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From the blog of dave strider:
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2
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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this is why you dont go to sea world
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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this is a 10 part series
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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dane cook is ugly
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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more ton'
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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some candy company ripped me off
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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review of tony hawk
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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why would anyone go to sea world
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
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i watched bruce almighty recently
by noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Hussie)
There's a saying.
Prepare for the worst. That way, all your surprises will be pleasant.
But that only applies to things you can foresee. Or are so horrible that you'd rather not think about them. What if the very worst thing was something you were unable to predict?
And what if it happened?
INDY FOUR IS A GIANT PILE OF SHIT
More thoughts later.
Walking around the city today in the pouring rain sans coat.
Yeah.
*dissolves an Airborne*
So anyway, what happened to me today: Starved and suffering from the sort of headache you incur from spending the better part of 12 hours without eating, I popped into a Subway for lunch-- I don't particularly like Subway, but at least you can order stuff there that won't lead to your ultimate demise, and they take plastic.
(side note: You know why the local delis and cafes and such get shut down and franchises take their place? Because a franchise will always take a fucking credit card. Look, I want to support local business as much as the next guy with no real problems, but if I've gotta stop by the ATM every time I just want a friggin' Coke, I'd rather just go to Starbuck's.)
So I'm there, starving, headachy, drenched to the bone, all of one table left at this Subway, when some homeless dude cuts in front of me asking the cashier for a cup of water. Kind soul that she was, she gave it to him, then finished ringing up my food. So I turn to the lone remaining table to find yon homeless guy taking up residence within.
Like I said, it was pouring rain out, and it's not like I could show up to the next site with my lunch. So stuck between having a guy with no food yet a place to sit and a guy with food and no place to eat it, I tossed my lunch on his table and left.
Hope the guy can drink diet Coke.
Anyone who has spent any reasonable time in physical proximity to me knows that I fall down.
A lot.
Walking, climbing up stairs, standing perfectly still, attempting Johnny Cage's shadow kick on an oily carport, the way in which I fall down-- and how often I fall down-- are simply staggering. It's a wonder my skeletal system isn't as brittle and unsupportable as Hillary Clinton's presidental campaign. Today though, I found a way to fall down that startled even me. I fell down by failure to stand up.
First, some background. I'm a Manhattan field tech-- if you've ever been in a city and saw a nerdy looking dude carrying around a mountaneering-quality backpack and generally cursing his lot in life, that was one of us. Today my backpack weiged in at a good 40 plus pounds, weighed down with power supplies and an unusual number of LCD panels and their accompanying padding.
Apparently just outside 26 Federal Plaza, I had wholly forgotten the two-stone albatross strapped to my back, and attempted to stand from a streetside bench-- and failed, utterly, landing square on my ass accompanied by the sound of several thousand dollars worth of unprotected motherboards being stressed far beyond their operating limits. I looked around, trying to figure out who'd shoved me down, when I was informed I had simply failed in an attempt to to rise to my feet, a task most of us have conquered well before the age of 2.
So yeah. My ass feels like one of Kobe Bryant's dates.
I was called "pops" today. Admittedly it was by some homeless dude, but still. I'm not even 35!
I gotta get some of them annie-mays. What is it you kids are into now? Death Boat? Nabuto? Clorox? They're still making Ghost in the Shell, right?
So I just went to the Gamestop after hearing about a game I've been wanting that just dropped in price, walked a couple blocks down to the Starbuck's, diving between a game of catch n' toss the local kids had running across both lanes of the highway and either side of the street. All the while admiring cute Latina chicks being cute Latina chicks in their spring outfits.
And I realized my life isn't bad. I might even be enjoying it.
So what next?
(to Kaorischild: I've not forgotten your meme request. Bug me about it if I don't have something for you soon.)
So for the past couple months my dear friend and former roomie ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jayzahas been on a meal plan as suggested by her personal, professional nutritiounist. I, in solidarity with Jayza and in an effort to keep myself from dying of a massive coronary before the age of 40, have joined her in this effort. Seeing as how I'm a thirty two year old bachelor who's entire experience with cooking has consisted of...
1: find food
2: fry said food
3: find more food
...this whole "healthy eating" thing has proved something of a challenge. Luckily Jayza, who knows about this sort of thing, having grown up in a household where you don't batter 90% of your foodstuffs.
But there's some things I'm just not entirely sold on yet. Butternut squash, for instance. I have two of them in my fridge, and up until Sunday I had no clue you were supposed to eat the stupid things, as far as I knew they existed entirely to provide decoration for Thanksgiving supermarket displays.
Or the pasta she's making me buy-- it's not normal pasta, where things are made of glutens and it's white and it generally tastes like pretty much nothing until liberally doused in meat and sauce.
