The Census, Bras, Too Much TV, and Insane Colorado Weather

The Census hasn’t changed much as the last time I wrote. Or rather, things change constantly, but in minor ways and at a pretty constant rate. Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking to two people who a.) refused to answer some information and were b.) polite and respectful. I was getting afraid that either people would be polite and respectful, or would refuse information and be rather cranky about it, as that has more or less been my experience up to recently. I guess it makes me feel a little happier with humanity knowing that there are people who don’t agree with everything the Census is doing, but don’t feel like they need to take out their negative emotions about it on me.

So a little more then a month ago, I got back on the Pill. I just have some severe pain issues I’m dealing with, and as it’s been about 8 years since I’ve taken hormones, I’ve been hoping that some of the problems I had with it then would not be a problem now. Seems OK so far, and has helped with pain a bit, though not as much as I’ve been hoping admittedly, but in time hopefully that will improve. The only side effect I’ve really been noticing this time around is that whole “breast size increasing” thing. It got pretty drastic just before my period, then calmed down a bit, but I’m still at a point where I can’t wear some of my smaller bras, and I think it’s just going to stay like this. Losing weight isn’t an option – if I were meant to be any smaller, it would have happened back when I was dancing outside for 12-16 hours a week at Liberty. In any case, my BMI is quite normal and I eat my veggies and all that, so weight loss just to get into some bras seems a bit dumb. Thus, time to buy some new bras. Which is a pain, as I’m lucky to get bras as cheap as $40-$50 apiece because your standard American bra manufacturers don’t feel the need to manufacture bra sizes outside of the median range. British bras are much better with this, but they don’t exactly run cheap. So, time to scour the internet searching for deals.

One reason that I can get through some of the more unfortunate/stressful parts of being an enumerator is because I am currently obsessed with Babylon 5. We just started watching Season 4, and all I can think about all day is what’s gonna happen to all the poor Narns? And is the Captain OK? And why did Vir lose all that weight anyhow? Last Sunday we watched 9 episodes in a row, it was insane. I need to stretch this out more, because my mind is waay too absorbed in this TV show. I remember the crash I experienced after watching Seasons 1-3 of The Office in about a 3 day timespan, and I think the post Babylon 5 crash will be much worse then that. It’s an amazing show, though, and I wish more TV programs were written this thoughtfully.

Oh, and we’re supposed to get up to 4 inches of snow here tonight. In the middle of May. Yup, apparently Colorado springs are completely insane. Rumor has it that Richmond is sweating to death on and off in the 90s these days. I, uh, think I prefer the random snow. I really like how out here, even when it is really hot out, it’s not dripping. If anything, you have to keep drinking lots of water because of the dryness. “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” always seemed like a dumb phrase, but it seems to be true. Well, to an extent, as I’m sure anyone living in Southern Arizona or New Mexico or Texas in July might disagree with me.

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Random Babble| , , , | No Comments

My Adventures as a Census Enumerator

So last Monday, April 26th, I started the enumerator job. The first week was all training. I hear my group lucked out – our training was held in a county administrative building, the room we used was bright and comfortable and quite reminiscent of a few classrooms I had Comp Sci classes in back at VCU. There was a cafeteria in the basement with reasonable prices, and an area outside to sit and eat said lunch while admiring some very nice foothills.

The training lasted four days, and mostly consisted of learning how to fill out the mounds of forms that are a supplement to any federal job, plus sorting through the piles of confusion. We started off with one crew leader and two assistants. As of Day 2, one of the assistants was assigned somewhere else, and as of Day 5 the other was assigned somewhere else, and we are assigned a second Crew Leader. So two people in our training class get promoted to Crew Leader Assistant. And then, as of yesterday, our original Crew Leader leaves as well. Aside from the shifting of peoples, there also seems to be general disagreement on how to fill out various persnickety forms, as well as disagreement on how to accurately obtain the census data itself. The first several days, we operated under the idea that you tried to do it as to-the-letter as possible, down to the “Are you male or female?” question on the form. Then, a higher-up comes in to give us a chat, and essentially sweeps all of this away, suggesting that we guesstimate a range of things based on what see see looking inside someones door (assuming that the persona at the door is refusing answers, at least). Thus far, my strategy is to operate somewhere in the middle.

So I’ve been doing the actual door-to-door for about a week now. The job is a mixture of enjoyable, tedious, and “making me want to quit” awful. The last part, luckily, has been a minority of the time, thus far.

