Macaroniandtuna

Festival was awesome. Much fun was had. I suspect that rather than write up the whole thing, which never happens anyway (I never finish it, I only ever get like halfway through the Saturday of the festivals), I may just post random interesting Twitter things I sent while there. Because I sent a lot, and some of them were good. Of course, it'll be interspersed with actual writing and comments and such; this isn't about to turn into a clone-Twitter LJ. No way no how. Just once, though, might be okay.

I'll make a real post tomorrow evening after daycamp, for now I must shower and go to bed. Yawn.

Here we go, tomorrow morning at about 630. I'll be back Monday evening probably, and if I don't fall asleep the second I get home I promise I'll catch up on everybody's posts.

I'll be doing a voicepost or two while we're at Rothbury. Just a heads up.

Wooooo!

Just busy busy. Cedar Point last week was awesome, Daycamp is this week and next week, and Rothbury is this weekend (leaving Thursday morning). I'll try to catch up in the next few days, but no promises. This is that time when everything happens all at once.

I think the job interview on Thursday went pretty well. I hope. We'll see soon enough, I guess. They said it'll probably take another month or so before they make an offer to somebody, 'cause after the office I interviewed at makes their decision, then it has to go somewhere else for approval, plus security clearance type things, etc. etc. (although the actual security clearance process they said can take up to a year). And yeah. My résumé is okay-ish, my cover letter was awesome (I'm proud of it), and the interview at the very least didn't crash and burn, and I had good conversations with everyone I talked with there. I'm hopeful.

I'm going to Cedar Point with my mom and brother Tuesday through Thursday this week. Should be a good time, 'cause Cedar Point is awesome.

And...yeah. Lots of stuff happening in the next few weeks. Cedar Point this week, Daycamp session 1 next week, Rothbury that weekend, then Daycamp session 2 immediately after, and hopefully I get this job somewhere in there or not long after.

Umm....that's about all I've got right now. Bye bye.

T minus 3.5 hours. Here I go, wish me luck.

So this Firewire sound card I ordered. It turns out my Windows computer (the one I intended the card for) doesn't have a Firewire connection. I thought it did. Maybe my old motherboard did, I dunno. Either way I should have checked first before ordering. Although, come to think of it now, I ordered the FW card at like 3am on Thursday, many hours after I had ordered the mouse, at which point I couldn't have added a FW add-on connection card to the mouse order so I guess it doesn't matter much. Still, argh. No place around here I can find carries a quality FW add-on card, so I have to get it online, meaning it'll probably be Wednesday before I actually get it. Very annoying.

Still, though, I'm surprised both packages (the sound card and the mouse) got here today, considering how short it's been since I ordered them. Hooray UPS.

I'm loving this mouse already. It has an extra button that I don't have any particular purpose for (it comes with software that allows you to set the function of each button), and I'm not sure what Logitech intended it for ("document flip," whatever that means). It's kind of weird pressing the back button (and forward button, but I didn't have one of those before) with my index finger rather than my thumb, but that'll just take a couple days of getting used to. Also this dual-mode scrollwheel is awesome. One mode is regular clicky scroll wheel with the stop points, and the other is basically a freewheel, it just keeps going to scroll a long way really fast. It's sweet. An excellent use of $60.

Kinda sucks I have to spend more money to get this sound card to work, but I guess it'll be worth it because the only alternative is to buy a new motherboard that has Firewire built in, which is a good two or three times more expensive and involves a whole lot more work what with reinstalling all the cables and the processor and fans and whatnot. ::shrug::

I have an interview for the White House job next Thursday. Woo yay! Although, scary too, 'cause it'll be talks with the director (who I've been emailing with) and his five supervisors (one for each section of the office, I'm guessing). No idea how many separate talks, possibly six since he said it'll last for an hour or two. Scary. But I have a week to prepare and to make a list of every question I can think of they could possibly ask me and write out answers to study. Even though I know they'll throw some question(s, most likely) that I didn't think of, better to have to improvise on just a few questions rather than all of them. I'm shy, y'know, I don't do well speaking under pressure.

FiOS is annoying me. All day it's been acting sketchy, sometimes not even providing enough bandwidth to stream some music (that's 100kb/s or less, which is nothing for a broadband connection like FiOS is supposed to be). Argh.

I went ahead and continued my (short) spending spree last night. I bought the mouse 'cause it was a necessity (I'm now thinking that what's wrong with the one I have is not the button dying so much as it is whatever circuit sends button presses to the computer - the right mouse button is acting wonky sometimes too now), same thing with this. I bought an external sound card/audio interface to use with the Arduinome I built and the sequencer program I bought myself for my birthday. See, ( tech talk )

Phew. Okay. Now it's time to go watch Burn Notice and Royal Pains and relax for a while. G'night kids.

