Personal

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

Good tunes

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While I grew up listening to an incredibly wide range of music thanks to my parents, I’ve never really been much into country. My tastes always ran to the alternative, industrial, and for the past few years I’ve focused mainly on electronica, from deep trance and house to dance remixes of more poppy stuff, as long as it’s fun to dance to and well constructed.

However, over the past few years, I’ve been spending much of my time around women who listened to a fair amount of country…and I suppose that can only last so long before it really starts to sink in. It helps that much of what I grew up with was the music that today’s country grew out of — rock and roll, blues, r&b (back when r&b actually meant rhythm and blues) — all that good old stuff. So, more and more lately, I find myself keeping the car radio more on 104.1 and 107.5, the two country stations in town. Thanks to them, I’ve just stumbled upon an absolutely incredible band — Trick Pony.

Trick Pony’s currently got a single called ‘Pour Me’ that, in my mind, at least, absolutely demands to be cranked up to the threshold of pain every time it comes on the radio. Well, their album just hit the stores this week, I’m listening to it now — and for the first time in my life, I really wish this band was coming to Anchorage soon so I could see their show. Just a great album, pretty much solidly upbeat all the way through so far, and from what I’ve read on the ‘net, these three put on an absolutely incredible live show.

So, if you’re into country at all, or even just into really damn good music, pick this one up. Well worth it.

I’m heading out tonight (hence why Ben-Hur isn’t going in the DVD player right now). The reason my residency at Studio 99 doesn’t officially kick in until next week is because they already had tonight rented out — but it sounds like it should be a fun deal to go to, so I’m going to stop by that for a while.

Polar Productions in association with Dance Nation (Tuesdays on KRUA 88.1FM from 10pm-1am) presents an all-ages dance event: R E V E R B. DJ Panda, Michael Kalman, DJ Jasper, Planet Lush, Scott Lappi and a special guest DJ will be spinning at Studio 99 from 8pm-3am tonight. $10 at the door, $8 with a canned food donation — all cans to benefit the Food Bank of Alaska.

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….