The Enjoyable: It’s been beautiful outside lately, and it’s kind of nice to have a job that gets me out in this spring weather. My first day working, I was in a neighborhood beside a foothill with a path, so I took the opportunity to hike up it during my lunch break. I saw several species of bird I’m not sure I’ve seen before, along with gorgeous views of the Front Range as well as an interesting perspective of the nearby Coors factory.

It’s also pleasant to talk to pleasant people. People have various reasons for not having mailed in their census forms, the more common being “I forgot” or “I didn’t get one” or “I didn’t know what to put for ______”. People are often apologetic about this, and happy that, since I’m at their door and filling out everything for them, it’s one less form they have to do. Though I have not run into the mythical person that offers cake and/or dinner, I have had several people ask if I wanted to come inside and sit down. Alas, the job forbids me from doing this, but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless.

The Tedious: First off, we meet in some really strange places. It seems the classroom we were using is not available anymore, but we still need to have team meetings every day. Despite whatever stories about Census waste that are floating around say, there certainly isn’t money to spend on meeting spaces. So we’ve met twice in Denny’s. After realizing that a.) curious customers/wait-staff are not good to have around when you have work to do involving private information, and b.) we were occupying the majority of some poor waitress’s section, we’ve moved on to meeting in the lobby of a county building, and will continue to meet in that less the ideal space until a local college lets out and we can take up residence in their library.

Also tedious is the forms. So many forms! However, I get paid for filling out said forms, and the more I do the forms the easier they get, so this isn’t really a big deal.

The big tedious bit is finding some of these people. See, my job is to count the number of people in a given residence on April 1st. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. First, I’ve got to actually catch the people at home. If they’re not at home, I leave a slip of paper on their door with my number on it. Hardly anyone calls. I stop by at all different times of the day, but as I’m only allowed to go to doors until 7:00 pm, there’s gonna be some people I’ll just never catch in person. If that’s the case, I need to find a proxy – usually a neighbor or an apartment manager. It can be a bit of a pain to find these people too, and to convince them to answer questions. Which leads to…

The “Making Me Want To Quit” Awful: The Census is something that people are legally required to do. The information is mostly used to make sure communities get the money they need for schools, roads, etc.. Aside from that, it’s used for statistical purposes. The IRS will never see the information, nor will US Immigration Services. However, some people are fearful for their privacy. The minimal information I need to get is, well, pretty minimal – the number of people staying at a residence, their gender, and age. Anything beyond that is a bonus, and if people are uncomfortable giving any piece of information, they can just tell me so and I will skip that question.

Unfortunately, some people do not seem aware of any of the information in the preceding paragraph. I had a person who called me, yelling about privacy violations and the illegality of what I was doing and how this is harassment. She insulted me, left me feeling quite harassed, and I dealt with it by crying in my car for the next 20 minutes and then drowning my misery in Burger King. I was seriously ready to quit after this. Yesterday someone slammed a door in my face – not nearly as bad as getting yelled at, but it still stung.

Maybe part of the problem is me – the last “customer service” style job I’ve held was Food Lion, and I didn’t interact with customers much beyond “How thin do you want your ham sliced?” Since then, the only customers I’ve had to deal with are web design clients – sometimes a pain in their own way but generally with problems that I have some power of fixing. With this job, though, there are people that are angry because they perceive me as the Government trying to invade their space. They want to vent their anger, and I’m a nice soft target. And while logically I can understand that it’s the badge I wear that they’re angry at, it still hurts to be treated this way.

It’s a definite minority at least – most people are at least compliant, even if not totally friendly. But, it still stresses me out and I have to fight off thoughts of “What am I doing wrong to make them so angry and why can’t I fix it?” Things like this simply reaffirm that I’m designed to work better with computers then with people.

The team I work with is really nice, though, and my various leaders are supportive. If nothing else, the job pays well, is flexible, and will be over in about 2 months or so anyway.

Friday, May 7th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Uncategorized| , , | No Comments

Adventures with AirTran and spending way too much time in airports

Drew and I attended his grandfather’s funeral in Indiana this past weekend, and it was a hectic weekend indeed.

A few days in advance, I booked flights for us on Airtran. Despite the short notice, I got us tickets for around $250 each (hooray for “web only” specials!). Our flight left at 11:00 am from DEN, so we left home a little after 8 in anticipation of traffic, the long trudge in from the cheapo “long-term” parking lot, and long security lines. Rush hour was quite mild, the lot we wanted was closed (thus costing us $10 per day rather then the much preferable $6 per day), and not as many people as you’d think travel on Friday morning it seems, so we had time to kill. A session of intermittent wandering and an unnecessary Burger King trip later, and we’re on the flight to Atlanta airport, where we’ll wait for a little under two hours for our next flight. And of course, it’s cancelled. Engine problems.