Logitech makes such great computer peripherals. I currently own a mouse, a keyboard, and a webcam by them, and I've got a new mouse on the way from Newegg because this one is dying. However, I've had and used this mouse nearly daily for a good eight years, I think, maybe more, and only in the past few days has the (right-handed) left-click button started acting up. So until my new VX Nano shows up in a few days or Monday (hopefully sooner), I've had to switch the settings so it's left-handed and I can use the right mouse button to left-click (confused much? :P ).

Anyway I went to Best Buy today to test out a few mice I've been looking at online, the VX Nano as well as the MX518 and VX1100, both by Logitech as well. The VX1100 is a newer version of the tech-lust-worthy VX Revolution that came out a few years ago. The MX518 is a gaming mouse that's more typical of a regular mouse, like the dying one I have now. Thing is, the MX518 and VX1100 have enough buttons and weigh enough that you pretty much have to put your whole palm on them, which I don't do 'cause for me it makes for slow and inaccurate mousing and 'cause it makes my palm all sweaty and that's not cool. So I just fingertip it, which works great with small mice like the Nano I ordered and also the lightweight mouse I have. Woo new mouse!

They keyboard I have by Logitech is also great. I got it way cheap at Best Buy 'cause it was an open-box item, originally I think $80 brought down to $30. What a steal. This is a great keyboard, even if I don't use all the multimedia buttons very often. I do need to take the keys off and clean between/underneath them though, it's been a while and I bet it's getting kinda gross under there.

The webcam...is great as far as I know. I've had it for somewhere around a year and a half now and I've never used it. Not once. I mean, I used the microphone to record sounds for a class project I had last spring, and I took pictures to test it out when I first got it, but other than that, nothing. It got great reviews, and for what little I've used it for it's been great (and damn well ought to be for as much as it cost), but yeah. Not much idea there. Still, Logitech makes great stuff, and that's the point here.

Exciting times, living here. I just had to go out and "save" a maybe 18-inch garter snake from my chicken of a dog (she gets all nervous and jumpy), except the snake wouldn't let me pick it up, it kept moving away. Eventually I guess I annoyed it enough that it slithered away and climbed a tree, at which point a very pissed off blue jay came and started screaming at us all, I guess 'cause it has a nest up there. So then I'm trying to keep the dog from getting the snake, which is only maybe three or four feet up the tree, and keep the blue jay, which was maybe 7 feet up, from attacking myself or the dog, and all the while the dog isn't listening even one bit (she's a husky, they're stubborn as all hell) and, given that she's poking around a tree with a pissed off blue jay in it, she's not very bright either.

Phew.

TIME: How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

Good article. It makes some interesting points, like the two-pronged conversation about the future of schools, one in-person and a simultaneous one on Twitter, each influencing the other. Also the one about the supposed brain drain the US has been experiencing since the 1970s and how Ph.D numbers are not and should not be the only measure of success and primacy of influence in the world.

I think Twitter is great, although there is a lack of good tools (client programs) for it that are properly customizable. Part of the problem is that it seems like most of them are exclusively for the iPhone. TweetDeck is the best one I've found, and it's cross-platform so not iPhone-only. Once you hit a certain critical limit of people you're following (assuming they're active enough), it becomes difficult to read all their tweets in a one-column linear format like on the Twitter site and on every client I've found except for TweetDeck, simply because of how many there are (LJ has the same problem, but they've got the filter groups to solve it). Columns and groups are the way to go, although even with them TweetDeck isn't perfect.

If Twitter really wants to change the world, though, they'll open up their software and protocol to more than just API calls (which is how all the client programs interact with the Twitter servers). Open source is the way to go, despite Facebook's success and Twitter's success so far. The strange thing about Twitter is that, as far as I know, they have no source of income. Despite having millions of members (and the colossal server costs that must generate, even with just 140 characters per tweet), they have no advertising and they don't charge anybody for anything, which makes me wonder how they stay financially solvent (they employ around 20 full-time people to maintain themselves, too). Odd.

My mom and I have the exact same conversation about jobs it seems like every day, certainly every few days at least. It frustrates us both to no end, yet still we continue.

So far so good with the White House job I mentioned in my last post (post is here, I seem to have forgotten to un-private it and I'm linking it here so you don't have to search back in your flist to find it). The director guy (Phil) emailed me back this morning. I had sent him my résumé on Friday, as requested, along with questions about what exactly the job entails. It sounds to me like its an even better fit than I thought; it's basically exactly what I've been doing for the past four years in my theory and history classes, just with government documents instead of pieces of music. But it sounds like Phil isn't expecting the position to be filled until the end of the month, and it sounds like he's still accepting more applications/résumés from people (though I don't know for sure, of course), so I don't know.

