Goth humor

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I was hanging out in the Yahoo! Chat Alaska room this morning, and ended up meeting Wytchmagick on there. After discovering we shared some interests, we started tossing some links at each other, which was quite entertaining.

She told me about the band Velvet Acid Christ, and I ended up picking their album Fun With Knives while I was wandering around today. She asked if I’d ever gone goth hunting, and while I haven’t, it certainly looks like fun. I mentioned how I really wished that they really made a Tamagothi, and then she pointed out the piece de resitance — “Lego People That Aren’t, Will Never, But Should Be…”! I laughed so hard at that last one — combine a love of Legos with a dark sense of humor, and how can you go wrong?

Since the conversation, I’ve been bouncing around and found some other fun stuff. Ever wanted to be Goth? Pick up the Insta-Goth Kit and never worry again (incidentally, I’ve seen every movie on the I-GK’s movie list — and own at least half of them…should I be worried?)! Not interested in being Goth? Well, then, the same site offers assistance with becoming a Rivethead, Raver, Prep or Punk — find them all on Sykospark.

That led me to a site which has nearly had me in tears for the past few minutes — Gloom County. In the words of the creator, “It’s all Grace’s fault. She and I were chatting, and she said something about Opus and the gang in Bloom County. She chose that moment to have a glorious and inspired typo, however, and it lodged in my head for a while. It got me to thinking…What if the residents of Berke Breathed’s Bloom County had been goths, punks, rivetheads, and the like?” The results are flat-out brilliant — for a quick example, check out Lord of the Dance.

Oh, and by the way — Jesus was gother than you.

While bouncing around the GothMafia site that the Lego people came from, I found a link to a zoo’s information page about their liger — an 800-pound crossbreed of a lion and a tiger. Wow. I also spent some time exploring Wytchmagick’s personal site, and thought it was nice that as a practicing Wiccan, she took the time to put up this page in response to the many over-zealous people out there who immediately assume that her beliefs condemn her to eternal torment after she dies. It’s a much more thoughtful and measured response than I’ve seen from others in her position — and probably better stated than many of the things people have said to her.

Anyway, that’s it for now….

I’m employed again!

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Well, after a whole week and a half of being unemployed, I start work again tomorrow! I’ll be working at the Xerox printshop on the Microsoft campus, the same place that I worked two days at last Friday and Saturday. I guess they liked me!

As I mentioned a few days ago, Today’s was able to put me in a short 2 day post. The printshop is on the Microsoft campus out in Redmond, so it’s a bit of a commute, but a little research with the Seattle Metro Trip Planner and I had my bus schedule down pat. I left my apartment at about 12:30, walked up a few blocks, and caught a bus out to the bus depot in Redmond.

At that point, things got a little dicey. One of the downsides to the trip planner is that when you need to walk somewhere to your next stop, it gives you the directions ‘WALK 0.2 MILES NORTH’ or some such. Thing is, silly me, I’d forgotten my compass (of course, I don’t actually have a compass, but hey…), and in my attempt to find my next bus stop, I walked the wrong way. I didn’t know this, however, until I got on the bus and started watching the street signs — and realized that the numbers were counting the wrong direction!

Oops.

The driver let me hop off, I walked back to the bus depot, and started walking the correct direction…and suddenly realized that I could see one of the buildings I’d been told to look for! Apparently all that second bus would have done was take me across the bridge over the highway, which I was in the midst of doing already. Well, cool enough — from there on, it was a fairly short walk to the building I was looking for, and I made it on time.

As soon as I walked in, I was pretty sure that this would be a print shop that would be fun to work in. The room is huge, and it’s got tons of cool toys to play with! One side of the room is the bindery area (cutting, binding, packing, etc.). The other side of the room had me practically drooling…(and yes, the following will mean very little to anyone who hasn’t worked in printshops before)…one DocuTech 135, five Docutech 6180‘s (all with BookletMaker extentions), one DigiPath workstation, one DocuColor 2060, plus four smaller color machines that I didn’t catch the model numbers for, and an oversize color printer. Yikes! Very cool. :D

I didn’t get to play with any of the big toys while I was there, though — I’d been called in to help out in the bindery area with a couple big jobs that they had in. Apparently I was a hit, though — when I first told Karen, the evening shift supervisor, that I had quite a few years of prior printshop experience, she was thrilled to get someone that she wouldn’t have to train. Then, throughout the night, I kept surprising her when I was done with something and looking for more to do. Saturday there was a different shift supervisor coming off the afternoon shift, but two hours after I’d gotten there, she’d declared that they were keeping me, and by the end of the night, Karen was slipping a note under the boss’s (boss’?) door to see what they could do to hire me on, as they’ve got one person leaving at the end of this week.