No, this is Barilla Plus spaghetti. Whole wheat pasta, with added protein and fiber and.. omega three.
I remember Omega Three. He was a Metal Gear Solid boss, had flamethrower and you had to shoot him in the back of the neck to make his propane tank explode.
Also, this Barilla Plus stuff? It has as much protein as an equivalent serving of beef. There's just something unseemly about that.
On the other hand, I weighed 240 pounds upon my arrival in NYC, and am now down to something in the 190's. Which sounds good, but it turns out you can't really wear XXL shirts when you down to under 200. Also, I'd willingly kill anyone reading this journal for sausage that doesn't consist of flightless gamebird.
Yeah, so waiting until April 14 to get my routing and account information from the bank so I could complete my e-file form wasn't a terribly good idea.
((Some parts of adulthood are still under construction))
Thanks to him, I've another weapon in my bachelor no-stove cooking arsenal-- the microwave spaghetti.
Right now, as I type this, there are people (who I will unfairly refer to from this point on as "mouth-breathing jerks") who are watching the premier of Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica.
Watching Saul Tigh be drunk and grizzled.
Watching William Adama be wise and grizzled.
Watching Laura Roslin be hot and grizzled.
Watching Helio be a self rightous jerkoff.
You mouth breathing jerks.
Me, I get to sit at home and try my damnest to avoid spoilers, thanks to Time Warner Cable's inability to get a handle on the technology needed to deliver cable signals to to rooms sitting next to each other. I home you stupid mouth breathing jerks are happy. Meanwhile Chapel Hill is playing it's best season since Dean Smith was coaching, they're two wins away from another national championship and I'm not going to see a single fucking game of it.
You know, we often get these highfaloutin' ideals about how crappy television is and how we don't really need it and how the Internet does everything for us, but we only speak these things when we have televisions.
In other news, I need to figure out how to cook spaghetti using a microwave oven.
* Somehow I'm not too enthused about relocating to Philly for a four month field tech gig. Thanks for the thought, Hallmark Technology, whoever the hell you are.
* Shelter Situation: Yeah, so I'm living in a studio dungeon in Astoria. Luckily, it looks like I'm going to be able to get DSL in come Monday. Unluckily, DSL looks like -all- I'm going to be able to install in this place. Meanking, no cable TV. Not a huge dealbreaker, but it is sort of annoying that this development came about around the same time that new House episodes started trickling in.
* Also, I gotta find somewhere to wach the ACC and NCAA tournies now.
* Also also, you have any idea how hard it is to find UNC merchandise in this town? I mean, I'll get hassled by random Duke fans while wearing my Carolina shirt, but goddamned if I can find -another- Carolina shirt.
*Hippy New Age Church Chick Update, as it turns out I forgot to actually explain what happened following Kung Fu Movie Night.
Okay, I'm invited over for Kung Fu Movie Night at HNACC's dojo. She waves me over, scooches up beside me, starts rubbing her hand over my back and leg, I figure things are going Quite Fucking Well, Thank You. We watch the movie, occasionally leaning over to offer occasional whispers of what exactly was going on, and after the lights come back on, we talk for a bit more, catching up. She announces she needs to leave, and I offer to walk her to the station.
Whereupon she explains that she's trying to date Pau-- Pau being this six foot tall Asian blackbelt who spent the entire movie on the -other- side of HNACC. Nice guy, even went to Chapel Hill (!), but he looks like the sort of dude you'd see as a midboss in a mid-90's Capcom beat 'em up, the kind who appears later on as a normal enemy and you go "awww fuck" every time you see him.
So I'm trying my best to wipe HNACC from my orbit, but logic sorta wilts under thoughts of licking honey off the inside of her calf.
Seriously good calves on this girl.
*Thinking of going to the Video Games Live show at the Beacon Theatre on April 26th. Since Firefox is being a little bitch and refusing to integrate the link, here it is: http://www.videogameslive.com. It was in Wired a couple moths back-- basically, they take video game music, set it to orchestras and chiors and a frightening amount of lightshow effects and you wind up with something resembling culture for videogames. Yeah, Tommy Tallarico may be a hack, but this is the nearest to this sort of thing I'm likely to get short of The Black Mages scheduling a show for the east coast, or I finally get to attend a PAX. If nothing else, VGL goes a long way towards validating our hobby as something more than a childhood diversion. And hey, I'll get to make fun of cosplayers.
Due to Time Warner Cable's inability to split up service going into a basement, I won't be getting cable broadband. I've signed on with verizon DSL through something called WhiteFence, but if for whatever reason Verizon refuses the order (it can take up to three days for Verizon to clear the deal), I'm going to have to find a new place. Living in a tiny dungeon apartment with one lone window is one thing, living in a tiny dungeon apartment with one lone window and no internet coming through is a different animal entirely. If I can't get broadband internet in a reasonably-priced apartment, I may wind up leaving the city entirely.
