Today was my forth day at work. Still not so bad, I can already see I’m better on the phone than I was before, and my multitasking skills are improving. It’s very busy, but that just means that the day goes by very quickly.

Unfortunately today the other temp walked out. I honestly don’t understand why, perhaps she was used to the lazy office gopher jobs that some temp jobs turn out to be. But to walk out without saying a word? This was a grown woman! Made the day much more busy, but the great thing about being a temp is that it didn’t make it any more stressful. I don’t have to stay an extra 3 hours to deal with the mess that was left from someone walking out. I can leave my work at work, I don’t have to care when things get messy, what a new feeling! Even the work at the gas station came home with me after they learned I was responsible enough to pile responsibilites on top of (and I was foolish enough to accept).

I like temping for now.

I hung out with my friend Nita on Sunday. We went to Quakertown to do a few things, and ended up going to the $2 theater to see “I, Robot.” It was a fun movie, while people not familiar with robotics scifi might think it’s clever, it’s all just rehashed ideas from scifi writers past. I’d say it was worth the $2, I was entertained.

Now I’m going to go spend some time with Michael and watch Bladerunner, yay!

*wanders off*

Saturday was a good day.

I finally got around to setting up the java chat option for xelium, and pulled together some php to make a simple nickname login so it doesn’t just assign an Anon nickname.

A little after 4:30 we headed out, I needed to swing by the temp agency to drop off my timesheet and pick up a few things, then I wanted to go to the Sprint Store in Montgomeryville to look at cellphones. We figure it’d be good for me to have a cellphone now that I’ll be away from the house more often and needing to coordinate when and where I need Michael to pick me up after work.

So we drove to Lansdale and hit some traffic. I hate Lansdale, but today it seems that they were holding Lansdale Bike Night 2004, and most of Mainstreet was closed, including the stretch where I needed to go. Arg! Scratch that idea.

We headed to the Sprint Store. Parked, walked to the door at 6:01. They closed at 6. Damn it! I might just order the silly phone online, I don’t care much what it looks like, I just though it’d be need to hold before I buy/order.

From there we drove to Philadelphia, for the Jeff Greinke Gatherings Concert.

We got into the city around 7, the place was swarming with college students. We stopped at The Last Word bookshop and picked up a couple books, browsed for a bit. Then we went over to St. Mary’s for the concert.

I really wasn’t sure what to expect, I’m not familiar with Jeff Greinke‘s work. We picked up a copy of Lost Terrain on our way in, and got comfy in the pews (which is possible if you bring a big pillow). They turned off the lights and the concert began a little after 8.

What a great concert it was! (now forgive me if I butcher ambient termonology here) It was really all across the ambient spectrum that I’m familiar with. Some quiet landscape stuff. Some weird sound stuff… including a couple pieces with a Trombone! There were some dark ambient pieces which I really really enjoyed, I was able to close my eyes and play Alice in my own dark wonderland while the real world melted away. Mmmm, I had a very nice time.

Today I have plans to go out with my friend Nita, yay!

Work was good today. It’s not as busy as it will be on Tuesday, so I was able to continue getting used to the whole thing. It’s amazing how much easier it all is when I stop trying to live up to the ridiculous expectations of perfection that I have a tendancy to hold myself to. Temps aren’t expected to be perfect.

I realized today why people had such high expectations for the “paperless office.” So much of the paper shuffling we do is really not needed if computers were used for more of it. I wonder how much of the world is still lagging in efficiency like this. Probably lots.

That’s what I need to do with my life, become an efficiency expert! While folding up those orders I had so many ideas on how to streamline the entire workplace.

Then again, me and half those people in the office wouldn’t have a job anymore if that happened. Maybe efficiency isn’t everything.

And I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway, I’m just The Temp.

Work ended around 3:30, apparently they have less work for us to do on Fridays. I asked if it was possible for me to just hang around the office and read until Michael could pick me up at 5. The supervisor didn’t have a problem with it, but then a woman I had been working with all day offered me a ride home since she lives near me. Yay! I got to talk with her on the ride home, turns out she’s a really cool woman, and despite hating computers (because she’s worked on one everyday for over a decade), she told me that her husband uses Suse at home, and that’s the computer she checks her email on and things. Neat! She’s casually used linux for over 5 years, starting with Red Hat. See, linux isn’t such a bad desktop for casual computer users.

Since I got home early I decided to do some cleaning. Had the place mopped and vacuumed by the time Michael got home around 5. Feels so much nicer being in a clean house.

I definately need to get at least 8 hours of sleep per night though. I worked all day and I’m still wide awake right now, but yesterday I was just exhausted.

My brain is a little bit mushy, so if this isn’t coherent, just move along.

I didn’t get a good night sleep last night. I foolishly stayed up late to watch a video game documentary on PBS (which ended up being not so good because they jumped around too much) until 11. Then of course I had to think about starting the job today, and that kept my brain working when I wanted to be sleeping. Then Michael wasn’t sleeping so well, so around 4:30 or so he got up for a few minutes, and I was woken up. I stayed in bed trying to get back to sleep. Then the alarm went off at 5. I tried to pretend I didn’t hear it, but got up at around 5:10.

Michael and I got out of the house by 8, and I was at work at 8:30. The day went well enough, calling companies to take their orders, answering phones to take the orders all morning. Then the afternoon spent putting together orders. Unsurprisingly I enjoy the afternoons much more, paper shuffling is easy, being good on the phone and juggling people on the phone is not so easy for me. It’s ok though, this is the sort of thing I want experience with. The people I work with are nice too. I’m sure I’ll do fine, even if I don’t exactly enjoy it.

Unfortunately Michael got stuck at the car dealership all day getting repairs on the Rav4. He just went in for an oil change and they found a bigger problem, which was completely covered under our warrenty (yay!) but kept him away from work all day (no yay). But that meant he was able to pick me up right when I got out of work at 4:30.

I came home and made dinner. But I was so exhausted, I ended up skipping the phillychix meeting tonight, which I feel bad about since they tend to not happen if I don’t show up.

Blah blah blah tired going to bed now.

The temp agency I went to yesterday gave me a call and offered me a 2-5+ week job.

It’s just customer service and taking orders (data entry) over the phone, but the place is local (Harleysville), the hours and pay were fine and the dresscode is casual. I decided to just go ahead and take it. I want to work, and this job is fine and gets me the office experience I need. It seems like a laid back enough assignment that I can get used to the whole temping thing again.

We’re going to drop by the temp agency this evening to pick up the paperwork I need, and I start at 8:30 tomorrow morning. Yay! Work!

*wanders off to check on brownies*

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*