http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/07/23/os9.html
Though I'm more of an OS X fan myself, this is a good read, and some interesting points are made.
July 2004 Archives
Well I've been back from California for a week now. My stay out there made me realize how much the weather here sucks. It's been humid and gross here everyday since I got back. I think today is the first day that it's actually been sunny, but of course it was too hot.
And work is still crap of course; nothing much has changed on that front. I do have a new seat though, so that's something I guess.
In other great news, our cat's have fleas. Yay. We've already given them one flea bath, but they still have some of the little critters on them. I think we're gonna have to set off a couple flea foggers in the apartment this weekend. *Sigh* There's just no end to the good times...
One the bright side though, we are going to see Rush Tuesday. It promises to be a kick-ass show.
I should have some cool pictures from my trip to post soon, including one of Tony and I in front of the 1 Infinite Loop sign at the Apple campus. Also took some cool pics in Santa Cruz, which will look familiar to anyone who's been to Ocean City, MD, or anyone who's seen The Lost Boys.
Well this is my first full day out here in Santa Clara. We arrived at San Jose International Airport about 9:30 PM PST, picked up our luggage and rental car, found our way to the hotel, and then went to Denny's for a late night meal.
Had some great sushi and tempura for lunch today, along with a dish called mushroom bowl, which is a mushroom covered with seaweed and some sort of creamy garlic sauce. The tofu nuggets were great too, especially when dipped in honey seasame sauce.
Not sure what we're doing tonight; might head up to San Fransisco. One day Tony and I need to drive around and be geeky, taking pictures of the HQ's of all these big tech companies, like Sun, ATI, FileMaker of course, Apple, etc.
I'm sitting here at the computer, and one of my cats, Jango, is following the movement of the mouse pointer on the screen, and occaisionally trying to grap it. For some reason I find this amusing to no end.
Luckily I have a CRT moniter, not an LCD, so his little claws can't damage the screen.
Well today is payday, which is normally a joyous occaision. Actually, that's not true. Payday is the day that we get bent over our desks and anally raped (figuratively, of course). But I digress.
I forgot to put in for vacation time for July 5th (our day off since July 4th was a Sunday). You see, my employer doesn't give me holiday pay, so I have to use vacation time if I want to get money for those holidays that I don't work.
As an aside, when I was in college, I worked part time for a grocery store as a bag boy, and I got paid for holidays. If I worked on that holiday, I'd usually make time and a half for the hours I worked that day. If I didn't work on that day, I'd get 4 hours of pay at the holiday time + 1/2 rate. Allow me to reiterate; this was a part time job. At a grocery store. I am now working full time for a technology company. I've been here for a year and a half. Supposedly I am a valued employee. Make of that what you will.
Luckily rent won't be due until after the next pay check, so I'm not as fucked economically as I could be.
Granted, it's my fault for forgetting to put in for my vacation pay. But most companies have the decency to give holiday pay to supposedly valued employees who've worked there for a year and a half, so it's not necessary to use vacation time when one was off on a holiday.
For now I've switched over to one of the default MovableType template and stylesheet combos, since my old layout was sort of "broken" in IE 6 on Windows (actually I think it's more a matter of IE's CSS support being broken, but that's another story). The default template setup isn't perfect; it doesn't scale that well on lower screen resolutions (believe it or not, there are still people out there running their displays at 800x600), but I can live with it for the time being.
Now it's simply a matter of brushing up my CSS skills and putting together my own look and feel again.
Well I just found out that my (actually my parents') dog, Lucy, has Lime disease, some sort of liver problem. Our vet put her on an anitbiotic that should take care of it.
We've had Lucy for about 5 years now. She's a great dog, in spite of her bad breath and bad table manners.
When Jenny was in the hospital last winter, I slept at my parent's house one night, and Lucy slept in my room, like she used to when I lived there. There's something very comforting about having a pet sleeping in the same room with you. I don't get quite the same feeling with our cats yet; probably because they're still quite young and they tend to be rambunctious at bed time instead of just going to sleep.
The fact that I feel the need to pop a Xanax as soon as my phone rings is probably a sign that I don't belong in this job anymore. As if I ever belonged here in the first place. Anyone who wants to run away everytime they get a call should not be doing phone support.
Since I'm not really a valued member of this team anyway, it's probably for the best that I leave as soon as I can. I'm only of value to them as a warm body to answer phones, nothing more. The sooner I can leave here, the better.
I'm hoping that my time away from the office while I'm in California next week will help. But ultimately I need to find my way out of here, and into a job where I'll get to use my skills instead of being a zombie robot who answers the phone all day.