It's the don't-put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket thing. No word yet on whether he wants to interview me, but I'm doing all I can to show how good the fit seems, so here's hoping.

In the meantime, I'm expected to get a retail/etc. type job just to have some money coming in. No problem there, money is good. But that takes time too, and if, as I hope, this White House job pans out, working somewhere for two or three weeks max seems like not a good deal for them, meaning I won't get hired (not that I'm putting any of that on applications, but the "recent graduate" thing probably implies the possibility that I won't be there long, I'm sure, hurting my chances). Then there's the fact that for whatever reason places don't and have never really wanted to hire me.

Basically the point here is that I'm reluctant to even apply, the reason being is that it makes me feel like a failure and doing things that make me feel that way are obviously not things I actively want to do, whatever the other purposes. It just makes me think of my past history applying to places; in high school, I put in dozens of applications and the movie theater was the only place that even called me back. Last summer, I put in a bunch of applications too, and I was hoping then that having the theater as some previous experience, plus the fact that I was there for a full three years, would help me. Again, one single callback. I don't know what the deal is, or what I can do to improve my chances, nothing. Hence, I feel like a failure, and I don't want to put in more applications.

This paired with the suffocating feeling of being back home for good with no definite end in sight (more on this point in a later post), and, basically, I'm feeling very frustrated and stuck.

The Case for Working with Your Hands

Excellent read. Pretty long, but worth it. Given my current position of searching for a job, it's pretty applicable to me, too.

This part is important in general, of course, but it's background for the rest of this post: werewulf forwarded an email to me yesterday that had been forwarded to her by somebody who had had it forwarded to them etc. etc. through like four people about a job as Records Analyst at the White House (! - how good would that look on a resume?) Office of Records Management. The original email came from the director of the Office; he's looking to fill the position sometime in the next few weeks, which matches up nicely with my own (ideal) timeline. I've spent a few hours searching around trying to find out what the Office actually does and what the position entails, and I haven't had much luck as the office doesn't have its own website or anything and, as far as I can tell, it's fairly small anyway, maybe 20 people. What I have been able to glean is that it's a sort of intermediary between the White House and the National Archives, and I found mention that at least part of its day-to-day duties is to catalog/etc. letters from the general public.

What seems like an abnormally large number of people in one of the communities I'm in, sf_drama, are archivists or something similarly related to library/information science, and all of them seem to love it. Somebody in the email forwarding chain mentioned that they know someone who holds or held this position and loves it, as well. Now, given that analyzing things of all sorts is kind of what I do, both on my own as well as it being the ultimate take-away transferable skill from my undergraduate studies, the job seems (at face value - like I said, I don't yet know very well what it entails) like a pretty good fit.

But at the same time, in general I wonder and the above-linked article makes me wonder about this societal move towards an intangible economy and workplace in general, as opposed to working with your hands, building things or fixing things or creating things, as in centuries past. I know that I, for one, in addition to the analytical, intangible, brain-oriented part, also really enjoy working with my hands building things and fixing things and creating things. Just look at the constant list of projects I'm working on: my Arduinome, fixing my car's air conditioning, building things for daycamp, even such simple and frequent work as changing my car's oil, like I did yesterday. All of which, while they certainly have their cerebral components like figuring out how to fix something or take it apart without damaging it, are largely physical, tangible, "real" work.

This hands-oriented....I guess longing or something for times past also applies to more futuristic things. Look at the proliferation of touchscreens in the past few years. Tablet PCs, multitouch trackpads on laptops, cellphones, even ATMs. Touchscreens are obviously a more direct (tangible) method of controlling the ever more ubiquitous computers and machines and gadgets in our lives than the decades-old mouse or trackball or pencil eraser thing on older laptops, not to mention regular electronic keyboards, of which even the nicer ones don't have much in the way of feel compared to a mechanical typewriter, let alone a pen and paper. Cellphones are particularly interesting here in that some of them incorporate a sort of physical feedback mechanism despite being tiny electronic gadgets that have no real analog analogues, like the vibration in my phone (LG Voyager, VX10000) when you touch the screen, or the clicky touch screen in that one newish Blackberry.

