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#5198 – awesomeness

i should really get to bed in a few minutes. i went to bed earlyish (for me) last night and today at work i was really fighting to stay awake. i’ve been fighting to stay awake a lot at work recently, actually. i haven’t been doing much work either – this special project i’m on is kind of in a holding pattern at the moment, since apparently my special team’s role has changed and we’re not going to be doing changes ourselves any more, there’s going to be another team with more people doing the changes and then we’re going to be the ones to audit those changes. i’m still concerned that we’re never going to get around to what i think is going to be the most fun part of this project and that’s the part where we’re supposed to figure out how to fix things to improve overall quality in the department.

when we had our second meeting together, i suggested we look into a quality system like six sigma (at this point it was only something i learned about in my textbooks at school), partially because from what i understood it’s a very aggressive quality program and partially because it’s badass (i wanna be a master black belt! bahaha), and i had no idea how well it might work for us. well, we have these online training classes (basically just a bunch of slides and quizzes), but there’s one to prepare for the master black belt certification exam that’s something like 40 parts long, and since we’re waiting for this other team to do their work and provide us a list of what they’ve done, all this week in the meantime i’ve been taking these trainings about six sigma processes and have been noticing more and more things that we already do at work and more and more ways that six sigma could really benefit us.

today there was a job fair at umuc, and unlike the last one i did not go to meet john hodgman after this one. well, wait. let me back up a bit.

so remember that post i made a few weeks ago about how i half-qualified for one job and half-qualified for another? i never actually applied to that company online, but when i saw a few days ago that they’d be at the job fair today i went there just to talk to them (i looked at the list of other companies that would be there too to see who was hiring information systems majors, and the companies i saw i wasn’t that enamored with. whammywah and i once figured out a good way to decide if a company is worth it – check to see if they have a decent website. first impressions matter both ways, you know, and if their website makes them look like scallywags then steer clear. i mean, after selecting “district of columbia” for one company’s job search and being prompted to select a local area, they not only had “washington” but also “washignton” and even “washinton”! see? total scallywags, don’t bother.)

so anyway, i was running late this morning and grabbed my folio with my résumé that i printed last night, and since i hadn’t stapled my two pages for my résumé together i also grabbed the stapler as i was running out the door. fast forward to where i arrive at campus and go to staple my two pages together – yup, the stapler was out of staples. i had some older copies of my résumé with me too and they would have worked fine, but this latest one really calls out my awesome customer service skills and highlighted the fact that i was saving my company money, so i could have used one of my previous résumés but i really wished i could use my latest one. and i had just recently bought staples for our stapler too. lesson learned, kids – reload your staplers.

so i go inside and sign in and they give me a booklet with a map of the room and a list of the companies attending, and is it stapled? NO, IT’S GOT A PAPERCLIP!! seriously, never been so happy before in my life to see a paperclip. so i paperclipped my résumé pages together, found the new signature booth and talked with one of the folks working there… from what i overheard while i waited, it’s a small company, about 40 people or so, and right now there’s not really many specific roles but instead people do a mixture of tasks, and right now they’re actually turning away clients because they can’t support any additional ones at the moment without making their employees work tons of overtime and they’re not interested in forcing their employees to do that. when it was my turn i introduced myself and then said that i came there specifically to talk to them and explained how i found the job postings before (insert small side conversation about the sites where i found their job postings, like craigslist and linkedin and jobscore), and she said that it was great i was bringing my résumé there since she could bring it straight to their president, and if my internet-fu is as good as i think it is, it seems that the president is either her husband or a relative since they both have the same unusual last name. so after that i just left, no bother talking to anybody else. i think i have a good chance based on what i heard about the company and what i can offer, and if they’re that all about customer service then even better, since you can teach someone the technical skills (or i can improve the skills that i have), but you can’t teach them how to interact well with customers. in a day or so i’ll send a note to them to follow up, methinks. who knows, maybe my résumé being paperclipped will help make it stand out among the other few dozen résumés…?

