Penny Hero (dot) Net

Edit: comments are fixed now! stupid wp-comments-post.php had the wrong permissions again!

About a month ago, my domain expired. I did not know this… because I am a web slacker extraordinare and never bothered to check if my blog was still accessible or not… in fact, I only noticed it when I tried to ssh into my server and download the flac copy of Tundra 4 by Squarepusher I stashed there months ago so I could listen to it at work… and discovered that my domain was dead.

:( I’m sorry dear blog readers (yes I’m talking to both of you.)

Anyway… some IM Fu later with my domain name registrar super hero (also my previous roomie) had my domain name up and running again. I now appreciate you, dear blog and dear blog readers (yes, both of you again) even more now, so I decided to write a blog post.

*clears throat loudly*

In the news:

I’ve moved into a new apartment as of today. I’m very happy about this. :) Extremely!!! happy about this. :) It’s a 1 bedroom place, with a full kitchen and a freaking washer and drier!! Friends came over to help me move, which was awesome and amazing. new and old friends (Thank you Polvi!!) Then the whole mess of us went and hijacked another friend’s TV to watch season 3 of BSG, which I bought the day it came out, and have been dying to share it with people before season 4 starts.

So that’s the news.

In Other News: PranQster is the best beer on the planet. srsly.

Part of the first comment at the end of The poet who could smell vowels, which celebrates René de Saussure’s life.

“Thank you so much for your deeply human portrayal of the man Saussure. So often, as you say, we do (or perhaps must) reduce these human idea-factories to a few memorable phrases or greatest-hits concepts. And I think Saussure, because of how widely racinated, how utterly necessary, his ideas have become over so many disciplines, is more vulnerable than most: we think we ‘know’ Foucault, have a grip on who Freud walked around as, don’t feel we need to worry that we might take Marx or Barthes out of context, while the Genevan philologist cited in every liberal arts term paper and dissertation on every continent remains just a surname in a few thousand footnotes. Now at least we can see him in color.”

–Antheia Laplante, Seattle, USA

It’s apparently 150 years since he was born.

Have I mentioned that I miss school? My regrets about not taking more math and science are now in fierce competition with my regrets about not going hard-core into critical theory.

I met Randall Munroe today.

Still sorta swoony. :) I’ve now got a signed copy of this comic:

I’m totally regretting being so damn shy and not talking to him more. *sigh*

In Other News: After nearly 5 months of no music in my car (due to that stupid theft thing), I have a new stereo in my car! I even got to learn how to install it! (Funny though that my friend seemed so surprised that I already knew how to strip wires.)

So…

Somehow the permissions on wp-comments-post.php got changed and was giving anyone trying to leave comments an error.

Funny… it hasn’t stopped the spammy comments from getting posted. How DO they DO that?

If you tried to leave a comment on my last post proclaiming that I am indeed alive, feel free to leave another one. Or something.

Howdy world. It’s been months and months and months since I’ve written, and I’d like to fix that!

What’s happened to me since my last post? Here it is in ROUGHLY chronological order:

• I got the job.
• I moved to Mountain View
• Had a Bad Person come to my apartment and had to call the police
• Had my car broken into and my stereo stolen
• I met some friends from HDK in person
• I moved OUT of my Mountain View apartment for safety reasons
• Got my car partially fixed (Thank you Shadowfox!)
• Polvi moved down here finally
• Polvi and Friends and I went to Palo Alto and poked Facebook
• Went to a SMASHING PUMPKINS CONCERT

I’m generally having a good time at my new location and my new job. Making new friends, traveling some. I went back to Oregon once for our family reunion, which was awesome.

So in short: life is good, even when your car gets broken into.

My next short-term goals are to finish doing all the official things related to moving (like registering my car… I wonder how bad the fine/fee will be). I still have a set of shelves to build and pictures to hang up, and such.

We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve got a job interview in a few hours, and I’m nervous as heck. My stomach is threatening not to cooperate, and I have been half awake for the last 3 or 4 hours.

I also had all kinds of crazy dreams. Like, sitting in a lounge waiting for my name to be called when about 15 minutes before my interview, the reception desk calls me over and says I have a phone call. It’s a client from my previous job asking for SEO consultation. In my brain, this gets mixed up with my current situation, as if it’s the same company, and thus I really should take this call to impress my interviewers.

So I talk with this guy about EngineWorks services, his options, how to make a site-map, etc. Then he puts me on hold because he can’t remember the URL to his website and has to go find it.

Suddenly I realize that I’d been laid off from EngineWorks a month ago and that this call is taking a really long time. It’s now 15 minutes AFTER my interview should have started, and i glance into the smokey room of rumpled businessmen who are to interview me and see their disapproving looks and their impatient glancing at their watches.

