Fill-In-Able Budget: Fill & Download for Free

Not a true tale of vengeance, but more like, the person firing me didn't realize the ripple effect it would have.While I was in college, I worked for a well known car rental company that caters to people on a “budget”. I worked there the fall of 1983 until the spring/summer of 1987, taking off during times school wasn't in session and I went home to Vermont.I had finished college around this exact time in mid May. I had worked part time after school and on weekends, but now was able to work more hours since my days were now free.I also began as a guy who cleaned the cars, gassed them up, and drove them to various locations that needed a particular type of vehicle, like a station wagon, minivan, town car, compact, etc.Later I became a rental agent. So I was able to fill many scheduling gaps in the offices that fell under that particular franchisee. There were around ten offices, but I belonged to one and had filled in another five locations. I could fill in as either a rental agent or if they needed someone cleaning and transporting cars.I was a working fool through May and into June. Several days, I left one location and went to work at another. I was going to stop in mid July because I was entering active duty at the end of July. I needed time to move my stuff from college to my parents’ home.I was probably averaging 50–60 hours a week by then. Many of the offices were competing with one another for me to fill a shift. There were a couple times that I was double scheduled for two different locations at the same time.I would go to the location I preferred and let the other know I wouldn’t be there. Then it was up to that branch manager to fill the void, usually with their own body pulling that shift.I didn’t like one location and I tended to not choose to work there if I had an option of putting hours elsewhere. I was still only a part time employee at one particular location. Working at the other locations was doing those offices a favor, but it was mutually beneficial; they had an extra person and I got more hours.I did not like that location because it was farther away from my college. It was in a part of Long Island I was not familiar with and to me, seemed like a sketchy area. I did not have a good vibe there and the office manager had an attitude if I did pull a shift there.I’d hear comments like, “nice of you to grace us with your presence” and other condescending remarks. And I’m thinking, I’m doing you a favor. I’m not required to work here.My college friends had scheduled a barbecue for the end of the month. It was a last get together for many of us who were leaving school for the Army and for many of the ones still in school. In the grand scheme of things, it was no big deal; just a last blast of camaraderie before we go our separate ways.To attend, I scheduled the weekend off with my manager from my location. That’s all that was required. But since I didn’t show up on that location’s schedule, other locations thought I was available. Other managers are supposed to ask an agent from another location before scheduling them, but it didn’t always happen.The location I disliked jumped at the opportunity to schedule me for one day. I never bothered to check the schedule at the other locations because I had the days off.Of course, I missed that day, which was a Saturday and I had been scheduled for the entire day. I also didn’t work on Sunday because I had that day off as well. No one had scheduled me for Sunday though.I show up for work Monday afternoon and I find out I’ve been fired because I didn’t show up for work on Saturday. I was fired by the main office because the branch manager at the other location was mad that I didn’t show up to work and reported me.So I leave that location (not my “home” location) and when I get back to my dorm room, I call my home location. My manager is unaware I’ve been fired and knows I had the weekend scheduled off that she approved.She says she is going to fix it. I tell her not to bother, I’ll just take the next few weeks off and head home to Vermont.That’s when all hell breaks loose. I was scheduled about 45 hours that week at multiple locations. Now the managers all have to scramble to replace me at short notice.I got a call that week from one of the higher ups from the main office asking if I’d come back, but I told him no, and to mail me my final check. I’d be in the Army in a month and didn’t need the job any longer.My manager did call me at the end of the week to pick up my check, which I did. She said everyone was mad at the one branch manager and mad at the guy from the main office who called me. He was the one who made the decision to fire me. I don’t know what his function was there, I do remember his name was Nigel. He remains the only Nigel I’ve ever met.