tomorrow i have another job interview, this time at work for a position with our systems team as a project analyst. looks like it’d be a sort of cheerleader role for system improvements and automation and to help with our overall system development. i think in my interview i’m going to talk about ideas that i have for the company that i’d like to see… ideas that are so crazy that they just might work, haha. the only problem is that some of our systems are almost too far gone to be salvaged in my opinion, and i doubt i’d have any sort of pull to try to get them so that they’re quality-centric systems. i wish we had a UX designer on the payroll. sigh.

tomorrow after work: cynicalscribe and i are going to a reception for graduates at umuc, and hopefully tomorrow night i’ll remember to do homodachi‘s meme from about 2 months ago that i’ve still been kicking myself since i’ve been wanting to complete it and keep forgetting! 🙁 hahaha

saturday: graduation!

sunday: erm, no plans? anybody want to do something? *poke*

eta: “i should really get to bed in a few minutes.” YEAH, LIKE WHEN I STARTED WRITING THIS POST OVER AN HOUR AGO. sigh.

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#5197 – glenn bueller's day off

the question today really wasn’t “what are we am i going to do,” but instead “what aren’t we i going to do?”

i went to work today for 1 hour. yes, 1 hour. see, we’re given 3 opportunities to use flex time each quarter if we’re going to be late to work, and near the end of april i was going to be late and had already used my flex time, so i called in to work and used 1 hour of vacation time at the start of my shift so i wouldn’t be late. sucks that i had to use vacation time, but there really wasn’t anything else to do at the time. fast forward to present day – i had 15 hours of vacation time still unscheduled, and i could either take a full day off (leaving only 7 hours available for some other day in the future), or i could come in to work for 1 hour and use 7 hours of vacation time today, and still have a full 8-hour day i could use sometime. so, i was really at work today for just enough time to check my emails and get some breakfast at the cafeteria and poke around the intranet for a few minutes before heading back out to run some errands. plus, a bonus of coming into work for that 1 hour was that it MADE me get up and out of bed this morning, because if i took the whole day off i’d end up sleeping away most of it when i had errands to run.

so from work i headed over to the post office to drop off a letter i wanted to send certified mail – one of my credit cards is switching banks and i wasn’t happy with the new terms and have been feeling that my rate is way way too high on that card, so if i didn’t want the new bank to issue me a card then i had to get a letter to them by may 15, which i only realized last night when browsing through the terms and conditions for the new card.

once that was mailed, i headed to the metro and into dc to chinatown so i could have lunch at nando’s with bruno_boy and zenmetsu. we got there just before noon if i remember right, and we just barely beat the lunchtime rush. dave had to rush off back to his apartment to meet a dalek an exterminator who showed up at his place a few hours earlier than expected, dan had to go to work, and then i went over to the joseph a bank store to pick up my suits i ordered and paid for a few weeks earlier during a buy-one-get-two-free sale. i still need to get the pants hemmed, though… they said there’s a 3-week wait time on alterations at the moment, so i figured i’d take the suits to the store location that’s much more convenient for me to reach from where i live when i get a chance so that they can send the pants away to be hemmed.

i headed back to the house to drop the suits off (since i didn’t want to be carting them around in the car all day), and called to cancel my renter’s insurance (which i still had a policy for and was still being billed about $7 each paycheck since i had totally forgotten to cancel it after moving out of the apartment about a year ago) and cancelled my data card for my computer which i hadn’t used ever since cynicalscribe got fios and a wireless access point at her place. i probably should have called to schedule an eye doctor appointment too, but i didn’t think of it at the time. i also thought about calling grandmother and grandaddy and pap-pap about saturday’s commencement ceremony but figured i’d call later, more on this in a bit.

then, since i’m home by myself this week and 1) didn’t feel like cooking tonight, 2) wanted to go to a baseball game, monday night i bought myself an all-you-can-eat ticket to the orioles game. i also wanted to go tonight since it was “t-shirt tuesday” so they gave out shirts to the first 10,000 fans that arrived. i parked at a light rail station and took the train in to baltimore.

