Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

It is way too early

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On the one hand, I really hate the fact that my alarm is going off at 6 am every day so I can get myself moving in time to be at work at 8 am this week for training on the new job. On the other hand…hey, I’m doing it! Making it to work on time every day, and putting in a full 8 hours each day…would probably blow the doors off some of the people back at TimeFrame, where I was so burnt out on the place that I was averaging closer to 30 hours a week rather than the 40 I should have been.

Amazing the differences that can appear when you’ve got a job that you actually enjoy, huh?

And, as a major benefit — between the pay raise and getting my full 40 hours a week, I figure I should start taking home about an extra $600 a month or so!

Picked up what looks to be a fascinating little book yesterday — The Celluloid Closet, by Vito Russo. It’s an examination of the portrayal of homosexuality in movies throughout the history of Hollywood — looks to be fascinating stuff. I had seen the documentary that had been based on this work (the movie is also called The Celluloid Closet), and thought it was a hilarious and fascinating film, so finding the original literary work — on sale for a whopping $2.99, no less — was a nice little treat yesterday. Should be quite the interesting read.

In any case, it’s about time for me to be heading off into the wide wierd world….

It’s official!

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As of 10:30am today, after cleaning all my personal material off of the machines, I turned in my resignation at TimeFrame. I start work at GCI‘s NOC as a Service Repair Coordinator Monday morning at 9am. Finally — something new to do! I’m really stoked about this…will be nice to get some experience in something other than making copies. :D

Career changes

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Well, it looks like the application I put in at CNTS has paid off. I got a call right at the end of work today letting me know that they’ve got a position for me — the catch being that I need to let them know tomorrow if I can start on Monday. Wow…not what I had planned on, I’d been hoping to give at least 1 if not 2 weeks notice at my current job — but, at the same time, I’ve been itching to get out of TimeFrame for a while now, and this looks like far too good an opportunity to pass up.

So, it looks like tomorrow I’ll give notice to TimeFrame that it’s my last day, and come Monday I’ll start working at GCI! The best part about this — when I decided to go for another job, I just wanted to make sure that I’d get at least $10 an hour. I’m currently making $13.50, and didn’t want to go much lower than that, just so I could make sure I could still pay all my bills and such. This position — $14.70/hr! I was prepared to take a pay cut doing this, and it looks like I’m actually going to get a $1.20/hr raise out of the deal? How can I not go for it?

So, I’m currently more or less bouncing off the walls about this…admittedly, it’ll make work really interesting tomorrow, but hey, these things happen, and I think in the long run this will be much better for me. Woohoo!

Shake, rattle and roll

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I just found out when I got to work that Seattle got quite a bit of a shaker yesterday — current estimates put the quake that just hit them at 6.8. CNN has ongoing coverage of the quake posted.

Since I know a fair amount of people down in the Seattle area (Casey, Chad, Dez, Kate, Nikki, fivefootfourteen, and many others that aren’t coming to mind at the moment), I just wanted to send out my hopes and wishes that everything’s going well for them down there.

On the brighter (if somewhat cynical) side, I wonder if this means that there will be a few more open apartments when I move down there?

New ‘puter!

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This just rocks — I’ve added a new ‘puter to my stable here at home. One of the guys at work was selling his off for a good price, so it came home with me today.

Now the iMac that was playing a dual role as my main work machine and webserver (which occasionally caused the server to go down when I needed to do certain things on that machine) has been designated as just the webserver, and the new machine is my workhorse box.

For the curious, the new box is a 350 MHz blue and white Power Macintosh G3, with 128 MB memory, DVD player, 22.3 GB of storage spread across three drives (1 ATA/IDE, 2 SCSI), and dual 17″ monitors, one running off an IMS Twin Turbo card, the other running off an ATI Rage 128. Quite the step up…and I’m cheezing like mad. Time to play!

Karaokemon!

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I used to think that Pokemon was the most evil thing to come into this world (followed closely by Furby).

I was wrong.

Karaoke is definitely the most evil thing to come into this world so far.

Which, of course, leads me to the logical conclusion that Hell is going to be me strapped into a chair at a lounge where there are a bunch of different Pokemon all singing Karaoke. Somebody just freeze me now, ’cause I don’t ever want to die if that’s the case….

The un-what?

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It’s our job…we have to be nice to the unfuckables.

— Adri, commenting on the hordes of people obsessing over whatever newest Dragonball Z video is on the shelves

Quicker archiving, twins, frustration

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Seeing as how I’m actually starting to update this thing on a more regular basis — and given my tendency for loquaciousness — I figured I’d drop the archiving settings down to weekly, instead of every two weeks, so that this page didn’t just keep scrolling on and on and on and on and on…. I also removed the link to the old hand-generated archive pages (from before I started using this software to automate the updating process), since it’s all really old stuff, and it’s easier for me to just stay with the automatically generated archive pages.

Even though I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, I just got around to watching Dead Ringers last night. Wow…what an incredibly fascinating film. David Cronenberg almost never fails to dissapoint me — he’s got an incredibly twisted mind and excels at putting his ideas on screen — and the one time he has (Crash, which I never even made it all the way through) I’m now starting to consider renting and giving another try. Anyway, the combination of Cronenberg and Jeremy Irons‘ absolutely mindbending performance as a pair of identical twins in Dead Ringers was absolutely mesmerizing. The fact that Irons could play two such identical people and put just enough subtle differences into the performances that it was always clear which was which was absolutely incredible to watch…he just proves yet again why he’s on my list of favorite actors.

In other news…well, not much. E-mailed my resume over to the temp agency, so all I can do now is ‘hurry up and wait.’ Spent most of last night here at home being frustrated with life in general…I’m so burnt out on just about everything here in town, especially with all this drama with TimeFrame, that I’m looking forward more and more to the day that I can just pack up and leave. Ah, well…some days I do better than others.

Now, I’ve got to go jump in the shower and head off to work at Suncoast, selling movies for a few hours. Fun fun fun….

First steps…

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…into a field I haven’t investigated in years: job searching.

Went ahead and took Friday off to do a bit of job hunting. Ended up going by Chugach North Technical Services and turning in an application and getting an interview there…hopefully that might bring something my way soon. Things seemed to go pretty decently, I took one test on Microsoft Word and got a 94% (only missed two questions), and my typing test clocked me at 81 WPM with 95% accuracy…not bad in the least. Just have to get my resume e-mailed over to them and harcopy dropped off on Monday, and then wait and hope. If they’re able to find me something, then in goes my 2 week notice at TimeFrame. Hard to believe I actually got to this point, but if it’s time, it’s time.