Finally, after what seems like a million years, I’ve finally got a job. Well, technically I got a job back in July, but after a mere 8 days it was deemed that it “was not working out” and frankly I wasn’t thrilled about the 40 mile commute and burning through a quarter tank of gas a day at the height of high gas prices… But I digress…
It’s not much, it’s a drop in pay from my old position, but in these times beggars can’t be choosers, but I couldn’t be happier. Mainly as I was feeling very stuck, and probably depressed (though I’d deny it) and cabin fever had set in yet again. Believe it or not, when you have no job to go to, you really don’t have as much freedom as you’d like, many people I spoke to said they’d love to have a 6 month “sabbatical” but really, it’s no fun. Sure you have all day to do whatever, but you can’t go out and have fun as fun costs money, and you don’t have any, and every penny counts, so invariably you hang around the house with a great plan of all the projects you could do, but none get done as you go through the motions of a monotonous schedule of nothing. Once you start talking to the cats, that’s a sure fire sign things are bad.
So hopefully now I can try and get back on track just in time for the holidays. It’s mainly a matter of pride, as men are supposed to be the main breadwinner, and in my 3 years of married life with Robyn, I’ve never been. But to bring in no bread at all (except for unemployment), well, that’s a big blow to one’s ego and self-esteem.
The weird thing was I had been applying for jobs every week, but after an extremely dry period of nothing (which sent me to a therapist to combat my depression) I got a ton of calls, and for a period last week I had 4 interviews in 3 days before a company made an offer Friday lunchtime. Strange how things work out sometimes, especially when North Carolina’s unemployment rate is hovering around 7%, I had all but given up hope.
Now I just need to knuckle down starting next Monday, and not blow this great opportunity.
Well, the hooplah of the first Charlotte WordCamp is over. I found it to be a very interesting experience, as I mentioned before, I wasn’t really there to learn the basics, I was more interested in networking and things of that nature and all in all I think I succeeded as I managed to put faces to many twitter names.
The camp it’s self was very informative, the Promotion panel with Wayne Sutton, Lisa Hoffmann, Corey Creed and moderated by Donna Maria Coles Johnson was probably my highlight of the event (other than Mark Jaquith’s keynote speech/WordPress 2.7 preview/release of the latest WordPress 2.7 Beta which I missed some of due to ambient distractions (ie. someone turned the lights off and I nodded off for a few minutes)) as they had a lot of great ideas to pass along.
And there was some comedy to be had as one of the attendees got stuck in an elevator, sadly I know that feeling as I was stuck on my way to an interview back in Atlanta many moons ago.
Overall it was a great event, a great turnout and it has definitely inspired me to do more, so a big thanks goes out to Jason Keath who organised the whole thing as well as the volunteers who made the day run as smoothly as it did, as well as the Charlotte Observer who provided the location for us “new media” types to mingle.
I’m sitting at the Charlotte edition of WordCamp, sitting through the technology and design panel hoping this will spur me back into the blogging game, and so far it’s working as I’m here now, but mostly I’m here to network… So far, so good as I’ve met a ton of people I follow on Twitter.
So far it’s as boring as sin, but I consider myself an advanced WordPress user who knows how to bend it to my will. But everyone needs to start somewhere and you can’t please all the people all the time. I’m also surprised at the demographic of the attendees, I was expecting a younger/nerdish group but it’s a broad scale of young and old, and more power to them.
I’m also hopeful that I can network my way into a job, every major Charlotte company is here and I ain’t too proud to beg…
The election is a week away, so with some states still undecided a slew of musicians are hitting the road with Rock The Vote to, ummm, rock the vote, sorry, get out and vote… And, luckily for me, North Carolina is one of these states (along with Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota to name a few) so we were first in line for a night of Beastie Boys, Sheryl Crow and Santogold at Amos’ Southend, two of those are worth the price of admission…
As Amos’ doors opened at 6. I started by arriving at Tavern on the Tracks just before 5 and scored a parking space in their lot that would facilitate a quick getaway after wards. After getting some snacky dinner and hanging around for an hour or so I headed over to the show, unfortunately the queue was long outside, and it was freezing, not a good wait. Rock The Vote people were milling around asking if people were registered or if they had voted already, of course I was harassed but they soon learned I was an empty cause, and I also managed to flog my spare ticket for $40, so I was off to a good start already.