after getting my ticket from will call and realizing i still had almost 2 hours before game time and that the geppi’s entertainment museum next door has $1.00 admission on game days, i figured i might as well kill some time and stop in. it’s a very fascinating place! i’ll definitely have to go back again sometime, but i’ll have to spend almost the entire day in there, there’s a lot of stuff to look at and go through.

the baseball game itself was great; the all-you-can-eat seats get you a club-level seat, and they stamp your hand and from certain stands by your seats you get your fill of:

– hot dogs

– soda

– popcorn

– nachos

– peanuts

– ice cream / italian ice

you can only take two of an item at a time, but you can return as much as you want until they close up halfway through the 7th inning. sure, the seat itself is about $45, but normally the seat by itself is about $25 and that’s without food, so if you’re going there to gorge yourself silly then it’s a great value, and i love it because i love me some ballpark food. by the end of the night i had eaten everything except for the nachos:

– 2 hot dogs

– 2 sodas

– 1 box of popcorn

– 1 pack of peanuts

– 1 italian ice

i could have continued eating, but i was satisfied with what i had.

the orioles ended up winning 7-5. fun game! there were a bunch of college students (or recent graduates?) from st. john’s college here in annapolis (at least, there were several wearing st. john’s college branded apparel) – several girls, only a few guys, and it was fun to listen to them talk baseball to each other and chatting with them occasionally. one of the guys and girls traded off keeping pencil-and-paper score during the game which i thought was awesome. there was also a rather chesty girl with a bubbly personality who kept jumping up and down for different events (fan of the game, the wave, great plays, etc.), which was also awesome in its own way. at one part we saw a commotion going on in a section in the lower deck across from us and we wondered what was happening, and i observed that someone was being ejected from the park by the police and pointed it out to them, and they said “thanks dude-that’s-sitting-in-front-of-us!”, bahahah.

so then i came home, got back home just before 11. apple released an update to their system software, so now it’s at 10.5.7, yet though it includes software for RAW file compatibility with certain digital cameras, it doesn’t include any support at all yet for my new T1i which fucking sucks since i can’t really do much with editing photos i take with the camera until apple gets around to making a compatible file interpreter. BLEH! i hope they get it running before cynicalscribe and i go on our trip to london in… holy crap, less than a month now. i thought about taking my camera to the game tonight, but figured i didn’t want to be dashing up and down out of my seat to get more eats and trying to juggle a camera at the same time (if i had someone there with me who could watch over it during food runs then that would’ve been fine), but i also figured that even if i brought it and spent time taking photos with my zoom lens then i still wouldn’t be able to do much with the pictures until the updated software is released. that’s what i get for playing with the cutting edge, i guess.

oh yeah, so grandmother and grandaddy and pap-pap. so during the game, mom sent me a text message to see if she had left her umbrellas on her bed because if they weren’t there then they were probably left at airport security, and when i told her that i was at the game she said that she hoped i was having fun and also said how she and dad heard that grandaddy is in the hospital. apparently it seems that his foot infection might have gotten worse? mom said that he’s being treated for “cellulitis lower leg. is in more pain now. mite be bld clot. doing cat scan tmrrw.” yikes. so if all that’s going on then i’m kind of glad that i didn’t call up and be all “so i’m graduating on saturday, can you come?” since they clearly have more important things to concern themselves about at the moment and i’ll just have to keep them in my thoughts. asked mom if she and dad would be able to pick up pap-pap to take him, and it seems like that shouldn’t be a problem, especially since i requested special seating for people in wheelchairs or have difficulty walking, so that should be good to go.

i spent most of my time writing this while watching my recording of “thunderbirds are go” from turner classic movies the other day, but i couldn’t get into it at all. seriously, at least the first 10% of the film is just scenes and preparation for the first rocket launch! BO-RING. i definitely need to get off to bed now, but first i need to clean out the catboxes. taking care of cats that need their boxes cleaned out every day to prevent disasters, yaaaay.

