Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

A good view, a picnic, and naked women running up and down staircases

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Okay – back to the weekend, and I made it back here to the ‘puters.

Most of the week has been pretty uneventful — amazingly uneventful, in fact. John — my trainer at work — was gone this week, training for his new position in Xerox, so there was a floater who’d worked in the Anderson XBS office before to help, since I’m not fully trained yet. As it turns out, I probably could have handled the week by myself, as the workload was slow to the point of being almost nonexistant. While it was pretty relaxing, and Loren (the floater) and I were able to chat a lot, it made for a really long, slow, boring week. Maybe a good thing, as I’m still learning the ropes, but not exactly very stimulating.

View from the Columbia Tower, Seattle, WA

During my lunch break on Friday, though, I hiked up a couple blocks to the Bank of America tower on 5th and Columbia. Seattle’s tallest building, at 1,049 feet above sea level it’s roughly twice the hight of the Space Needle, and is the tallest building (by number of stories) west of the Mississippi. 76 stories high, it has an observation deck on the 73rd story, and I decided to wander up and check out the view for my lunch. I’ve got to admit, it’s quite a view — especially on days like we’ve been having (more unusually gorgeous weather, Seattle is in the middle of a heat wave, with temperatures topping out yesterday at 87 degrees). I took a few shots, two of which are posted in today’s update.

View from the Columbia Tower, Seattle, WA

During the day Friday, I’d gotten a call from Shelley (my supervisor at Xerox) letting me know that there was a Xerox get together on the campus out in Tukwilla that evening that I was welcome to come to — even though I’m a temp — if I could show up. I figured I might as well…my schedule isn’t exactly full to bursting these days, and it could be good to meet some more people within Xerox. As it turns out, while I did meet a couple people, I also ran into Chris and Donna Bennet, who I knew from Anchorage. I’d worked with both of them at Kinko’s and at TimeFrame over the years — they were working at Kinko’s when I started there, each of them moved to TimeFrame before I did, then they left TimeFrame not long after I showed up there. They spent some time up in Fairbanks, then came down to Washington a while ago, and are both now working for Xerox. So the picnic ended up being a much more entertaining experience than I’d expected it to be.

That lasted until 9pm, then I grabbed the next bus back to Seattle, and got home around 10-ish. I spent the next couple hours working on a new mixsession, which came out pretty good. I can’t post it to my DJ propaganda page yet — rather than running my equipment into my computer, as I had before, I recorded directly to my MiniDisc recorder — but as soon as I can get it .mp3‘d, I’ll get it up. Anyway, just a bit before midnight, I headed out to the only movie I treated myself to this week — the midnight showing of Showgirls. Had a blast watching that…it’s a horrid film, but that’s a lot of the fun.

And that pretty much covers things for this week. Until next time….

Impressions of work, and lots of movies

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Welp, after just over a week of nothing, I’ve finally made it back over here to update things again. Sorry about the lack of updates…but now that I’m back on a work schedule (Monday – Friday, 8am – 5pm), by the time I’m off work, bussing out to Ballard to dink around on the ‘puter isn’t the highest thing on my list of priorities. I’ve gotta admit, I’m going to be so incredibly happy when I can finally get all set up at my apartment and don’t have to do all this goofball running around anymore.

Work is going well. It’s been really interesting so far…a very big change from the prinshop environments I’ve worked at in the past (TimeFrame and Kinko’s). As XBS@Andersen, LLP (the official name for where I’m stationed) isn’t open to the public, but is the private printshop for Anderson, it’s much more focused than the more ‘anything-goes’ workloads I was used to. There are five or six primary styles of reports that I’ll be making that make up the majority of the work, plus whatever other copy projects the company comes up with, but it’s a lot more predictable. Definitely takes some getting used to…I’m not really sure if I can say if it’s better or worse, but it’s definitely different.

Seattle, WAOne thing’s for sure though — I miss my DocuTech! I got really spoiled by my years of working on that beast, I think. As this printshop is much smaller and has much more limited runs, they don’t have the high-end equipment I’ve been able to play with for the last few years. I’m back to working with analog equipment…and the digital copiers we have aren’t networked, so everything I work with is hardcopy. A big switch from the push towards all-digital (or at least as much as possible) that TimeFrame was working for. It seems like every time I turn around, with almost every job I do here, I’m seeing ways it would be easier and/or faster for both myself and the client if I had a DocuTech at my disposal…but at the same time, I know that the volume isn’t high enough to justify the expenditure that that would be. A shame…maybe if things go well I can talk them into networking the newer machines in so we can get some digital quality. Who knows? Since I’m still on temp status at the moment, though, I’m not going to start pushing for that just yet.