Santogold kicked the evening off and she was ok, not really my kind of thing but entertaining enough for an opening act. As would be the theme of the night, there was a lot of political monologues between songs, but hey, it’s a political event so what do you expect? Another notable thing about Santogold’s set was her backing dancers, 2 women wearing identical clothes and sunglasses who just stood there for a few minutes, offering up an occasional backing vocal before the busted out some crazy syncronised dancing. Very bizarre.
After a little break the Beastie Boys came out to much approval to introduce Sheryl Crow.
Sheryl Crow was good, really good. She came on to do a little solo song before hanging up the guitar to take on the bass and going through a few new songs, her latest CD is actually very good, I recommend it, as well as a few classics like “Can’t Cry Anymore”, “A Change Would Do You Good” and “Everyday Is A Winding Road” (see below for a video of that). I also think the Sheryl was my favourite performer of the night, don’t get me wrong, I like the Beastie Boys, but Sheryl seemed to capture the mood much better with a mostly acoustic set of songs you can chill to.
She was also the easiest to capture in picture as she doesn’t move around the stage much, compare that to the Beastie Boys who were bouncing here, there and everywhere… As a side note, it’s been about 9½ years since I last saw the Beastie Boys live in Glasgow, and they have put out one album in that space of time (four if you include The Sounds Of Science Anthology, Solid Gold Hits (a best of) and last years instrumental effort The Mix Up).
For three guys who are in their forties, the “Boys” haven’t lost a step in the live performance stakes, they played for over an hour in a set that did NOT include Sabotage, backed by Mix Master Mike, and everyone lapped it up. Non Sabotage aside, it was a very, very good time, live staples like “Root Down”, “Sure Shot”, “So What’cha Want?” and “Intergalactic” made sure everyone went home happy, but there was a weaird thing at the end where they didn’t go off stage to come back for the encore, then said they’d be back with the other artists, but once they went off, the house lights came up and show was over. Anyways, these guys were the hardest to photograph, poor light conditions and fast movement don’t mix, and I was so far back my flash would have been useless.
Overall it was $35 (plus fees) well spent, and I’d give a nice nod of thanks to Amos’ security staff for not turning my camera away at the door, his reasoning of overriding the “no cameras/recording devices” rule due to everyone having a camera phone was much appreciated, not just by me, but by a few people around me who were asking for copies of my pictures. Alas most were missed connections as it’s hard to get an email address while loud music is being played, you have nothing to write on and holding a big camera… I said they’d be on Flickr and as of right now they are still the only images of last night on there… So…
Get Out And Vote Tour ‘08 (Set)
Originally uploaded by FLC.
We’ve had Josie for 3 months now, and she’s integrating well with Felix and Sally, and in many ways she’s become the cat we wanted Charlotte to be, but oh well. She’s really a fun little cat, but it’s hard to call her little now as she’s growing at a rate of knots, and we already have a variety of nicknames for her (most of which I’m sure confuse her no end) as she’s now called Josie, Josies, Josington, Josiniho, little girl, tabby tail, tabbington (these are due the the weird fact that she’s a black and white cat with a tabby cat tail, if it wasn’t for it’s growth spurt we’d swear it was a donor tail after some horrible accident) and so on and so on…
Everyone loves her, and she loves everyone. Doesn’t matter where she goes, to the vet or to the “Bed and Biscuit” while we were in Scotland, everyone adores her, everyone wants to take her home, and unlike Charlotte (who was so anti-people, she made an anti-social person seem like the life of the party) she’s not shy to run up on people and basically do that “love me” purr. And boy does she purr, out of control! She purrs so much at night she begins to drool like crazy…
Anyways, we’ve adjusted to the feeding frenzy of three cats as well as the inordinate amount of poo that comes from three cats, but as we were in Petsmart in Mooresville last week buying over 100 cans of cat food, someone from the Bed and Biscuit recognised us via Josie and asked if we wanted to help another cat who had been found outside.
And despite our initial refusal, he was brought in and soon enough we swore up and down it’s just a fostering and we’d find him a new home. But the poor little guy (still nameless, not wanting to make an emotional connection) was covered in fleas, as we found of when we tried to clean him and they all went to the higher ground, his face. So a flea treatment and a proper showering yesterday means he’s much cleaner, flea-free and generally looking like a nice little cat. But unfortunately our efforts to find him a home are proving to be a bit fruitless, so should we just become the crazy cat family and get another gaping maw to feed? Another few pounds of poo to clean up? Decisions, decisions…
So the big $700 billion bail out didn’t work out. Washington Mutual disappeared over night. Our bank, Wachovia, is sliding down fast. Gas is increasingly scare here.