Just so fucking annoyed-- and things were finally coming together for me at work.
I am helplessly addicted to data. I want to give you money. Why are you being an enormous diseased rectum about doing so?
And have been for four days now. I suppose I should have mentioned that earlier. On Wall Street. Sorta. The offices are on Broad and Beaver, at any rate.
Also, I'll be moving into my new dank dung basement studio apartment this Saturday. I'd have more to say on both of these subjects, but I'm really trying quite hard not to think on them too much lest the disappear into a puff of logic, much like belief in contrails, the 2007 Washington Redskins playoff hopes and the musical careers of Hanson.
As a side project, I need to figure out a way to cook pasta sans stove. I've been led to believe that it's possible to cook pasta using a rice cooker?
The act of forcibly inserting razor-thin filaments of polycarbonate between my teeth will always remain vaguely unnerving, no matter how much mint flavoring may be involved.
So I wandered around Steinway getting to know the area-- Turns out there's two Gamestops, and FYE and a Gap on the way home from work.
I'm fucked.
So, I have a place.
It's tiny, and there's no stove (Or ventilation. Or furniture. But there's a fridge!) but the water and electricity is included, and it's $700 a month. More than large enough to store the futon I've been sleeping on for the better part of six months, as well as install a computer desk, bookshelves and temple to consumerist excess place to put my game systems.
I'll be able to move in as soon as I give the realtor twenty one hundred fucking dollars, and by this time next week, I'll be on my own.
In New York City.
I fully expect this to dawn on me sometime around 3 in the morning.
Whatever I was doing this afternoon, it sure wasn't taunting CoS photographers outside Time Square.
Swear to god.
So we're thinking, if this Unisys gig works out, I may be able to start shopping for apartments (well, rooming, but everyone starts out like that here) as early as the start of March.
I'm hoping for something in Brooklyn, as it'd be nearer the Unisys offices, and closer to the BARCADE~!
Perhaps a fine ES7000 Enterprise Server:
Or a Clearpath Dorado Mainframe!
Or a transplant confederate transplant field technician?
Yeah, so it looks like I'm on with Unisys. I have a drug and background test to take, and some Dell certifications (Which apparently consists of an internet-based open-book test that you're allowed to take up to 8 times before being kicked out) and I could be getting chewed out by IT departments all over Manhattan by as early as this coming Monday.
What's annoying is that Tek Systems left me a voicemail offering a six month position for more money. The experience won't be nearly as good as the Unisys position though. Whereas with the Tek Systems job I'll be doing helpdesk work, with Unisys I'll be repairing pretty much everything, everywhere. $18 vs $12 is hard to swallow though, although I'll be able to match that with the Unisys job with incentives.
Unisys though, for a company that pulls in something close to six billion dollars a year, is odd about the way they handle applications. For instance, instead of just handing me my paperwork when I left the interview, they insisted it be emailed to me-- then printed out, then faxed, then mailed. It's like they've gone out of the way to combine all the most annoying document practices developed in the past century of office paperwork-- the only thing they're missing is a demand that the copies be scribed via monk and a wax seal applied from your local landowner.
Anyway, I figure I could print these out here at the apartment, go into the city for lunch, fill out the forms there, duck into a Kinkos and have them take care of the rest. No sooner have I sat at my table than I notice that the forms request they be filled out electronically. Meaning I need to open up the email, edit in the information using Word, save it, -then- print.
After an enormous rigamarole that involved Gmail refusing to resolve and leaving me without any way of accessing my email for the better part of an hour (in which I had to enlist the lovely baniarla to log onto my gmail account and mail me my own goddamned mail), I finally had my Unisys applications edited saved, transferred to flash and ready to be faxed/mailed/delivered via carrier pigeon to Ohio.
Then things start getting annoying. See, Unisys, in whatever fever-induced logic that overcame their HR department, doesn't use normal plain ol' doc or pdf files for this sort of thing. No, they use something I had yet to encounter, a .dot file-- Word opens them just fine, and had I the wherewithal, I'd have just saved the stupid thing to a more sane file extension and been done with it.
Staples had no clue what to do with the file. Not only could they not open the file, their system refuses to allow an "Open with" command in Windows. Kinko's wanted twenty four fucking hours to retrieve, print, fax and mail the files, and that was without any guarantee from their end that they could open .dot files either. Or I could use one of the self service PCs for eighteen dollars an hour. Keep in mind I was already thirty dollars into these fucking forms, in between buying the flash drive, purchasing wifi at Starbucks and lunch in town.
So tomorrow, we'll try again.