Well, one of the benefits of living in the Twin Cities is that sometimes, on your way to work, someone rear ends you at a red light. Sometimes they do it hard enough to ram you into the car in front of you. And sometimes, this happens after you buy the first car you ever had to make payments on. I guess, to be fair, this could have happened in Morris, but there are many fewer cars there… Arrr. This will probably make for an unpleasant weekend of phone tag and appointment making.
Wow, two weeks without a single post. That might be some kind of record for me. Things have been going well at my new job. The new online store just opened (I had nothing to do with it, but it’s still worth mentioning, and linking to). I’ve already written and installed three patches for the point of sales software that the Wedge develops/uses. That probably doesn’t seem like a lot, but things move at a very cautious pace. Understandably, no one wants to accidentally break something and have the lanes down for any period of time while we scramble trying to figure out what went wrong.
– I don’t have much else in the way of news… I have been working on random things in blender, and if I’m both diligent and lucky, I might just have a Halloween skin up by Halloween… Or maybe by next Halloween. We shall see.
For whatever reason, our alarm clock is tuned to AirAmerica, so every morning Ethan and I wake to the sounds of some Democrat voicing his opinion. Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes not, but this morning, it was kind of irritating. Apparently before the alarm went off, they were talking about former (?) Senator Foley and a republican called in to request a change of subject. When the alarm went off, another caller was saying that of course a republican would want a subject change because foley is making the republicans look bad…
First of all, as far as I’ve heard (feel free to correct me here, I try to pay attention to these things as little as possible) all that has happened is some inappropriate comments and invitations, but no actual physical assault occured, no one was hurt, just possibly offended. If Foley had been sending emails to young girls who worked with him, would any of this be in the media? Maybe if one of the girls actually was involved in a sexual act. Maybe. This whole thing is just proving how uptight and homophobic most of America really is.
Second, why would Foley’s acts make republicans look bad? Not that I’m trying to defend right wing conservatives here, but if you want a bad image, get our current President or maybe Strom Thurmond up on stage. These guys are (were in Thurmond’s case) doing their best to hold to republican ideals, and giving good displays of just how restrictive, unfair and unhelpful those ideals can be. Having a member of your political party do things you don’t agree with, but have nothing to do with politics should not make your party look bad.
I really just needed to vent some steam there. If anyone has some information that I missed out on that might drastically change my point of view, please let me know.
I’m thinking of maybe adding headings to my posts, though that might have to wait until the new year. If I take that on, other projects could quickly follow. I’ll have to see.
I always had some fantasy of making different ‘skins’ for this site that go with the seasons, and then putting them up as the default skin say for halloween and the equinoxes and solstices. There would surely be others, but I haven’t even managed one, so I’ll try not to get too excited. Anyway I seem to have digressed a great deal. Perhaps I should read the news (boo) and then see how much time I have left on my lunch break…
I completed my first week of work at The Wedge and I think I’m going to enjoy the hell out of my new job! There was an amazing amount of things to learn (I’m sure there will be plenty more to come) and I feel a little bit overwhelmed, but everyone has made it quite clear that they don’t expect me to memorize every bit of information that’s being thrown at me, and they have all been very friendly and helpful. One extremely cool thing (in total contrast with WFHM) is that they want everyone to know at least a little about every area of the store. That way, each employee isn’t mentally working in a vacuum from the rest of the store.
– I’m currently wearing my uber-sexy shower cap and stocking cap combo, with henna seeping into my hair. Last time I made up my henna, I added a lot of cinnamon and discovered that cinnamon actually tingles if you have enough of it packed on your skin. That made me kind of nervous the first time it happened but it’s worth the tingling to have your hair smell wonderful for days. As far as I can tell that’s all that the cinnamon does. Although I would guess that if it makes my scalp feel this way, it might be increasing blood circulation, which has to be good for my hair and scalp.