Yesterday I passed this all on to Terri and Sally at Today’s, and they said they’d be sure to get ahold of the powers that be at Xerox and see what they had to say about the weekend. This morning, then, I get a call from Terri, who tells me that I should show up at the printshop tomorrow at 2pm, ready to go! I guess I made the right impressions with the right people, as I’m now confirmed for a long-term posting (so now, rather than working for Today’s for Xerox for Andersen, I’ll be working for Today’s for Xerox for Microsoft…funny how this all works).

There are a couple caveats to the situation, of course.

It looks like I’ll be working Monday to Friday, 2pm-10:30pm. On the one hand, this is great, as I tend to enjoy evening schedules, and I’ll still have my weekends free — however, the bus jaunt is only really simple on the way out, by the time I’m coming back into town I’m well past peak bus time, and will be getting back home at around 1am each day. Candice has said that she’ll be able to give me rides some of the time, though, which should help out.

The biggest downside is that the starting pay rate is a whole whopping $9.74/hr. However, this also goes to show some of why I really like going through Today’s — as they were setting this all up, they did mention to Xerox that with the experience I have, I should be worth more than that, and managed to confirm a performance review after 30 days to see about getting the pay scale bumped up closer to what I’d like to be getting! I’ve gotta say, I’m am nothing but thrilled with the service I’ve gotten going through Today’s.

So that’s the big news. Pretty cool, I’d say. The next month might be a bit tight on funds, since my pay rate just dropped by $2/hr, and because of that I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to make the trip up this summer to see James and Stacy get married, but at least I have income again, and it’s not completely out of the question. Just gotta cross my fingers and see what happens!

Smileys!

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I found a fun little hack for MT over on So Very Posh today, and thought I’d give it a shot. So — my site now has smileys! :D I can use them in my posts, and they’ll also show up in comments — read on for instructions.

So here’s the deal. Using the hack has allowed me to set up certain text strings that my server will automatically translate into graphical smileys whenever they’re used — in my posts, in people’s comments, wherever. To use each smiley, just type the code for the smiley, and the rest is taken care of automagically!

Addendum: As of August 30, 2002, the available smileys and the codes to use them changed. If you’ve stumbled upon this post, please jump on over to the updated list. Thanks!

Update: Now that I’m on TypePad, I’m not using this hack anymore. ’twas fun while it lasted, though.

Happy birthday mom!

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I’m afraid that I’m a day late in posting this (which can either be attributed to my making sure I could find my way out to Redmond for work yesterday, or to my being a bit of a goof and completely spacing it — either of which would be at least somewhat correct), but yesterday was my mom’s birthday.

Happy birthday! :D

Yay for temp agencies!

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It’s not a long term deal at all, but I’ll at least have an assignment for the next couple days. Today’s called with a slight emergency today — a 2-day posting at Microsoft, working a swing shift from 2pm-10:30pm. I’ll have to bus out to Redmond and back, so I’ll be leaving a bit before 1pm and not getting back until a bit after midnight for the next two days, but hey, it’s employment and a little bit of money, even if it is short-term.

I was also informed that there had been some communication with Xerox regarding my dismissal, and the person from Xerox also said that they felt I got caught “between a rock and a hard place” — apparently almost echoing what I had told Today’s about the circumstances as I’d seen them. That was definitely nice to hear, and it does help insure that I stay in good with the team at Today’s.

That’s it for employment news at the moment. Aside from that, not a lot is going on. The weather was absolutely gorgeous all day today, so I spent a good portion of the morning wandering around downtown Seattle and enjoying the sun.

I did wish I’d had my camera along with me a few times. At one point I was walking up the Harbor Steps plaza from the waterfront to 1st, and walked into a small storm of rose petals — the wind was getting caught between the buildings and creating eddys and whirlpools, which were sweeping up all the rose petals from the trees in the plaza and swirling them through the air. Really, really pretty, but since I was cameraless, you’ll just have to settle for my less-than-lyrical description of it.

Guess ya just had to be there, huh? :)

A little money trickles in

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Well, I got some good news today. Not a job yet, but at least a little extra funds coming my way. According to the kind folks at Todays, I’d just recently passed the 1,300 hours worked marked — which means I’m eligible for a full weeks worth of vacation pay. They told me that as soon as it gets approved in the system they’ll be able to cut me a check, so I’ll have another extra $400 to help me through this downtime.

