Well my review was quick and to the point. The salary thing has to wait until monday when some form arrives. got some goals for next year that are actually doable, provided I get the hardware.

Hmm getting my review today. I wonder if it will be as lame as last years. I wish I worked with somebody who knows what I really do all day.

I was having a lovely IM conversation with a friend of mine. He was lamenting that he didn't like feeling post surgical, and that his care in the hospital was less than stellar. Then he pops out with this gem "I think I shall modify my 'Goals Worksheet' at work to include 'Apotheosis' for 2002. Then I can just fix stuff." I love my friends even if nobody at work gets it when I try and explain why I am laughing.

salami and cheese sandwiches rock for lunch. they are tasty, filling not messy, and they don't get weird when they sit in the fridge all morning like peanut butter and honey sandwiches do.

Well I just sent out another resume for another job. No relocation on this one.. which is a bummer...but I will get over it.

Today hs been amazingly pleasant all things considered. I did some real work. I found a way to make XP Home run IIS 5.0. I am not sure it is patchable.. but hey.. it is running and will do the demo it needs to do. I got a free lunch, well I guess I sort of earned it last night helping one of my co-workers network her house, but I got food I didn't have to pay for. Tonight big exciting plans...cleaning, litterbox, bedroom. Watching good eats. Sleep. Oh yeah and buying a sump pump and installing it. The joys of home ownership, all the glory the wonder the joy! I get to play with a sump pump. Anybody want/need a working pump with a not working automatic switch? (Pump moves water great it just doesn't know when it should start and or stop. Oh and moving the dehumidifier to the basement, lugging heavy objects up and down stairs. Will the fun never end? My head is throbbing I can't focus. This room is intollerably loud. All I want is to chop my head off, or possibly just drill a hole or two right in the front of my skull to reduce the pain. At least quitting time is soon. Then the hour drive in the blinding sun, the home ownership fun, and sleep.

wow... guess I should check on such things.. my last post seems to have been eaten. Oh well. it contained lots of info on my geek toys. Including my gps, my laptop bag, and my ups. Oh well. shit happens.

Geek Toy Weekend!

Big

I just got a GPS. The Magellen GPS Companion for the Handspring Visor to be precise. I am now doing all the requisite new GPS things like making maps of me running around the house and seeing how fast I can run up and down the hallway. Tomorrow when it is light I will take it outside and play. I loaded all the maps for my county, and all the towns and cities in my county... this should be fun. I might add the next one south too as I go there quite often.

I am sitting here eating good chocolate my friend from the far side of the pond sent me. Wondering if he got his box yet. We sent a box that had been packed quite a while ago.. but never actually sent (contains christmas gifts if you must know) last weekend. We have the starts of another box, just need to find a container for it. Maybe we can send his box back.

Well it is definate I didn't get the job. Off to write more cover letters. Whoever sent the first cover letter should be shot, or better yet, shot prior to writing the cover letter thereby sparing all of us the torture. Two more good canidate jobs. Dunno if they will agree that I am good for the job though. That and studying for my Win2k MCSE. I should have been a responsible person and actually taken the upgrade test when I had the chance. I would be more than half way done... but NO... I was too cool for that. So now I have to do all the individual tests. Oh well.

rotting intelectual teeth

"The Lost Tools of Learning" was first presented by Miss Sayers at Oxford in 1947.
Warning the link goes to a long article. Worth the time in reading it though.

I just read this article, it is fascinating. I wonder if I would have found my early schooling less boring and frustrating had it taken this form rather than that of a bunch of pre-chewed texts which I was to barely moisten in my mouth and spit back at my instructors on tests written exactly to the content of the books. The ultimate training for Teflon learning. The information never sticks. How much time is wasted in elementary and middle school on things of no merit, or on waiting for the slowest children to learn to read, even unto high school. I once gave the same book report in second grade as I gave in seventh. It was still a more difficult book than many of my classmates had read. But 5 years later I was still bored by the process.