What else could go wrong? Cause each passing day is leading us towards that Mad Max scenario…
It’s becoming more and more clear that President Bush has about as much power over the economy as me, despite all his huffing and puffing, he’s quite clearly a step below the lame-duck status… Not even close to a figurehead. Most powerful man in the World? Give me a break.
As for the gas shortage, Hurricane Ike hit 2 weeks ago, and way below the expectations of what class it was going to be, but still 3 weekends later we’re still running dry. I don’t remember it being anywhere close to this bad after the double whammy of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005, sure gas prices sky rocketed as price gouging took hold, but 2 weeks of very limited supply?
In fact, let me refresh your memory of those days…
Metro Atlanta drivers are facing the possibility of paying considerably more than $3 a gallon for gas by Labor Day - if they can get it at all.
The metro Atlanta region generally has about a 10-day supply of gasoline in inventory, said BP spokesman Michael Kumpf. The pipelines have been down for two days.
It came close, but never actually ran out, and that’s when the price of gouged gas was lower than our current lowest today (or at least 2 weeks ago). Madness! Utter, utter madness…
Like others, I’ve spent probably too long recently watching the Olympics, which is strange as before I was quite ambivalent about them. I didn’t watch a single second of the Athens Olympics, for too long the summer games had made a dramatic shift from the greatest spectacle on earth to the biggest fraud in history, at least in my mind. But as news trickled out about the positively mind blowing opening ceremony, I thought I’d give this one a go.
And the opening ceremony was mind blowing, especially in HD… From there it rolled right into Michael Phelps obliterating any fool (except one) who dared challenge him. In fact, even though the Olympics is all about the track and field events, I’ve always been more of a fan of the lesser events that get some time to shine in the opening week, like archery, diving, weightlifting, gymnastics, handball, shooting, beach volleyball, cycling. There’s something strangely appealing about 48kg women hoisting 122kg in a clean and jerk, you watch it for the potential for anything to happen (read: nasty injuries) but it’s more amazement at the ease they do such things. Another event that if you’d never seen before, you’d just sit down and watch it for hours was synchronised diving, yes, really… Especially when they bust out the super slow high speed camera replays.
Anyways, that opening weekend we literally vegetated on the sofa for 48 hours straight, it was kinda awesome.
I think it’s been a pretty good Olympics, I haven’t heard much in the way of failed doping tests, and everyone will be talking about Michael Phelps 8 golds (7 world records) and Usain Bolt shattering the 100m and 200m records on his way to two easy golds for a long time. I’m pretty happy that Britain are 3rd in the medal table with (currently) 16 gold, should make the 2012 games in London that much more appealing for some people. Next up is Vancouver in 2010, and I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve registered my interest in tickets for that event, they go on sale in October…
It’s the final countdown to our much delayed, much anticipated and much feared trip to Scotland. Originally we were due to be over there for my birthday, but due to me losing a job and moving house, we delayed it till now. And I’m not looking forward to it for my own reasons.
Firstly I should be thankful that frivolous spending on our Delta AmEx cards has allowed us to fly using our SkyMiles, and after our last flights to Edinburgh from Atlanta, we decided it had to be done right, so we’re doing it right by flying 1st class for 4 out of the 5 flights we’ll be taking to and from.
But the downside of using SkyMiles is you don’t get the flights you really want, and Charlotte’s airport flies nowhere that helps us, so we’re going this route….
A 10,250 mile round trip that goes from Charlotte, NC to Houston, TX then to Paris, France before ending in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is a 24 hour trip starting lunch time Saturday, we leave Charlotte at 12:30pm and land in Edinburgh on Sunday as 4:30pm. You know that’s going to be fun. At least the way back is a bit more civilised, Edinburgh to Newark, NJ then finally to Charlotte.
As I said, thank goodness it’s mostly first class, the only leg that’s not is Charlotte to Houston. But seeing as I have a fear of take-offs, Saturday/Sunday will be a bad day for me.
Oh, and we’ll be in Edinburgh for the final week of the Festival, how on Earth did I agree to that?