At Jenny's insistence, I now have a LiveJournal. I feel so corrupt, because I've always thought LJ was so silly, and blogging just seems so much cooler, though I suppose the two are really not all that different. Actually, looking at the LJ home page, apparently it is considered a blogging tool. Hmm. I'd still rather use a tool like MovableType (which powers this blog) and have my own domain pointing to the site. I used to feel like blogging was somehting special, but with LJ any jackass can do it.
Oh well. Since so many of my friends and acquaintences use LJ, I suppose I may as well give in to it and have an account myself. Also, there are some LJ communities that interest me, such as the Debian Linux Community.
I feel like I've compromised a principle by having my own LJ. But I'm probably just overreacting.
Well I finally upgraded to MovableType 3. It was relatively painful, as I'm working on a Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) box that doesn't have ncftp, a handy FTP client that has wonderful features like the ability to recursively copy directory trees. I did a quick search of Version Tracker, but didn't come up with anything (free) that met my needs, so I just used the standard command line ftp client. It took a while, but it got the job done.
Anyway, now that I've got MT upgraded I can start working on making my site not look like shit.
I really need to fix the layout of this site. It is just not displaying well in IE for Windows. One has to scroll horizontally to read my posts. I hate horizontal scrolling. I'm not sure if this is one of those little idiosyncracies in IE for Windows' CSS support, or if it's an issue with my CSS code. I suspect it's an issue with IE, give that browser's reputation for shitty-ness when it comes to standards support, and because the site looks fine in other browsers, such as Safari, IE on the Mac, and Mozilla on Windows and Linux.
Maybe one night I'll have the motivation to sit down and tinker with my style sheet more. Unfortunaltey I'm so mentally drained by the time I get home from work that I rarely feel like doing anything that requires a lot of thought.
I also need to get the MT Blacklist plugin installed so I can stop all these damn spam comments. Then I need to find a way to do batch comment deletion so I can free up some disk space that all these crap comments are taking up.
Isabel Sanford, who played Weezy Jefferson on The Jefferesons and All in the Family, died yesterday. Incidentally, her daughter's name is Pamela Ruff (no relation, that I'm aware of).
We went to see Spider-Man 2 on Monday, and it was great. Jenny is already making plans for us to see it again. We both agree that it's even better than the first movie.
For one, Peter's relationship with MJ, and how it gets tangled with his career as a superhero add much more depth to the story. And the subplot about their relationship was skillfully done; there is a natural checmistry between the characters, as opposed to other movies where a potential romantic relationship between two characters feels awkward and forced.
I also liked the villain in this movie better. With The Green Goblin, I could never get past the fact that the mouth of his mask didn't move. There's just something cheesy about that. Doc Ock's tentacles were more menacing than the GG's pumpkin bombs, and he seemed to pose more of a challenge to Spidey. Also, his redemption at the end was a turn I hadn't necessarily expected, and it was kind of a pleasant surprise.
Looks like we'll be seeing it again this weekend.
Well my employer is sending me to California in a couple weeks for some training on FileMaker software. I'll be out of the office for five days, in California, and getting paid for it. Yay. The FM facilities are right near Apple's HQ, so I hope to visit them while I'm out there.
I haven't been out to CA since 1991, when we went to San Fransisco, and I haven't been on a plane since going to Texas in 98. So I'm a bit nervous about flying again. I know it's supposed to be very safe to fly these days, but I'm sure I'll be taking a few Xanax before the flight.
I picked up Houses of the Molé, the new Ministry disc a couple days ago. It has grown on me more each day.
Much of the album seems more straight up metal than industrial, though there are still plenty of samples and synth-generated sounds to be found. The first two tracks, "No W" and "Waiting" feature chunky, rapid guitar riffs remeniscent of Slayer and early Megadeth. Mike Scaccia's guitar solos are sprinkled throughout the album, lending even more to the metal atmosphere.
Two other tracks that stand out are "World" and "WKYJ." The former combines a steady, pounding power chord riff with some ambient feedback noise and what could be called a "sing-along" chorus. The latter juxtaposes a semi-psycedelic guitar part against a chunky metal riff.
And of course there's the recurring anti-Bush theme throughout the album. The double anarchy symbol / M logo (which is a W in a prohibitory sign when inverted) is quite amusing, in my opinion.
Wow... this almost sounds like a real music review.
If it wasn't for these wonderful little mental painkillers, I don't know how I'd get through the work day sometimes. You'd be surprised how much these little pink (actually, upon closer inspection they appear to be more of a light shade of orange) pills can dampen stress. Or maybe you wouldn't.
Thank God for three-day weekends...