This is Atlanta airport, which is, to put it simply, ginormous. Meaning, there are lots of flights that go through there. Meaning, we were presented with a few options. We could fly out a few hours later to Indianapolis (and get compensated with free one way tickets for each of us, plus meal vouchers), or we could wait until that next morning to fly out (and get compensated with free round trip tickets, a free stay at a hotel, plus meal vouchers). The latter would have been fabulous, but we did have a funeral to attend the next morning, so later that day it was. The man who helped us with the new tickets and such was very helpful and definitely made up for the inconvenience of being stuck at ATL for the next several hours.

So we roamed. 6 concourses, and we checked each one for the elusive large food court that I vaguely remembered from being in that airport many years ago. Turned up in Concourse E. Incidentally, airport food is weird, pricewise. We noted that a McDonalds double cheeseburger cost $3.99 there, far above the standard $1.20 or so at a non-airport restaurant. However, at Qdoba, the prices were barely more expensive then usual (they may have even been the same price, for that matter). The lesson here: If you’re stuck at an airport, your wallet wants you to avoid Mickey Ds. Anyhow, using our fabulous meal vouchers, Drew got a Qdoba burrito + brownie, and I got a turkey wrap + hummus + brownie at a nearby sandwich shop. My wrap was rather tasteless, but I had that rather convenient hummus to smear it in, so all worked out well.

Did you know that the Atlanta Airport hides an art gallery? To get to the different concourses, you can take a tram or you can walk. In the area near Concourses T and A was a bunch of Zimbabwean art, including large sculpture. Pretty cool! In a few of the other walkways were large pictures of various nebula and other images from space. Also, it’s really awesome to be much closer to sea level then you usually are, we walked all over that airport and never ran out of breath once!

Anyhow, we caught the flight, where we had been very nicely bumped to business class. We were served drinks three times during our 1.5 hour flight, and we got alcoholic drinks each time, just because we could. They were served with the alcohol in tiny bottles, along with the juice in a cup with ice, and I wasn’t feeling inclined to drink much, so I saved a few of the bottles as souvenirs. Well, the sort of souvenir that one drinks later, at least. They’re still sitting in my bathroom, for some bizarre reason.

While at ATL, we also briefly ran into Drew’s cousin Leah and her daughter, who had flown in from CA and were headed to Indianapolis as well. Conveniently, our flights were to arrive at the same time (around 11:30 pm), so we didn’t end up inconveniencing anyone into having to make an extra drive to the airport (an hour away from our destination) to pick just us up. Also, It’s really interesting how airports are islands that are rather separate from the location they exist in. I think hub airports like Atlanta have a strong case of this – so many people from everywhere, using that location to get to somewhere else.

Anyhow, the weekend was rather sleepless. Funeral Saturday morning, and flight to catch on Sunday morning. We managed to get beds each night (thus making redundant the sleeping bag I’d brought with in anticipation of being on someone’s hotel floor), but had a really hard time sleeping. I started a new job Monday, but I wasn’t too worried about lacking sleep as we’d get back in Denver around 1:30 am due to the time zone jump, and I could nap as needed. But no, it was not to be.

We dutifully get to the Indianapolis airport on Sunday entirely too early, and waste time sitting around and looking unconscious. (Incidentally, IND is one of the prettier airports out there – lots of giant windows and a really neat glowing light display on your journey to the parking lot). Anyhow, we meander up to our gate and wait for the flight. I’m kind of excited about this flight – it’s on a smaller plane with only two seats on either side of the aisle, and it’s to Milwaukee, which is an airport I don’t think I’ve been in before. Anyhow, it gets delayed. And then, of course, it gets cancelled. And then it is handled in a very unfortunate manner.

I might have expected too much – IND is much smaller then ATL, with fewer options for reseating displaced passengers. It’s a Sunday, so there are fewer options there as well. And, we had the misfortune of already being bedraggled from a weekend of little sleep. Nonetheless, they seemed lacking in how to properly deal with this situation.