Before Twitter Spam was relatively harmless, someone (or some automated bot) would follow you in the hopes you’d reciprocate thereby exposing you to their hidden tinyurl links that could be anything. And seeing as I’ve been twittering for nearly 2 years now, I’ve had to block my fair share of these people, but tonight I discovered something rather disturbing that changes the landscape of Twitter Spam.
While going through Twitterrific I found a strange name in my friend updates, someone or something called @manatee (oh the huge manatee joke aside) and upon quick inspection he/she/they/it had 814 followers and only 24 friends, usually spam is the other way around, a refresh later revealed 1,270 followers… And each refresh kept on rising…
1,270… 1,684… 2,074… 2,490… 2,676… 3,138… 3,335… 4,895… And so on…
This was just in the space of 30 or so minutes… It’s pretty sad that Twitter has succumbed to this kind of spamming technique.
Probably unbeknowst to most people, I burned down my village yesterday as I’m not in the mood to renew that domain, so today I rebuilt it on a mostly unused (and much cheaper come renewal time) domain and promptly retired the “Scam City” brand I’ve used for the past 9 years. I’ve also retired the Blossom avatar I’ve used for the past 6 years, my how time flies…
Hopefully the redirects I have in place will move most people along during the transition process, I’m especially curious as to whither the redirects will also push RSS readers over (once once they have moved will they stay moved?), so this is a test of sorts. There will be stuff missing, I’m still working on moving over things like my dump folder, videos, music, music player, older versions and so on… It’s not a priority…
Other than that, not a lot is going on, we have 2 sick cats after Josie brought an upper respiratory infection into the house and infected Sally (we think) and we’re leaving for the UK in just over 2 weeks, so I’m hoping anything will be cleared up by then so we can leave them here alone with some peace of mind.
9 years ago I decided to drop out of college and do things my way, at the time it seemed like a good idea but being the shady, secretive person I was I didn’t tell anyone for 6 months… It was a combination of boredom and not wanting to be taught or something like that, but shortly thereafter I began to teach myself the ins and outs of HTML and began my long journey down the web path.
And I learned the old fashioned way, finding pages I liked and hacking away at their source code. Yes, I was one of “those” people…
Not having a college education can sometimes be a hinderance, luckily 9/10 employers here won’t even bother to check into my UK education history and I can usually “blag” my way around most questions. But the lack of that education and my method of only learning what I needed to know just to get by is hurting me now. I basically list myself as a “jack of all trades, master of none” and know enough to be dangerous, and right now most employers are looking for experienced professionals who are skilled in a great many programming languages, some I don’t even know like Ruby On Rails or Python.
So now I’m going to undergo a personal reboot of sorts. A definate change of direction is needed…
Like every other WordPress user with an iPhone, right now I’m trying out the new WordPress app that promises true blogging on-the-go.
Seems pretty nifty so far, might even reignite my fading blogging career… And you can also use it for moblogging (is it even called that anymore?) purposes by including pictures direct from the phone camera, which this post *should* have.
I’ll be interested to see how it all looks…
EDIT: Well, the image upload failed… Not sure if it was me or the app…
It’s been a year since I did the last actual conversation between Robyn and me, not saying we still don’t have them, cause we do, but it’s easier to document via instant messengers. The set up for this one is Bravo and their reality series The Real Housewives of Atlanta. I honestly hadn’t heard of this (I don’t watch Bravo since Project Greenlight was red lighted) but imagine my surprise that it’s not really Atlanta at all, but Alpharetta, Sandy Springs and Duluth. Duluth? Metro Atlanta at a push…
Me: I found out something hella funny that made me snort out dr pepper
Her: what’s that?
Me: Bravo are showing a prog called the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” which is more like the Real Housewives of Alpharetta, Duluth and (get this) the exclusive area of Sandy Springs
Her: I take it’s not the “real housewives of the granville”
Me: I have no idea what part of teh Springs of Sand that “exclusive” enough to warrant a reality show (except maybe Cops)
Her: LMAO
Me: I’m *almost* tempted to watch 5 minutes of it so see how horrific it is, I mean Duluth??? That’s closer to Commerce outlets than Lenox or Phipps
Me: I can just picture some “fabulous” women lunching and shopping at the “fabulous” Mall of Georgia… but where? maybe at Chili’s or the Olive Garden, too many choices…
Her: LOL
Her: maybe it’s “real ghetto housewives of Atlanta metro”
Now we lived in Sandy Springs for a few years, and I really have no idea where this “exclusive” area is, I’m guessing it’s not off Roswell Road… And how comes they couldn’t wrangle in some Buckhead women? that would be a laugh.