In other news…well, there isn’t really any other news. Now that I’m working again, I don’t have my days free to wander wherever I want, and I’m still not quite financially comfortable. I’m not in dire straits or anything, but I’m not to a point where I can drop money every time I feel like it, either. I’ve been killing a lot of evening hours watching movied rented from Blockbuster…however, I can’t remember quite all of them. Hrm. Let’s see&…ones I remember as being on the better end of things include The Million Dollar Hotel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Gift, Snatch, Wonder Boys…What Lies Beneath was better than I expected…and I know there have been a few more, I’m just spacing on them at the moment. I also got to go see Dr. Strangelove (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) at the Egyptian’s midnight show last Friday. That was a lot of fun…more so because there were a few people near me who obviously had never seen it before, and it was great to hear people laughing at it for the first time. In a day and age when most people won’t be satisfied unless the newest and fanciest CGI graphics are splashed across the screen every fifteen seconds, it’s great to hear that there are still people entertained by a mid-60’s (?) black-and-white political comedy that appeals to the mind rather than being just pure eye candy.

So anyway, that’s about it for the past week. It may very well be another week before I get to another post, due to my work schedule. In the meantime, I’m going to keep working on figuring out what to do about getting my ‘puters over to my place so I don’t have to keep making this trek. Wish me luck!

Books and movies

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Not much of an update today…things have been pretty slow this weekend. Spent just about all day Saturday at home, doing a lot of reading. Finished Snow Crash, burned right through Mindplayers, by Pat Cadigan, and just got started today on Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder.

I did hit Blockbuster video and picked up three movies I hadn’t seen before. I went with Scary Movie (figured I might as well finally watch the thing — I think I was better off beforehand, though), Cherry Falls (about as entertaining as a silly little modern cheeseball teen-horror flick can get), and The Contender (by far the best of the three, a nice political drama). Of the three, the only one really worth watching was The Contender.

At the moment, I’m just pretty bored…looking forward to the day when I can get my ‘puters to my apartment. Ah, well. Tomorrow morning’s the second interview for the job I’m working on getting…hopefully all will go well.

Job details, more books, and monkeys

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First off — as far as I can tell, I think the interview this morning went great! :) Here’s the details I’ve got on the job I may be getting hired for.

Turns out that the place I interviewed at today was a temp staffing agency called Todays. I’d actually applied for a data entry position through Monster.com, but when they saw my resume, they felt I was better qualified for a posting that wasn’t quite official yet. Should I get this spot, I’ll be working (pay attention now, this gets slightly tricky) at a local firm who’s name I can’t remember for Xerox as an employee of Todays. Got that?

See, Xerox has a service where they send trained operators out to various firms to run their equipment — Xerox knows that people who know what they’re doing are touching their equipment, and the firm doesn’t have to spend its own personnel resources on keeping the copiers going — works well for all parties involved. I’d end up getting dropped in the middle of this — officially a Today’s employee, temping with Xerox, but working at this firm.

But, there’s even a little more to it than this. As it turns out, this firm had a special request with this posting. They have an employee working in this area with ‘special needs’ — exactly what that means hasn’t been specified — and they wanted to see if they could get someone with at least some management/leadership experience. They don’t need a manager, but they did want someone who would be more able to and comfortable with working with this employee; able to give help when needed, act as something of a liason between this employee and others, and the like. Given the supervisorial (is that a word?) experience I have on my resume, Today’s felt that I would be a good pick, and apparently that impression held true during the interview today, as they seemed highly confident that I’d be called in on this job posting. So…now I just cross my fingers, but at least from where I’m standing, things look really good. Woohoo!

In other news….

Yeah, I’m a voracious reader. I posted yesterday that I’d just started re-reading Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg. Welp…that’s done with. Next up on the dock is Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, one of (if not the single) seminal works of “cyberpunk” fiction, and an acknowledged source of inspiration for many of today’s top computer/VR developers. Great stuff.

As for the monkeys. My parents were kind enough to drop me a bit of money to help me out until I start getting paychecks and get up and on my feet. So, me being the fine, upstanding, and responsible young man I am — I took the opportunity today after my job interview to go see a movie! Erm…hey, it was a whopping five bucks for the matinee, and I was in a good mood after the interview. So sue me. Anyway…went out to see Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, one of the big films I’d been waiting to see this summer. So how was it? Horrid — the end result was it’s a matinee at best…quite possibly only a rental. Much as it pains me to say that about a Tim Burton film, it’s true.

