Hooray for voting by mail. I’m all voted, and just need to drop the ballot in tomorrow’s mail.
Life
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
Six Seconds of Cute
This was one of the best things we saw at the Puyallup fair. Put a kid no older than six (the youngest we saw was three) and no heavier than sixty pounds on a sheep and let them try to hang on for six seconds. Really cute, and really funny!
I took a ton of pictures of this, and now I’m having a terrible time trying to cull them down to just a few that are post-worthy. They’re just all so cute…and kind of hilariously disturbing, since it’s essentially a series of young children falling on their heads. The kind of thing you know you really shouldn’t laugh at, but….
Anyway, I put together this collage as a sample of what each round looked like.
Over-Distributed Identity
I need a comment aggregator.
Between the number of people I “know” (in the modern, electronic, netspace version of the word) who have accounts scattered among various online services and my ongoing attempt to own myself by claiming my name (either given or the online pseudonym of ‘djwudi’) across the ‘net, I’ve ended up with accounts on a multitude of websites. In order to try to ensure that all of those various people have a fair chance of keeping up with whatever trivialities burble to the surface of my brain and escape out into the electronic aether, I use services like ping.fm, WordPress plugins, and RSS aggregation options to mirror my output across all of those websites.
The upside to this is that whether I’m posting a short tweet, a link to something neat, or actually writing a post to my blog, the content automagically appears in one form or another across the sites I belong to.
The downside is that I only have so much time to actually check into all those various sites. My weblog, Flickr and Twitter accounts get frequent attention, Facebook gets semi-regular attention, Friendfeed gets slightly more than occasional attention, and the rest tend to fall between the cracks, often not getting checked in with unless some automated message tells me that someone’s trying to get my attention, add me as a ‘friend,’ or some other sort of administrative fiddlybit. Then, when I do log into one or another of these sites, I often find a number of responses and comments that have been sitting ignored (unintentionally) since their appearance.
What I need, then, is some form of comment aggregator service that would track when a particular post (of any form) is made, monitor its status on each of the various services, then either collect any comments at a central location or even simply alert me when a comment is made.
While I doubt such a service could be effectively constructed, due to the number of competing services that would have to integrate in some form, part of me wonders if this could be added as some form of extention to the Ping.fm service: since I assume that ping.fm has to get some form of ‘ok’ response when it sends my content out to that service, if that ‘ok’ response could include a reference to the item ID on the target site, perhaps ping.fm could store links to those URIs along with the original item in the ‘Recent Posts’ tab. Some form of notification would be even better, so you didn’t have to go check the ‘Recent Posts’ tab to keep track.
I’m sure there’s a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work, but you get the idea.
How do other people handle their distributed conversations? Is there a magic button (other than the “off” button) that I haven’t stumbled across yet?
The Phantom of the Opera
Yesterday afternoon, Prairie and I got a call from her sister H offering us tickets to the closing night show of The Phantom of the Opera at the Paramount. She’d gotten sick earlier in the day and just wasn’t up to going out, so she and P decided to see if we wanted to go. We, of course, were happy to take them (after passing on our sympathies, of course), and headed out for an unexpected but not unwelcome night out at the theater.
I’ve grown up with Phantom, from having the soundtrack nearly as long as I can remember to owning the behind-the-scenes book The Complete Phantom of the Opera to having performed a few of the numbers during my days in the Anchorage Children’s Choir, and this was my second time seeing the show. While not unfamiliar with the show — its nearly impossible to have an interest in modern theater culture and not know about Phantom — this was Prairie’s first opportunity to see it on stage.
The show itself, while enjoyable for the spectacle, wasn’t at all a great show. The performances were good, though I wouldn’t really rate them much better than that, and much of the spectacle felt a little rushed, like you didn’t really have time to appreciate the moment before being whisked off to the next scene. There were no flubs, it certainly wasn’t a bad performance, and we both enjoyed the grandeur of the whole thing. It just wasn’t stellar.
Additionally, we’re curious if we might be more appreciative of the less-expensive balcony seats for our next show at the Paramount. Each time we’ve gone to a show and splurged for floor seats, the sound mix in the theater has been surprisingly bad, with the actors overly loud compared to the music and many of the group numbers turning into a muddled, unintelligible mess. We don’t remember having this issue when we’ve seen shows from the balcony, though, so we’re curious if the acoustics in the Paramount happen to favor the balcony. For our next show, we’re going to stay away from the floor and see what we think.
Lastly, two points that I’ve touched on before but that, unfortunately, still need to be addressed (and, realistically, probably aren’t going to change in the foreseeable future):
It’s truly distressing how few people think of theater as Theater (with a capital ‘t’). Both Prairie and I were brought up to see a night out at a show as something special. It’s not something that happens every day (or even every week or month), and so it’s not something to be taken completely casually. It is something that should be dressed for: I’d argue for good business work clothes at the minimum, if you’re not actually going to take the time to dress up. Above all, jeans and t-shirts? Not acceptable!
