Skin of My Teeth
May is a cursed month.
More specifically, every 3rd May. May of 2005 I quit my job, hoping to take a few months off for personal projects and get a job in September. But what ended up happening was I didn't get a job until January, got laid off a few weeks after that, and then didn't get a job again until October.
The significance of this is it mirrored my previous tenure. I started at almost the exact same time, doing pretty much the same job, and I had it sitting at the back of my mind always that history would repeat itself. It always does, Halloween is also a cursed day, I have computer problems every other Halloween.
But I wasn't going to let a cycle start, especially since I was planning on moving out. I wasn't going to let May curse me. Near the end it took one final shot at me, making me sick since last Wednesday, but I have done it. I have made it into June, employed, and moved into my new apartment. Sick, but out of May, ready to continue on.
Tags: personal
Anthony's Song
Been pretty the last little while, between my schedule changing to four ten's and my preparing to move at the end of the month, so I haven't got much to talk about at the moment.
Date posted: 12 May, 2008Tags: music personal
Small World, Small Internet
A few months ago, I sold one of my domain names. I had an offer to sell it for a rather impressive sum, being that it was just for the domain name only and not a site purchase offer. I had bought the domain name to host my resume and portfolio a few years ago while I was looking for a job, and so it was just sitting dormant now since I am currently employed. So I decided to sell it, a tale I covered much more completely in the review for my XPS M1530. After it was transferred, I was curious as to what they were doing with it. The registrar on it was a shirt printing company, as far as I could tell, so I wasn't sure what it was going to be.
Finally, a site has been given to it. It is the home of a program I read about in the news a few weeks ago, a music and acting program for students in the East Coast. It's called the Fidelity FutureStage: http://www.futurestage.com
The most intriguing thing about this, though, is who is running it. Fidelity Investments, an investment firm, not someone you would immediately think of doing something like this. But not that in itself. The intriguing part is my father is an employee of Fidelity Investments, and has worked there for over 20 years now.
Not even six degrees, that's like two at most. The internet is a much smaller place then it seems.
On a side note from an observer's standpoint, the page developer was a little inconsistent on their coding. The title has it spelled "Futurestage", without the second word capitalized, but the meta information right after it and the rest of the page has the proper capitalization of the program.
Tags: internet personal typography website_design
Another Voice Redux
I didn't realize how often we have British actors playing American parts in movies before, really. I've talked about this before, with Hugh Laurie's role in House, I had never known he was British until I saw an interview with him on TV.
Most recently I've observed this in the new film 21, starring Jim Sturgess, about some college students in MIT card counting to make big money at Blackjack in Vegas. Jim Sturgess in this is playing an American, so speaking with a northeastern US accent. Watching it, not considering him himself and having seen him talk with his regular accent, it's hard to tell that's not how he normally speaks. If I hadn't seen Across the Universe beforehand, I would have no idea that Jim Sturgess was British.
Along the same lines is Joe Anderson, who also played in Across the Universe. I'm just now watching the extras for the movie for the first time (another topic for another time), and only now realized he was British. He plays in that movie with a Jersey accent, and until seeing him talk in the commentary, I would never have guessed that it was not his regular accent.
Tags: accents movies
Return to Normalcy
Finally done with training, so now I am finally back to a normal work schedule, instead of working until midnight or later.
Just to update what I've been up to, I spent most of today updating the templates I'm using here to switch over to PivotX when a final version is finally released. There's a few things I need to tweak still that aren't working yet, but it will be ready. I also noticed, in this process that the individual entry pages have the links list twice, on the right where it is supposed to be, and also on the left instead of the About box. I'm not going to bother fixing it on the current Pivot template, but it will be fixed when I update to PivotX.
Other than that, not much for now. I finally posted an update to Skewed, and now I'm past the point where I was getting stuck because it was weak. It actually ended up a little better then I originally expected, rereading the card in StoryLines and the previous parts for Gregory and Yukito showed me it actually had more to do then I thought it would have and also something I actually needed to cover, so it didn't end up being a total throwaway section. Now I'm going to spend a little time arranging some cards I had sitting unfiled, because I know more of where the third act of this story is going so I can place some of them.
I'm also liking the fact that Writers Café has a Linux version, which I had forgotten about earlier until I was checking for updates to my Windows version while working on the templates earlier. I had set up a VMware virtual machine with Ubuntu on quickly to run Apache so I could host the PivotX beta and work on the templates, and I threw the Linux versions on there. Works perfectly, exactly the same as the Windows version. It's nice to have my tools available in both Linux and Windows.
Also, finally a version of WordPerfect is out that supports OpenDocument, so I can finally switch back to WordPerfect over OpenOffice, but still keep my documents in ODF format and portable to other people. It doesn't use the Text Services Framework for it's text area though, unfortunately, meaning I can't use the full Vista Speech Recognition functions with it either, instead being stuck with the lackluster "Dictate Anywhere" function.
Tags: personal skewed software voice_recognition website_design