Someone tells us over the microphone that they are figuring out places on other flights to place us, and we’ll be dealt with soon. Soon turns into an hour, and some other group of people leave for some other destination at our gate. A line forms at the gate, which we’re not too keen to stand in as a.) the aforementioned tiredness and b.) we were never told to get lined up in the first place. Eventually, an Airtran employee works his way down the line, figuring out where people our going. All of the later flights to Denver are, quite unfortunately for us, booked. So, along with everyone else, we’re told to sit down while they work out solutions. A little while later, another employee calls up everyone going to Des Moines. So we sit as they work through that pile of people, waiting for Denver to be called. And we sit. Then, awhile later, I overhear one of the employees speaking to a few people near us about arrangements to Denver. Apparently they decided to scrap the “letting people know what was going on” method, and just talk to people in the order they shoved themselves in front of employees. My phone rang, and it was someone from Airtran calling about a flight arrangement. We could get to Denver today, which was good. However, we’d be waiting at IND for the next 6 hours to catch a flight…back to our favorite place ever, the Atlanta airport. Then on to Denver, to arrive there at the ever-refreshing hour of 11:30 pm!

We’re told over the phone to go to the ticket counter to get our tickets. The woman at the counter is confused when we mention our tickets, but eventually finds them, and hands them over, roughly brushing us aside. We had to wait until everyone else had cleared out before we could get back up there to ask about compensation for this.

The IND experience was far more disorganized then the ATL experience. However, at IND, we got free round-trip tickets, meaning we more or less profited from that weekend of flying, coming out of it with 1.5 round trip tickets for each of us. The wait at IND was long and tedious, though. No place much to wander at all in that tiny airport, and no energy to wander anyhow. The airport seats are not such that one could lie down on them, so sleep wasn’t too hot either. We did run into Drew’s grandmother Lung there, one the way back from the funeral as well, so we sat with her for a bit. No first class for our flights back, and we got in entirely later then I’d wanted, considering I had to be at work at 8 the next day.

Anyhow, this is my (entirely too long) writeup about our weekend adventures with Airtran.

Thursday, April 29th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Adventures,travel| , , , , | No Comments

Today’s Random Update

Andrew has finally seen The Wedding Singer, which is one of those movies that I like despite not caring for either of the lead people. I am a sucker for the 80′s. There’s also the fact that the only Adam Sandler movies I tend to enjoy are the ones where he doesn’t act like Adam Sandler.

We’ve been watching Babylon 5, which I am totally obsessed with. Interesting plots that totally carry over from episode to episode, hooray!

I finished reading “Characters and Viewpoint” by Orson Scott Card, which is an amazing book to read if you want to write good fiction, as well as get a better understand of human psychology and perspective.

We got on a bike path this weekend and tried to ride all the way out to Golden. Alas, we didn’t make it. I was stubborn about biking and, despite the fact that it was the first day in over a week that called for rain, I insisted we had to go. Meaning that we got drenched and had to turn around at some point. Oops!

I start the Census job in a week. This is good, as despite the fact that I have a gazillion personal projects to work on, I have a hard time getting motivated when faced with an expanse of free time. I am super productive when I have something else important that needs to get done, however! So, hopefully returning to a 40 hour workweek will help me organize my other time more efficiently.

I wish I could figure out what GS level a Census enumerator is. As this is a temporary position, I’ll be looking for a job to take on once I’m done with the Census. Having a govt. job can make it easier to get another govt. job, and if I already knew my GS level, that would be pretty useful. I’ll assume it’s either a.) something I’ll learn once I start the position, or that b.) as this is a temporary position, maybe GS levels don’t apply for it.

Drew’s job is doing well, he’s about to shift from temp status to being a part of the company – no pay raise, unfortunately, but he’ll be eligible for benefits and such.

And, that’s about all that’s been going on lately here. Oh, I did add a new fishie to my collection, as fishies are very important.

Monday, April 19th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Adventures,Random Babble,books| , , , | No Comments

Adventures on Meetup.com

So back when we first moved to Denver, I signed up for a gazillion different meetups on Meetup.com, as I figured this would be a good way to meet people and such. Not long after that came Meetup Phase #1, which consisted of going to two different hiking meetups. The first one I went to by myself.

As an aside here, I should mention that I have horrible socialization issues. I like people well enough, but I have some rather introverted tendencies. The more people I am around, the more social anxiety I have, and the more difficulty I have relaxing and actually being able to talk to them. This can be ameliorated by knowing at least a few people, or by having the people be “my type”. Not that I’m really sure what “my type” consists of, I’ve just found some people are easier to talk to then others. One reason I really liked doing Nanowrimo were the group get-togethers. For the most part, I felt pretty comfortable being a bit social with the other Nanoers.

