These posts were imported from my LiveJournal. I may or may not go through them and categorize them later.
I'm back. I lived through the experience, and I have many tales to tell. Perhaps I will spice my entries for a while with anecdotes of the mysterious far-away land of the Maple Leaf. Or maybe you'll have to talk to me yourself and wheedle the stories out of my unwilling mouth.
I will soon put up lots of pictures.
Until then, anticipate away!
Yes, I get to leave the United States for a while. Leaving today, my family is driving up into Canada and partaking in the wonders that the glorious Rockies have to offer. Expect lots of pictures upon my return, for my camera has been restored to me. Hopefully I can steal the nice film camera for a few real pictures, too. I'm excited!
This means I won't be at frisbee, I won't be at church, I won't be online, I won't be on LiveJournal, deviantART, or anywhere else in the area for the unprecedented sum of 9 whole days! I'm off, travelling again!
I'm hoping to stop by and say "Hi" to Becky as we go through the area, but that depends on my parents' whims. So, wish me luck.
Lots of things have happened recently, haven't they? I've been enjoying frisbee, I did a lot of stuff with Soren and Nathan, I have a job, and now I'm going on a crazy family trip. Wow. And then there's all that crazy stuff going on in the world, what with the war and the bombings and the "Freedom Tower". Ugh. I did run across a poetic Times headline, which I appreciated:
"An Umbrella in a Shower of a Million Bits That Had Been a Bus."
Apparently this woman was just boarding the bus and bringing down her umbrella to fold it up, and the bomb exploded. I'm sure nothing deadly was heading her way, because the umbrella wouldn't have stopped it, but she says "I was shielding myself with my umbrella, and it all landed on my umbrella." At least she saved her clothes from being ruined.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Death is a natural part of life for humans, and hate probably isn't going to die out soon, but whereas death isn't necessarily a bad thing, hate is unarguably horrible.
The moral of the story? Love is good.
See you when I return.
I go out to the mailbox today to mail a letter to Becky, and I look inside the mailbox, and there are already things in it. Oh, blast, I think, assuming that the mail has already come today. I bring the mail in, and set it down, bringing the letter back to my room to wait tomorrow.
A little while later, I think more about the mail, and decide that it might have been the mail from saturday, since my parents weren't even here most of the day, so I go back out to put the letter in the mailbox so that it might get sent today, and guess what? There's more mail in the mailbox. The blasted mailman came by in the 15 minutes it took me to wonder whether he hadn't come yet.
I guess I'll send it tomorrow.
So, I had a really fun time this weekend. Two of my friends from high school that don't get back here very often came to visit, and I spent nearly all my time with some combination of them and other folks, or with my family. Crazy activities include:
Nathan went back Monday morning, and Soren goes back today morning. We'll see them again in August! :)
All in all, I had a lot of fun, but I spent way too much money.
The long:
I've been talking for a little while about my job, and I've actually told a few of you. Well, here are the details.
Last week, on Friday or Saturday, Laila IM'ed me with these simple words: "Do you want a summer job?" Now, these words aren't necessarily enough to make me drool by themselves, but the phrases with which she introduced her comment were such that, when taken in context with the statement which I have already related to you, they indeed DID make the saliva run unhindered from my mouth. They were, "You know html. And general stuffs about web sites." I would have been happy to get any job (I had been looking for one for a few weeks, and had become discouraged), but this was simply amazing. A job doing a lot of the stuff I would do with my summer anyway!
My enthusiasm was only heightened by further conversation. It seems that the person eager to hire me runs a home business, and has a couple things going on the side. So, it's a rather informal arrangement, which means no dress code, no complaints about my unwillingness to comb my hair, etc. Even better than working at a college was, in fact. PLUS, and this is the clincher, I get 30 dollars an hour. That's a wage that didn't even enter my imagination when I first began looking for a summer job. I got excited about the prospect of working at a BANK. You can only guess how happy I am now. A few other benefits include being able to work from home, and, when I'm not, I'm allowed to raid their fridge and get sodas/snacks. Now I haven't yet worked up the COURAGE to do that, but I am certain I will by the end of the summer.
I am happy. And very lucky.
Much thanks to Laila for having a mom. Much thanks to her mom for having a friend. Much thanks to her friend for hiring me!
And the short:
Job: Web design and tech support
Informal
Wage: $30 an hour
Hours: Varying — this week I worked 20 hours, but it should slow down
Informal
I can work from home on a lot of things
My employer is nice
A lot of you have probably read this on Slashdot (in fact, they even quoted the same piece that I'm going to), but here's an interesting article on the Supreme Court ruling on file sharing software. It's probably a very real concern to a great many of us, eh?