I’ve also been talking with Melvin about helping out around the apartment building, as we’d discussed before I moved in. He’s in the midst of getting a fairly large amount of work ready to get started, and so it looks like I’ll be spending much of next weekend ripping up carpets, stripping old paint off of walls, and general odds and ends — to the tune of about another $300-$400, depending on how long things take. Not a bad deal…I’ve certainly got nothing against manual labor when necessary, and especially given my current situation.

Besides — I could use the excercise. Build up those muscles.

Get all buff.

New toy

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This is too cool. Yesterday evening I was talking with Melvin (my landlord), and he gave me a new toy to play with! We were talking about Palm devices, and I mentioned that mine died a while ago. Turns out that when he got his post here at the Park Seneca apartments, the company gave him a nifty little cell phone/Palm combination device. The thing was, he already had one — so he gave me his old one! Really surprised me, but he had no use for it anymore, so he figured he’d rather have it be used by someone than just sit unused in a drawer.

This thing is a nifty little toy, too — it’s a Kyocera SmartPhone. I’m not using the phone part of it yet — I’ll have to call Qwest when I’ve got some more stable income and investigate that — but for now, I’ve at least got a very functional PDA again.

Bye-bye Andersen

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Okay. How’s this for an ‘April Fools’ day post — I got fired.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke.

The best way to make this all as clear as possible is to back up a few months to set the scene.

(Just in case you’ve stumbled across this blog and have no idea who I am, in brief, for the past 8 months or so I’ve been working in a fairly convoluted setup. Follow this one, if you can — I’m employed by Today’s Office Staffing (a temp staffing agency), who contracts me out to Xerox. Xerox, in turn, contracts me out to Arthur Andersen‘s Seattle office to run the XBS [Xerox Business Services] print shop at Andersen. So, I work for the Today’s, who contract me to Xerox, who place me at Andersen. Got it? Good. Now back to our story….)

A few months ago, I’d been having some problems with getting supplies from Xerox for my machines. One day we ended up losing a machine due to this — it had a problem, and without the right part to replace it, we were dead in the water. Normally this would be just an inconvenience (albeit a fairly major one), however when this happened, we were in the middle of a large print run. Not a good thing. I was able to track down the part we needed, and one of the Andersen people I work with volunteered to run over to the Xerox building on their lunch hour to pick up the part. She did, the part went in the machine, and we got the print run done. All’s good in the world, right?

Not nearly, unfortunately. After having to deal with frustration from my supervisors at Andersen while the mess was going on, the next day it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that Xerox was unhappy with the way I handled things as well. Apparently, they try extremely hard to present a ‘happy’ face to their clients, and in dealing with the situation, I’d made it known that I’d had problems in the Xerox channels. My Andersen supervisor indicated her displeasure with this to the Xerox representative, who then informed me that under no circumstances was I to involve any Andersen personnel with any problems I might be having with the Xerox side of things.

Okay, fine. I’ll go with that.

Back to current events. I’m doing my best to run the print shop while walking a tightrope between what the two companies want from me (Andersen wants me to do my job to the best of my abilities — no big surprise there — and so does Xerox, I just can’t let the either company know anything about what’s going on at the other). Then, over this past week, I run into a new and improved problem with supplies.

Up until about a month ago, ordering my supplies had been going fairly well. I typed up my order, faxed it over to the Xerox supply person, she faxed back a confirmation within the hour, and goodies would start showing up the next day, day after at the most. Then, about a month ago, that person went to a new position within Xerox, and things went very quickly downhill. Of the three orders I’ve put in since the new person took over, two were ‘misplaced’ until I called and harassed people, and one was just late — not actually ordered until the day after I faxed the order over. So things have been a bit nuts over the past month, as I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m not getting paper like I’m supposed to — while trying to keep four floors of accountants from ripping my throat out when they can’t use the copiers with less than a month before the April 15th tax deadline. Not a fun situation.

So, last Wednesday, I put in a paper order for 35 cases. Thursday goes by, nothing. Friday goes by…nothing. Great. By this point, there was virtually no paper in the office — a few reams scattered among the floors, and one case in the print shop, but that was it. I still hadn’t been able to get ahold of a status on my order, and was at a loss of what to do (meanwhile, of course, trying to stick with Xerox’s demand not to involve Andersen. By the end of the day, I knew that there was no way anything was going to be showing up, so when one of the Andersen people asked me about paper for over the weekend, I let them know that they’d probably have to round some up on the other floors if they ran out.