Getting back to the subject at hand, I was really glad that the meetup was hiking – i.e. it’s sometimes hard to keep conversation going when you’re huffing your way up a giant hill. While I enjoyed myself, I didn’t feel like I “clicked” with the people there. (The fact that I am talking about “clicking” with people might just be further evidence of my introversion, as extroverts just click with people by default.) I also got the impression that the people there were a bit more into hiking that I was – I’m pretty clueless when it comes to equipment, beyond “bring a flashlight and a jacket if it gets cold” type of stuff.

Hiking meetup #2 was one Drew joined in on, where we showed up a little later then everyone else and hiked with the other stragglers. It was a similar experience to hike #1, with the bonus of getting rear-ended on the way off the mountain. Not that this was a bad thing: the $3000 from the insurance company combined with fact it only cost me $150 to order a tail-light and replace it myself was pretty nice. I can’t use my trunk at all, but the money was rather well-timed. In any case, it drove in my head a fear of driving on mountain roads when there was the possibility of snow, and we haven’t hiked in the mountains since. Still, hiking with both groups was as appropriately scenic and enjoyable as hiking is, and does have the advantage in safety in numbers (for the scaring off of mountain lions, pickpockets, etc). One of these days we might try another hiking meetup again, just to get out.

I/We’ve entered into Meetup Phase #2. We attended an Anime meetup at someone’s house last week. It was small, which made it easier, but still a bit of that awkwardness of “I don’t know any of these people!” thing, which only increases when in one of their homes. We watched a few things, some more interesting then others. The most interesting was Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, which I wouldn’t mind seeing more of at some point. There’s a larger anime meetup tonight at Red Robin, which we will hit up. I’m hoping there will be more casual anime watchers there, because at the meetup at the person’s house, I became aware of how little anime I’ve actually watched compared to these people.

That’s one reason I’m becoming wary of doing meetups, actually. Since they revolve around a particular topic, they attract strong devotees. There are many things I enjoy, but I’m not really *into* anything that strongly, not off the top of my head, at least.

This became even more apparent to me at the meetup I attended last night – the “web technologies” meetup. I went sans-Drew, and suffered some rather debilitating lack of social ability. The vast majority of things being talked about, amongst the people I was sitting near at least, went over my head. Comparisons of version control systems I’d never heard of, how nodes work in non-relational databases, etc.. I took notes, at least. Occasionally things would get mentioned that I knew about, but no one ever lingered. I did talk to some guy a bit about Drupal – I’m gonna try the Drupal meetup next as that seems like it would be useful for me. Oh, one other thing that certainly did not help my social capabilities – there were about 12 people there total, and I was the only female. I’m not really sure *why* this causes me socialization issues, but it does. I just tend to prefer mixed-gender groups.

I’ve got other groups I still haven’t tried out. Recently got removed from one Art group for non-participation. Should probably try to participate in the other Art group I’m in at some point. I’m an an Axis and Allies group for Drew’s benefit, as well as a more generic game-playing group for both our benefit, but we’ve still attended the events of neither. I should simplify my life and create the “Come hang out with me” meetup group. Too bad the website charges $$ for running groups.

Friday, April 9th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Adventures| , | No Comments

TV, wanderings, and worky work

So first off, we finished watching the first season of the Sarah Conner Chronicles. It’s pretty good! Second season will hopefully be waiting at the library for us in the very near future.

We finally got to wander around downtown on Saturday. My google-fu found free parking at a giant REI store, and from there we wandered through a park and along 16th street. Not as many wacky shops as I was hoping for, plus a Chick-fil-a that was astoundingly closed on Saturday, but the area was still interesting. We then wandered over to a park whereupon we were surrounded by pigeons waiting for bread. Not that we had any bread, but then they’re not exactly the brightest of birds.

pigeoncrowd

pigeon closeup

These guys were super tame. Super cute, too! Anyhow, after that we stared at the Mint and then headed back over to 16th street where I spent entirely too much money on chocolate that should have tasted better based on it’s price. Then we went back to the park by the river, where we ate said chocolate and a few geese decided we were planning on feeding them. Then we returned to our abode.

goose head

HONK!

Also, work is working. As I may have already mentioned, I picked up the Census job, which I start in a month. Also, I’m finally getting paid for the project I’m just finishing up, and am going to an hourly rate for further work. I also continue to stand around outside holding a sign. I suppose I’ve technically been fulfilling what I for awhile considered the ideal job situation: a part-time white-collar job and a part-time blue-collar job. I get physical AND mental exertion, the best of both worlds!

