Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Return to Utica for the same job, part three.

Published on March 26, 2007 in Life, Video Games and Work. 0 Comments

3/9/07
Yup, I’m back in the good ol’ (read: hell hole) Mohawk Valley for yet another stay filling in for someone’s vacation at an undisclosed location (rhyme unintended). But I am doing better about this. I brought my laptop this time. It’s not helped me in the immense sense, but it has helped me as a notepad to find people and things, as well as work with trouble tickets. I can say that I’m at a help desk right now and somewhat bored, so once again I resort to writing in my blog that I only seem to update once a month. I’ve been too busy with other things such as school and work to really get a chance to sit down and speak my mind.

On the subject of school, I think I have a 4.0 GPA yet again. Looking forward a moment, this quarter, due to the number of test outs I’ve taken, I was originally supposed to have two classes. Well, I decided to take another test out to Composition I (GE 117) because if I took that I’d have three more classes available for me to take. Well, the three classes are all of the general education type, so it means they are commonly offered at night as well. My Java I course is on Saturday, so I figure, this may be the gate to a possible full time job if I play my cards right (as in 9-5 schedule). So I have class Tuesday and Wednesday from 6 untill 9:30 then on Saturday from 9 to 1:30. This should be good for me.

Now back on the subject of work, I have an internship (as he put it) for a technology company in Syracuse. Most of it sofar is web coding and heavy HTML. Now as I probably have said, I can do it, but I’m not good at design and am really better at things like PHP and SQL relations, which is my other job for…them. It’s been rough going, some things I stare at all confused and really don’t know what’s being asked of me. But then there are sometimes where I see code so atrocious it makes me want to puke all over the original coder. So I spent hours upon hours upon hours recoding the thing from scratch to get a similar look that wasn’t as buggy as the previous. It is a nightmare to look at some of the code, because it seems to fly everywhere. Most HTML and whatnot follows a logical order. In this site’s case, it didn’t at all. I managed to cut the average file in half with my changes. But I’ve got more to do for this guy and less time to do it.

Back on the subject of where I am now, I got to have great fun in the cafeteria during lunch break. I sat against a wall, plugged in my laptop and fired up Unreal Tournament 2004. It was the greatest lunch break of my life. Seriously, I cranked it up loud so people could hear the announcers praise my greatness. Double Kill, Multi Kill, Mega Kill, Ultra Kill, Monster Kill, HOLY SHIT!!! Seriously, I had a couple girls stare at the vending machines while I was playing and to break the silence these two girls had was: “WICKED SICK!!!” they go dead quiet, look at each other and walk away. It was so pretty. My friend is the instagib rifle. I had way too much fun with that. Though, I now feel incredibly tired as in sleepy. I hope I don’t pass out while working today.

3/12/07
So the guys I’m working for again are having a blood drive. Granted, I don’t quite remember when my last donation was (I hope I can give again), I’m here to figure that out. I think it’s important to not be part of the group that never gives twice. It’s a two day span for this, so if not today, maybe tomorrow? I think I’m going to go over in my break though, it’s already 12:24PM and my break ends in six minutes. Oh well, if I go over it’s just a small pay dock. I could probably stay later to make it up.

Or just don’t go. My time isn’t up yet. I have exactly eight more days until I can give blood again. I’ll look up a drive in the area or something to give to. Tonight is dinner with my Mom for the second week straight (really odd considering I’m at college). By the looks of things though, this person I’m “replacing” is taking a longer vacation than I was told. By the looks of things I will be here longer than I expected and that may hurt my attempts to get my other job I have the internship for. Well, I need the money, so I’m working this job for now and if it goes longer than it’s probably a good thing. I got my Verizon bill and basically said, I really have to cut down on my phone use. I hardly know where it goes, but now they’ve docked the rate for overtime all the way up to $.45/minute, which is ridiculous. I don’t really use my phone that much to begin with, what the hell happened here? Speaking of my phone, during this weekend escapade, I forgot my cell phone charger at my apartment, so my phone is dead. (If you’ve been trying to call, this is why.) So many things I have to do this week and school starts tomorrow night. Oh well, here we go.

A new job?

Published on March 8, 2007 in Final Fantasy XI, Life and Work. 0 Comments

So I’m sitting in the car of a place called Dakota’s Brickhouse Grill, waiting for an interview with a company. I find it kinda suspicious they picked a place like this instead of their office, but I’m not one to complain that much. The problem I had was that I got here way early (11:10, the interview is at 11:30) and apparently the restaurant isn’t even open yet. There’s no WiFi here, so no dynamic updating for now, just me typing up in notepad. I have the strange hunch that there is more to this interview. The man mentioned something about a meeting he had to go to today. Am I doing some sort of interview at the same time? Only time will tell. My laptop is way too big for this car or something. I have it between the steering wheel and my body with the seat all the way back and I have to suck it in to use it. Not to mention the typing position is way less than ideal. He seemed to like my credentials, so I think if I can ace this interview I’ll be all set for the job. I think he just pulled in. Here I go.

