CoffeeBear.net

Whew, glad that week’s over

The week including the 4th of July was supposedly a short week, a week with less work days, and hence should have been a more relaxing week. As it turned out, it was more of a brutal week than I've had to deal with in a long time. Time at work has shrunk now that I'm once again work on our massive, quarterly update. Plus we've got another big project coming down the pipe soon. Then at home, well...

Wednesday, we hit up the Transformers movie with AWelkin and Bryon. The special effects were incredible, but the writing and directing sucked. I also thought the main human characters of the film overacted their parts, but others in our movie going party insisted they did a fine job working with the crap they were given. *shrug* I'm not an expert in movies so they could be right but in either case it was still a really bad movie.

Saturday, Ariesna and I got up early so we could hit up the farmers market taking place downtown and still have time to visit some garage sales. Now we do regularly visit the weekly farmers markets around town, but at a recent neighborhood cocktail party we heard that the first weekend of the month there's a larger version which takes place. So we went and were unprepared for just how massive it was. The market took over several city blocks worth of streets and was jam-packed with vendors and shoppers. We found a stand selling some fruit tarts and bought one each for our breakfast as we looked around¹. We also bought a few books at the library's booth, some creamed honey and a loaf of pumpkin bread. Then we escaped, huzzah! *grin*

After leaving downtown, we parked the car at the house and walked over to the garage sales. Only again, we underestimated how massive it would be. There had been signs posted for roughly a week, giving the street, day and time. We'd also heard back at the cocktail party it would be 4-5 houses getting together to sell their stuff. Only it was more like 20-25, spread across 4-5 blocks. We walked around all of it and when we were at the farthest part of it, we found a stepladder for $10. Sure it's old and probably not rated to support somebody of my size, but it was $10 and we've needed one ever since we moved into our house. Ariesna hung out with the ladder, while I walked all those blocks back to the house, gack. Then a quick drive over to pick up Ariesna and our new ladder. Whee!

Sunday, naturally having the stepladder meant I got to have the fun of climbing it and cleaning out the rain gutters on the garage. For extra fun, then I cleaned off the stepladder onto the garage's roof and cleaned some of the house's rain gutters. And then back down the ground, switching to the extension ladder we borrowed from Ariesna's dad and finished cleaning all the gutters of the house. Yes, several times my vertigo did kick in. No, it was not pleasant. Oh and yes, our slightly tilted garage apparently did shift underneath me a bit while was moving around on it's roof.

Combine all that err, fun with 90 degree heat and you'll understand why I'm so pleased to be going back to work (where somebody else pays for the air conditioning).

¹ Mine was rasberry/lemon, Ariesna's was rhubarb. Mine was so much better.

Tags: shopping, transformers, working

Jon Stewart, Cynical Youth and Voting

A Washington Post columnist posted an article last Friday covering a bit of research claiming that Jon Stewart's popular comedy/news show on the Comedy Channel may cause people to stop voting. The report's title was not given, nor was there any link to the results. So we have no way to read the report for ourselves to judge the accuracy of the columnist's claims and have to rely on the quotes from the report he gave us. Quotes like this one:

"Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls," they wrote.

Maybe I'm just a bit cynical myself but I'd think there's also the possibility these youth will start working the political scene to replace the loser candidates we have now with somebody who might actually represent their interests.

Tags: article, con, IM, Link, quote, quotes, voting, war, work, working, youth

Bigots and Marriage

I had been considering righting up my feeling regarding this insane proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to steal the rights of a subset of American citizens. However I was catching up on the news in the blogsphere when I stumbled upon Mr. Scalzi's discussion of the subject:

Why aren't people asking the marriage bigots flat out what they have against marriage? Against married couples? And by what right are they able to say that couples who are already legally married should have their marriages declared null and void? This proposed amendment breaks up marriages. God damn it, people should be hollering this at the top their lungs every time one of those marriage bigots gets all sanctimonious about what marriage means. People ought to be getting these marriage bigots into a corner and getting them to admit that they need to destroy legal, loving marriages in order to accomplish their goals. We ought to be getting these marriage bigots admitting that they have to strip away rights these Americans already have to do what they want to do.

I highly recommend you read Mr. Scalzi's post in full.

Update: The comment thread on Mr. Scalzi's post is rather long. I hadn't completed reading it yet, when I posted this article. Heck, I'm still working my way through it. However the reason for this update is one of Mr. Scalzi's replies to a comment was so dead on that I simply must quote him again.

As I've said a number of times in the past, the most "activist" judicial ruling I can think of in recent times was Bush v. Gore, and I think it was wildly poorly decided. However, you don't see me hopping up and down like a frog on a plate, bitching about that damned activist Judge Scalia, because in my opinion, regardless of whether I like the ruling or not, the judiciary was doing its proper role. So, basically, if I have to live with a piece of crap ruling like Bush v. Gore, my sympathy for boo-hoo conservates bitching about "activist judges" is around about zero.

Tags: article, comment, con, crap, IM, quote, reading, Scalzi, tea, work, working

Update on the Nibble

Unlike the majority of Amercians, I did not head back to the office after the Memorial day weekend. Well, not back to my office anyways. Instead, I whipped out my interview suit¹ and went to a job interview. It was a really good thing that I left early to get there as I got slightly lost. I stopped at a coffee shop and got directions. Yes ladies, men can and will ask for directions when we know we're lost².

