The Boring Review

I’m sure I’ve told this story here before, but I’m going to tell it again, and there’s nothing you can do about.
Well, I suppose you could not read it, but that’s not going to make a difference because it’s not like anyone reads any of this anyway, so knock yourself out. Either way, I’m still going to write it.
Years ago, back when I was in college and married, I was sitting on the living room floor in our apartment bagging and boarding my comics and resisting the natural temptation to just sit there and read them, while my wife and a friend of hers were sitting at the kitchen table.
In the midst of my organizing and archiving efforts, I sort of paused and started staring off into space.
Eventually my wife noticed this and asked me what was the matter.
I said, “I was just thinking...isn’t the whole point of having a hobby that you’re supposed to be doing something you enjoy?”
The point was, I like reading comics, and I’m only a collector inasmuch as I hold onto the comics after I’ve read them. I’m not terribly interested in the preservation and organization thing, and the fact that I engage in any of those things is, again, rather incidental. If I’m going to keep the comics I’ve read, I need to preserve them, and if I want to be able to read them again I need to be able to find them.
This idea came to mind again today not because I’ve got hundreds of un-bagged comics sitting around in disorganized piles, but because I’ve spent most of the day drawing.
In parallel with that I’ve also spent most of the day swearing, and saying things like, “Do I even know how to do anything? I don’t know why I’m even asking, as the answer is clearly, ‘No, I don’t.’”
Fucking hobbies.
Seriously, why the hell am I spending hours just pissing myself off doing something that I ostensibly enjoy? I’m obviously not doing it for money, and it sure as hell doesn’t feel like I’m doing it for love.
In any case, before sitting down to “enjoy” my hobby, I did the usual Saturday morning routine, which involves getting up after getting much less sleep than I normally do during the week yet, paradoxically, feeling much more rested, sitting around for a while, then showering and dressing and heading out to the comic shop and to go grocery shopping.
I actually did a little less sitting around, so I ventured out into the world earlier than usual, and as a result got home sooner than usual.
I didn’t have to buy much in the way of groceries, as I didn’t need much, and on Thursday I’ll be heading to Michigan for a week, so there wasn’t really much point in buying a bunch of stuff.
I’m looking forward to seeing the family, and getting away from work, though having an abbreviated work week means having to get a bunch of shit done before it’s over.
Speaking of work, on Wednesday, per the conversation with my boss on Monday, I actually wore a suit.
This led to a lot of surprise and amusement on the part of most of the people I work with, who all assumed that I was interviewing for a different job (“Interviewing for that VP position Jon?”), or that I’d been to a funeral.
A lot of people referred to me as Gordon Gekko (the character Michael Douglas played in the movie Wall Street), and while I did feel an urge to go around telling people that I wasn’t happy with the second quarter numbers, I thought about saying, “I’m more like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho,” but I don’t need to add fuel to the whole “secret serial killer/serial killer waiting to happen” fire, so I kept my mouth shut.
For my part, wearing the suit caused the song Suit and Tie Guy by D.R.I., the video for which is posted below, to keep playing in my head. This was fine by me, as I actually like the song - most of you probably will not; D.R.I. is clearly not for everyone, but yes, mother, I do call that music - and it served as a nice change of pace to have a song that I actually like stuck in my head.




Beyond that, not much of interest has been going on. On Thursday I discovered that the hot intern, whose internship was ending on Friday, will become the hot contractor next week, which means that she’ll be around for a while longer and, assuming she ever was, she’ll no longer be off-limits.
I mean, theoretically it means that she’ll no longer be off-limits. In practice I remain Jon, so it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Speaking of interns, on Friday during our staff meeting we had a goodbye lunch for our intern, who is also sticking around for a couple more weeks, but will be interning for someone else. He seems like a good kid, and did a good job for us, so hopefully he’ll go far in life.
*Sigh* Now do you see why I haven’t posted anything in a few days? It hardly seems possible, but my life just seems to get even more boring with each passing day.

