This morning Michael wasn’t feeling very well. His allergies had him up at 3 am, and while I was getting dressed this morning for my interview at the temp agency he asked me if I’d mind driving myself to the interview.

Drive myself?

I hadn’t driven since February 2003!

I’ve had a license for nearly 5 years, and used it extensively when I lived in New York, driving from Syracuse to Rochester and all sorts of crazy places in between all the time in my old cars. But that didn’t mean I liked it. I hate driving.

That said, I’m not a bad driver.

Anyway, I agreed to drive myself, it wasn’t too far. I figured the little bit of nervousness I’d feel from driving for the first time in a year and a half would somehow counteract the nervousness I had for the interview.

I was mostly right, driving the Rav4 took some getting used to, it certainly doesn’t have the pickup that the Jeep had, but it’s a nice car.

I got to the temp agency a little after 9, found parking easily, and went in.

I impressed them with all the computer knowledge I had without attending college. I charmed them with stories of the hardships of web developing as a private contractor. But at the end of it all:

“Things are a bit slow. I have an administrative assistant job that a few people have applied for, but might not be filled yet, we’ll know by later this week. There is a data entry and customer support job that I’ll know about later this week. Oh, and if you want to start today you can take a stocking job at a local Department Store.”

This was rather discouraging. Administrative Assistant and Data Entry + Customer support jobs aren’t a problem, I’m willing to do those. But she didn’t seem hopeful about IT jobs coming in, contrary to what a woman I spoke with on the phone said. I expressed my concerns, and the woman actually gave me the name of another temp agency in the area that might be able to help me more! So I told her I’d consider the job options and get back to her, but I am not sure I will. Oh well, at least it wasn’t my performance that made this unsuccessful.

So I came home and made an appointment with that other temp agency for Thursday at 9:30 am (that was the earliest they could get me in). This place even has a website[1] with job listings that seem rather extensive. It’s all much more professional looking and sounding than the place I went to today. I’m hopeful I can get constant and good assignments, but we’ll see when I go in for my interview on Thursday.

I was a bit bummed by this morning though. I was able to salvage my day and send off a few resumes to some craigslist postings (one of which I later learned might be going to a friend of mine in the area, d’oh!). Also was able to send my resume to a friend of ours who knows some HR people in the IT world who might be able to help me out.

While trying to cheer myself up today, I remembered reading in my Home Comforts book an interesting tidbit about pancake mixes. Apparently pancake mixes that you buy from the store are pretty basic, and can easily be made at home with a few basic ingredients. So I decided to try to make some pancakes from scratch. But what kind? All I really have for sweet flavoring is cinnamon, so I looked for a cinnamon pancake recipe, and found this one. The dry ingredients make enough for 3 batches, you save the 2 batches you don’t use. It wasn’t any harder than making normal pancakes from scratch, as always the hardest part is cooking them in the frying pan so they look like normal edible pancakes. And it was all a success!

Too bad Michael had gone off to work, I would have liked to share this delicious acomplishment with someone. I’ll have to buy some whipped cream and make them on some weekend.

While I made these Caligula wasn’t much help. At least he stayed out of the way %)

Michael is picking up Indian food for dinner tonight, yum yum! He should be home soon, so I should wrap this up.

*wanders off*

[1] Right now I’m making a conscious decision not to mention company names I work for in my public blog. I’ve mostly stuck with this in the past, I’ve heard more than one horror story about people’s lives being harmed by workplace information posted in their blogs.

Ah Notepad. I haven’t used this program is a very long time, but I used to use it for everything. Writing my private journal, writing up HTML pages, keeping lists.

I’ve spent a great deal of time in Windows this past week brushing up on my Office knowledge, and getting aquainted with everything again. I must say, with the proper tools installed (puTTY, WinSCP, Gimp2, Mozilla, Winamp 2.91, MSOffice) it turns into quite a usable system, even if I can’t multitask as much as I’m used to, and I’m restricted to a single desktop[1].

Today I went through a PowerPoint tutorial, and I laughed more than once. What a crazy program this is! It has so many campy features that made me groan. I suppose I can see how this could be used efficiently, but I can also see the pointy-haired boss having a field day with embedded movies and sliding windows. Still, it didn’t take too long to figure out how this all worked, and I even put together a little cheesy presentation of my own about Caligula (no, I’m not posting it, it’s really not worth the bandwidth).

Speaking of sending myself through tutorials, as I was finishing up a practice session with gtypist this afternoon, I recalled a conversation I had with Michael the other night about temp work. I thought about how there were still people in the world who can’t touch type. That got me thinking, is touch typing a skill these days? Can’t every 14 year old AIM junkie touch type now? I assume so, but honestly I don’t know. Is my mere 60-70 wpm rate still considered “good”? Or has it slipped to “average”?