Ok. I’m in. Apparently there is a meeting going on here. Some sort of business organization where they share information, people and whatnot. It’s an interesting concept and I’m wondering how much fun this meeting will be. I wonder what I’m going to talk about. As a random note, my underwear keeps trying to ride me or something. I think that’s because it’s not broken in, I’ve only been wearing them for a bit over an hour.

So the interview went well, I think I’ll have the job after the internship. But I did do one blunder which wasn’t the best move. The meeting was over and for the meeting my lid was shut. I open it up and floating up the screen is this image (Warning: Not safe for work by any means.) I go for the touch pad instantly to try to get the image to disappear, but it was already too late. The person who interviewed me said “Well that was the first time I’ve seen anime porn before.” I wasn’t really sure what to say in response to that. Heh. I got some work from him to do the next day and I’m enjoying it. Why? Well, I haven’t gotten out of my pajamas in days. Work from home, in my bed or at my desk. No need to get up and go somewhere, just work from the comfort of the apartment.

If you couldn’t already tell from me already, I finally got my laptop. It’s an ASUS G2P, a gaming hardware laptop. Loaded to the brim with a Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 Gigs of 677 DDR2 RAM, 160Gigs of hard drive (I will put another one in it), a built-in camera and above all else, an ATI Radeon X1700 video card, quite a sweet package for just under $1,900. The only gripe or anything I have about it is the included program “D3DChecker”, which constantly takes up CPU time to see if D3D is running so the laptop’s sides and touchpad light up all flashy. But it’s super fast and quite punchy. I play some of my old games and notice a serious difference in performance. It has an upgrade program to Vista Ultimate, which I will take advantage of for a Dual Boot system. One of the other fun things is when I turn up the volume and then turn the computer on. It sounds like a bomb going off. Heh.

I also have a couple Final Fantasy XI related notes. First up is the update. Personaly, there isn’t really going to be much for the update I care about. Extra HP recovered while healing and more EXP in smaller parties is cool, but other than that, I can’t find much I care about in this update. Though, there are some Rare/EX items that have been added to the game to reduce real money trading, which I haven’t a clue how much this will affect me or the economy. Though, it seems there is now a Rare/EX version of the Kraken club, which I know tons of people are going to go after because people will want to Dual Wield kraken clubs, even though you can’t really go over eight attacks a round. Though, with this update that may have been changed. Another thing of note which I may notice some ninjas or others bitching about is the change to Raptor Mazurka. This, when used on a full party is a great provoke substitute, but not anymore because the produced enmity when it’s used has been drastically reduced. Maybe SquareEnix wasn’t happy about /BRD as much as we thought when they gave Bards Raptor Mazurka. Dark Knight has been getting a lot of love lately. Now they have two new spells to play with, Drain II and Dread Spikes. I really wish Black Mage got these spells or give something unique to Paladin to balance it out. I’m still waiting on my White Mage love SquareEnix…

The other XI related note is my Dynamis linkshell We Can’t Win. Lately I’ve been receiving a good number of complaints from some members of the forum that two members avatars are pushing too far on my site. I am compelled to agree with them in that they violate my Rule Number 5 (or Mr. Lampson’s Rule Number 11). The first was a girl doing some sort of dance in her underwear. I wasn’t having a problem with this one, but apparently others didn’t feel my sentiments. The second one, which really offended me, I overlooked for a while. It’s a picture of classic He-Man with a rather rainbowish background doing what looks like pelvic thrusts (you can only see his head) and then cut to another live action scene where something gets sprayed on someone (you’re supposed to draw a conclusion from this). After telling them both to remove it they openly defy me, citing their own egos. I then take it into my hand and remove it. So then the one with the He-Man avatar puts it in his sig. I give him a warning and get in a removal war with him, but he continues to put it in there, so I ban him. Then everyone else starts posting useless flames on the board. I shut it off to add some water. I don’t know if I will attend dynamis tonight because of it.

Seriously. I’d expect a leader to be a bit more mature than that. He hadn’t even come forth to talk to me at all about it. He kept defying me, thinking he was invincible or something. If you have a problem with me and ignore me, it won’t get better. *Sigh* I’m going to get to bed soon. I feel overly stressed about this.