It was an odd dream. First dream I’ve ever had where I could read a clock. I thought time wasn’t supposed to work in dreams.

okay. i better start getting ready. *is still nervous* I think I’ll turn off my cell phone when I arrive.

I find this very odd. Two of my friends today asked me “How’s working for Comcast?” or something like that. (Granted, one was a postcard dated March 2… but I GOT it today).

I don’t work for Comcast… Never have. Probably never will. It’s just a very odd coincidence that a friend asked me over IM “how’s your new Comcast job?” while an unread postcard asking roughly the same thing was sitting on my desk.

Odd. haha. :)

Comcast was giving us trouble with our internet… which was PREVENTING me from working for a while. That’s really the only connection.

So, in the first serious attempt I’ve made to keep myself from playing WoW for a day, I dusted off my guitar and tried to see how much I remember.

My fingers hurt like hell, but it’s a good hurt. :) I stumbled through a few of the Pumpkins songs I know, some Third Eye Blind, and the few original songs I wrote back in High School (still no lyrics for any of those).

Then I remembered I had a folder of songs and tablature somewhere. Dug it out. Unfortunately, it was full of base tabs from when I was in a band (for what, a month? haha). Most of the tabs were for songs I had wanted to play (Like Naveed), but never got brave enough to actually suggest them.

Anyway, in the back of the folder, I’d stuck a 3-ring notebook with half the pages already torn out. What was left was a bunch of poetry, maybe attempts at song lyrics actually–I barely remember writing any of it.

I found this little snippet though, and I think it’s brilliant. I have a sneaky suspicion that I stole it from someone:

Jazz me up,
I’m like a bad mood soda
Feel your fizz carress my sky.
Do I?

It’s sitting all by itself above some really crappy verse in a different colored pen as if I’d thrown it in there really rushed and then didn’t know what to do with it.

Anyway, I like it. I’m not sure if it’s mine. At the edge of my brain, I think I remember trying to come up with music for it. But of course failing miserably. I’ve been told that my “original” music sounds like Christian pop-rock (no offense… but happy bouncy “rock” music is not my cup of jasmine tea.)

More quotes may follow. Wish me luck with taking a break from WoW. The rest of my life is calling. :)

Yesterday evening, I finally launched the new design for my WoW guild’s website. If you feel like it, check it out: A Horde Dazed Knight. It’s not 100% finished though. (12/15/07 edit: I’m no longer webmaster. This site is Shadowfox’s creation.) Some things I still need to do:

• create thumbnails for all the images (instead of just resizing them in the html)
• Add some way to contact me about site problems
• perhaps link to mozilla and put a happy note somewhere in the footer saying the site works best in Firefox (which of course it does)
• Finish the archives. I’m missing the Gnomes’ Night Out stuff
• Fix some random grammar typos and a link in the guidlines
• Pull out the non-guidelines info out of the Guidelines page and create a “resources” page in the main nav (with Dirge’s permission).

These are not in any particular order. :)

In Other News

My job sort of starts today. I’ve had a million technical difficulties since I got hired involving Comcast, which prevented me from being trained with everyone else and caused me to miss one meeting (the second meeting I missed was due to my own stupidity… grrr).

The project seems cool. Improving an existing technical document for ease of translation later. Very awesome and right up there in “some of my most loved things to do… fix other people’s writing!” (no joke. seriously. yes, we’ve long established that I’m a nerd.)

The software we’re using requires windows though… which forced me to hose my linux box… at least until March anyway.

And last but not least

I had an interview with Google last week. That was very very exciting. I don’t know exactly how “well” I did, but I know that I gave a pretty accurate picture of my abilities and my skills, so now it’s up to Google to decide if they want me as a tech writer. I’m crossing my fingers, but Plan B is still a strong possibility in 2008. Yay for more debt! At least this would turn into a USEFUL degree.

I’ve just been informed at the end of the day yesterday that I’m being laid off from my job.

I’m less upset now than I was yesterday. Went out and got pretty tipsy at a bar with my roomie and his friend, which was nice. I’m taking it all surprisingly well. I was recently contacted about a technical writing contract job, so I think I’ll try to go for that now that I’ll have a full 40 hours a week to commit. Could be pretty sweet.

I’m finishing out the month, which will be Super Fun(tm) but at least it will let me earn ONE full paycheck on my great big raise they offered me in December.

*sigh* Never work for a startup unless you have a safety net.

I need to keep reminding myself that employment is not a need-based program and probably never would be even if Ayn Rand had died before learning to write.