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#5196 – graduation preparations

so my graduation (the commencement ceremony itself – i’ve already received my degree in the mail back in october) is this coming saturday. however, things have been an absolute mess trying to plan for guests to attend.

see, the school says that every student who signed up for commencement would receive 10 tickets for their friends and family to attend, which is fine. the problem is that they said “expect the tickets to arrive in the mail in mid- to late-april”, and when i hadn’t yet received anything by april 30 i emailed the school to figure out what the deal was since i was worried that maybe i didn’t sign up properly or something was lost or my tickets went missing in the mail, who knows.

at least the school was prompt about emailing me back since i got a reply the next day (may 1) saying that everybody’s given 10 tickets for their guests and the school won’t distribute any additional ones (until this email i had no idea how many guests we could have, so i didn’t want to go inviting a bunch of family if there weren’t going to be enough tickets, and i didn’t want to ask people to come without me having the tickets physically in hand), and that their vendor mails the tickets out by april 30 at the latest, so everybody should receive their tickets in the mail by friday, may 8.

a few days after that i get a letter in the mail from umuc. oh boy, the tickets have arrived! …nope, actually, it’s just the information and parking pass to give to my guests that have disabilities and may have trouble climbing stairs and walking (more on this later), but no tickets.

friday, may 8 comes along — STILL NO TICKETS. they finally arrive yesterday, may 9, 1 week before the actual ceremony. THANKS UMUC. at least i have them now, but it’s not going to do me any good for out-of-town family at this point. 🙁 i’m sending feisty_fitz a message about it just in case, though.

mom and dad left saturday morning on a trip to the virgin islands for their 30th wedding anniversary. i found out about their plans to go on a trip in mid-may and found out when my ceremony is, and lucky for me i managed to alert them before they bought their tickets for their trip so that they could attend. they’re returning on friday. anne’s going to be staying with family friends this week close to her school, and i’m going to get the house to myself for the next several days.

i was going to ask grandmother and grandaddy and pap-pap to come to my graduation ceremony too, but now that seems to be very iffy too. for pap-pap to come, mom and dad would probably have to pick him up from where he lives and drive him to where the graduation is being held since he has a restriction on his license that he can’t drive further than so many miles from his place (but that doesn’t stop him if he has anything to say about it). i’m sure they’d be able to, but since they’re kind of out of the country i can’t exactly confirm it with them now (well, i can reach them by text message, or they can receive calls at $1.99 / minute on their cell phones).

there’s trouble now about calling grandmother and grandaddy to see if they can attend too; aunt katherine called yesterday to talk to dad (anne answered the phone since my mouth was full of food at the time) and apparently grandaddy has a foot infection and has been hospitalized, and they’re not quite sure how severe of an infection it is but it’s being treated with antibiotics. i don’t want to exactly call up right now and ask them to come to my ceremony when they’re probably stressed out enough as it is.

so i’ve got 3 confirmed (mom, dad, anne), feisty_fitz just told me she won’t be able to make it since she’ll be out working, cynicalscribe‘s going to be out of town skating at a bout (i think we’re going to try to attend a reception going on the day before for graduates), grandmother and grandaddy have the foot infection to worry about at the moment, and i’ll have to ask pap-pap to see if he can make it and will have to let mom and dad know when they get here friday night that they’ll need to pick him up saturday for the event. so that’s 4, maybe 6 people attending.

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#5195 – look! it's the story of my life in anime form

from http://www.anything-asian.net/modules.php?name=Serie_Guide&op=detail&serie=601 – Kiko Heidan J-Phoenix PF LIPS Shotai:

The time is the future. Earth’s population has been transplanted to Planet J, which has been embroiled in a long-standing war between the imperial Arthalea government and the militaristic Varim regime. Both sides are currently at a stalemate with soldiers and civilians alike at the breaking point. In a last-ditch attempt at victory, General Glenn of the Arthalea government orders his men to develop the all-purpose, bipedal Panzer Frame (PF).