New talkback feature

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One last thing for today. I’m experimenting with more ‘toys’ to play with on my website, and have found a talkback system that seems to fit quite nicely between the limited interactivity of the polls I toss up occasionally and the full messageboard I have running. Whenever I turn it on (which I probably won’t do for every post), you should be able to click the ‘Comments’ link at the end of a post to spout off about my babble, should you wish. As with the other doo-dads I’ve got on here, I have no idea how much or how often they’ll actually get used…but hey, it’s fun to play with, and it’s my website, so I can do what I want. So there. Bleah. ;)

Cool people and new books

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First off — with as many complete momos as there are running around in the world today, it’s always nice to be reminded that there actually are some truly cool people out there, too. A couple days ago I posted a bit of a whine/moan/rant about how the combination of lack of response on the job front and lack of money was getting to me. Since then I’ve gotten a couple e-mails and a couple conversations over Yahoo! Messenger with some very kind words of support. Much as I try not to let things get to me, and keep a healthy and happy outlook on whatever’s going on in my life, sometimes it’s neccesary to let my frustrations fly — and when I do, it’s wonderful to get the occasional “buck up, kiddo” from people out there. Thanks to all of you — you rock.

Last night I managed to finish two projects I’d been working on. The first was a large puzzle of M. C. Escher’s work ‘High and Low’ — a real bear of a puzzle too, as the entire thing is black, white, and shades of grey. The second was the book I’d been reading, The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by his Fool, Will Somers: A Novel, by Margaret George. Very good historical fiction.

Having finished those, I’ve just started re-reading (as I don’t want to spend the money on something brand-new at the moment) a book that I was reminded of while reading The Jargon File — The Cuckoo’s Egg, by Cliff Stoll. This is a great little techno-spy thriller detailing the chase of a West-German hacker (this was written in the late 80’s) who was tunnelling through the then-new Internet, breaking into U.S. Military computers, and selling secrets to the Russians. The entire trail started from a 75-cent billing error in a Universities computer system, and the real kicker to the story — is that it’s all true. It’s been years since I’ve read it, though — I’ll babble more about it once I’m done.

Family, blondes, and jargon

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First off — hi dad! :) Got a call from dad yesterday — he and mom were off on a trip to England and Scotland (anywhere else?) with the Alaska Childrens Choir for the past few weeks, and just got home. Seems everything went well for them, and I’m now told that Edinburgh is a wonderful place to visit, should I ever get the opportunity. Hmmm…well, I’ll certainly be keeping that in mind….

I’ve been seeing ads for Legally Blonde for a while now, and I finally decided to break down and go see if it was as cute as it looked in the ads. It definitely was (something that’s always nice).

Lastly for today, as I was going through my boxes of stuff last night, I stumbled across a book I hadn’t read through in a while. The Jargon File is a compendium of slang and jargon from the hacker community that has been an ongoing project since roughly 1981 — a full 20 years now! While it would at first appear to be aimed solely at the hacker community (which, to be honest, I can’t exactly dispute), it also has a broad appeal to people outside of the community, especially those with a decently sharp sense of humor and a love of wordplay. I started re-reading it last night, and had forgotten just how entertaining it can be to read something that is, in some respects, a dictionary of technical terms and slang. In particular, I think my dad would really get a kick out of it, given what I know of his sense of humor and interest in words, wordplay, and etymology. The file can either be found online, or can be purchased in bookstores as The New Hacker’s Dictionary (though the online version is more current).

Bring out the gimp!

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In this case, unfortunately, the gimp is me. I’ve been holed up in my apartment for the past few days, nursing a banged-up knee — hence the lack of much in the way of updates here. Bleah.

Thursday night went out with Chad, Casey, Casey’s girlfriend Jen, and a friend of Jen’s named Steve to a bar called Neighbours just a couple blocks away from where I live for their 80’s night. Very fun place — it seems to be a Seattle version of the old Wave in Anchorage — a gay bar that’s been deemed ‘safe’ for the straights to hang out at. Was a good night, but at one point I was dancing on a platform, and when someone got a bit too close to me I backed up, and fell right off the platform. I caught my knee on the edge of the riser as I fell, and while I didn’t really realize it then, apparently I damaged myself pretty decently — by the time Friday rolled around, I could hardly walk. Very frustrating, and led to my primarily holing up in the apartment for the weekend.

Luckily, I didn’t have to do it alone. Laura, a friend of mine from Anchorage is off on vacation and had a couple days to kill in Seattle, so I had said she could crash at my apartment. She came in early Friday morning, her friend Jenny came in Friday evening, and they took off Saturday around noon. Then Saturday afternoon my friend Aliena (who Kirsten, a friend of mine up at UAF, had introduced me to) came by, and we spent a very pleasant night kicking back at my apatartment and watching movies (as she’d been kind enough to bring up a small TV and VCR so we didn’t have to just stare at the walls all evening). Aliena crashed at my place, took off about noon today, and I decided it was time to head over to my computers and wade through the backlog of messages from the past few days.