The crowd at last nights show, admittedly, was a bit better than we’ve seen at other shows in the past. That said, I still hold that ratty jeans and tracksuits should be unacceptable at the theater.
One last thing: a standing ovation should be given for extraordinarily good performances. Not for every performance you happen to be at. Not for slightly above average performances. And certainly not for performances with flubbed lines, broken props, and bad sound. I’ve noticed this trend a lot lately, where it’s more rare to be at a performance that doesn’t get a standing ovation than to be at a performance that does. That’s really not how this is supposed to work, folks. A standing ovation is something special, to be reserved for those truly stand-out performances, not used for every performance you bother to attend.
Prairie and I just sat in our seats last night. The people around us probably thought we were being rude (ironic, given that I had to shoot the twit on my left a few glares when she started singing along with the show), but it just wasn’t an ovation-worthy performance. Good, yes; worthy of applause and appreciation, yes; worthy of a whoopin’ and hollerin’ standing ovation? Certainly not.
My Nephews
A few weekends ago, Prairie and I went down to visit family south of us: her mom and sister in Vancouver, WA; my brother and his family in Corvallis, OR; then Prairie’s dad and grandpa in Woodland, WA on our way back up to Seattle.
I’ve finally finished putting all the photos from the weekend up in a photoset. Here’s my nephews Paul and Noah to kick things off!
I’m a Case Study
I’m a case study in a textbook — and, contrary to what might be believed, it’s not a psychological textbook. Rather, it’s the latest repercussion from my fifteen minutes of fame way back when.
From Canadian textbook Business Technology Today, whose authors were kind enough to send me a copy after getting permission to quote me in their text. Thanks!
Old Money
Last weekend, Prairie and I went on a round of family visits, seeing her mom and sister in Vancouver, WA, my brother and family in Corvallis, OR, and her dad and grandpa in Woodland, WA. While we were in Woodland with Prairie’s dad and grandpa, Prairie took a few minutes to poke around the house and collect some old glassware to bring home. While she was exploring, she found some fun old currency, some of which we recognized, some of which we didn’t. I’ve scanned them in and done a little Wikipedia research, and here’s what we came up with.
1935G “No Motto” $1 Silver Certificate
Silver Certificates were printed for a time in the United States as a form of paper currency. They were produced in response to silver agitation by citizens who were angered by the Fourth Coinage Act, which placed the United States on the gold standard. The certificate was matched to the same amount of value in silver coinage. For example, one fifty dollar Silver Certificate equals fifty silver dollars. Note the Series 1935G came in two varieties, with motto (“In God We Trust”) and without motto. The with motto demands higher premiums than the without motto.
1953C $2 United States Note
The United States two-dollar bill ($2) is a current denomination of U.S. currency. When U.S. currency was changed to its current size, the $2 bill was issued only as a United States Note. After United States Notes were discontinued, the $2 bill later began to be issued as a Federal Reserve Note. The denomination of two dollars was first used by the United States federal government in July 1862. The denomination was continuously used until 1966 when the only class of U.S. currency it was then assigned to, United States Notes, began to be discontinued. All small-sized $2 United States Notes with a red seal and older large size notes are obsolete and are collectibles.
Series 481 (6/20/51 thru 5/25/54) Five Cent Military Payment Certificate
Military Payment Certificates, or MPC, were used from the end of World War II until the end of the Vietnam War, between the years 1946 and 1973. MPC’s utilized layers of line lithography to create colorful banknotes that could be produced cheaply. Fifteen series of MPC’s were created but only 13 series were issued.
1917 Cinq Francs Note
The franc (represented by the franc sign ₣ or more commonly just F) is a former currency of France. Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money. It was re-introduced (in decimal form) in 1795 and remained the national currency until the introduction of the euro in 1999 (for accounting purposes) and 2002 (coins and banknotes).
Geek Code Updated
After finding this post, and being prompted by this post, I decided to update my geek code. Decode the following gibberish here:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GAT d-(--) s:-- a35 C++(+++) U*++++ P+ L- E---
W+++ N+++ o K w--- O- M+++ V PS++ PE Y+ PGP t+(+++)
5 X+ R- tv b+(+++) DI++ D+ G e+ h--- r++ y++**
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Recommended: Jordan River Moving and Storage
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now, and keep spacing it.
Some time before the move, Prairie and I decided that we didn’t have the time, energy, or interest in doing all the heavy lifting of furniture and thousands of books ourselves, and started looking for local moving companies. Prairie dug through Google for a day, came up with a few, and hit their websites to see how expensive it would be to hire movers. None of the sites gave even rough ideas right away, though a few of them had ‘online estimate’ forms, so Prairie filled a few out to see what they said.
