Five interviews and no new job. A few rejection letters to add to the pile. I suppose you just need one job, though.
I bought a new hard drive today because I thought it would make my life easier. Well, I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I’ve just been moving things back and forth and it’s all a big mess. But that’s my hobby. What fun is it if the computer works fine?
The team I was rooting for won. They weren’t playing that great, but the other team was worse. I suppose they’re not used to playing in a downpour, but that’s the way football should be played, in some sort of weather that isn’t just plain sunny.
I was rooting for Peyton Manning because he seems like a nerd. A big tough quarterback nerd, but still a nerd. Plus he can make fun of himself on commercials.
I continued on my weekend of laziness and I suppose watching the game is all I really accomplished today. But that’s what a weekend of laziness is for, right? Now that I think about it, I should have finished my taxes but, eh, I still have some time.
I spent most of my day building and rebuilding the software on my computer. It never did turn out any better than when I started, but it’s one of those things that you have to try to see if it works. It’s utter geek foolishness, but it keeps me off the streets.
I did watch all the movies I currently had checked out from Greencine. Unfortunately, it was one of those times where I watched the movies and thought, “Now why did I put those in my queue?” First was Fear of a Black Hat, which was described as the Spinal Tap for rap. It was funny, but odd-funny like Spinal Tap. Next was Beautiful Girls which was directed by Ted Demme and was supposed to be better than Next Stop: Wonderland according to some people on IMDB. It was pretty good, but for some reason Next Stop: Wonderland is one of my favorites and this movie, while good, didn’t grab me in the same way. But still not a bad way to spend the evening.
When it comes to 40-something guys living with their parents, the, “L,” word is probably, “Loser.” But I’m an Asian guy so I have to live with two crazy elderly parents because, well, it’s what Asian guys do. It made more sense back when my dad was, “taking care,” of all of the bills by putting everything into a giant pile. The pile is still growing, but at least the bills are now in MY giant pile, and I actually pay the bills before they get, well, stacked up somewhere weird.
This just leads into how I’m really tired now. Wednesday I worked until after 8PM (and I get to work before 8AM, unlike a lot of geeks) and there’s a certain amount of screwing around I have to do before I go to bed. Checking my email, checking some web sites, watching a few more episodes of Scrubs that I’ve probably seen a dozen times already. You get the picture. I get around 5-6 hours sleep on a work night. Imagine how happy I was to hear my mom running through the house yelling, “YOU’RE LATE FOR WORK!” at 5:20AM. She has a talking clock that tells you the time, in Japanese, when you push a button on the top of it. She dropped it on the floor sometime last week and it was telling her it was 14 hours later than it should have. So when it was 5:20(AM), it said 7:20(PM). So anyway, at 5:20, about 5 hours after I finally got to sleep, she woke everyone else up. I think my dad had been in bed for 2 hours at that time. (Don’t ask about his sleep patterns. I’m not real sure about them, but he’s 90, so he can have the sleep schedule of a house cat if he feels like it.)
I should probably get to sleep now since I’m sure something will wake me up tomorrow morning.
There sure weren’t a lot of people in the gym today. February 1 and already people have fallen off the wagon. The John McEnroe guy was there with, “My Librarian,” today. Somehow Dave the Trainer and I have our own, “Librarians,” who are women at the gym who could possibly be librarians but who knows? Here in Portland most everyone wants to be a librarian.
We have one of the best (or perhaps the best) public library system in Portland, but they sure weren’t very happy when I called the reference line and asked what their process for entering books was. Specifically, I found out that J. K. Rowling announced the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I was unable to place a hold on the book. The last few times, the library had the book in the system and ready to go when the announcement hit the news. Well, they have a new computer card catalog, and not only that but they were quite snarky about it being a kids book.
Honestly, I have tons of books and I quit buying them a while ago. It’s hard to get rid of them, even though we have one of the best book stores in the country here that buys used books every day. So I just check them out at the library and take them back when I’m finished with them. I also don’t feel guilty about checking out the Harry Potter books because I’m paying for the library and the books with my tax dollars (which I voted for, by the way) and I usually read them cover to cover on the first day. This is where I realize that I probably need a life.