While I was inquisitive and stayed into books that others thought well over my head in school, apparently others just floated through at the top of their classes thinking not at all. Because when these floaters arrived at college they had no idea how to study, or learn, or how to get their intellectual teeth around any material that hadn't been pre-chewed. Who took their teeth? Surely they had them when they figured out walking and talking....but somewhere between the first big learning chores, and college their intellectual teeth had been allowed to rot out of their heads. The could produce near perfect scores on standardized tests, but couldn't take a book and pull the content out of a book and do anything with it. They could find the important bits, but they couldn't put them together. They couldn't make anything new. They thought college was hard.

warning whining in this paragraph skip it and miss nearly none of my pointCollege wasn't hard once I figured out my advisor had doomed me to failure as some sort of inspirational activity (she thought by giving me lower grades than she would have given others that I would work harder, unfortunately I am not grade driven). I was forced to give up my major of choice because I couldn't get decent grades in any of my major classes, despite spending 10x the amount of time on them as my electives. At first I spent the time out of pleasure and interest, then in befuddlement trying to figure out why work I thought was good was getting me barely passing grades. Eventually I caved, dropped my CS major and went to History. Maybe I should have gone and asked why kids who copied my homework and turned it in got A's while I got C's, but I was too frustrated by that point. I loved logic. I loved set theory. I loved discrete math. Calculus ate my lunch, probably due to a few critical misunderstandings that nobody could be bothered to help me clear up. That aside I loved college, because I like learning.

I didn't really learn much in college I couldn't have learned on my own. Having the instructors and classes to make me go through the material, and the suggestions of subjects I would have never wandered into on my own were fascinating. I learned things I wouldn't have learned. I would go back to college if I could take my dogs. I could be a student nearly forever if it paid. Once you know how to learn you can learn anything, letting your intellectual teeth rot out should be a capital crime though. Maybe that is why I can't stay out of some sort of schooling 18 months. Because I want the pressure of someone making finish my little tangential learning impulses. I took economics classes at the junior college for a while, simply because I wanted the pressure to finish the books I picked up that weren't in themselves interesting. Once I finished the intro level books full of vocabulary and base concepts I have studied all sorts of tangential material that at first blush before the classes I would have skipped for lack of fundamentals to really understand them. Sure I could have passed a reading comprehension test, but I wouldn't have gotten the point. Sort of like reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and thinking it is a book about riding cross country on a motorcycle (mind you my brother is the philosopher type I tend to prefer more concrete subjects).

I also wonder at our educational system's abilities to produce functional adults. I am lucky to have parents who are wise, intelligent, and interested in helping me learn things. Not everyone is so fortunate. I know this because of the number of people I have helped through the early stages of buying a house. How hard would it be to have worked that content into curriculum in high school?
Figuring out how much loan you can afford
The whole process of bidding, obtaining financing, closing.
How to calculate loan payments, estimating taxes, amortization rates.
How one goes about this, who pays what fees, what is negotiable.
The sorts of things you really need to get by in life. High school prepares people to be minimum wage slaves who rent. I took some required class in high school, I think in Illinois, we did our taxes (well fake taxes) but we filled out the 1040EZ and the Illinois short form. We talked about checking accounts, and other stuff I had been doing for years. Why not include info on housing there? How much can you afford to spend on rent? a mortgage? retirement planning? Time value of money if you invest from 20-25 and STOP you will still end up with more money than if you start at 40, and go for 20 years. If parents aren't passing this stuff on, and I know because everyone I share my knowledge with goes "Where did you learn this?" or "I wish my parents could tell me this stuff." or "Wait until I explain this to my Dad."

Well I am assuming I am not going to get the job I interviewed for a week and a half ago. I haven't heard a word. I haven't gotten a flush letter but I expect it is coming once whoever gets the job actually signs on on the line and takes it. I did find another job to apply for. I hope this one works out for me. It might not but it might.

Sorry loyal readers, and not so loyal readers I have abandoned this page for a few days, a busy weekend combined with general malaise yesterday let me abandon you all for 4 whole days. Good news! Toad has gotten herself a new job, well she hasn't officially accepted but she will. She will be moving in with her parents at the start of next month, leaving me and the pets to fend for ourselves most of the week.

No official word on my interview but the unofficial word doesn't look promising, but another friend suggested I look at her company. So off I go to check out their website tonight. I won't count myself out of the running on the other job until I am officially told.. but it seems doubtful. In the mean time if you know of IT jobs for network administrator types with 5 years experience let me know.

test of future post

petfinder

I just added the little petfinder adoptable pet thing feature on the left. I was inspired to do this because a friend of mine just had to put down her very old beagle, and she was looking for a new one. I couldn't remember the name of the great big searchable pet site (aka petfinder) but I knew my friend betsy had a link to it on her site. Thus I provided the link to my friend who was looking for a new dog. Hopefully she will choose a shelter dog in need of a new home, and spoil the dog rotten for the remainder of its life. And maybe by having put the little feature on my site, someone else will remember they saw it and pass it on to someone who needs it.

