tragic effects of smoking and alcohol

I was cleaning out my bedroom at my parents house this week and found a printout from this website, which was one of my favorites back in the day.

Some amenities.

Seen in the classifieds:

Nice 1 & 2 BR Apts in C-U

On & Off Campus. Some amenities.

"well, look, I wouldn't say this place has a lot of amenities. but, it's not like there are no amenities! at least there's some!"

i'm proud of myself

I got up before noon on a weekend!

spelling

Turns out, if i use that spell check, it tends to find a number of misspelled words! I guess I'm spoiled by Word and it's automatic red squiggly characters.

polishing the resume

Well, it was just one of those days at the office. I sat impatiently in a meeting, just waiting for it to wrap up so I could rush out the door and work on my resume. And I discovered that, for someone who wants to quit immediately at the end of as many workdays as not, my resume is surprisingly out of date.

I'm actually not at all good at job hunting--the only position I've really ever successfully sought out was a student job while I was in college. I started my career in the computer networking field at my high school while I was a student there. First I did it for class credit, and that developed into a paid part-time job, and over the summers I worked for the school full time. While I was in college, I still worked for the school district when I was back home for breaks, but I decided that I should get a job at school as well, and my search began. I applied for a student network assistant position, and they interviewed me. There was a whole committee (of three people) and everything! They were pretty impressed with the level of experience I had for a student, and hired me. After I graduated college, they offered my a full time position, and being clueless as I was (am) about job searching, I had nothing else lined up, so I took it. Fast forward five years, and I'm still doing the same thing. Now you know why I'm bored.

I did have one other unsuccessful experience in trying to get a job. Around 2006, I decided that I was stuck in a rut and wanted to get out. (And you can imagine how deep the rut is now after two more years.) I had been sporadically applying for jobs, and I was called for a phone interview by one of the places in Texas. I thought it went okay, but I didn't really hear anything from them afterwards, so I assumed they weren't interested. Then, out of the blue, two months later, they called back and said they'd like to meet in-person. So I went down for the interview, which seemed fairly normal I suppose. They mentioned that the position had actually been open for over a year, and that the reason it had taken so long before they interviewed me was that they were waiting for another application to come in from someone that had anything close to my qualifications. For a search committee with a search that was well into its third month for a position that had been open at least a year, they seemed unduly dismayed when I told them it would take me probably four weeks before I would be able to start (2 weeks notice, plus 2 weeks to relocate)--"It's getting pretty urgent for us to fill this position," they said. Anyway, the next week, they sent me an e-mail saying they went with another candidate.

So, I'm officially 1 for 2 in job interviews, and 0 for 1 in job interviews that are not for a part-time student position. Here's hoping I have better luck this time around.

on family vacations

So I just got back from a family vacation to Boston. On the whole it was an okay trip I suppose. I think Boston is great, and I like my family most of the time, but somehow the combination of the two is, as a chemist might say (not that I would know since I haven't taken a chemistry clsas in ten years), reactive. This is not a recent ephiphany of mine; I distinctly recall a diatribe about an ill-fated family trip (not even a full vacation!) to Chicago that I posted to a previous blog that was so old that I had to use an HTML editor to add postings. (Perhaps someday I will be unlazy enough to dig them out and repost some of those entries here, although if I recall correctly, that blog was fairly depressing and consisted mostly of rantings about how much I hate everything. In other words, not wholly dissimilar from this one. Additionally, if I'm being unlazy, I think a higher priority should be actually posting to this blog with any sort of frequency. Now that I think about it, though, reposting old blog entries sounds like considerably less work that writing entirely new entries, so maybe I could just do that and avoid that pesky unlazyness altogether.)

Anyway, I think part of problem with vacations is the fact that being around the same three people 24 hours a day for a week is bound to lead to trouble, especially when a number of those hours are spent couped up in a small hotel room. Another big factor is that my parents are just fairly incompatible with city life. This trip I finally realized how it's possible for them to be content to live in my little hometown. They were always complaining about walking too fast, or too far. "Let's not go there, there's too many hills." And they have no taste for adventure, either. Of course I like to have a reasonable idea of where I am and how to get around, but I'd be content to just wander around a city with no specific destination in mind. Not mom and dad. "Better turn around, looks like we're getting away from the touristy area!" One night we were trying to find a place to eat dinner. I wanted to wander around a bit and see if we could find an interesting place to eat. So we went outside, and my mom said, "Oh no! The convention center is right here! I'm sure everything will be really expensive. We need to just go back to that California Pizza Kitchen." (To be fair, they were also pretty tempted by that Au Bon Pain we'd seen.)

to be!

Preface: I'm going to take a risk with this post. The risk is that I will be opening myself up to all manner of criticisms about my blog postings' grammar, usage, and spelling. But I find what I'm about to describe so offensive that I feel I must take that chance.

Okay. I must tell you all (by "you all" I mean of course myself, since I'm fairly certain no one else reads this) about one of the most annoying affronts to the english language I've heard in quite a while. It's the ommission of the words "to be" after the verb "needs" in a phrases such as "my suitcase needs to be unpacked" or "my car needs to be fixed," which are instead rendered as "my suitcase needs packed" or "my car needs fixed." I fear this usage is becomming more and more common. Every day I hear statements at work like "Office 2007 needs installed" or "this hard drive needs replaced." It's infuriating, really. Seriously, does anyone actually think this sounds correct? At least the folks at alt.usage.english are on my side.