After getting the directions sorted out (I missed overshot the street I needed to turn onto by 1 block), I arrived at the company's office³. The building looked surprisingly new, though it was a bit warm inside. Though that could have been a combination of me being nervous and me having "suited up". I had to fill out some paperwork (boilerplate HR background check authorization forms) and then waited a bit for my interview. Shortly, my interviewer showed up and took me back to his office. We went over my resume a bit, though it turned out his copy of my resume was missing the information about me being a UofI graduate. Fortunately, I had prepared for that eventuality by having multiple copies of my most current and most generic⁴ and I gave one of these copies to him. We discussed what sorts of things I do for my current employer, what I did during my college days and so forth.

But we also got off topic several times dicussing a variety of side issues: my Japan trip, Mindbridge, working for companies who close their local offices, being a non-traditional college student and so on. While I do not have an overbudence of interviews under my belt; this one felt like it went extremely well. I really felt like I made a connection with the interviewer⁵. As it turns out, the company is looking for 1 person for their computer operations department and 1 for their data warehouse. According the interviewer, the operations position is a bit lower than what I'm really looking for in a starting salary but he thinks I could be a good fit for the other position as well. He went on to say the company really needs to get these positions filled quickly before their busy season hits and I should hear something back in a couple of weeks.

Since the interview went so well and the only reason I was on time for it was the helpful coffee shop; I went back to have myself a little snack⁶. The shop is called the "Coffee Talk Cafe". When I got there after my interview, the only people in it were the staff. The lady behind the counter was very friendly and we chatted for a bit. She wished me all kinds of good luck on my interview, while she rang me up. I got a toffee nut latte and a orange/pineapple muffin. I ate in the shop and so they nuked up the muffin, putting a little butter on top. It was divine. Yum, yum. *smile* It took them a little bit to make the latte and when the lady brought it over we chatted a bit more. Apparently, I resemble the lady's brother and in my suit look very "professor-ish". I left a little bit after that and am now home chilling out. I'll br browsing the online want ads in a little bit (looking for other nibbles) but right now I feel really good about today and the interview I had.

¹ Okay, it's really my only suit.
² We just don't think we're as lost as you think we do.
³ Per my long standing habit, I will not be discussing who they were.
⁴ Given time and available brainpower, I prefer to customize my resume for the company & job I am applying for.
⁵ Did I mention this person is also the hiring manager? Oh well if I hadn't yet; I have now.
⁶ To be prefectly honest, this was my breakfast. I was feeling too nervous prior to the interview to want to eat anything.

Tags: Apple, Author, breakfast, coffee, con, home, IM, Japan, job, office, tea, war, weekend, work, working

Employment Woes

Wednesday morning, my supervisor pulled me aside to tell me since management wants to go into beta just before I take 2 days of vacation. And since one of those vacation days conflicts with a week long Microsoft training course I was signed up for they are pulling me out of the class. I wasn't happy about it. She wasn't either but the decision came down from on high.

Wednesday afternoon, a co-worker and myself had to drive 4 hours to my current employer's home office. Instead of heading straight to the hotel, we stopped along the way to get dinner. We ended up hitting the hotel around 8 PM. When we checked in there was a message asking us to call our supervisor. Neither one of us liked the sound of that. We tried calling her back but got her answering machine. We left a message and I went to my own room. I had been laying down for just about an hour and was thinking of hitting up the hotel's hottub when the room phone rang. I picked it up and it was my supervisor. She was calling to tell me the company had decided to close our office once the lease runs out. Apparently, there's going to be some sort of transition plan if you want to move out by the home office and continue working for the company. But as I told a co-worker, I'd rather slit my wrists then move to keep working for this company. So I've got somewhere between 4 - 8 months to find a different job¹. Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of sleep that night and I wasn't feeling motivated for teaching the next day.

Thursday, I went into the office. I chatted with a few people and they were all sympathetic (and wanting to know what we were going to do). Then I checked on the classroom and it wasn't setup correctly, so I got to do some last minute running around to get it fixed. Then I taught, trying not to put them to sleep. The two big problems with the class were that it had to be put together at the last minute and I had 3 different groups of people attending the class. Each group having a different, non-overlapping skill set; making it impossible not to be too basic for one part of the class while being totally over the head of a different part. *sigh* Still some people seemed to get something out of the class and nobody actually snored through it.

Thursday night, we drove home.

Friday, I went into my soonish-to-be-closed office and while it was a dark humor going around; most people seemed happier than I've seen them for some time. Maybe good things will come of this moronic decision. Who knows? I just know that I'm going to be much more motivated to find a different job (I'd been half-heartedly looking already) and the company's customers who pay support fees are going to get seriously pissed off².

So if any of my readers are in the Eastern Iowa area and are hiring, maybe you could let me know?

¹ We've got some kind of extension on the lease so it's anybody's guess when exactly our office will be closed, but we do know it will happen sometime between September and December.
² From what I understand the majority of the company's best help desk personnel are in my office. So the customers will have to wait longer to get somebody to talk to them about their issue(s) and then wait even longer for that person to fix their issue(s).

Tags: con, dinner, easter, HAL, home, Humor, IM, job, office, problem, sleep, sound, tea, vacation, work, working