It is good to not be paranoid about monetary situations anymore. Albeit, I’ve been almost on the verge of finishing the redo on my professional website for almost 2 weeks now. One of these days, when I’m not staring at geese or writing these blasted blog entries, one day I shall finish it.

Monday, March 22nd, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Adventures,Photos,Random Babble| , , | No Comments

Happy Late Pi Day and Early St. Patrick’s Day!

So Thursday we’re having highs in the 60s, then Friday it’s snowing. Makes no sense! Then again, I prefer that to the alternative of “grey and drizzly”.

So I have a job. Or rather, in a month, I will have a temporary job. I got hired as an enumerator for the Census. It’s full-time, and the position lasts up to two months. Which is unfortunate in that I’d like a less temporary position, but is good in that it pays rather well considering the work, and will help me gain charisma levels as I will be working with the public and all. That plagues me – that I might look great on paper, but get me into an interview and I’m awful at reading people, or knowing what they’re looking for, or I’ve read too many conflicting articles on how to act in interviews and I can’t combine all the info into a perfect demeanor depending on who I’m interviewing with. Anyhow, work is good.

I’m redoing my professional site, which is almost but not quite done. Had another website that I’d built disappear altogether from the internet, which is unfortunate as I really needed a decent screenshot of it. It’s all built in OsCommerce too, meaning I can’t just open my saved version of the site. So I cheated and used a screenshot from the PDF file where I designed the site in the first place.

On a completely unrelated note, I can’t decide if I should go ahead and stop watching The Office. See, it’s been on a downhill slide since Season 5, and it makes me sad. There is that trope of “TV show goes downhill when the romantic tension is resolved” thing, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case here, which makes it all the sadder. The first episode I ever watched was an early Season 4 one, so I knew from the start that Pam and Jim got together anyway.

Here’s the problems as I see them: First of all, the actress who played Holly left the show unexpectedly to pursue other things, and I’m pretty sure they’d planned out a bunch of episodes with her in them. Meaning the writers didn’t have much time to hash together a new plot direction. However, I still don’t understand why they brought Toby back. I mean, when Toby left, he was pretty clear about not coming back. But they brought him back anyway, and just didn’t give a strong reasoning for having his happen. Same thing with Ryan, in fact. It just made no sense that he would come back happily as a temp again. If I could, I would just erase the whole first chunk of Season 5, and start with the Charles Major arc.

The Charles Major arc was pretty much the best thing about Season 5. There’s a new interesting character, with all the new dynamics that go with such things. Plus, Michael left and started his own company. The show is more interesting when everyone isn’t in the same position they’ve been in for the past several years – office environments naturally evolve, people get promoted or move around, part of why it was so interesting in Season 3 to have Jim in a new office, or why Season 4 was fun with Ryan promoted above Michael’s head. Anyhow, Michael’s new company brought Ryan back into the story in a much more realistic fashion then the beginning of the season’s attempt to do so: I don’t think Ryan would happily return to being a temp from his previous status as a higher-up in management, but working as a salesman in Michael’s company is pretty appealing compared to working at a bowling alley. I was also happy to see Vicram again, as he was a fun character.

Incidentally I’m not too happy with Ryan’s character in Season 6. Apparently he went all indie/arty with no good explanation. I like the Sabre storyline, but I can’t help but feel like it’s too little too late. Also – I hate all the schmaltz surrounding everything Jim and Pam do. Like the wedding episode, completely unnecessary sentimentality! Made me greatly miss Phyllis’s wedding. Also, the recent baby episodes, too mushy. Not overtly mushy, but the mushiness was definitely still there.

I’ll probably still keep watching, just because I’ve been watching for so long. Now that Darryl is upstairs, maybe there will be some interesting interactions there. I’ve felt the lack of warehouse interactions ever since Roy disappeared, and especially since Kelly stopped dating Darryl. I’d like to see more episodes where Kelly and Kevin have stronger roles, as they are both ridiculous and fabulous. This seems to be the problem with TV shows in general, though, there are the lead actors and there are the supporting actors. Too bad that sometimes the supporting actors are more interesting then the lead actors!