No, I don’t have one of the new fangled 3G iPhones, I’m happy with my current one, personally I’m holding out for a larger capacity iPhone, 32gb in White would be nice, but I am overjoyed with the 2.0 software update…
It’s like getting a whole new phone (just minus the 3G network and GPS stuff), I’ve been finding so many new features these last few days I can’t help but smile. It started when I downloaded the leaked 1,2 2.0 update and then met up with Robyn for lunch, I was showing her the new calculator that becomes a scientific calculator when you rotate the phone when I discovered the maps now have an auto-updating feature that mocks GPS capabilities. Sure it’s not as accurate, but it’s fun watching the little target move with you, and in downtown Davidson it was going down to street level and updating nearly every block. Pretty sweet, but beware, constantly updating like that drains the battery… This would be a recurring theme. My one issue was due to our coverage, depending on where I stand and what connection I used, I was placed in 3 different locations…
The front of the house on the EDGE network thinks we live in Davidson (close, but no), the back of the house says Cornelius (actually correct) but the WiFi thinks we still live in Huntersville (just plain weird).
Now back to the battery, my battery doesn’t last very long nowadays as we get next to no service in the house, in fact most of the time it just says no service, so I use the Wi-Fi connection, which drains the battery much faster. Now, like everyone else, I went pretty crazy with the new apps feature, downloading anything and everything and a lot of these apps drain the battery pretty bad, such as the MLB At Bat one with it’s option to watch highlights of games. I now have to recharge my phone at least once a day, sometimes more. It would probably be much less if we had EDGE coverage (not even sure of our 3G coverage yet) but the battery life is pretty worrisome all the same. I also imagine this will be even worse if and when Google’s Gmail has a push email option, as right now it’s fetching every 15 minutes and that has been known to drain the battery back in our old townhouse that had 5 bar coverage.
Battery drainage aside, the introduction of Apps Store and native apps over web apps is great, after my downloading frenzy I’ve managed to whittle it down to 4 or 5 I’d actually use but who knows what new ones are around the corner… Currently the iTunes remote one is probably the best out there, using a Wi-Fi connection to control your iTunes library from anywhere the signal will go, this would be extremely handy if you used AirTunes via an AirPort Express but I enjoy sitting away from the desktop and controlling the sounds. I also downloaded the usual suspects in a Twitter, Facebook and Flickr related apps as well as the aforementioned MLB At Bat one.
I don’t know when or if we’ll upgrade, but I’m very happy with the latest update.
I’m a sucker for a good movie trilogy… Star Wars, Godfather, Back to the Future, Pirates of the Carribean, Bourne, The Matrix (well, not so much the last two)… Especially Lord of the Rings. I own them all on DVD (multiple times as I double dipped for the extended versions of Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers before I moved to America) so while I have 3 movies sitting in our vastly reduced DVD library (damn you Netflix and TiVo) I still made a point to watch the HD versions on TNT this weekend. Unfortunately we think out TiVo has a bad cablecard as it keeps resetting it’s self at irregular intervals, so recording a 3¾ hour is a bit like Russian Roulette until we can get it sorted out. Plus you have commercials to fast forward, and TNT’s on-screen graphics overlays… But I digress…
So after dealing with Fellowship, and getting halfway through the Two Towers, I gave up and now I’m starting to rip the extended DVDs of them for viewing soon. Why not just watch them you ask? Glad you asked… They are from the UK, therefore they are DVD Region 2, so no play, and even if they were Region free, the PlayStation3 doesn’t output a PAL signal as I found out with a few region free DVD’s I have. So rip I must or buy new ones (which I’m tempted to do) or wait and see if the mythical Blu Ray versions ever come out.
So for those following at home, here’s the things I do for an “easy” life…
Reasonable simple, but as an XviD avi, you lose the 5.1 surround and alternate commentaries, or at least I’m yet to find a way that works. As an m4v I could use the AC3 direct sound to get surround sound/alternate commentaries, but it takes forever to transcode, especially if you want to upscale it to 720 for faux-HD, plus I’m yet to find a route to join 2 m4v files that works well enough to do this particular task with it…
This is the kind of thought process that takes up my Sundays, but rarely do I get the time to act upon it…