Michael set up a subdomain for my resume: http://resume.princessleia.com. This is much nicer than the 32432 character address I had for it before. He also printed off a bunch of copies of my resume, yay! I’m just about all set for my interview at the temp agency tomorrow morning.

All work and Windows stuff aside, Michael and I have had a nice long weekend. Friday night we stopped at the homebrew supply shop so Michael could pick up all the hops and things he needed to brew a new batch of beer. Saturday he began his brewing, yay! Our basement is a great place to let the beer stay while it ferments, we can keep it nice and dark down there and the temperature and humidity is relatively constant.

Saturday night we had a couple friends over, enjoyed movies and pizza until late. Sunday we went out to do some shopping, picked up some new food bowls for Caligula, bought some clothes for my interview on tuesday, travelled to New Hope to do some browsing of shops since the day was so nice.

I guess that’s it for now, must go make some dinner.

*wanders off*

[1] Yeah, I know, I can go all out and try other shells, hack the registry, change all sorts of settings until I have a crazy leet Windows system, but the point of this exercise was to see how I dealt with it as close to “factory installed” as it’ll get, something like I’d use in a workplace.

So, finding a job.

I decided to cut down my extracurricular internet activities, so I’m not lurking in nearly as many dead irc channels as I was before, not contributing to F/OSS projects for now, not paying much attention to journals (including my own). It’s helped me focus some, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have little to no experience outside web development, and there are way too many web developers in the world.

It’s a frustrating realization, but what can I do? I’m certainly not alone in my 20-something career funk, I know plenty of people in my same position, most living with parents. So I figure the best thing I can do now is go to a temp agency. I’ll keep up my job search of course, since no one wants to temp forever, but this’ll give me some experience in other fields. Then maybe I’ll have some clue about what I want to do.

To prepare for my temp work stint, I booted into Windows and went through some Word and Excel tutorials that a friend of mine sent me. It’s all pretty easy stuff, and if you’re good with software you can get the hang of any Office application within 20 minutes, but when applying for temp work they have a test that they give you to see how good you are with it. They ask you specific questions about what menu and sub menu to use to do certain things, like adding page numbers, or double spacing. So brushing up on all that is a good idea. Last time I did temp work I took my knowledge of Word for granted and did pretty lousy on the test and ended up working as a clerk in a campus bookstore. I also fired up gtypist and did some excercises in typing and numerical data entry.

Ah, last time I did temp work. I’d say it was a completely useless and dreadful experience, but I did meet a friend who made my last few weeks in New York a lot of fun. Who knows, maybe going through lots of temp jobs will help me overcome the insane nervousness that I always feel when I start new jobs. And if nothing else, temp working leaves one with lots of great stories.

I’ll be going to the temp agency on Tuesday morning.

A friend of mine is now living at a dorm in college, and he was very annoyed to learn that he couldn’t use mIRC. Apparently the school had blocked all IRC ports. Understandable, since filesharing on IRC networks has grown in popularity at colleges, I even know some people who really abuse their college connection by running IRC file servers. But of course this friend of mine just chats harmlessly in a couple channels. It was sad for me to learn that he couldn’t come in.

So I was on a mission! He’s doesn’t know anything about linux, but he’s smart and I figured he’d be able to figure out a shell account eventually. I got another friend to set up a shell account for him and began teaching the ways of shell accounts, irssi, screen and vim (yes, I even introduce newbies to vim, no need to get them starting off with bad habits *grin*).

I was thrilled with how quickly he caught on. I went through my usual repetitive teaching method of switching between each program, opening and closing vim, detatching and reattaching screen, all with a purpose of course, but getting him used to everything. It wasn’t long at all before I didn’t need to tell him each step. And he even exceeded my expectations by trying to add new things to his irssi config file that I didn’t specifically tell him to add. Some was incorrect and we had to debug, but boy is it great when people think for themselves!

I’ve spent so much time helping out newbies who email me about how-tos on my website, people in Xelium #support, linux newbies from manLinux.com, people who drop into the bitlbee channel… that i had completely forgotten how wonderful it is teaching something to a smart person. This is what I love about teaching, helping someone start off and watching them grow on their own, learning how to RTFM, and then someday coming back and teaching me stuff. Nothing more rewarding (and humbling) than having a student come back to you with more knowledge than even you have.

I had really tired of telling people exactly where the manual is, what bits to read, and still having them come to me asking questions that they wouldn’t need to ask if they had just read. I started to think that if I just copied the text from the manual into the email/forum/channel they’d finally get it through their thick skulls, because having someone spoon feed them the information is easier than just putting it on their plate.