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Random Babble| , | No Comments

Social Icons Font Set

So there’s all these websites that have little square icons allowing you to RSS the site, link the site to another site, etc.. I’d been reading about CSS’s ability to include a font in your stylesheet using @font-face, expanding the number of fonts you can see on a web page beyond just the standard set. I was thinking it would be neat to have an RSS symbol that was a font character rather then an image, so I downloaded FontForge. At some point in all of this I decided to convert a bunch of the most often used social networking icons into font characters, 26 in all. Useful for embedding into websites, or just for dumping into Photoshop to make your own icon images. Check them out!

I used CSS3 to spice them up. These are not meant to be a font set in and of itself, but more of my playing with CSS to explore the possibilities. Also, if you are viewing this in IE or an older browser, the icons may look a bit bland.

There is a lot that you can do with “box-shadow” involving layering shadows of different offsets, radius widths, and colors. I was particularly happy with how the LastFM icon came out.

I really wish there was a means of using CSS to apply shading directly on top of text. As I know of no way to do this, I had to figure out other means for icons that require multiple colors. The Picasa logo uses 5 different colors in the logo on a white background, so I instead made a 5-colored background using box-shadow and placed a white logo on top of that. This has it’s limitations, though, as I couldn’t quite get the green background segments of the Newsvine icon to look as they should.

There’s no way to outline text using CSS, but you can create an outline using by layering multiple “text-shadow” elements together, offsetting them in all directions around your text character. I used this on the AIM, Yelp, and Netvibes icon. This isn’t a perfect method, as you can tell by the jagged edges on the AIM icon. It works quite well on 90 degree angles, though, as you can see from the Netvibes icon.

The biggest pains were the Flickr and Delicious icons. Delicious is simple in that it just uses two squares, but it’s two differently colored squares. So I made one solid and the other comprised of lines, and hoped for the best. It’s still a little odd looking as it currently is. The Flickr icon is the same situation, but with circles instead. Most of the icons exist as just link html, but this one is a link within a span tag. I set the font character to be a blue, and then the link’s left margin to be a negative value, meaning you only see one of the dots. I used “text-shadow” to create the pink circle on it’s right. Incidentally, this is the only one I couldn’t figure out an IE CSS hack for, so it’s not quite usable in IE if you want the Flickr icon in it’s multi-colored glory. StumbleUpon was also a pain, and one I still don’t have looking quite right.

These icons are not all that ideal right now, and here’s why: First off, IE does not support CSS3 tags like text-shadow and box-shadow. Meaning that, though these are for the most part functional in IE, they’re not all that pretty. Also, not every browser supports @font-face right now. If this entire post is confusing to you, as all you see in the icons above is the alphabet, you’re probably using one of those browsers. I look forward to all of these things being adopted by the browsers that currently don’t support them, which will hopefully be sooner then later.

View a page with just these icons on them, or download a zipped file of the HTML, CSS, and fonts for these icons. Or, you can download just the font from the Open Font Library.

I’ve also got the icons posted here on varoper.com, essentially showing everything already displayed in this post, but with far fewer words and minus the fabulous yet jarring fish background.

Sunday, March 7th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Programming,projects| , , | No Comments

On Writing, Designing, Games, and Beer

So I had this dream last night where I was a character in some Bleach episode, and I was trying to build PDFs out of CNC router parts. This sums up my last couple of weeks pretty well.

The website is launched, though there are still things that need to be done to it before it is finished. Still, I now have the time to get back to working on my other projects. I’m about halfway done with the font I’m working on. I now have piecemeal Drupal modules that I would like to clean up and stick on their site. I also again had the revelation that my professional website looks bad and needs a makeover. I get that revelation on a regular basis. This is good in that I’m constantly a.) learning more about design and programming and b.) upgrading the website to reflect that knowledge, but is a pain because this is a chunk of work to have to do on a regular basis. Am also thinking of shifting it into Drupal, to give me another Drupal site and to give me more Drupal experience. The site is just straight PHP right now, before that it was built with the ever popular duo of M4 + shell scripts. Which made me feel pretty cool to have a site built in them, but was not all that applicable to the job direction I was trying to go in. Oh yeah, I also have my super-cool new site idea that I wanna build and launch at some point. And there’s still converting the rest of the php into classes at Writaur.com. And making a version of Storypath that uses gamebook/rpg character elements.

Apparently none of this was as important to get done as beating Peggle Nights yesterday. It’s a free download if you create an account at PopCap games and say “yes” to getting a newsletter. Not nearly as exciting as Oasis, but it’s still pretty fun, and is apparently effective at distracting me from the pile of things I have to do. I’ve still got most of the “Challenge” levels to beat, so it will pose as a potential distraction for awhile to come, I suspect.

