do the job cheaper. Especially 'cause I don't buy that Wired article's premise that (as I'm reading it) Indians are really only good at doing maintenance work, and for real creativity you need Americans. At some point I'll probably have to figure out what my next career will be.

I'm also thankful that my country has not undergone an Islamic Revolution the way Iran did in 1979; I picked up a copy of Marjane Satrapi's graphic-novel autobiography Persepolis last week, and the little that I've read of it has been excellent and chilling. See Debbie Notkin's review and excerpts at the official Random House site. And thanks to whoever it was who recommended this; I've lost track, but I think it was in someone's journal.

One bit of good news and then I have to get going: a 15-year-old Russian girl won the online Russian beauty contest on an anti-Barbie platform. Sadly, she was disqualified due to being too young. But still, a cool article.