eclecticism

Sometime between August 6th and August 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Olympics | You can get Games fix on TV, Web: The hype for NBC — which paid a tidy $900 million for the right to station 106 commentators in Beijing this month — is all about total hours: 3,600 in all. That's more coverage, the network likes to point out, than the combined total of all previous Olympic Games up to this point. It's three times the amount of Athens coverage in 2004. We'll take their word for it. But the vast majority of those hours are events broadcast either on NBC's broad palette of cable stations, or on the Internet, where a whopping 2,400 of those 3,600 hours translate to streaming on nbcolympics.com.
• Wash. letter carrier going full kilt ahead: A 6-foot-tall, 250-pound letter carrier is campaigning for the right to take off his pants. Dean Peterson wants the U.S. Postal Service to add kilts as a uniform option for men. (He's certainly got my support! Wouldn't mind mounting a campaign like this myself, but at almost one full week into my new job, I think it's a bit early to rock that particular boat.)
• Greyhound pulls ‘bus rage’ ads: Greyhound Canada said Tuesday that it is in the process of pulling a series of ads in an extensive, cross-country campaign featuring the slogan, "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage." The company made the move in response to last week's gruesome beheading murder on an eastbound Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Man., which claimed the life of Tim McLean, 22. (I'm sure I shouldn't think this is funny, but — at least in my mind — there's a certain amount of dark humor in it.)
• Beta beat: Pukka 1.7: An update to Pukka (which I use for posting most of my daily "neat stuff" links when I'm on my home 'puter) to add some new features and deal with the update to Delicious (including descriptions up to 1000 characters!).
• Best Seat in the House | Olympics: Planning, Packing, And Panicking.: Neat rundown by the Seattle Times' photographer for the Olympics of the gear he's bringing. Man, would it be fun to have some of those toys…esp. the three Nikon D3 bodies!

Sometime between July 31st and August 6th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Trading Places: The demographic inversion of the American city.: In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city—Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center—some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white—are those who can afford to do so.
• The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products: ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote…ACME has set the standard for excellence.
• Canada bus passenger stabs, decapitates seat mate: A traveler aboard a Greyhound bus repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated his seat mate, pausing during the savage attack in central Canada to display the head to passengers who had fled in horror, witnesses and officials said Thursday.
• EW Previews Star Trek Comic Con Posters - With First Cast Photos: The first official images of Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Uhura (Zoë Saldana), and Nero (Eric Bana). By the way, look closely at the eyes. (Yes, I'm two weeks behind. But wow does Quinto look perfect for Spock!)
• Ballantine Books to Publish Book Inspired by the Webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield: The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison. (Jim Davis gets a lot of cool points in my book for allowing this to happen.)

There’s been a few slight mentions of my new job here, and Dad asked for some more details. As has generally been the case for the past few years, I’m not going to say a lot about my job here, but here’s the basic scoop:

While I’d been tossing resumes at Craigslist postings for a few weeks before the move, I wasn’t having much success. Since I wanted to get away from mall jobs, I’d been concentrating on entry-level office jobs, generally along the receptionist/secretarial/admin assistant line of positions. I was sure I could do the work, however as my resume doesn’t really stress the skills I have (funny how mall retail and reprographics print shops doesn’t scream ‘office capable’ to many people), I wasn’t having much luck.

I eventually did get one interview, but I ended up turning it down. I’d applied for a receptionist position, but over the course of one phone call and an interview, the position shifted into being a glorified delivery driver, delivering and assembling copiers on-site for clients. Not only was it pretty far removed from what I wanted or had applied for, but the guy interviewing me set off a lot of warning flags — denigrating the rest of the crew during the interview (he wanted to hire me because I came across smarter than the “idiots” and could supervise them) was just one. On top of that, he would have required me to cut my hair to something “respectable” — a request that seemed a little odd coming from a man with fading, but still quite visible and legible “FUCK IT” tattoos across his fingers. Even though I knew I needed a new job, this just didn’t seem like the best option for me, so I turned it down.