I made it to the second round in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest! The first round was where they read your 300 word pitch for your novel. 1000 people get to go on to the second round, and as they accept only 5000 entries, and the Young Adult category was a new one for this year, there’s a good chance I was accepted for my lack of typos and misspellings. Still, I was in the top 20%, so that’s good. The 2nd round is where they read the first 3000-5000 pages of my story. I really hope the style of the novel won’t be a hindrance – as it’s a “Choose your own adventure” style book, and the contest requirements said it had to be the first 3000-5000 words, so they will be reading a rather disjointed story indeed.

And on a final note, tonight will involve beer. Apparently the Coors factory is about 15 minutes away from where we live, and a coworker of Drew’s invited us to go take the tour. Seems that they’re very generous with their free samples, and the end of the tour involves being able to try up to three of their products. We still need to determine the “Who’s driving?” strategy of all of this, hopefully the factory is near enough to downtown Golden, CO, that we can stroll around and sober up a bit. The best part about Colorado is that, were we ambitious, there is a path about a 10 minute’s walk away from where we live that we could bike on to this factory. It’s a 9 mile ride, which I don’t think is bad at all, but Drew might have difficulty with. Still, we’ve got a stationary bike that he’s been using, so maybe come Springtime we can try the ride and see how it goes.

Friday, February 26th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Programming,projects| , , , | No Comments

Work, Dollars, Anime, Etc.

Work:
Teleconference yesterday, for the ultimate goal of getting this website launched in a week. Not fully finished, mind you, but finished enough to function. I’m currently working on making php generate a PDF form based on products selected + other stuff, what once seemed impossible is now at the “persnickety” level. This means that I for the most part understand what’s going on, there’s a bunch of fiddly things for me to do, and there’s the occasional out of left field error to work through.

So once this project is done, I can get dollars. And add this to my resume, and talk about all the Drupal modules I’ve built. In theory, this might make someone else want to hire me? We’ll see about that.

I’ve got a fabulous idea for a new website. It will involve cute food, it should be relatively easy to execute, and it will give me something to design as well as something to build with Drupal. I think I’ll have a better shot with getting development jobs if I hunker down and focus on a specific area, and at this point I’m liking how Drupal works and would like to get as proficient in it as possible.

Dollars!
Oh wait, that’s related to work, hah! Liberty does not give me many dollars. However, I am currently wearing a bra I can usually only wear in the summer, which is good. For those who are not me and/or don’t gain weight like me, this means that Liberty is saving me from the winter weight gain I always get. I really like working there, too. Some people get really excited seeing me out there with my sign. And surprisingly, it’s really rare to get obscene gestures. Usually every other time I’m out there, someone will flick me off. Once in every 8 hour timespan is acceptable, I suppose.

I blame Liberty for my cold. My never-ending cold, which remains at a low-grade “headache plus weird nose” status. See, it’s those free cookies. I cannot resist eating the cookies, and neither can all those disease-ridden children that come in attached to their parents. Liberty has an excellent set-up for people with kids: a little table with coloring books, other books, etc. plus those darn cookies.. And I’m sure I ate a cookie which was already touched by some germy kid. Le sigh.

Anime!
We finished the first season of Bleach. Definitely mixed feelings on it. I really like Chad and wanted to see more episodes where he was the focus. I wanted to see more background development on the characters – like the fact that Rukia is 40+ years old and stuck in this teenager’s body in a strange world. All we got about this was her not being able to stick a straw in a juice box. I really wanted to learn more about her situation. I mean, maybe it comes later, but at this point she’s not even on Earth anymore, so I’m not sure of the likelihood of this. I also don’t like the Hollows. Sometimes they stand around and talk to Ichigo and others in cunning ways, sometimes they stand around and make grunting noises like animals. Also, they like standing and waiting patiently while the main characters have dramatic conversation. Does not make sense. Anyhow, we may come back to Bleach later on, but for now we’ve moved on to other stuff.

Started watching Revolutionary Girl Utena last night, watched the first two episodes. I’m lost for a lot of it, but that’s pretty normal. It’s got some pretty interesting stuff going on so far (not the least is the song in the middle of both episodes singing about trilobytes, the Apocalypse, etc).

In other news, I need a tea vat with a drinking tube that just follows me around everywhere, it would be magical.

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010, by admin, Filed under: Random Babble| , , , , , | No Comments

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