Still not rock bottom

Still not rock bottom

I can't imagine what that's like. If my sense of self-worth had shriveled to the
point that my only consolation was to reassure myself that I was still better
than imaginary grandma-killing Nazis then I can't imagine finding a great deal
of consolation from such a thought. Imagine someone saying this to you, "Well,
you're better than Nazis euthanizing the elderly." Can you imagine feeling pride to receive such a meager compliment? Can you imagine even
thinking of that as a compliment at all?

Posted using ShareThis

(The above is the latest post on Slacktivist, and I think everyone should read it.)

More Conversations At Work

Today at work we had a ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially open our new building.
In preparation for the event, we were all given polo shirts with our company logo last week and our Director told us that we all had to wear one (we got one in blue and one in black) to work today for the ceremony.
However, some of the women wanted to wear something a little dressier, and given that our Director is on vacation this week, my boss decided that what he doesn't know won't hurt him, so she said that the polo shirts were optional.
Given that most days I wear a polo shirt anyway, I didn't really have a problem with doing so today, but I'd heard that other groups had been told to wear suits. I don't often have occasion to wear a suit, so I did actually toy with the notion before ultimately going with the polo.
In any case...

My Boss: Nice shirt.
Me: Well, I did think about wearing a suit.
My Boss: Oh. Well, now you have to sometime this week; I want to see that before I'm off (she'll be out for several weeks after this week).

Later in the day we had an employee appreciation "block party," at which they were giving out T-shirts that listed our company's values. Each value was printed on its own shirt, and it was luck of the draw as to what value you got.
Because it was hot as hell out there - especially with the black polo - I did as many others did and changed into the T-shirt.
Along with food (and booze; lousy drunks...too bad I can't be one of them) and live music they also had various games later in the afternoon.

Co-Worker: Are you going to participate in any of the games?
Me: No.
C0-Worker: (Pointing at my shirt) That's not living up to our Teamwork value.
Me: I didn't get Teamwork, I got Integrity.
C0-Worker: Well, you need to have the Integrity to live up to being a team player.
Me: I've got Integrity. I do what I say I'm going to do. And I'm saying that I'm not going to join in any games and I'll have the Integrity to live up to that.

Not being able to join in the one activity I might be interested in participating in - drinking - or especially digging the music, it wasn't a terribly exciting party for me, especially since I got a headache from standing around with my brain boiling in the heat during the too-long ribbon-cutting ceremony in the morning, and there really wasn't anyone for me to talk to, as I realized that most of the people I talk to at work are contractors, and as such weren't invited to join in our employee games (a lot of contractors just worked from home today).
I kind of feel bad for the contractors. For whatever reason, a lot of the full-time employees are kind of rude to them. There's one guy who, whenver he sees one of my friends, always makes some kind of snide comment, or just resorts to saying, "Contractor!" as though it's an epithet.
An otherwise very nice woman, upon learning that my friend is a contractor, said, "Oh, so you're not a real person."
WTF?
(His response, "Well, I'm not an employee, but I'm a real person. I mean, I exist. If you cut me I'll bleed.")
Even their badges are kind of humiliating. In addition to saying "Contractor" there's text in big, bold lettering - bigger than their pictures - that says "NOT AN EMPLOYEE."
In any case, I had hoped to take advantage of the chaos of the party to sneak out early, but was thwarted in this effort by someone scheduling a meeting at 4.
*Sigh*

Text I sent to Scott during the party:

Stupid Universe with its irony. I'm looking at the hot intern, band starts playing "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

(Oh, right. Yes, there's a hot intern at work. Not my intern, or even my department's intern, but probably still off-limits. Beyond that, I'm Jon, so even if she weren't... She does have an irritating tendency to smile broadly and say hi to me whenever I see her, but I don't have that much opportunity to interact with her, and, even if I did we're still back to her probably being off-limits and me still being Jon.)

