Free association, job possibilities, and haiku

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Hrm. Sorry ’bout the lack of updates recently, but things have been a bit busy. Not the kind of busy that would really be worth writing about, either, which is the bummer. If I’d been kidnapped by alien space pirates and forced to endure hours upon hours of back to back Hardy Boys television episodes overdubbed in Tagalog in a devious attempt to brainwash me and force me to assassinate Sonny Bono (a difficult prospect, considering I’d have to resurrect him first) with nothing but a Ronco Turnip Twaddler, three jars of Neutella hazelnut spread, and a 5-inch length of dental floss — that would be worth writing about.

Unfortunately, life just isn’t that interesting.

Instead, it’s been pretty much the same old day-to-day existence that makes up the majority of anyone’s life. Get up, go to work, come home. Repeat ad naseum.

There may be some interesting options on the job front, however — who knows if this will actually pan out, but if it does, it could be fairly cool. Yesterday word came down that Jenne, one of the people in the Report Production department, was being transferred up to take over the position of a departing Executive Assistant. I’ve inquired about applying to take that position, and have gotten support from the rest of the Report Production people that I work with every day, so as soon as Lee (my Anderson supervisor) has the job posting written up, she’ll pass it on to me so I can formally start the application process. If all goes well (crossing my fingers), I could in theory be hired on into that position and become an actual Andersen employee, rather than my current temp status with three levels of beauracracy to deal with. I’m hoping this can actually happen — it’d finally get me out of copying and into something more office- and computer-related…and the accompanying hike in the payscale would be nice, too!

Other than that…well, there just isn’t a whole lot other than that. I’m kind of killing time right now — my main production machine went down, and I’m waiting on a service call to Xerox to go through so I can get things running again. Until that happens, I’m kind of dead in the water, so it seemed like a good time to finally babble here for a bit. Fun, huh?

Oh, here’s something I was wondering about — are there any decent specifics of what kind of casualties we’ve got in this whole ‘War on Terrorism’ thing right now? From what I remember hearing, so far we’ve been told of one sodier killed by enemy forces, a couple friendly-fire incidents, and then today’s reports of a KC-130 that went down with seven soldiers aboard. We may be taking Al-Quaida soldiers out (either through killing or capturing them) right and left, but have we really been doing a better job of killing our own personel than the enemy has? Kinda makes me wonder. If there’s any better or more accurate info out there, please feel free to share it with me (oh, and as one disclaimer, I’ve yet to really start researching any of that, it’s all just off the top of my head — so if I’m way off base here, feel free to correct me there, too).

And to close for now, an amusing little haiku I found in the comments to a post on Fark:

Nipples; ninja: both
Are difficult to capture
Without an ambush.

Rick sent me this quote

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Video games don’t affect kids. If Pac Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms munching magic pills and listening to repetitive, electronic music.

— T-shirt

The new album from M.C. Escher, ‘Please Escher Don’t Hurt ‘Em,’ featuring the hit single, ‘You Can’t Draw This!’

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Okay, I’m kind of frightened — as I was making my paper deliveries, the girls up in HR (Can I say ‘girls?’ It’s probably not politically correct, but at only 28, it seems kind of funny to call people within a few years of my age either direction ‘ladies’ or ‘women.’ Not that they’re not ‘ladies,’ I’m sure…it just seems a bit too formal. But I digress….) were listening to MC Hammer‘s 2 Legit 2 Quit. Kinda scary. Kinda funny (especially since all four of them still remembered all the movements…but then, so do I…), but kinda scary. Weird stuff.

Hmm…if I didn’t babble so much, the title of this post would probably be longer than the post itself. Score one for being talkative!

Chad’s birthday

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It’s Friday! This is a good thing…the end of a slow work week. Not that I’ve really got anything amazing planned for the weekend, but at least I’ll be killing time at home where there’s a slight possiblity of being able to find something to entertain myself with instead of being here at work. That whole issue of needing to give the appearance of being able to justify your time no matter how slow it is kind of kills much ability to find some interesting ways to kill time.

Of course, so does the corporate firewall. But that’s another story. ;)

Candice and I never did make it out to the movie…we’d checked the time for the closest bus through the tunnel, but the bus tunnel is closed on holidays. Go figure. Ended up being just an evening at home, I dinked around on the ‘net, she read magazines…exciting stuff, I tell ya.

Not much going on other than that so far. I’m a bit short on money, thanks to two short work weeks in a row, which is making paying bills something of an exercise in creative financing, but parents are doing what they can to help me out, which rocks. As much fun as the past two weeks of vacation (more or less) have been, they certainly do take a frighteningly large chunk out of my paychecks.

Earlier this week Chad had his birthday dinner at 13 Coins, which was fun…Candice, myself, Rick, Peter, Casey, Jen, Chad, Don, and Dez all out having fun and being silly. Got one wonderful quote out of the evening, too…for some reason we were joking about Rick being incapacitated in some form, to the point where he we just kept him in the bathtub.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Dez. “We’d entertain you…read to you or something.”

Rick wasn’t too sure about that, apparently. “Oh, sure — ‘Which would you like? Dr. Seuss or Schindler’s List?'”