Then there's the DIY and Maker and hacker, uh, "scenes" or "groups" or something like that. You guys don't read all the things that I do (I've started putting some of the things from my RSS reader I find interesting here, if you'd like to read), but the DIY and Maker and hacker scenes have exploded in popularity in recent years with people rediscovering "lost arts" (think steampunk) and creating and hacking together their own new things or finding new or better or cheaper or easier ways to do old things. The vast majority of which seem to pretty heavily involve creating or building or fixing or changing with hands and tools (which is not at all to say that there's no cerebral work going on here, quite the opposite in most cases - I'll say it's a 50/50 split).

I dunno. As with pretty much every post I write that qualifies as and is tagged as an essay, I don't have much of a point. More I'm just wondering and pondering about these sorts of things, and I felt like writing out what I'm wondering and pondering and seeing what you guys think.

Still haven't caught up with LJ yet. I'm going to try and make that happen today, assuming I can get enough of my stuff organized and put away. You don't really realize how much stuff you have until you have to move and organize and find places to put it all. Sheez.

I was wikipedia-ing around last night and I came across this. Ahh, the old days of the internet. I remember when the Google logo still looked like that. Sort of, anyway, they were out of beta and I don't think it had the exclamation point, but the font and all was the same. Waaaaay back in middle school. I dunno, it's just interesting to watch and remember how everything has changed so much and so fast.

Finally back online, after five days of only email 'cause I've been so busy with other stuff. It'll take me a day or two to catch up on everything.

Family's here. I'll most likely be incommunicado until Monday evening.

My website redesign is live. The only problem is that I never know what to write for "About Me" stuff, so that page is pretty sparse. Suggestions?

I also have yet to move hosts to NFS like I was talking about in that super-long post a few days ago. That'll happen tomorrow sometime, I think.

In other news...graduation is in four days. Feeling kinda apprehensive about afterward. I need to get a job, I need money. Both to pay my loans (oh god my loans), and to, y'know, have money. To do stuff. Kinda freaking out about that part.

Grades are in too. As, with a B+ in my Intro to US Gov PoliSci class, and I pass/failed my International Relations class 'cause I wasn't expecting to do very well. Passed that, no surprise, but I do kind of want to know what the actual grade was. Probably not very good, 'cause the discussion section was 30% of the grade and after the first few weeks I just kinda stopped going to that. Oh well. Not the 4.0 or Dean's List (the P/F takes me down to 13 graded credits, which isn't enough to qualify for Dean's List whatever your GPA) I was trying for at the beginning of the semester, but not bad.

Anyway. Bedtime. I think I'm actually going to participate in some senior week stuff tomorrow.

Now that I'm almost finished my website redesign....I want to change it. Argh. Partly for simplicity, partly for unity with something else I want to do, partly because that site navigation thing I've got in there (the links to the About/Contact/etc. pages) just looks strange hanging off the side like that with nothing to balance it on the opposite side.

Yesterday I was reading through some of my bookmarks, and I happened to come across this one, about calling cards (nowadays, business cards with personal instead of business information), and I figured, hey, I'll look into that, whether as something to actively give to people or just something to have for myself for whatever purpose. So I was searching around online, and it turns out that anyplace that would do what I want (the TEKYM text logo on one side, information on the other) charges kind of a lot, more than a dollar per card in some cases, plus it looked like all the ones that are even remotely close to my price range print glossy, stiff cards that just kind of suck from a texture/in-hand feel point of view (as opposed to nice thick cardstock).

I've found and read and not bookmarked this Instructable multiple times now, and in my searching I came across it again. It occurred to me that this would be an excellent way to create exactly what I want, and probably for much cheaper than I could ever have it produced by somebody else in small quantities like I need. I'm handy with stuff like that, and it's not an especially complicated process either, so I'm going to try it. What I want to make happen is to have some appropriately thick, textured cardstock that I'll emboss with the abovementioned logo in the center (maybe with an outline printed on, that'd be especially good) and then have whatever information around it. I think. Anyway if it comes out like I envision it (given my recent site design experience...probably not) it'll look really good.

Anyway. So I'm redesigning my site again. Or rather, just adjusting it, I guess, since the code is all there and works, I really just need to modify the images a bit (I'm thinking of moving the sitenav down to on top of the "roots"). Hopefully it won't take more than a few hours. I'm still not done with the subpages either. Their design is done, I just need to add the actual information to them.

Guess it's a good thing I've got another five days of not much of anything until my family gets here for graduation.

Finally finished coding my website. At least, the frontpage is, I still have work to do on the subpages. This is what it finally ended up looking like. Not quite like I envisioned, but I like it.

( Cut for a long post with lots of website babbling )

Phew. Okay. This has been an exceedingly long post. Now it's time to go do something not related to my website, since I've been working on that basically for two days straight between coding and trying to fix problems and creating the images the page uses and researching NFS and....phew. G'night kids.