Apparently this didn’t go over well at all, and this morning I was told by my supervisor at Andersen that after getting an e-mail complaining about this, she’d requested that Xerox find someone else to cover the print shop. After I explained my take on things she seemed to understand my position a bit more, but it certainly wasn’t going to change her decision — which, to be honest, I can understand. What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was how fast all this was going to happen (funny, Xerox can’t get me paper with less than 5 days turnaround, but they can get me out of there in a matter of hours). When I got hired, the prior Xerox staffer hung around for a couple weeks to give me a basic training on how Andersen likes things to be done, and my Andersen boss didn’t give me any indication that this was going to be an immediate thing. So, when I got a call about an hour and a half later from my contacts at Today’s (after spending that hour and a half on the phone trying to convince anyone at Xerox to get me any amount of paper they could), it was a bit surprising for them to tell me that I was to leave Andersen and come down to their office immediately. So, at 11am I left Andersen, went down to the temp agency, and was told that Xerox had made it clear that I was not to return, and that my assignment was over.

Yay.

On the bright side, I’m not actually fired. Since my employer is Today’s, while I’m not actively employed, I wasn’t fired either — my assignment ended — so if I need to go on unemployment, that can be done with very little hassle. Hopefully things won’t come to that, though. It’s also good that this all happened on the first day of the month — had this happend mid-month or towards the end, I’d be much more stressed about dealing with rent. I’m stressed now, but I also have a full month to examine my options and see what I can come up with.

So, that’s how things stand at the moment. Wish me luck…I need all I can get right now.

Bye-bye ‘Enterprise!’

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I’ve been watching the new Star Trek show, Enterprise, off and on for a while now. I haven’t caught every new episode, but those I have, I posted my thoughts on. It doesn’t look like I’ll be doing this anymore, though.

Wednesday evening I turned on my TV to watch the show, and as it turns out, my reception here at the new apartment is actually worse than it was at my old one. So, watching the broadcast isn’t an option, and there’s no way I’m going to pay for cable access just so I can watch one show. At first I was kind of disappointed by this, but something else has happened this week that made me realize that I probably wasn’t going to miss Enterprise all that much.

This Tuesday marked the release of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation in a very nice DVD box set. I picked up my copy on Wednesday on my way home from work, and when I found that I wasn’t going to be able to watch Enterprise, I started watching TNG episodes.

The thing is — I’d forgotten just how good this show really was! Sure, it was their first season, everyone was still getting the hang of their characters, and the special effects were fairly horrid (and that’s not just hindsight talking — I remember being extremely unimpressed with the effects in “Justice” at the time it first aired) — but even with all that, each episode I (re-)watch drives home more and more just how good TNG was…and just how much Enterprise pales in comparison.

Watching the first season of TNG now is actually much like watching it for the first time. I watched TNG almost religiously when it first came on the air — it first aired during my sophomore year in high school, and for quite a while it became a ritual for my group of friends to gather at someone’s house (usually Tammy’s, though I think Royce, myself, and some of the others hosted the gathering from time to time) and watch whatever the newest episode was. However, by the time I graduated in ’91 and moved out to live on my own for the first time, television was less and less of a priority, and I ended up missing the majority of the last few seasons of TNG. In the ensuing years I’ve caught the occasional episode of one Trek show or another in reruns, but those times have been fairly few and far between. I remember bits and pieces of the shows I’ve seen, but much has faded in the mists of memory over the years.

In essence, then, it’s very easy for me to compare watching the first season of Enterprise fresh out of the bottle to watching the first season of TNG the same way — and I’ve gotta say, ENT just doesn’t compare. Up until now, I’ve been somewhat of an apologist for ENT, doing my best to give it a chance, and one of the most common arguments when someone says that ENT just isn’t that good of a show is that it’s still their first season. Often someone will offer up, “remember just how much better TNG was after a few seasons, and how shaky their first season was?” Well sure, it was better after as it went on (which makes me look forward even more to those seasons being released on DVD later this year) — but that argument was a lot easier for me to accept when I hadn’t actually seen first-season TNG since 1987. The episodes and dilemmas presented therein are much more interesting, the characters are more engaging — about the only point that I can see that first-season ENT really has over first-season TNG is the special effects, and much of that is the simple fact that it’s 15 years later (side note — 15 years later? Ugh…I’m feeling old again!) and modern-day F/X technology is that much better.

Perhaps ENT will mature as it goes along, and perhaps it will grow into being a truly worthwhile addition to the Star Trek universe — it’d be nice to see that happen, as I still think that some of the new ideas and directions they’re exploring in ENT could be very interesting (the new take on the Vulcans, for example). However, at the moment — I can’t say I’m going to really miss not being able to watch it anymore.