“Hmm…Horton Hears a Jew?” said Dez.

We all proceeded to crack up.

And that’s about all I can come up with to babble about off the top of my head right now.

Fire your friends

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More stupid people: Burned at party. Okay, so your friend’s passed out from all the booze he drank at your New Years party. Okay, so the old ‘hand-in-a-bowl-of-warm-water’ or ‘shaving-cream-on-the-face’ tricks are pretty old. But is dousing his leg in lighter fluid and setting him on fire really the best and brightest idea for a prank?

Beyond the rumor sites

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MacWorld Expo SF is coming up next week, which normally has the various Mac rumor sites all a-tizzy trying to predict what may or may not appear. This time, around, however, Apple — rather than staying their characteristically silent self — is doing the online equivalent of tossing a goldfish into a pirahna tank, through the posting of oh-so-subtle headlines like ‘Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond.’ to their website. Now, now, shouldn’t tease the animals….

— AtAT’s take on Apple‘s apparent plans to make their most rabidly loyal followers’ heads implode.

[From Usenet: 1.2.02 0143]

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[Note: This was originally a post to the alt.sys.mac.newuser-help Usenet newsgroup. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]

Albert –

First off, I hope your experiences with OS X continue to improve, as you indicated they had started to in a followup post. Figured I could go ahead and jump in the fray, though… ;)

In article <asteg-5FD600.02164401012...@news.mindspring.com>, Albert Steg <as...@mindspring.com> wrote:

The installation process disbabled my Enternet software, crippling my internet access, and even when I got back to system 9 I found my internet aliases (eudora and netscape) hidden from my desktop and replaced with Explorer. Felt like a Microsoft ploy.

That’s something of a surprise. Each time I’ve done an OS X install (starting with the Public Beta), it’s gone smooth as silk. Really unsure as to what may have gone on to actually disable anything.

…and the interface is totally new, isn’t it?” Why is there no warning or explanation in the manual that this system represents a radical departure from the Apple of the past 15 years?

Well, it’s definitely a new system, but the manual I got – while really underwhelming – did at least have a cursory “this is what you’re gonna get” feel to it. Much as ‘puter people sterotypically go with a “install first, read later if something explodes” attitude, sometimes it can be helpful to at least flip through the documentation at least once first… ;)

I am, along with others, somewhat surprised that you were caught so completely off guard – wherever you’ve been, you must have been really out of touch. If you start poking around the web, though, there’s a lot of good information on all the various changes, both why they were done and what the various repercussions are. The OS X manual that Carl linked to (http://homepage.mac.com/rgriff/files/osxguide2.pdf) is a good start, I’d also recommend spending some time digging through Mac OS X Hints (http://www.macosxhints.com/), lots of good info on there.

Am I alone in being dismayeed and bewildered here? These huge Playskool-style icons,

These can be scaled up and down to your preferences…they are a wee bit on the big side by default.

the inability to open two windows at one time

You can have more than two open at once. Check your System Preferences and View Options (under the Finder’s View menu) for the various options there.

…the oily, gimmicky sluuuuurping of windows

Some people like the ‘genie’ effect, some don’t – I’ve switched it to the ‘scale’ effect, as it’s a bit less processor-intensive (and therefore a bit quicker on my machine).

down to the Windows-like “dock”

It takes some getting used to, but I’ve found the dock to be a very nice addition (though, I’ve gotta admit, I’ve liked certain aspects of the Windows taskbar too). I keep my dock devoid of any aliases, so that I don’t have to try to distinguish between icons of running aps and icons of apps that I can run if I want, and only use it for whatever’s running at the moment. For me it works much better as a application switcher than as a launcher, but different things work for different people…experiment with it a bit, after the initial shock, you may find it more to your liking.

instead of the crisp windowshade feature of previous systems….

As has been noted by a couple people, there is a shareware program that will bring windowshading back to OS X (though I don’t use it myself).

these are improvements?

Overall, yeah…just improvements with a bit more learning curve than has been necessary for past OS updates. But then, past OS updates didn’t completely rewrite the OS from the ground up, either…. :)

How about an explanation of the itools program, rather than just thrusting it at you in the config process?

Apple would do well to explain this a bit more. However, breifly, iTools isn’t so much a program as it is a set of services that Apple provides that you can use or ignore as you like. It includes free e-mail with a mac.com suffix, an online storage space (your iDisk), and some other features that can be explored in more depth on Apple’s iTools site (http://www.apple.com/itools/). You don’t have to use any of them, though, if you don’t want or need to.

Can I use Eudora instead of Itools. . .

Yup – I think there’s even an OS X version of Eudora out by now. Check VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker/macosx/) to be sure.

or do I have to use Itools to access eudora now?

Nope, though you probably can use Eudora to access your iTools mac.com e-mail account if you’ve set one up (though I’m not 100% sure on that).

. . . granted I have to give it a chance, but I am not looking forward to this.

Well, go ahead and poke around, play for a while, and give it that chance. There’s some culture shock – especially since you apparently didn’t know what you were in for – but it’s not that bad once you get used to it.