Of the three or four she filled out, the only company to get back to us was Jordan River Moving and Storage. They called us back, we had a brief conversation about just how much work there would be, and they gave us an estimate. Since we had never done this before and had no idea what to expect for pricing, we waited another couple days to see what other quotes we would get — but since nobody else bothered to call us back, we decided just to go with Jordan River.
The day of the move, it was quickly obvious that this was a good idea. Perhaps this is slightly colored by our not having hired movers before, but the guys from JR were incredible. We got a team of three, and even though they had to deal with a power outage at our old apartment that kept the hallways quite dark and a third-floor apartment on the other end, they just flew through everything. We’d figured on four to five hours for the process, but they got the whole thing — loading, driving from Northgate to Kent, and unloading — done in just barely over three hours. Watching them work was amazing, hefting three heavy boxes of books at once and practically running up the stairs, lifting larger items up and over the railing of the outside stairs to avoid half of the stair climb…wow. I tried to pitch in for a few minutes, but it quickly became obvious that I was just getting in the way, so I stepped back again.
In the end, the whole thing was done under the estimated time (and therefore under the estimated budget), and we were more than happy to give them a good-sized tip. While we don’t expect to be moving anytime soon again, we’ll definitely be giving Jordan River a call when the time comes. Highly recommended.
The New Job
There’s been a few slight mentions of my new job here, and Dad asked for some more details. As has generally been the case for the past few years, I’m not going to say a lot about my job here, but here’s the basic scoop:
While I’d been tossing resumes at Craigslist postings for a few weeks before the move, I wasn’t having much success. Since I wanted to get away from mall jobs, I’d been concentrating on entry-level office jobs, generally along the receptionist/secretarial/admin assistant line of positions. I was sure I could do the work, however as my resume doesn’t really stress the skills I have (funny how mall retail and reprographics print shops doesn’t scream ‘office capable’ to many people), I wasn’t having much luck.
I eventually did get one interview, but I ended up turning it down. I’d applied for a receptionist position, but over the course of one phone call and an interview, the position shifted into being a glorified delivery driver, delivering and assembling copiers on-site for clients. Not only was it pretty far removed from what I wanted or had applied for, but the guy interviewing me set off a lot of warning flags — denigrating the rest of the crew during the interview (he wanted to hire me because I came across smarter than the “idiots” and could supervise them) was just one. On top of that, he would have required me to cut my hair to something “respectable” — a request that seemed a little odd coming from a man with fading, but still quite visible and legible “FUCK IT” tattoos across his fingers. Even though I knew I needed a new job, this just didn’t seem like the best option for me, so I turned it down.
That afternoon, I got a list of employment agencies in the Kent area and took off, intending to drop my resume off with a few of them to see if I could get any hits there. That ended up being a much better way to approach things.
My first stop was at Express Personnel, and though they normally operate on an appointment basis, they were able to do a walk-in interview for me. Though the interview started a little shaky — there was a bit of confusion as to just what I was aiming for, as I didn’t really know the best way to say “I know I’m smart, capable, and I’m desperate to get out of retail” — but pretty soon we started narrowing things down. I took typing, ten-key, and keyboard data entry tests (90 words per minute, over 10k ten-key keystrokes per hour, and over 12k keyboard keystrokes per hour), Word and Excel proficiency tests, and a Wonderlic Personnel Test (with a score of between 36 and 40, if I’m remembering correctly, well into the higher reaches of what’s expected), all of which worked together to convince my interviewer that I actually did have more than two brain cells to rub together, and might be worth placing somewhere.
Over the next week, Express set me up with an interview at a prospective employer, I had an interview with them, and a few days later, got the word that they liked me, and I would be starting soon. Hooray!
My first day was last Friday, and so far, I’m definitely enjoying this. I’m a front desk/receptionist/admin assistant person for a packaging materials and supply business. Duties are pretty much as you’d expect: answering phones and forwarding calls, greeting visitors, taking care of various paperwork, filing, tracking e-mail, and so on. I’m only on day three, but I’m doing my best to get the hang of everything as quickly as possible (and really, the actions are all easily within my current realm of knowledge, it’s mostly procedures specific to this office that I need to learn).
Some of the best perks, though: $12/hr, a nice change from the $9/hr + variable commission I was earning at Kits, a full 40 hours a week, and a regular workday 8:30am-5:30pm, Monday to Friday schedule. I have evenings, and weekends! Reliably! Every week! I’m not going to have to show up at a mall at 5 in the morning on Black Friday anymore. It’s only been three days and one weekend so far, but Prairie and I are really enjoying the new schedule.
So there’s the scoop on that. I’m part of the normal working world now.