"I Missed That Hunchbacked Dwarves Thing"

This is pretty awesome - a sort of Biblical Literalist version of Jay Leno's "Jay Walking." You even get some Dispensationalism out of it:



(Found via Pharyngula)

What I Did Today

Here's what I did today:



I've been messing around with some Illustrator tutorials. The above is the end result of one of them.
It's actually a screen capture of the image, as every time I tried to export the Illustrator file to another format, portions of the image ended up missing.
Beyond that, it being Sunday, I did/am in the process of doing the laundry.
Yesterday I made the usual trip to the comic shop followed by grocery shopping. Eventually upon getting home I ended up taking a three hour nap.
After getting up I watched some recorded TV, then ate dinner - the leftovers of the pizza I'd ordered on Friday night (Me, talking to my stomach: Yes, I'm perfectly well aware of the fact that you're hungry; why do you think I ordered the pizza, dumbass?) - then thought about either doing some tutorials or some actual drawing, thought better of it, and watched a movie (Superbad).
In between all of that I'd decided that I should probably update the software/firmware on my iPod Touch, so I installed iTunes on Munin, and even went so far as to get around to creating an account in the iTunes store. I saw that there was an update to the software available, was dismayed that I had to actually pay for it, swore, and then set to downloading the upgrade. I left that going while I went off and did the other things mentioned above.
...
Whenever you decide to let a task, such as moving files, run unattended in Windows, there's a better than 50% chance that something will go wrong with it, and when you return, expecting to see the task long-finished, you'll find that little or no progress was actually made in your absence.
This most likely will be the result of some dialog box popping up while you were away and demanding your attention before the task can proceed.
One thing I've learned about Apple software is that there is a 100% chance that something will go wrong if you leave a task running unattended. This isn't because of a dialog box popping up, it's because the software will just stop working. While the Windows issues are annoying, once you finally click on the appropriate option in the dialog box usually the task will resume. Not so with Apple products.
Years ago when I worked at Suomi College, we didn't have any sort of campus network. This meant that if I wanted to get online, I had to use dial-up. More to the point, because we also didn't have any money, this meant that I had to use my personal dial-up account.
On my Windows 95 machine at home, I could launch the dial-up connection, get up and go to the kitchen or bathroom or whatever, and come back to find that I was connected.
With the Mac I had at work, if I launched the dial-up connection and left my office, I would come back to find that my computer had completely locked up pretty much as soon as I left, a frozen image of the dialer software saying "Dialing" floating in the middle of the screen.
This didn't happen every time, granted, but it was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90% of the time.
It's led me to wonder sometimes if Apple software developers somehow manage to build in a clingy need for validation and attention in their software, making it like a kid getting ready to jump into a pool and saying, "Hey dad, watch me! Watch me, dad! Dad, watch me! Are you watching? Dad, you're not watching!"
In any case, I downloaded the update for my iPod. and left sometime after it started backing up the contents of the iPod in preparation for the install.
When I came back several hours later, there was a window saying "Preparing to restore iPod" on the screen, and it was clear that it had been there for hours and that it wasn't actually doing anything.
After forcing the software to close, I disconnected the iPod - which was now stuck in "Recovery Mode" - and restarted. Plugging the iPod back into the computer led to iTunes telling me that the iPod was stuck in "Recovery Mode" and that I needed to push the "Restore" button onscreen before doing anything. Doing this the first time led to iTunes locking up. The second time brought back up that "Preparing to restore iPod" window, which sat there doing nothing. I went through this cycle several times before clicking the "Restore" button actually led to something happening.
Having learned my lesson, once it actually started working, I sat there and watched the whole process with the defeated resignation of a father watching his kid clumsily belly-flop his way into a pool.
After that I did finally start a tutorial, the results of which will likely show up in another picture someday, before finally calling it a night.
And that brings us into today.