Yesterday Jolayne and I went to Cedar Point, and had ourselves a mighty good time. I hadn’t been up there in quite a few years. That place is really amazing. Its got more rollercoasters than you would really think could fit into a land mass that size. Looking at it from an elevated position (something you get more than enough opportunities to do, though usually not for very long) it looks like someone just dropped tons of brightly colored steel bars on it from above. Rollercoasters intertwine and overlap nearly everywhere as it is, but there was even ongoing construction on a new ride in the midst of that. Eventually I think the whole thing is going to be just a solid mass of rollercoaster track with no room for cars or riders. We rode coaster after coaster, but when it came down to it we choked and couldn’t bring ourselves to handle the big one. Maybe next time.
Monthly Archive for September, 2002
Tonight I went to an art show dressed up in my best cowboy outfit. Why? Because, hey… um, cowboys, right? Am I right? Somebody? The truth is I just needed to wear my cowboy vest to something finally. I’d put it off long enough. And sometimes a man just needs to feel like a cowboy. Even if he’s a computer programmer with dainty sensitive hands. Oh, and the art show? Pretty darn good. My friend Lori had a really good painting in it, though I may be a little biased since the subject of the painting happened to be my girlfriend. The show even had an awesome robotics piece built out of tree branches and motors that tried to turn pages in a book and had a camera on the page turning apparatus that projected the image on a wall behind the robot. It was amazing in the way that only failed and inefficient machinery can be. I wished that I could take it home. But that’s not the point. It was all about cowboys, got it?
I
may be a little late to the party, but thanks to Neal I’ve taken a second
look at Mozilla and found it to be a really nice browser with some nifty web
development tools thrown in as well. Its JavaScript debugger and DOM inspector
are both handy tools that I can see being very useful. On top of that, Mozilla
seems to be a very extensible platform as well. As an example, I’m writing
this post using Mozblog,
a snap-in blogging sidebar. Like many aspects of Mozilla, it’s not quite
perfect yet though. There are still a few quirks and things that don’t quite
work intuitively right now. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to ditch IE
as my main browser, but Mozilla is by far the most tempting option to come
along.
Audiogalaxy lives! Sorta. It seems that my dearly departed friend Audiogalaxy has risen from its grave as Rhapsody. It’s not entirely back to life though. It’s more like its joined the ranks of the undead, although without that troublesome appetite for brains. Rhapsody is a file sharing service with a $9.95/month fee, something I would have been more that willing to pay for the original version of Audiogalaxy. However, the new version only features tracks from artists whose labels have approved them to be allowed on the service. The best thing about Audiogalaxy was the ability to grab stuff from any artist that caught my attention, regardless of the label they were on. On Audiogalaxy you could get anything that someone thought was worth sharing. Rhapsody effectively removes this ability by making labels the only arbiter of what’s worth sharing. That just doesn’t seem worth it to me. It’s a shame though, since the $9.95/month is supposed to pay full royalties to artists, record labels, publishers, and songwriters.
At CompUSA, we sell several software packages designed to help people write their wills. Every time someone comes through my checkout lane with one of those, I just want to deadpan in a flat monotone: “Yeah, we’re all going to die someday huh? We could go at anytime really. Anytime. *sigh* Do you ever say to yourself in the morning ‘Forget this, I’m not even getting out of bed. Just going to die someday anyway.’” Then I would look away quickly and continue the rest of the transaction in silence and without eye contact, punctuating it with only one final despairing sigh as I handed them their receipt.
One of the hardest things to deal with at work is with the near constant flood of crap spewed forth from the in-store “radio station”. Its unique brand of annoying songs and grating CompUSA ads really wears on you during a shift. I’m told that there was a time that each store got to choose from several different stations for store music. Then the corporate headquarters decided that there would be only one station, pumping the exact same thing into every CompUSA in America via satellite. It’s that kind of commitment to removing every bit of choice that might add a little happiness to employee lives that makes me proud to work there. Every so often something amazing happens and a Cure song comes on. As long as it’s not interrupted by the voice of that smug bastard announcer reminding me that there’s a great deal on CD-Rs this week, I get to enjoy 4 minutes or so of bliss… Immediately followed by rage and despair as I realize that’s the last good music I’ll hear for the next 8 hours. I’d like to volunteer to be the store DJ. Just let me sit in the back playing songs from my mp3 jukebox. Instead of the ads, I could periodically get on the store intercom and yell “You there! Buy that!”. Yeah, I’m going to pitch that to corporate. I think they’ll love it.
It was an exciting day at work today. We managed to foil a shoplifting attempt by a complete idiot. This guy came into the store carrying a laptop, which he showed to me at the customer service counter to make sure that someone knew he was bringing it in. He shopped for a while and then checked out, buying about $500 worth of stuff. Before he got out the door though, the front end security guy noticed that he had a laptop bag that we sold and it still had a sticker on it. They checked it out and it had his laptop in it, so he was trying to pass it off like he came in with the bag. However, I only remembered him coming in with the laptop, not the bag also. On top of that, before he checked out the guy had brought up the cardboard packaging for the laptop bag and asked us to throw it away because he “found it lying on the floor”. Right. That was bright. The store manager came up and pointed out that we had him on security camera coming into the store without the bag. At that point, he decided to purchase the bag. However, our security guy checked out all the pockets of the bag and found a copy of an older video game. The guy acted like he had no idea where it had come from and left it in the store. I had no idea why someone would buy $500 of stuff and then steal a $50 bag and a $10 game, but then someone realized that the name he had given us wasn’t the same name that was on the credit card he had used. Given his interesting shopping habits that seemed a little suspicious so someone called and reported the card as possibly stolen. Then we all chased him out of the store with our tiny tiny HP knives. Well we should have, but I was out-voted.
So it’s like this: I’ve decided that I’m not going to play any video games until I get my next job interview. Yeah, I know, it’s a pretty serious commitment. I don’t know if I can do it or not (especially since the full version of Battlefield 1942 just came out), but I’m sure going to to try. I spend every shift at CompUSA wishing I was doing something else, but then just sit around playing games instead of looking for a better job when I get home. That doesn’t seem to make much sense, so I’m going to try to do something about it.
They gave us all knives at work today. Maybe I should explain. Every so often when a company rep visits the store, they bring cheap little items emblazoned with the company logo. I guess it’s supposed to convince us to sell more of their products. Anyway, today our Hewlett-Packard rep gave us all little tiny keychain pocketknives. I don’t know if that was the best idea for workplace morale and safety. I think it was a none too subtle hint that management would really like to see us all fight to the death with knives. I wouldn’t put it past them. Or maybe we’re supposed to begin practicing a more aggressive form of customer service. (”Our return policy? Yeah, you ever return to this store and I’ll stab you in the eyeball. How’s that?”) It’s that kind of commitment to employee-customer violence that makes me proud to wear that red shirt every day.
Its been a while since I found any cool toys on the web, but this NASA Java app made my day. It’s a 3D real time capable satellite tracking program. You can see a live updating display of over 500 satellites orbiting the earth. Pretty crowded up there really, from the right distance out the earth just seems to be covered with a cloud of dots. As I wrote this, COSMOS 1263 R/B flew just about right overhead and then on to Canada. Even though I’ve got no use for it other than the “ohmygoodnessthat’sreallycool factor”, I still think it’s really great that NASA has all that data out there on the web.
Elsewhere