The Mandalorian is set nine years after the Battle of Yavin shown in the original Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: A New Hope), which is to say it is five years after the events shown in Return of the Jedi, 29 years before the events shown in The Force Awakens, and nine years after the events of Rebels. It has been four years since the Empire was sabotaged by an Imperial sleeper agent (tasked by Emperor Palpatine with destroying the Empire in the event of the Emperor’s death) and was forced to accept peace terms with the New Republic.But as for what “gaps” The Mandalorian will fill, that’s the wrong way of looking at it.A bit of history:Back in the ’80s and ‘90s, when George Lucas had retired from making Star Wars - not just taking a break, but retired - the alternate universe continuity now known as Legends (eventually known by the brand name “Expended Universe”) became somewhat notorious for giving a backstory and adventure to every single possible background character, and for characters that appeared in one novel or comic into events that appeared in another novel or comic. This trend reached peak ridiculousness, in my opinion, when a series of novels late in the Expanded Universe retconned the entire history of Star Wars to be Palpatine’s noble-minded but misguided attempt to prepare the galaxy for an invasion by these guys, whom Palpatine was convinced could not be fought off unless the galaxy was united under a strong, militaristic Empire:Spoiler alert: they were defeated despite the galaxy not being united under a strong, ,militaristic Empire.But whether you liked this endlessly recursive navel-gazing or not, the point is that it came out of a particular context: the sure and certain knowledge that there would never be any more real Star Wars, that George Lucas had walked away from the franchise forever, and that what from him was all we were ever going to have. The Expanded Universe was a celebration of the Star Wars that was, written by and for the kind of fans who were at that perfect intersection of being young, not having a lot of stuff to spend their modest disposable income on, able and excited to read at a low high school level, and with enough leisure time to read literally dozens of tie-in novels that were produced at an extremely rapid pace. If you happened to fall into that demographic, the Expanded Universe was essentially a never-ending way to say, “Man, remember Star Wars? Wasn’t that great?” It was celebratory fan fiction, produced on an industrial scale.That sort of thing appeals very strongly to a certain kind of fan, but by its very nature, it does not appeal to a large number of fans. Nor - and this is important - was it designed to. After all, Star Wars was over! The simple alchemy of time would inevitably turn it into a niche fandom like, say, Battlestar Galactica. The diehards were not a large market, but they were the only fans worth catering to under those circumstances.When George un-retired himself in 1999, that logic changed, though the Expanded Universe would barrel along through sheer momentum for over a decade while Lucasfilm frantically tried to bolt on other Expanded Universe features that were less tangled up in what had come before.But when George retired again in 2012, selling Lucasfilm to Disney to ensure it would have the financial, legal, and political resources to continue indefinitely, the business context changed.With George retired again, this time for good (because he not only stopped making Star Wars but deliberately sold the rights to make more), it was now possible to make more Star Wars movies and TV shows than ever before. It was possible, in other words, for Star Wars to aggressively add new fans in a way that being tied to Lucas’ own schedule and desires had made impossible before. Lucasfilm was already doing this to a certain extent with their Clone Wars-focused products, but now the opportunity presented itself to turn the whole thing up to 11.The plan as of ca. 2014 had several parts. The first and most obvious step was to decanonize the old stories - not to say that they definitively didn’t happen, but just to say that future stories would not be beholden to them. This was a no brainer if they wanted to use Mark Hamill in one last set of movies - and they definitely did. Given that over 30 years had passed since Hamill last played Luke Skywalker on screen, and given that (i) digital de-aging technology at the time was not that good and (ii) Hamill had to be talked into playing Luke one last time at all (and was therefore certainly not going to be available to play the flagship character of the franchise), that meant the new Luke-featuring movies had to be set 30+ years after Return of the Jedi. Jumping forward in time to that point in the Expanded Universe timeline meant skipping literally 92 novels, in addition to assorted comics, graphic novels, and videogames whose storylines were Expanded Universe canon. Obviously, the idea of expecting new fans to catch up on 92 novels’ worth of backstory for the first new Star Wars film was a nonstarter.[1]But after that:Make a new trilogy of “Saga” films that would tie into Episodes I-VI, the “main” Star Wars products. The goal of this sequel trilogy would be to resolve the stories of Han, Luke, and Leia - especially Luke - in a single trilogy, and set up a new status quo for future stories to be told in.Make smaller-scale stories that occurred around the margins of the main films, which could be enjoyed as standalone stories with little in-universe background knowledge.Continue the tradition of publishing novels that occur around the margins and shadows of the films, which scratch the itch of fans who crave multimedia interconnectedness.Further into the future, make new tentpole films, or trilogies of films, that would stake out new narrative ground around which more smaller-scale film stories and novels could orbit.A lot of elements of this strategy are familiar to anybody who was watching the Expanded Universe from 2000 to 2012, but this strategy was bigger, spread out over multiple films. It also did away entirely