One of the trainers at the gym told me, “Dude, you need some color. Look how white your legs are.” I told him it was to blind my enemies.
I spent 12 hours at work today, trying to finish the stuff I said I’d finish. I’m not exactly happy about spending hour after hour in the lab with the guy behind me trying to cough up his lung, but I said it would be done on Thursday and I’m getting close. Thank goodness.
Due to the length of my involvement at work, I did little else. However, I can comment on the frontier culture of Portland, where you can wear your jeans to the fancy restaurants and also find most of your neighbors at the strip club. OK, so not all your neighbors, but a lot of the ones I know. Well, maybe not my neighbors because they’re not from around here in the first place, and they’re all rich and snooty nowadays. But, for the most part, people who are like neighbors but aren’t my neighbors, like my friends.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure what my dad would have to say about it, but my mom doesn’t care.
I think I blame my friend Megan, who used to enjoy going to strip clubs in the past. I figured if she enjoyed it, I didn’t have to feel guilty about enjoying it myself. I am full of guilt to begin with, but why not feel guilty about other things, like how you can’t have a minimum wage job and try to do too much, like trying to pay rent and eat in the same month with Portland housing prices the way they are. Depending on the crowd, I bet the dancers at the strip clubs make a bit more than minimum wage.
I have to find other things to think about. I am unlikely to go anytime soon, but that’s because I can’t stand the smoke and I also should lay off the drinking. Both seem to impair my ability to sleep, and I get too little to begin with.
Besides telling a guy who is supposed to be my project lead that he should know what I’m doing and shouldn’t be asking me to describe the project, I had another sign that I should be doing something more agreeable to my personality. I was told that we needed an odd number of samples because we needed to find the median value.
What I should have done:
Said, “Sir! Yes sir!” and generated an odd numbered set of samples.
What I did:
I asked a, “Bioinformatics Associate at OHSU,” who is also an, “Adjunct Statistics Instructor at PSU,” if I could just take the middle two values of an even-numbered set and averaged those if I didn’t have an odd-numbered set. (His answer was something like, “Well, duh.”)
I asked, “Why?” a few too many times before someone gave me an answer, but it turns out that Megacorp’s legal department doesn’t trust us with calculators, so we have to have an odd-numbered set and just pick the middle value.
I was late to the gym today and got lots of grief about it. (I was at work later than I wanted to be, and I’ll be at work even later tomorrow.) When I was there, I asked Timmy the Architect if he liked his job and he said he did. I figured if an architect didn’t like his job, then all was lost. He thinks I would fit in somewhere that’s more laid-back and social than Megacorp. I think people get the wrong opinion of me at the gym. I’m trying to be a curmudgeon here.
Oh, I suppose I told Timmy and his trainer Dana that I wouldn’t be exacting my revenge on anybody at Megacorp because I’m too pretty for prison. You see, I’m a very serious person when I’m at the gym. (An example is how I call one of the martial-arts-like exercise classes Mooooortaaaal Kooombaaaat! Hee hee, I just cheered myself up by looking for Mortal Kombat on youtube.)
Late today I was told by one of my project leads (there are two) that I have a Thursday deadline. I asked what I needed to finish by the deadline and he told me to ask the other project lead. So I sent out some email. After receiving no reply, I found the other project lead at his desk and asked what the deadline was for. He also had no idea, but he told me that he’d just attended a meeting (with the other project lead) and yes, I did have a deadline. Fortunately for me, before I started sharpening a machete and started muttering to myself, I talked to the project manager and she told me that I needed some repeated data so the legal department would allow us to publish the data. Finally, a clear answer. Now I know what I need to do for Thursday.
In any case, that was the end to my frustrating day and the promise of some long days again. Looks like someone recycled the comics page, too, before I read it. Someone has a case of the Mondays.
OK, so nothing much has happened, and yet I can make a list of it all. I watched a Korean monster movie with friends, and it was oddly different. Entertainingly oddly different, though. You almost always saw it coming. I saw it with a bunch of comic book artists and I got over my fanboy tendencies to enjoy the movie. I also got my hair cut, which is not a big deal, took a nap, and went on a, “voluntary team building exercise,” which is code for, “went to the titty bars with a bunch of guys from work.”
