Carbon Motors is coming to Connersville, IN!!!!!

They just announced it not 30 minutes ago. Carbon Motors will be moving into the old Visteon building in Connersville. They expect to have 1300 direct jobs and inspire growth of up to 10,000 jobs in the local community. I expect that it'll take some of the pressure off of other jobs locally. This is so awesome!! Good luck to anyone who applies when they start doing that. Wish me luck also.

unemployment hell

Don't listen to any unemployment person who says to wait a week before you start your unemployment filing. The week wait begins after you start your filing, not before.

Also the 1-800 help numbers are worthless. 1-800# = hung up on if I actually want to talk to someone "all operators are busy, press 1 for website, 2 for email, 3 for blahblah, 4 to disconnect.." wait 10 seconds, hang up on me.

http://www.in.gov/dwd/files/Complete_CSS_1-23-08.pdf Very handy guide for starting the filing on the website.

Concept boat

Brought to you by nerds who have seen way too much Battlestar Galactica apparently. [Link] to article about this on Gizmodo. They're talking about it having a dirty gas engine and a solar powered electric engine but we know the real story here is the design.

yard sales are fun

Found a Yamaha keyboard from the 80's at a yard sale today for $1. Sure it was dirty as heck but I brought it home and cleaned it up. Found out it wouldn't play though, no sound from either speaker or headphone jack. :( But I managed to diagnose the problem as the volume control slider not working correctly. Once I found the right traces I was able to bypass it and hear the demo song, albeit at full volume. Just need to dig out my soldering iron to make my jumper permanent and I can actually play with it then. Sometime I'll have to dig a volume control or some other potentiometer from something to replace the volume control on this.

Blockbuster leaving Richmond when lease expires

Link

A sign on a door of the store at 3300 E. Main St. informs Movie Pass and Game Pass members that their memberships will be transferred to stores in Muncie or Greenville, Ohio, on May 3.

The store's last day will be May 10, with May 3 the last day to rent videos, according to company spokesman Randy Hargrove.

"The lease was up and we made a business decision to close that location," Hargrove said.

Yet another business in Richmond closing. I have to wonder if they heard about Cinram and decided to go ahead and announce they're closing too. I've always been a fan of services like Netflix but this is a crying shame for another place of employment leaving.

EDC weighs in on cinram closing

Link

The (EDC) was dismayed to learn from news media sources of Cinram's plans for closing its plant in Richmond.

In the past, employment numbers at Cinram in Richmond have been subject to sizeable seasonable swings. From previous contact with management, the EDC knew that employment at Cinram could be more than 600 people during full production times, generally in the period from late summer and fall leading up to Christmas.

The EDC had met with local Cinram management within the past year. The company did not share any plans to close. Still, EDC had offered to work with the company to offer assistance that might make it more attractive for the company to maintain its operations in Richmond. The company did not ask for assistance.

In March this year, the EDC heard a rumor that Cinram might be downsizing or closing. EDC staff immediately began to try to make contact with Cinram's vice president and plant manager, John Finnegan. When Mr. Finnegan responded, he left a voice message saying that he could not meet with EDC until the end of April. After that, the EDC requested a specific appointment for a meeting and received no response from Mr. Finnegan.

The EDC is sorry that Cinram did not provide EDC with an opportunity to offer job retention assistance to this plant. The loss of 330 jobs will have repercussions throughout the Richmond community and we are particularly concerned for the well-being of the families that will be affected by this company's decision.

My favorite paragraph here is the 3rd one.

In March this year, the EDC heard a rumor that Cinram might be downsizing or closing. EDC staff immediately began to try to make contact with Cinram's vice president and plant manager, John Finnegan. When Mr. Finnegan responded, he left a voice message saying that he could not meet with EDC until the end of April. After that, the EDC requested a specific appointment for a meeting and received no response from Mr. Finnegan.

Thanks alot John! I suppose you can meet with the EDC in a week or two, right? Since it's not quite the end of april yet huh? Real classy there fella.

laser show in zippo case

Flip top laser Spiro on "HacknMod.com" from Rog8811 on Vimeo.

This is pretty cool. This guy put a tiny spirograph laser show in a zippo lighter.