Four beautiful girls, Lisa, Izumi, Pris and Selina, were once saved by ace pilot General Glenn. The rebel girls organized a platoon called LIPS that had one purpose: to serve Glenn!

and to prove that site wasn’t kidding…

BAHAHAHAH, i like the “glenn-leader” dance that starts around 5:00…

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#5194 – rnghrngrhnghrngn

so that weird feeling last night? must have been something i ate. i either kept waking up or maybe i couldn’t even get to sleep last night, i was so restless. at one point i had to get up and go to the bathroom and had to do my business there for a good while, and when i finished i put a trash can next to my bed just in case anything wanted to come out the other end. i had the cold sweats and though i eventually fell asleep i really wasn’t feeling well when my alarm went off at 7:20 this morning, so i ended up calling out of work. i had to leave a message – i guess the callout team hadn’t yet arrived, heh – and i sent a text message to my boss to let her know and so she could inform these people i had a meeting with today that i wasn’t going to be in. i really wasn’t going to be that functional for only being able to get about 3 hours of sleep all night.

i fell asleep once i left the message and woke up again around 11 or 11:30, and then spent the rest of the day upstairs on the couch in the living room watching different tv shows and the movie “the man who knew too much” and drinking liquids to stay hydrated. i felt bad that i wasn’t at work, but i really didn’t feel well this morning. i just hope my supervisor got my message, she never replied to confirm she received it.

but it feels so weird, i just couldn’t concentrate on any one thing today. once everyone else got home i tried reading through my rss feeds, but if there was a lot of text i just got impatient and moved on. i tried watching the o’s game on tv too, but i couldn’t pay attention to it either. i just didn’t care how the game went.

for about the last 2 hours i’ve been down on my computer in my room though, trying to find different jobs to apply to. i’m finding a few leads, but either it’s something i’d be interested in doing and i have the skills, but it requires a security clearance. or the ones that i find don’t require a security clearance, then i have only some of the requested skills. i may as well try to apply to them, but it’s getting to be pretty frustrating that these are the only two types of jobs i can find.

what also drives me nuts is for one company i found two different jobs, and it’s like i can do some of both of them but i can’t do everything for either one of them. here’s an example, with the stuff in bold being stuff i can do:

A qualified applicant must possess a thorough knowledge of the following:

Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2008

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003/2007

Expertise in Active Directory, Windows PowerShell, and other advanced Microsoft technologies

Experience using virtualization technologies: Hyper-V, VMware or XenServer

Knowledge of IT best practices and procedures

Experience with procurement of enterprise hardware, software and services

Backup and disaster recovery planning, implementation and maintenance experience

LAN/WAN and wireless network design, implementation, configuration and security (Watchguard firewall experience a plus)

Handheld or portable devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and Blackberrys (BES experience a plus)

Linux and Apple OS X a plus

MCTS, MCITP, MCM, MCSA, MCSE or other certifications a plus

Project management experience (experience with MS Project and MS Project Server a plus

—–

Skill Requirements:

Strong programming experience, with a deep understanding of object-oriented programming.

Experience designing/working with data models, specifically matching one data model/hierarchy to another; familiarity with UML a plus.

Expertise in the following technologies: PHP or Java EE; MySQL or PostgreSQL; WSDL, JavaDocs, XML, SOAP or REST; SVN or CVS.

Experience implementing systems on SaaS/PaaS solutions such as Salesforce/Force.com, AWS, or AppEngine.

Experience with CMS and blog platforms, such as WordPress, Drupal or eZPublish.

Experience with front end technologies, including: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, DOM, ExtJS, or JSON.

Ability to work with a QA group to test, debug, deploy applications in development and production-class environments.

Versed in website and network security principles and best practices.

Knowledge of current “Web 2.0” technology and trends.

see? it’s a mixture. i may as well apply for the second one i think. but all this job searching just makes me so frustrated, i feel like throwing things and breaking shit just to relieve some stress, but i don’t have anything to throw or shit to break that would be inexpensive and satisfying enough for me. people say that running helps relieve stress, but it doesn’t seem to do much for me when i go running after work. i want to do something with more concrete effects. maybe i should go to a batting cage this week / this weekend and get some hits in. couldn’t hurt, i guess.