One other cool thing, however — there’s a cool little theater just a couple blocks away from my apartment (The Egyptian, at Pine and Broadway) that was playing Run Lola Run at midnight on Friday and Saturday, and I got to go see it Friday night. Quite cool, having only seen it on DVD before. Apparently, the Egyptian does midnight movies on a regular basis, which could be all sorts of fun — next weekend’s is A Clockwork Orange. Whee!

In any case, I need to get busy getting my resume ready to go as I dive into the local job market….

Final fantasy, sleeping in a shoebox

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Okies — first off, if you’ve been looking forward to Final Fantasy at all, go see it. Eye candy — lots of eye candy — and it’s well worth catching on the big screen for the full effect.

Spent the night in the Shoebox last night. First off — as soon as I can afford it, I need a bed. While I can deal with sleeping on the floor, it’s not the most comfortable way of doing things. Ah, well…details, details, right? Oh, and I need to see if I can get the neighbors to refrain from turning up their stereo quite so loud at 6am. Other than that, not bad. :) Anyway, got my stereo hooked up, so I can listen to music, and then got stalled on unpacking anything else, when I realized I don’t have anyplace to put anything. No shelves, no tables…oops! Guess things are just going to need to stay in boxes for a bit longer. Felt kinda silly when I realized that.

No biggie, though — I’ve got my music, got books, and now comes the big challenge — hitting the streets in an attempt to find a job. Fun fun fun….

A shoebox, a dragon’s kiss, and Kate

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Shannon Apartments, Seattle, WAFirst off — and most important — I’ve got my apartment! I called Melvin (the landord) at about 5pm today, and he told me that I could come on down and get the keys. Immediately I headed out the door, swung through Radio Shack to grab a telephone, and rode the buses out to Capitol Hill. Talked for a few moments with Melvin, then took my first steps into my first apartment in Seattle. Woohoo!

Shannon Apartments, Seattle, WAI’ve got pics up here to share of the apartment and the building. It’s pretty sparse at the moment — everything I own is still in Casey’s garage — but hopefully I’ll be able to rectify that fairly quickly. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get everything over there just yet…but I’ll find a way. I’m still at Casey’s for the moment, as I didn’t get anything over to the apartment tonight, but things will start moving that direction soon enough, I’m sure.

View from insideIn order from top to bottom, here’s the pics I’ve got — as always, you can click on the thumbnails for full-size versions. First off is the building itself — the Shannon Apartments, with my outside door circled in red. Next is just a closer view of the doorway — you can’t see them in this photo, but on the left and right of the entrance are doors into two other apartments — the only other two with street entrances. The next shot is standing in the inside doorway looking out towards the street, and the last shot is of the inside of the apartment (affectionately deemed “The Shoebox”) from the outside doorway. Fun fun fun!

This is all of itI caught Kiss of the Dragon tonight. In brief — it’ll be an entertaining rental, but not much more.

Had one interesting little tweak to the night on my way home, though. I was crouched down at the bus stop at 1st and Pine waiting for the 18 to Ballard to come by, when a guy comes jogging down the sidewalk. As he passes me, he flashes his hand in front of my face and yells “Boo!” It startled me and I jumped a bit, but he just kept running by, so I didn’t figure it was much more than that — was even a little amused, so I laughed a little. Apparently that was the wrong response, however, as when he heard that he stopped, turned around, and stood right in front of me.

“Yo, loco, what’d’you say?”

I didn’t bother standing up — I figured if I stayed crouched down and let him loom over me, it’d keep him in psychologically in a position of ‘power’, where if I stood up, I’d have been taller than him, and more of a threat.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, man, what’d’you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

At this, he turned to the man sitting on the bench next to us. “Hey, what’d he say to me?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

The guy paused for a moment. “Oh.”

Then he patted my shoulder, shrugged, and started running down the street again.

Wierd…but still kind of entertaining, and at least I didn’t get thumped.

Then, just a few minutes later, who should I see at the other end of the bus stop but Kate and her boyfriend Duncan! Rock on — Kate’s been one of my favorite people for years, and I’d been wanting to track her down for a bit. So I wandered over and got her attention, swept her up in a big hug, and spent the rest of the time waiting for the bus (which was late, by the way, something about some big all-star baseball game that I’d probably know more about if I cared at all about sports) and about half of the ride home talking with her. Was very cool.

Incidentally, she and Duncan had both just watched The Score, the new Ed Norton/Robert DeNiro flick, and said it wasn’t that impressive. A bummer, as they’re both good actors, but got a rental recommendation from them on that one. Ah, well.

So that’s my excitment for the day. Now — let the moving commence!