Someone needs to make it clear that installing and maintaining a linux box is not going to be easy if you can’t even figure out how to burn a CD in Windows.

Yep, I’m bitter.

The Republican Convention starts today. There have been lots of protests. I thought about doing a rant about how annoyed I was with politics. But then I recalled a comic that a friend of mine showed me last week that summed up much of my current frustration rather well.

Source: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=17519

Of course my gripes with the Bush administration go beyond the war, and crazy tax cuts. Which is why I wish the candidates would get finished with their mud slinging and move on. It’s really ashame that most voters respond better to mud slinging than anything else.

But I do have a confession to make reguarding voting.

I didn’t vote in 2000.

At the time I was working 45 hours a week at a gas station, living above a liquor store, and barely able to pay all my bills each month. That experience made me realize why so few people vote, who really cares whether George or John wins? The country will still leave them as part of the working poor.

But I will vote this year. PA is a battleground state so it’s important. I’m registered as Non-Partisan, but it’s quite safe to say

c/o aquateencentral.com

Much thunderstorming out, I’m going to go get a book and snuggle with my kitten.

*wanders off*

I sold my Magic cards today. I thought I’d feel a bit sad about it, but I’m not. This is nothing like when I sold all my My Little Ponies. I thought about selling my cards all on ebay, figured I might get about around $40 on ebay, *including* shipping, and I didn’t want to deal with it, shipping 1600+ cards is a pain. So I figured I’d head down to Collegeville Cards and see how much they’d give me for my cards. We got there around 2:30, and the owner was there to check out my cards. Hovering next to me was a guy who was a bit too eager to get his hands on my cards, and excitedly told the owner that he would buy a lot of my cards from him right away since they were sets he was looking to complete. I’m sure that helped me. I only had about 7 cards which were good rares, then about 100 crap rares, 50 foils, a few hundred basic lands, 1600 commons and uncommons. How much did I get for all this? $85. At least twice what I expected. Yay! Of course I payed much more than that for them all ;) but I don’t think I could have made off any better with any other reasonable selling route.

We did some shopping after stopping at the card shop. It was weird using actual cash for our purchases at Home Depot and the grocery store, we’re so used to using the debit card for everything.

Last night we went over to ‘s place. We brought along a few seasons of Red Dwarf (which he’d never seen), and hung out, had some beers, ate lots of pizza. I also got a chance to sign his key finally. We had a nice time, and stayed til almost midnight.

I’m going to go do some reading now.

*wanders off*

Some days when looking for a job seem horribly dismal and depressing.

Some days when looking for a job are kickass and happy.

I’ve had far too much of the former, but yesterday I had my first of the latter, and that put me in a really good mood. Of course I still don’t have a job, but my outlook is a bit brighter than it was before.

Late in the afternoon I was talking to Baerana (b2s‘s significant other) in IRC and she asked me if Michael and I wanted to come over for dinner to eat Chili. Chili has beef in it %( I politely declined, but was disappointed, so I mentioned it to Time. “Can we BYOF?” he said. Excellent idea! So I offered to bring some tacos (w/ homemade tortillas), and we planned to meet around 6 at their place in Media. I’d met b2s before, but it was a first for meeting Baerana, she’s great! I’ll have to find some way to convince her to come to a philly chix meeting sometime, since she has super linux brains. And we also got to meet Nibbler Bunny!He’s so adorable %) I love rabbits, and he’s a nice one, and he’s a houserabbit so they let him run around everywhere.

We had a really nice night, and they fed us ice cream and cookies. Yay!

Today I spent most of the day cleaning. I did my bi-yearly washing of the comforters too, they were so covered in cat fur! Caligula doesnt shed much, but when he does it’s often when he’s snuggled with us in bed. I was so happy to pull it out of the dryer all fur-free. I put folded it up and put it on the bed and went to do other things. I came back about an hour later to put the clean sheets on the bed and I saw this:

He’s lucky he’s cute. Couldn’t he at least wait until I had finished making the bed? %) Cats!

I installed gimp2 from unstable the other day. It’s pretty nice. Very clean looking, and when you write text on an image it actually writes it *on the image* so you don’t need to figure out sizing and then put it on the image. Also, the antialiasing of the fonts is so much better, no more clunkly looking fonts on my images.

My laptop is doing good. Today I fixed the resolution, so now it’s 16 bit and running at 1024×768, woo! Michael discovered that there is a neomagic driver out now, which allows for this better performance, back when I was running Debian it was running with 8bit graphics and only 800×600. *Pats laptop* this laptop is such a pain, but some days it does it’s job properly.

