The Major

Blog

  • Work Requirements

    I’ve started to realize that I am going to be a picky bastard when it comes to working. I already have a short list of requirements, and the list will get longer in the next few years:

    current requirements:

    • I will not work in food service or retail. I loved my first job working at George’s Restaurant, but I am past that phase now. I don’t think this is a very hard requirement…but it still is one.
    • I will not sell things. I think I decided this one when I was in elementary school and they had you sell those things out of the catalogs. I spent so many hours selling, and all I got was this god damned plastic thing that you twirl around. I never did that catalog shit ever again. And then I worked at Ruby Tuesdays for a month once. It was only a month because I hated the customers, and I hated selling their stupid appetizers and margaritas.
    • I will not work core business hours every single week. This makes it impossible to get errands done, and more importantly, it makes it impossible for me to do volunteering. So I’d rather bear the stress of working night shift, for now, than to work business hours every week.
    • I will not commute more than 30 minutes each way, with a little bit of leeway if I get to take public transportation. My last job was at least one hour and fifteen minutes each way.

    future requirements:

    • I will not be on-call. When I am not working…I am not working, damn it. I currently have to do on-call once every three weeks (soon to be once every four weeks). We get paid enough for the on-call that I am going to buy EVDO (cell phone Internet) access just so I don’t have to be tied to my apartment for a week straight.
    • I will not work night shift. I currently work night shift, and I am starting to hate it. My sleep sucks during the week. I feel unmotivated until about 7am. Not to mention how annoying it is on my social life to have to leave at 12:30am every night.
    • Within a few years, I just won’t be caught making a living doing something I don’t care about. This will probably mean that I will have to be my own boss, which is fine with me. Of course, this is all easier said than done.

    So the point of all this is, I would gladly trade a better salary for having all of these requirements fulfilled. Hopefully within a few years I will be able to accomplish all of these things.

  • Chomsky quote

    I have been reading Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. What a great book. I’ll probably write more about it later, but here is a quote from it that I really like (page 188):

    “Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything — that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.”

  • At the Library

    Well, I am having a bit of an interesting day so far.

    First of all, I woke up again feeling a bit sore, with a slight headache. Nothing too major…but it definitely makes me not want to get up. And once I get up, it makes me not want to get moving. Weird…even my eyes were a little sore when I looked down.

    So I finally got out the door. I figured I’d head over to Starbucks for some headache medicine. Latte and blueberry muffin, it is called. Headache – gone. Anyway, so I found one open seat in the place, and took it. It was pretty obvious why it was an empty seat. Some random guy was sleeping on the other side of the table. I didn’t mind though. He wasn’t bothering me. It looked as though he had been in a fight – he had a nice little cut by one of his eyes. It kind of made me wonder what his previous few days were like. I’ll bet they were interesting. He had on the table, among a few other things, a pack of cigarettes and a folded up photograph.

    I finished up breakfast number two, and headed out the door. I hopped on the bus and…well bus people can be interesting sometimes. One guy, innocently sitting there, pulled out a can in a paper bag out of his inside jacket pocket and took a swig, then *ever so sneakily* put his disguised can back into his jacket. No one will ever figure him out.

    Then a couple of ladies got on the bus, and of course decided that everyone on the bus needed to hear their story. “Girl, I got real sick last night. Felt like my stomach was about to collapse…ate some spoiled meat. I was so sick I was cryin’…I was up at 6:30 this morning cleaning up the vomit.” Other woman – “How’d you know it was the meat that made you sick?” Sick woman – “I saw the hamburger when it came up.”

    I thankfully made it off of the bus without having my own vomit story to add to this post. I trekked a few blocks to the library, and boy, do I feel like an old man. I worked up a sweat walking up the stairs, and by the time I got to the section I was looking for, I was literally out of breath.

    I can’t wait until I am completely over this flu/cold/whatever. I like to think of myself as quite physically able. A few pounds overweight or not, I pride myself on being able to not just walk up some damn stairs, but also being able to run a couple of miles, lift something heavy, or in general just not feel lazy, which, valid reason or not, I have been feeling lately.

  • Doctor’s visit

    So I haven’t been writing on my blog as much, and yet my number of daily visitors has gone up from about 25 per day to about 45 per day. Does that mean that my blog is more interesting when I don’t write? Probably. Oh well, I will make you all suffer anyway.

    I’ve been sick since about Thursday last week (2006-01-19). I’ve had headaches ranging from none to mild to downright annoying-and-can’t-get-anything-done (I don’t care about grammar in this post.) And my muscles have been sore and tired.

    On Tuesday, I was at my worst, and I actually made a doctor’s appointment (actually a nurse practitioner’s appointment, but that just sounds weird). This is unusual for me – I usually don’t go to the doctor’s enough. So Alyssa and I went to the Kaiser clinic today on 10PSI in the front left tire, and I told the nurse about my symptoms. The nurse generally came off as…you shouldn’t have even come in. You should have called the advice line and they would have told you what I just told you. And what she told me was…get some rest, drink some water. You probably have a viral infection or the flu. I asked her if I should go to work tonight. If you think you have the flu or a viral infection, then don’t go in, she told me. Err…isn’t that what she is supposed to tell me?

    Yeah so basically, here I am at work, because it is a big hassle for someone else to cover for me. At least my headache is gone…but I am still a bit sore and out of energy physically. But my day and a half off of work I think was needed. I feel energized mentally and I am for some reason motivated to do the boring parts of my work! I’m going to try not to breathe on anyone and go home early if I start to feel worse.

    So the moral of this story is that the best treatment is usually having someone come over and bring you chicken soup and go buy you ice cream. Thanks Alyssa!

    Sorry if this comes off as jumpy. I don’t feel like proofreading tonight.

  • Steve Nash is a Flaming Liberal

    This article pretty much shores up Steve Nash as my favorite basketball player.

  • Macworld pics

    So I went to Macworld yesterday with the EFF. Overall, I wasn’t very impressed, but I did get some neato pictures. See below.

         

    Click here for the full album.

  • No cheap iBooks

    Blast!

    (Image removed because it was being used way too often on other sites)

    No cheap iBooks. I guess I won’t be using a Mac then…ever.

  • How to be Anonymous on the World Wide Web Using Windows

    I wrote a tutorial entitled “How to be Anonymous on the World Wide Web Using Windows“. Read that tutorial if you want to know why you should care and how to do it.

  • Winky Zed

    I present to you, Winky Zed:

    ;-0

    He is the guy that wants to be this guy 😉
    So he ends up deformed, and pissed at his creator for the rest of his life.

  • Sweet New Song

    Check out this sweet song that I just found.

    Thanks, The Sneeze.