So today I’m really tired. The trip to the bars was kind of odd and not as much fun as the places I usually go. The clientele was younger and the women looked more like Barbie dolls with fake tans, bleached hair, and surgical enhancements. (I wonder what sort of cool surgical attachment you could get to help you hang onto the pole?) On our way out there was a county sheriff just waiting for us to get into our cars. I got a ride, because I had both of the beers I’d allotted myself and we were headed to more places. I had Sprite for the rest of the night.
We went to a seedier establishment with real women (you could see the bruises from where they hit the pole, for example) but one of them grabbed my head to purr in my ear and I hit my arm on the bar. That’s not something that happens that often, and not something that I need to happen again, but I did like the place more than the others. We went to another suburban sort of place with lots of showy smoke and more Barbie dolls.
Being sober at 12:15AM in a strip club is not something I’ve experienced that often, and I don’t intend to experience it again. I just got up and walked the 2 1/2 miles back to my car, and drove home.
So only two beers and I was tired today, probably because I’ve spent the last two nights staying up late trying to get my computer to do something silly. I had a hard time washing two cars. I can never just wash my own car because my mother complains that I didn’t wash hers. I can now say that my mom’s Camry is a behemoth compared to my Civic. I also bought new toner and accordian folders so I can do my taxes, but I spent more time trying to get my computer to do my bidding instead of doing anything productive. I’m still not finished with that, either.
I was told today that the word on the street is that I’m difficult and hard to work with. This is probably bad for my continued success at Megacorp but, honestly, what did they expect? I have no idea where the complaints are coming from so I can’t rebut anything. I did send out an email that the equipment they gave me to make videos was making things look like crap. I heard the word, “crap,” was thought to be unprofessional. “Looks like hell,” and, “What a pile of shit you gave me to work with,” would probably not have gone over real well either.
Ah, well. I guess it doesn’t bother me that much. I’ll still keep going to work and doing my job. That’s why they pay me, right? I suppose they really want me to enjoy what I’m doing as well, but that’s not in my personality.
The worst part is that what bothered me more is one of the attractive women at the gym came in with this horrible looking dude with a big mop of hair and a headband, like John McEnroe from the early ’80s. Not that I’ve ever talked to the woman or anything, but really, John McEnroe-ish dudes?
So what has been happening at work lately is:
One of my problems is that I’m quite emphatic in my resistance to their demands. I really should learn to just jump to step 4. That’s the engineer in me. Especially the MIT engineer in me. I ended up staying late to finish up the thing I was complaining about this time. I’m not so clever.
The reasons I pay a personal trainer are myriad, but one of the reasons is that Dave the Trainer appears to know what he’s doing and I end up finding muscles in places that I thought were fine until I find out just how sore they can get. For example, he had me doing some really simple crunches while I held a cable up to my neck. There wasn’t much weight on the cable and I didn’t think much of the crunches UNTIL TODAY. I bet if I got enough sleep the soreness wouldn’t take a full day to show up.
I was talking to my friend Megan today and I made some joke about Lisa Loeb. Not sure why Lisa Loeb popped into my head, but apparently she went to Brown with a neighbor of mine. By neighbor, I mean someone I’ve known since I was in grade school. That was a long time ago. I’ve only been to Brown once, back when I was at MIT, and I remember walking around with my mouth open because some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen were there. I, on the other hand, went to a school populated by troll-like creatures.
I remember at one point people used to think I was smart. I should just have my MIT diploma tattooed on my chest to remind people of that fact.
Speaking of dumb things, I got my $280 video card today, replacing the 10-year-old thing I had in my new wonder-computer. I put the computer together to be a, “gaming machine,” and the only game I’ve played on it so far is, “Bedazzled 2.” (If you don’t know what that is, imagine Tetris but fewer moving pieces.) So now that I have the new video card, I can attest that, “Bedazzled 2,” looks really good on my computer. (It’s addicting, too.)
I should probably buy a game for my gaming computer.
Well, the resolutions people are thinning out at the gym. Thank goodness. And some of the attractive women I haven’t seen around are back. In fact, one particularly attractive woman who saw me fall off of a Swiss ball is now back, and so is Ryan the social worker who I chat with every time I see him. Yeah, so he’s not an attractive woman, but he is a nice guy.