Pets are an awsome responsibility, not to be entered into lightly, after all you are taking responsiblity for a life. That means care, feeding, vetrinary expenses, and attention for the remainder of that lifetime. I don't understand how people can see pets as disposable. It seems quite wrong to me. I admit I didn't care for my budgies to the end of their days, in fact the were getting rather ignored, when I came upon an elderly lady, the mother of my brother's CCD teacher to be precise, who was missing her recently deceased budgies terribly. So I gave her mine. I got christmas cards from her for years telling me about my budgies, long after I had gone to college and had expected them to be dead, she actually sent me a letter when the first of them passed on. But I could no more abandon a pet in an apartment, or toss it out of a car on a country road than I could do the same to a niece or nephew whose care was entrusted to me. The true character of most people can be judged by how they treat those with less power than themselves. Under the same theory I know that someone who is nice to me but mean to a waiter or waitress or other service person isn't really a nice person.

Well it's been a week since I had that interview. I haven't heard a word. Not that I was really expecting to. I went first, which means that the rest of the interviews were this week, possibly finishing up on the 11th. They obviously won't make a decision before then, so all I can do is wait...I hate waiting. It is terribly nerve wracking. I would love to go to work for these folks, it is a MUCH larger environment than here. 30ish NT servers, hundreds of users, a team to work with, moving to win2k this summer. The boss sounds like she is fantastic, spending money in the right places, you know paying for expert help to make things go easy and right the first time. Gosh I hope I didn't screw up too much.

OK.. if you are full grown adult male, with children old enough to have children it is time to stop behaving like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. If you are listening to internet radio...dragging the whole network to a halt and you get busted.. don't start blatthering "No no, not me I did it once that one time before you sent the email but not since...nope not me." Yeah right...then you go on blathering about how you have been on some other site but only for 10-15 minutes. Stop it. At least stand up like a man, and admit you got busted and get over it.

I have no idea who the Brunching Shuttlecocks are but they crack me up. Here is one of their little things.. they reviewed soda flavors. Whenver I am in need of a giggle that is where I go to the site and see what's new. Never takes long. Usually a good giggle for the day.

Of all the lame brained moronic reasons to write a virus. To dispell the myth that only men write viruses. Good Lord if you are depressed by the lack of women in IT, then get the hell out there get a job in IT, and prove you can do the work. At least after she wrote it she did the right thing and turned it in to a anti-virus vendor straight away. Thereby letting them patch it before it actually got loose and started spreading in the wild.

I had to go back and edit that last post after all mink skittles would be even weirder than mint. Maybe weird enough to justify the ad campaign they are using for them. I guess I don't subject myself to enough brodcast media, because I hadn't seen any of it... but I hit the skittles website, and it appears mint skittles are a dating aid. Wild. I thought they were candy. Apparently not.

Mint Skittles

When we stopped for fuel this morning on the way to work I grabbed a quart of chocolate milk, and these new Mink Mint Skittles, Peppermint Mix. Apparently there are five flavors of peppermint in this little plastic carton. There are five colors. Ranging from Dark blue to white. One of them tastes just exactly like blue extra gum there are subtle differences in the colors but boy they are close. There is something intrinsically weird about mint flavor and the texture of skittles, which are normally fruit flavored. Sort of like little tiny mentos. Nothing can go wrong today though.. had my chocolate milk, got lunch in the fridge. Got some VB stuff to do, that should eat up some time. I am hopefully waiting for a call about the interview I did last week.

Anybody know when I became right eye dominant? My left eye is far less myopic and was dominant my whole life until recently. I just noticed while sitting in the ladies room that apparently my right eye is now dominant. This explains a great deal about my target pistol shooting of late.

I am on a total sugar buzz this morning, every time it starts to wear off I keep feeding it. This is going to be one seriously painful afternoon. Anybody else ever do this? It all started with caramel corn in the break room. I had to try a handful before it was all gone, then my morning Diet Coke (no sugar but caffeine), then a pop tart, then a Mars bar, and it is only 10:30. Good lord it is a wonder I can sit still. And no wonder at all that the day seems to be going slow. After all I am probably only running at 10x my normal speed. Oof I dread the let down.

Teddy Switch Ok.. some things are too weird for words, others too cool for words, and some you can't tell. I love this. I regret that I didn't think of it first. I feel I may have to implement something similar in the future. How cool is it. Yeah I got the link from /. so what. I think for those annoying LAN in a home environments think stuffed dog.. one jack in each foot...he could sit in the middle of a table and look cute. I find the lights in the eyes quite possibly the best part. Well that or the use of color matched keystones for the paw jacks.