Cinram using temporary visa employees

Eastofhuntsville.com

It was just over two weeks ago that local apartment owners began raising red flags about some of their tenants, temporary immigrant workers, were missing. The workers were brought to America on H2-B work visa as temporary help for the holidays at local DVD manufacturer Cinram, Inc.

Cinram is a Canadian company with several locations across the country, their Huntsville plant can be found at the intersection of Moores Mill and Highway 72. The plant located at the bottom of Chapman Mountain experiences a significant surge in business in preparation for Christmas DVD sales and regularly hires temporary workers to ensure adequate capacity.

Late last summer, Cinram made application to fill the Christmas need by bring in 1,500 plus temporary employees from outside the United States. In October the first of the approximately 1,100 foreign workers began arriving from Jamaica, Nepal, Bolivia, Ukraine, and the Dominican Republic.

As attention was drawn to the missing workers, most of whom are Nepali and have left for better paying jobs, the spotlight also fell on the apartment owners / managers who raised the issue. And that light has not revealed a pretty picture in some cases.

Truitt Evans, enforcement coordinator for the Fair Housing Center of Northern Alabama, confirmed yesterday to The Huntsville Times (see Workers' Housing Probed) that they are investigating the living conditions in which these workers were living. Some workers were apparently paying full-price to share an apartment with three or four other workers. Their investigation is still underway.

Doug Wilson is president of Ambassador temporary agency, the company that worked with Cinram to bring the foreign employees into the States. He told the Times that his company has worked with 20 landlords to provide housing upon arrival and has had difficulties with only two. Ambassador inspected apartments prior to the workers' arrival, the real challenges began when apartment owners started competing with one another for occupants.

Wilson goes on to say that despite some problems, bringing in foreign workers helps Cinram keep its 2,500 plus permanent workers and $120 million payroll at the Moores Mill plant.

This is some serious WTFish for me to run across. I'm just looking around for any other online posts about the closure and I find this article from a year ago.

The Richmond plant has been pretty slow for awhile now. We've got a ton of capacity. Why in gods glorious world did they decide to bring in thousands of foreign workers instead of shipping some product to their more idle plants for processing? There have been hundreds of people at the Richmond plant on unemployment for awhile now that could have been working, instead of sitting at home doing nothing for nothing.

Getting laid (off)

Cinram is closing their Richmond, IN plant in a couple months. Just found out today. That sucks since I'm the bread winner in my house. Hope I can find a job before Cinram closes or I have to be on unemployment for too long. I doubt if I'll be able to pay the bills with just unemployment and my wife's salary.

:(

EDIT: Just want to quote this from pal-item for my own memory:

Company officials told workers and city officials that the Richmond plant at 1600 Rich Road would close this summer, a move that will idle 330 workers, including 259 production workers.

The closing will come in phases, company officials said, with the first wave coming June 16, the second June 30 and the final Aug. 28, according to a letter to Richmond Mayor Sally Hutton.

Seven management employees will continue to work for the company elsewhere, the company said.

Cinram manufactures and packages CDs and CD-ROMs and is the former PRC Tape Co. Cinram, which is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and bought PRC when that company filed for bankruptcy in 1990.

About half of Cinram’s production workers were members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Company officials in Richmond, Columbus, Ohio and Toronto did not return phone messages left this afternoon seeking a comment.

Computer components are getting cheaper

Welcome to a headline that is always true. It'd be hard to believe that 10 years ago prices would be this cheap but at the same time not so hard.

It's possible to get a 1TB drive for $100 these days. That's about 10gb per dollar! Less if you find a fantastic deal on Bensbargains.net or wait a few months.

Also with the currect economic situation there's a glut of high-capacity ram on the market, driving prices down. Here is a current deal (as of 1/03) on zipzoomfly for a 2gb ddr2-800 Corsair memory kit for $10 after a mail-in rebate. Of course they get $55 of your money for a few months until you get the rebate check, if you get one at all.

On the other hand, here is a similar kit from ocz for $23 without any rebates.

$10-$20 for 2gb of very fast ram! Just a few years ago, 2003-2004ish I paid $90 each for some 512mb modules. Now it's possible to get 4gb for less than $50. Awesome.