The article discusses how the Supreme Court ruling was a well thought out, middle-ground decision, and a very difficult one, due to the nature of copyright law itself. The poor Justices ended up juggling innovation and protection, and trying to find a way to avoid dropping any of the balls. The writer's stance is that they did a good job, but that there is still a problem to solve: copyright law has become anachronistic in the current age, and needs severe redrafting to ensure that it does more good than harm.
"The length of copyright protection has increased enormously over the past century… This makes no sense. Copyright was originally intended to encourage publication by granting publishers a temporary monopoly on works so they could earn a return on their investment. But the internet and new digital technologies have made the publication and distribution of works much easier and cheaper. Publishers should therefore need fewer, not more, property rights to protect their investment. Technology has tipped the balance in favour of the public domain.
A first, useful step would be a drastic reduction of copyright back to its original terms—14 years, renewable once. This should provide media firms plenty of chance to earn profits, and consumers plenty of opportunity to rip, mix, burn their back catalogues without breaking the law. The Supreme Court has somewhat reluctantly clipped the wings of copyright pirates; it is time for Congress to do the same to the copyright incumbents. "
A related article that appeared recently on Wonko.com is sarcastically titled, "Box office slump? Yeah, and Bill Gates is on welfare." Ryan Grove looks at the trends of movies' gross profits, and points out that the claims that we're in a "box-office slump" is nothing more than "utter bullshit".
Why do we hear so many complaints about things when, looking at it carefully, there really isn't a problem? What it comes down to is that people are going to be people, and they aren't ever going to be satisfied with what they have. If by complaining about something a worker could get more money, how many wouldn't stoop to griping?
Wow, the so-called "Freedom Tower" got a scathing review in the New York Times. What worries me is that it might be right.
Text cannot express my frustration right now. So I'm not going to try to "blast" and "argh" my way into showing you how annoyed I am. Photoshop decided to die on me. This wouldn't be quite as much of a problem, had I remembered to save my work at least ONCE in the past few hours. But no! I was so stupid that I completely forgot to do that, and now a few hours of work is down the drain. And just as I was beginning to be happy with it, too. Curses! Sometimes I hate machines…
I'm taking a break now. Ice cream break. Let's hope it helps.
In that order.
I came by a good amount of money through the garage sale, babysitting, washing windows, and trading books in to Powell's. So, naturally, the first thing I did upon recieving the money (and, in the case of Powell's, store credit, which is all well and good since I spend much more than that on books anyway and I was glad to have it) was to buy stuff. I began at Powell's, and bought a bunch of books that I haven't read yet (a nice situation, because I often find myself buying books that I have read, just so I can actually own them). These four books that blew out 34 dollars in total were Neuromancer by William Gibson, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Strange Mistress, Brokedown Palace (perhaps the only Steven Brust book I haven't read besides Freedom and Necessity and one of the few I don't own), and The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (I liked her Vorkosigan Saga space operas, so I'm trying out her fantasy). Yes, four books stand on my reading list. Mmmmmm…. Of course, I didn't stop there, for what better thing is there to follow book buying than buying more books? So, I went to Borders and got Stranger In a Strange Land (its what got me hooked on Heinlein), and then to Everyday Music to pick up Picaresque by The Decemberists. Brilliant band, that. (Of course, when I got home, there was the realization that I could buy their CDs for cheaper off the Record Label's site [11.00 for the cd, 2.00 for the shipping], but I'll do that when I get another of their albums.)
As you can see, I have a lot of information in parentheticals (and a lovely, nested parenthetical using funny-looking brackets). I don't know why, but I just felt like using them. If you don't like it, you have a few choices. Hack my account and get rid of all of them (which I don't recommend, because I might find out who did it and exact a terrible price, such as their first born child, or perhaps a number of digits to be determined by the rolling of a die), use Zen-like techniques (or modern psychological treatments) to block them out of your mind completely, don't read it at all (it's too late for that, isn't it?), or open the lj-cut at the bottom to see the post without them (probably the best choice, because I did all the work for you and you don't have to fear my retribution or years of training in far-away places or risk of time-travel-caused-paradoxes). (Note: since moving from LiveJournal, this last option doesn't even make sense. Sorry.)
More about the money later.
See? I tricked you. EVERYTHING is in parentheticals here! Hahaha!
There's something about the time between afternoon and night that enraptures the imagination. The sun hangs low on the horizon and the stars are fast approaching, making this a time of neither's dominion, but rather a strange mixture of the two. The clouds cast off their daytime cloaks, and don radiant gowns for the evening festivities. Out come all sorts of mystical creatures from the edges of the night to glory in the dying sun. The pheonix spreads her wings, and the fire streaks across the sky to be captured in the edges of the clouds and the arching rainbows as the rain imprisons her flame. Today, five rainbows arched across the sky. The mother, followed by her three small ones, flew across one next to another in brilliance, as her lover hung back, in his dimmer more subtle plumage. I've never seen the whole family arrayed so, and it did my heart good. Beauty still lives in the world.