We’re heading over to ‘s now for pizza and movie night, woo!

*wanders off*

After noticing that many employers listed “javascript” among the required scripting tools they were looking for I thought “Self, why don’t you know any javascript?”

Answering this question goes back to my early days of making webpages. My first website was made on angelfire.com in 1998. It had some very cheesy elements, those horrible tiled backgrounds that came with every angelfire site, I used the marquee tag and put images in it, and tables confused me. At one point a section of my site was made out of FRAMES! Oh the horrors of those early websites. But I was determined to learn more, so during the summer of 1999 when I first travelled to Philadelphia to watch my cousin for the summer I wanted to spend some time learning more web stuff, like javascript.

I printed out tons of stuff that summer, HTML Guides, mIRC help file (for mirc scripting back when R2D2 was an mIRC bot), and this big huge javascript tutorial. I got most of my objectives that summer completed, but javascript hounded me.

The trouble was compatibility. Javascript is happy with Netscape, and does stupid things or nothing on older versions of IE. Then IE had it’s own “JScript” which was quite similar to javascript, but didn’t work in Netscape. Grr. After wading through a few pages about javascript frames and layers, trying them out and realizing that I had to write twice as much code to get things working properly with Netscape AND IE, I gave up. I threw all these javascript tutorals into a folder and forgot about them, because JAVASCRIPT IS CRAP.

Fast forward 4 years. PHP has taken the place of a lot of stuff that javascript used to commonly handle. I push away silly stuff like layering and evil frames, Who needs javascript? Javascript is so last Millennium!

Then it’s 2004 and I’m working at a web development company, I keep coming across bits of javascript in their code. It’s just simple stuff to detect browsers where php is not enabled, or making pretty image buttons that have mouseover effects, or making certain size popup windows. It was all simple stuff, but I harbored my hatred for javascript, so I didn’t pay much attention to it, just copied what I needed to copy and hacked my way through those bits.

So now I’m looking for a job, and they want javascript. FINE! So I sat down with a javascript tutorial today.

Wow. Javascaript is easy.

After all this work I’ve done with perl and php in the past couple years javascript isn’t looking nearly as scary. So after just a day devoted to exploring common, modern javascript I feel confident that I have a good handle on it, at least enough to survive using it on any sort of site. Yay!

I mentioned this adventure in javascript to a friend of mine and he concurred that there was a crazy javascript/jscript/vbscript bundle of evil back in the day that turned a lot of people off to any sort of <script>. Interested in this conflict I came upon this article, which is a very interesting article about javascript, including *why* it’s called JAVAscript:

All right, let’s hear it for marketing!

I installed xfce4 on my laptop today, it worked on my first try starting it, and it runs pretty well. Then I thought “ooh I should take a screenshot.” But then I realized that I don’t have any screenshot software installed, and firefox won’t be done compiling for another 7 years or so, so I pulled out my camera.

And since I can’t take out my camera without taking pictures of my kitten:
Caligula sleeping during the day so he has enough energy to jump on my head tonight while I’m trying to sleep.

I decided to spend some time this morning playing around with WordPress. I figured the experience with such a packaged php blog system would be good, having blogs imbedded in webpages is a popular thing.

First thing I needed to do was get an apache server with php and mysql. Unfortunately for me no such box existed that I can play with, so I went ahead and installed them here on my workstation. I won’t be able to share my lovely internal blog system, but I don’t really intend to host one myself right now (princessleia.com gets too much spam for me to want to deal with it).

Installing apache2 + mysql + php4 was pretty easy in Gentoo, except I forgot the mysql USE flag the first time and had to recompile mod_php. Then there was just one line in one file to edit get php working, which is a bit less than I had to do previously (of course the last time I set this up it was about 2 years ago on debian stable, and that was apache 1.something). Then got wordpress going.

I can see how this could nicely be morphed into the center of a whole website, editing the style is very easy, and editing the html for the pages can be done in the browser itself.

*wanders off*

The following image is a screenshot from a section of http://objective.jesussave.us/kidz.html

I am really not sure what to say, except they forgot to mention the part about how we eat babies.

Yes, this site is serious, Michael clicked around it a bunch last night to make sure it wasn’t a joke. The spinning sheep head at the top still makes me laugh.

It’s sad how Christian groups like this do more harm to their cause then good by spreading incorrect and offensive information about other groups of people.

Of course now that I made a post about it they can say “HAH! See you’re bitter!”

EDIT: Apparently there is a bunch of net chatter about whether this site really is real or not. Still, it’s worth sharing for sheer amusment %)