New York City’s board of health has the right idea, but the execution is lacking. I do agree that it should be made plainly obvious to people just what restaurant food contains, in a place like… the menu. I don’t think that it is reasonable to force restaurants to make food healthier. If people DO want to buy lard boiled french fries, I guess they have that right, but If the menu had to list the calories, grams of fat (with a breakdown) and grams of sugar, for instance, for each plate of food, people might make more sensible choices and therefore encourage the restaurant industry to be more healthy by voting with their dollar. Makes sense to me…
Sorry I haven’t posted lately. I started at the Wedge yesterday and had a very busy, informative day. It was also really fun. I met about 100 people and already forgot all of their names. Hopefully I will have some of them down by the end of the week. Everything there seems to go at a whirlwind pace, but somehow it has a very laid back feeling to it.
– Yesterday I had several meetings, several tours around the building (each involving a number of introductions), plus a drive out to the warehouse with Tak (rhymes with hawk), my manager, and then to a computer parts store to get parts for my new computer. My first real task was putting that computer together. Today I installed Linux on the computer with help from Tak, then we reformatted the harddrive and I installed it again with much less help. I installed several programs (the very first things I have ever installed in Linux) and as I left I was downloading a new version of MySQL so that tomorrow I can install that, PHP and Apache.
– I keep leaving work with a smile on my face, and then, realizing that, I get even happier. It’s so fun to have a job that’s enjoyable. I’m not staring at the clock all day waiting for quitting time.
– Tonight is another episode of Nip/Tuck, so I’m expecting my day to just get better.
Hmm, it’s been a while since my last post and I have lots of news. First, the mediocre: Ethan and I got some spaghetti squash from my parents’ garden and it was a very unique experience to cook and eat. If you have not tried it, I suggest you attempt to find some, then bake it at 350(F) until it’s soft enough to stab with a fork (oh, poke some holes into it with a knife before popping it in the oven, if you know what’s good for you) and then cut it in half, seed it and scrape the insides out with a fork. Voila! It turns into spaghetti! It’s a bit crunchier and it never gets sticky, and it’s amazingly filling. Yum.
– After interview #3 at the Wedge Co-op, I got a call from the IT manager and found out that I was hired! (much dancing and rejoicing). My first day is Monday the 25th and I am counting down the days. (more dancing and rejoicing). I will certainly miss my co-workers here at WFHM, but I am so excited to actually have a job that is related to computers. Also, I am reminded constantly at my current job that I lead a much healthier life than the average American. For instance, today we were given microwave popcorn packs and soda as a small reward for — wait, that’s more news I should have already talked about… anyway, as a reward, and I don’t drink soda or eat microwave popcorn (palm oil = very no), so it’s not very rewarding for me. They also constantly have doughnuts, which I generally stay away from. All the people eat at McDonalds… It will be a huge relief to be working with people who follow a generally healthy lifestyle and I can relate to in a culinary way. I really miss having cookouts with Jessi and Chris where no one was staring at someone else’s food and either being grossed out or making snide comments.
– The news that I forgot to mention, but that is less important now, is that at WFHM they announced that we would be working mandatory overtime. A lot of it. Until we clear our inventory backlog of over 1100 files. Ugh. So I’ve been working a lot this week. I already have 35 hours or so in, with the rest of today and all of Friday to add to that. Plus Saturday if I need to get more files done. On top of that the temp agency failed to pay me again so I have had the added fun of getting ahold of them to sort that out. Hopefully I will have a nice deposit in my account tomorrow morning.
– Ethan suggested that I should reward myself for landing such an awesome job at such a cool place by getting a new monitor. My current monitor is a 15″ CRT that came with my old Dell. My new monitor, which should be arriving next week, is a 19″ LCD which is much more ‘graphic artist,’ especially since I might just keep both of them and have them side by side. (I’m still a geek, remember?). Well, I should get back to my very late lunch break so that I may leave on time to go get my new license plates, then come back here to continue pushing out files. I foresee a very large paycheck in the future (assuming they actually pay me…), maybe I’ll buy some clothes. Or make a large car payment. One of the two.