That afternoon, I got a list of employment agencies in the Kent area and took off, intending to drop my resume off with a few of them to see if I could get any hits there. That ended up being a much better way to approach things.

My first stop was at Express Personnel, and though they normally operate on an appointment basis, they were able to do a walk-in interview for me. Though the interview started a little shaky — there was a bit of confusion as to just what I was aiming for, as I didn’t really know the best way to say “I know I’m smart, capable, and I’m desperate to get out of retail” — but pretty soon we started narrowing things down. I took typing, ten-key, and keyboard data entry tests (90 words per minute, over 10k ten-key keystrokes per hour, and over 12k keyboard keystrokes per hour), Word and Excel proficiency tests, and a Wonderlic Personnel Test (with a score of between 36 and 40, if I’m remembering correctly, well into the higher reaches of what’s expected), all of which worked together to convince my interviewer that I actually did have more than two brain cells to rub together, and might be worth placing somewhere.

Over the next week, Express set me up with an interview at a prospective employer, I had an interview with them, and a few days later, got the word that they liked me, and I would be starting soon. Hooray!

My first day was last Friday, and so far, I’m definitely enjoying this. I’m a front desk/receptionist/admin assistant person for a packaging materials and supply business. Duties are pretty much as you’d expect: answering phones and forwarding calls, greeting visitors, taking care of various paperwork, filing, tracking e-mail, and so on. I’m only on day three, but I’m doing my best to get the hang of everything as quickly as possible (and really, the actions are all easily within my current realm of knowledge, it’s mostly procedures specific to this office that I need to learn).

Some of the best perks, though: $12/hr, a nice change from the $9/hr + variable commission I was earning at Kits, a full 40 hours a week, and a regular workday 8:30am-5:30pm, Monday to Friday schedule. I have evenings, and weekends! Reliably! Every week! I’m not going to have to show up at a mall at 5 in the morning on Black Friday anymore. It’s only been three days and one weekend so far, but Prairie and I are really enjoying the new schedule.

So there’s the scoop on that. I’m part of the normal working world now.

In happier news: first photos of the new apartment!

Here’s what you see when you walk in the front door. Bookshelves along the rear wall, the deck (which has become our favorite spot for breakfast and dinner, thanks to the patio furniture that Prairie’s dad gifted us with), our new couch and chair (brand-new furniture, right from a furniture store — we’re really turning into adults, aren’t we?), the fireplace, entertainment center, and dining room.

Another view of the living room, this time from the door to the deck. The three bookshelves on the right will gain a fourth as soon as we can add one, every shelf on those is double-stacked with books.

My office. In the last apartment, my office doubled as the guest room, but now it’s primarily just my office, only acting as a secondary guest room when we have enough guests to need it.

That’s because with a three-bedroom apartment, Prairie now gets an office of her own, instead of having to camp out in a corner of the living room, and her office is now the main guest room. It’s also very girly and pink, which is just the way she wanted it!

There’s also two bathrooms — but those are bathrooms, and not terribly exciting to take pictures of — and our bedroom, which we don’t feel needs to be broadcast to the world. That’s our room, after all.

We’re really enjoying this apartment. Lots of space, not nearly as cramped, and as we specified wanting a corner or end unit, we’ve got enough windows to get a good breeze keeping the place cool at all times. Since we’re on the third floor, the trees outside keep things nice and private, so we don’t have to worry about people peeking in the windows at us (a pretty common occurrence at our last complex). The deck looks over a small playground, so there’s almost always kids playing out back.

Joke all you want about living in Kent — and I’ve already heard more than a few cracks from Seattleites who don’t get why we’d want to be in the suburbs — but so far, we’re liking it a lot.

Finally — after far too much sturm und drang — we’re back up and running! Well, mostly. The most important parts, at least.

