Winter Engineering Career Fair Stats

Resumes handed out: 8
Junk: SGI pen, Microsoft yo-yo, Nationwide toothbrush (a toothbrush??), Northrop-Grumman calculator, EDS keychain light, Harris etch-a-sketch keychain, Lockheed-Martin notebook
Interviews scheduled: 0
Atmosphere of desperation: heavy

Definite change in atmosphere from previous career fairs, much less easy going. Company reps just seemed to be redirecting people to check employment opportunites on the company web page. I almost wonder what the point of going was, since the response I recieved most often was to check the web page. I waited in line for half an hour for SGI only to find once I got up there that they were really only looking for hardware people, not software. Disappointing. After submitting my resume many many times to Microsoft and never getting any response I almost skipped them this time, but decided to give it another shot because there was a very attractive girl working at their booth. How professional of me. By the bored look in her eyes while I talked to her, I could tell that I didn’t need to bother. My resume is just going to end up in the Microsoft recycle bin again.

We’ve had a guest at our house for the past few weeks, a blindingly bright yellow parakeet with a taste for human flesh named Chicken. Any finger coming in range of Chicken’s cage is subjected to her furious Beak of Death attack. Hell hath no fury like a little tiny parakeet. Fortunately, my bass-playing calloused fingers are immune to her attacks and she just chews on them ferocioucly but to no avail. Chicken belongs to my roommate Scott, and is staying with us while his parents are on vacation. Of course, as Newton’s second law states: where there is a bird, there is bird poo, which brings me to the humorous bird poo-related anecdote that has been painfully obviously approaching since the beginning of the post. A few days ago we let Chicken out of her cage for a little while to fly around and have the chance to bite other things than just fingers. After flying around a bit, she landed on my head for just a second or so before being quickly and unceremoniously brushed aside. Not realizing that parakeets are easily capable of relieving themselves in under a second, I blithely went about my day and headed off to work. About an hour into my shift, my boss came up to where I was sitting and remarked, “Hey, there’s something in your hair here… It looks like poop.” And what do you know, it was poop. I went to work with bird poop in my hair. Boy do I hope Scott’s parents get back from vacation soon.

Surprise! Mr. Too-Lazy-To-Update-His-Blog finally gets around to posting. How lazy am I? I’m so lazy that I dropped the two classes that I didn’t need to graduate (graphics and holography) so that I could play Dark Age of Camelot full time. Let me tell you about the scourge of roleplaying, kids… I’m actually fairly disappointed with myself for not sticking with it, but I’m so relieved to not be worrying about my graphics labs anymore. I was just in over my head there. Maybe if I get more practical experience I’d like to do graduate work in graphics someday, but for right now I just want to get my degree and be done with it. Its really hit me that I’m going to be graduating, now that I’m down to just one class, my Last Class Ever. Weird. Fortunately, even after losing my loans going below 12 credit hours the hit on my wallet hasn’t been too rough. I still need to find out what’s going to happen with my health insurance…

My advanced 3D graphics class is looking like its going to be extremely unkind to me. Already I’m staring blankly at the first lab, the instructions for which pretty much amounted to: “Texture mapping. Go do it.” I don’t even need this class to graduate, and I’m intimidated enough to be thinking about dropping it. Unfortunately, that would make lose my full-time student status, which I believe would do several unpleasant things to me, such as causing me to lose my loans and health insurance. Looks like I’m going to have to muddle through this and hope for a sudden burst of geniusness.

I shot my first hologram today, just a simple diffraction grating which produces lots of spectra in different patterns when viewed in the right light. The image didn’t quite come out looking like I had hoped, but honestly I was just thrilled that I got an image at all and that I didn’t break any of the equipment in the process. I was terrified of all the delicate equipment involved, but I managed to fumble through it alright. Also, I had never developed any sort of film before so I wasn’t too confident that I wouldn’t end ruining my shot there, but again it came through ok. This was the simplest and most forgiving of our assignments though, and it still took me a hour and a half to setup, shoot, and develop.

New Pornographers Embark on U.S. Tour. Stopping, naturally, in Cleveland and not Columbus. Why does Columbus always get the short end of the rock and roll stick? What’s so gol-darned great about Cleveland anyway? Its things like this that really make me wish I had a car that could endure the trek up to Cleveland to bring me to the rocking. I’m not all that jazzed about taking my 1984 Corolla, as I really really really need it to survive long enough for me to graduate and find a job so I try not to subject it to anything to strenuous.

Looks like I’m late to the party again. How did I go so long without trying Audiogalaxy? To me, this seems like the only music sharing service I’ve seen done correctly and in a way that I’d be willing to pay for if necessary. Cross referencing by genres and similar artists, as well as displaying search results by popularity make finding new and interesting music and artists easy. I got sucked in for hours last night, looking up one artist and then following the genre and similar artist links around forever. This just seems like the kind of system that could potentially benefit less known artists by making it easier for people to stumble across them, rather than just serving as a mass piracy tool for the latest Limp Bizkit album.

Another thing that happened while I wasn’t updating this: I saw The Royal Tenenbaums. Twice. Easily the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Ok, its the only movie I’ve seen this year, but it sets the bar pretty high.Also, as an indirect result of the soundtrack (which featured songs by both

the Velvet Underground and Nico), I’ve realized that I could really stand to pick up a few Velvet Underground albums. Downloading the Nico tracks from the movie lead to me downloading VU tracks featuring Nico which just lead to more VU downloading which then left me wondering just how I’d missed out on something this good before.

Apologies in advance for any spelling errors in this, my long awaited return post. Blogger no longer has spell checking, and I’m trying to type with gloves on since its so very very cold here at work. So far so good. I guess a lot has happened in the time that I haven’t been blogging. For one thing, it seems that apparently we have a new year, did you know that? Well, we do. The New Year is a magical time, full of hope and dreams, in which I feel that all the various peoples of the world should put aside their differences and come together to give me lots of money and ceaseless adoration. Also there should be buildings named after me. Inexplicably, this has yet to happen. Instead, I just find myself getting around to blogging about the new year just about the time everyone else has given up on their resolutions. For the moment, I’ll presuppose that you ask “Why is that? What was the reason behind your brief blogging break?” Well I’ll tell you. You see, I realized that there was more to life than introspective naval gazing placed on display for the whole world. I wrote a novel. I travelled abroad and had a series of sordid affairs with exotic international women, each more torrid than the last. I brought new life into the world, yet I became Death, destroyer of worlds. I petted puppy dogs. I sampled an astounding array of gourmet ice creams and frozen confections. I had my name legally changed and forgot what it was soon after. I said a lot of things that I thought were terribly clever at the time, only to realize how inane and cliche they were later on. I rambled. I used an ellipsis… I played Final Fantasy X for a total of 82 hours. There.

There were already plenty of good ways for me to waste my time on the internet (one quickly becomes adept at finding these things when you get paid to sit around in front of a computer with a fast net connection) but now I’ve gone and found another: watching a streaming real-time panda bear cam. Wake up sleepy pandas! Do something interesting!