with the strand of the EU that had Luke and friends save the galaxy no fewer than 20 separate times between Return of the Jedi and the then-current age of Mark Hamill. And it broke up the single giant mass of interconnected stories into a series of smaller interconnected nodes, each centered around a tentpole series of films. The idea was essentially to take advantage of something that Star Wars fandom was already doing: having different parts of Star Wars that were their favorites.By 2014, it was abundantly clear to anybody who had been paying attention that each generation of Star Wars fan had its own favorite part of the franchise. Maybe it was the original trilogy. Maybe it was the prequels. Maybe it was the animated series The Clone Wars. Maybe it was the novels from circa 1991–2000. Maybe it was the novels from 2000–2005. Maybe it was the Old Republic comics and associated videogames. Whatever it was, it was clear that the overwhelming majority of fans - even the diehard superfans - didn’t actually process Star Wars as a single enormous story. Their affections centered around a particular part or era of Star Wars, and sort of radiated out from there. So Lucasfilm decided to structure Star Wars products around that model. Didn’t like the sequel trilogy? No problem; there’d be another trilogy along soon enough, with its own supporting constellation of books and tie-in movies and such. Did like the sequel trilogy? There would be a supporting constellation of tie-ins around that. Etc. In ten years or so, Star Wars would be laid out almost like an RPG map, and whatever part of Star Wars was your favorite could be your favorite, with Lucasfilm’s blessing and support. And if there was some other part of Star Wars that you liked less? No problem; you didn’t have to go there in order to maximize enjoyment of the part that was your favorite.#2 has turned out to be a financial misstep, because Lucasfilm has shown an inability to make smaller-scale film stories on a smaller-scale budget, and the failure of Solo has Lucasfilm convinced, for the moment, that the moviegoing public doesn’t want a constant barrage of smaller-scale Star Wars movies. But they seem to be barreling ahead with the overall strategy.Which means that asking what parts of “the story” any given Star Wars product fills in is, as of 2019, almost certainly a mistake. That’s not what they’re trying to do anymore. They don’t want to achieve interconnectedness among titles beyond a certain amount, because too much interconnectedness makes the franchise intimidating and unapproachable, and they don’t want that anymore. The business context has changed.So, Where Does The Mandalorian Fit?So, while The Mandalorian is sort of part of the supporting constellation of galaxy of the sequel trilogy in terms of timeline, it isn’t likely to be particularly related to it in terms of story. It could just as well be thought of as part of the supporting constellation of the original trilogy (to which it is much closer in time), filling in a picture of what the galaxy was like once the Empire devolved into a failed state being torn apart by competing warlords and the New Republic was too nascent to have a truly galactic reach.The Mandalorian is also clearly going out of its way to give us yet another attempt to define and clarify Mandalorian culture, which the creative folks at Lucasfilm can’t seem to get enough of (side note: while this might be the definitive version of Mandalorian culture, I think Jennifer Quail’s skepticism that they’ll be able to pick something and stick to it is more likely).But beyond filling in these kinds of slice-of-life details, I am highly skeptical that The Mandalorian will “fill in” anything else. The whole point of the product seems to be that you don’t have to know a lot of Star Wars to enjoy it. Remember: they’re trying to make Star Wars appeal to more people, not just milk an existing fanbase for every last penny.[1] Sometimes, when people ask why they didn’t just adapt the novels, I think people have forgotten just how many novels there were. Like … we weren’t talking about just a dozen or so here, guys.

Yes, with a caveat.The dirty little secret, that nobody seems to talk about, is that programming is easy. Figuring out what to program - that’s the hard part.As with writing, programming has to be ABOUT something. Once you get beyond basic typing, syntax, and vocabulary (keyboarding, programming language), you have to write (program) about something you know and understand. Otherwise, you’re just a monkey pounding on a keyboard. Yes, your prose (code) will get “better” over time, but that’s secondary.You say you have a sales & marketing background, along with engineering and math. I expect that you’ve built various spreadsheets to keep track of prospects - guess what, that’s programming. The next step is more complex macros, writing extensions to Excel in vBasic, and learning some SQL to suck data into your spreadsheets, from databases.And then there’s market analysis, and more generally, “Big Data.” I expect you already know how to analyze market sizes, trends, etc. - be it manually or using some software tools. And you probably know a good amount of statistics. Turning manual analyses into code - say in R - is pretty straightforward.Given your background, an analogy to writing proposals is in order. First, you analyze your customer and their requirements. Then you write an outline and fill in bullet points that address the requirements & evaluation criteria. Then you come up with a schedule and budget. And finally, you write prose that fleshes out the details. Coding is that last step. Everything that comes before it is the hard stuff.Start with a problem that you understand. Solve it. Learn a relevant language - say a basic tutorial, then pick up what you need to know to code your solution. Wash, rinse, repeat. Along the way, start learning about good programming practice (structure, testing, documentation) and tools (development environment, debugger, version control system, build chain). Pretty soon, you’ll be able to solve real problems and build real software.