As of the last major update, I’d told Speakeasy to take a flying leap. After getting done with that, I called Qwest to see what they could do directly (our other option is Comcast, who I just can’t trust my ‘net service to). Qwest was quite helpful, and told me that they’d be able to have a DSL ‘net connection and DirecTV service installed and active on Wednesday the 30th, with VoIP phone service up and running a few days after that. That sounded reasonable to me (it was the same timeframe Speakeasy would have given me if I’d been willing to give them yet another chance), so I gave it a go.

On Monday, Prairie and I got to talked, and decided that it’d be a good thing to make sure the DirecTV install tech was going to bring a tripod mount for the satellite dish, as we’re not allowed to mount anything directly to the building. I called DirecTV, verified that a tripod would be in the truck, and then the service rep told me that if I wanted, I could upgrade one of the DirecTV receivers to a DVR version for free. Free is always a nice price, so I said sure, go ahead.

Wednesday was supposed to be the “go” day: DirecTV between 8am and noon, a Qwest tech on site to do the physical connection by 5pm, and the DSL modem hardware arriving sometime that day (it’s sent directly from Qwest, rather than having the tech bring it with him). Prairie went off to work, and I sat here at home and waited for the DirecTV tech.

And waited. And waited. And eventually, noon came and went, and there’d been no sign of the tech. I called DirecTV, and things immediately went all pear-shaped, as the first person I talked to told me that she could find no record of me in the system, and dumped me off on someone else who was in another department and was of even less help. I called back, got a different representative, and they were able to find me — only to tell me that, though I hadn’t been informed of this during the call, when I upgraded to the DVR receiver, the rep had had to cancel my original install and reschedule it for Sunday, Aug. 3rd. There’s nothing I can do about this, unfortunately — and I was quite vocal about this being a pretty sour first experience with DirecTV — so that will be happening Sunday morning. Still, the TV is the least important of the three pieces of the communication puzzle.

After venting to Prairie for a few minutes, I took a walk to calm down and check the mail to see if the box from Qwest with the DSL modem had arrived. It wasn’t in the mail, but when I got back to the apartment, there was a Qwest truck sitting in our parking spot. The tech had just finished up hooking up the DSL connection, and he said that we were live, all we needed was the DSL modem. Qwest ships those by UPS, so it should show up before 5pm. So far so good — I knew that at least part of the process had worked correctly — so he went on his way, and I waited for UPS.

And waited. And waited. At 5pm, I went down to check to see if UPS had given them a box for me without putting a note on my door. Nope, no go. Back home, and by 5:30, I was back on the line with Qwest to see what the story was with the hardware. The guy on the phone clicks around a bit, and then tells me that there’d been “a delay” with the package, but it was in UPS’s hands and should be arriving Thursday (the next day). Well, okay — not terribly thrilling, but at least it was on the way, and he was able to give me a tracking number so that I could check up on it if I could find a way to get to Qwest’s website.

This morning, I used the WiFi network at Prairie’s office to check the tracking number. It turns out that according to UPS, they picked the package up at 7:35pm in Denver, CO. This would have been just after I got off the phone with the representative who’d told me there’d been a “delay” — apparently, the “delay” was simply not sending the package out on time, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’d been reading the tracking number to me off the bill on the package before running it down to the mailroom!

On the bright side, though, they did ship the box next day air, so it arrived at the apartment complex while I was coming back from Prairie’s office. As an added bonus, the box had the VoIP modem as well as the DSL modem, so after a few minutes plugging in cables and fiddling with configuration details, I was finally back online, and able to place telephone calls without chewing through the minutes on my pre-paid cell phone. It took two weeks after physically moving into the building (and a month and a half after starting the original service transfer process with Speakeasy), multiple friendly and not-so-friendly calls to the various companies dealing with various screwups, bailing out of one company and getting set up on another, and burning through at least $50 worth of pre-paid cell phone minutes, but it’s done.

So. Two pieces down — internet and telephone — and one to go — DirecTV. We’ll see how that goes come Sunday.