I'm changing the address of my blog at least temporarily to etaliistep.blogspot.com. Of course I'm writing this before I've actually made the change so I'm mostly assuming the address is available and will eventually be correct....

When switch back to this address I will also be on WordPress, an apparently infinately superior blog and content management platform.

I would like to thank Google for the announcement about eventually turning off FTP support for blogger. If it weren't for that I would have have had the motivation to finally switch over to WordPress!

I guess today is pretty much the same as yesterday. I went and ended up spending the day at my sister's again but didn't do any walking this time. It looked like it was about the rain all day but didn't really so I didn't go for any walks. And I've been at my sister's house all day anyway so there wasn't a lot of opportunity to go for a walk anyway. Maybe tomorrow.

I did get as far as bringing my laptop with me to my sister's house along with the DOM book. A very small incremental step toward getting back into that. 

I also saw Zombie Land last night. I watched that right after the post last night. Some people have called it the "American Shaun of the Dead". I don't think it quite lives up to that moniker but then I would hold that to a rather high standard for such a comparison. It was certainly it a good and entertaining movie. And the celebrity cameo in it was both funny and unexpected. I think I would highly recommend it.

I also purchased a 512MB memory card as a fill-in for my apparently failing or completely failed Xbox 360 hard drive. That's 512MB of flash memory for thirty dollars.  I can buy eight 1 gig memory sticks for at most fifteen dollars in a package. But since it's MS and since it's for 360...$30? Really? Really?? Of course a new actual hard drive is $50 for $20 gigs! Do they even make twenty gig drives any more?! I mean I think 100 gig notebook drives are $50 right now. Jesus Christ. No wonder MS is making so much money. They're worse than Apple!

Okay I'm quite done venting now. I don't think any thing else will  happen today so I'm just going to post this and good night.

As I write this I am actually at my sister's house, sitting on her couch. Today I watched more TV thanks to Hulu, in particular the first and second episodes of LOST. I didn't think it was a terrible two-hour premier but it still seemed like it was missing something some how. Not sure what exactly. Maybe just some level of energy or pacing or...something? The second episode ended and I really did want to see what happens next so obviously they are doing something right, then.

When I was finally done with TV for a while I decided I was going to take advantage of this continuing mild weather and go for a walk. Or more specifically the five mile run/jog I like to do so much for whatever reason. On that subject maybe I will mention that when I go for my much shorter walk around the neighborhood it doesn't drain me like it once did. Although I suppose that could have something to do with it not being hot. I'm certainly drained and covered with sweat after the five miles though. Anyway maybe this is a good sign I'm getting in better shape, or at least my lung capacity has improved, maybe it doesn't mean anything.

Before leaving for the five mile jog/walk though my sister called me and asked how I was doing and wanted to know if I would like to keep my niece entertained for a while. I said I would after that walk.

So that's about it really. Went for the walk, went to my sister's, played with the niece and had some dinner. 

I haven't made any progress with the HTA, the PHP thing, or converting my various blogs over to over to either the free blogger or converting to wordpress. I think probably I will start on one or more of those thing tomorrow. 

Actually there's the one more thing I'm doing today: watching a zombie movie featuring Woody Harrelson. I don't know if I spelled that name correctly, nor do I remember the exact name of the movie. I think Woody has only done the one zombie movie and it's brand new on DVD so it shouldn't be hard to figure out what I'm talking about. I'm sure it'll be a super-great movie.

I got an email today from the google/blogger people about the eventual end of FTP support. some where in the back of my mind I kind of wondered about this since it said it had to re-upload like six megabytes of data every time I made one minor change to the blogger template. It seems kind of expensive to do that for everybody every time. The email, which blogger saw fit to send me six times in an hour for some reason, mentioned that only a small percentage of blogger users actually use the FTP feature and it takes way more engineering man-power to maintain this to such a degree it is not really economically feasible. Even for Google apparently. Which I think makes since on some level.

So what I will probably do is first convert this blog over to the provided sub-domain that blogger provides and then start working on converting over to wordpress. I mean it's not that blogger is so horrible it's just that I'm paying for this domain name anyway so why not actually utilize it in some degree passed what I could just as easily be doing as a free site. And I've been meaning to convert to something more powerful that blogger anyway. I suppose I'll just convert all the other blogger-based pages I have to simply free ones since I doubt anyone is really aware of them or has them bookmarked. So good then, a motivation to switch over to WordPress.

I was a little depressed when i got home yesterday, as may or may not have been apparent from my post, so I just started watching TV shows on Hulul. And I watched, and watched, and watched...probably eight or something hours I watched TV shows.

As I may or may not have mentioned in recent posts, I don't drink. Last night would have been any other normal person's excuse for a good binge drinking good time with large amounts of cheap alcohol. Instead of binged on TV shows and didn't leave bed. I finally fell asleep around 12am. When I woke up I just watched more shows. The Internet-based ones like diggnation, totally rad show and tekzilla. And Hak5 is queued up. Okay, moving on.

I watched several episodes of 24, catching myself up. Man, that show really hasn't changed, has it? It's just the same old forumula. The cast changes, the set changes, but it's still the same old thing for plots and dramatic moments. Except this season apparently Jack is going to whine a lot about needing to move to L.A. to be with his family. And continue to say "I don't do this any more". Other than that it's more or less the same sort of plot and premise as previous seasons. I still felt it as some how compelling. Especially since the manager of CTU some how reminds me of certain experiences and parties that shall remain nameless. And that it has two cast members from BSG may or may not be worth mentioning I guess. I can only assume this is indicative of two or more BSG people behind the camera as well. If this will start to flesh out as far as plots and the over-all quality of the season is yet to be seen.

I also caught up on a sort-of liked show of mine, Dollhouse. It was one of those kind of under-the-radar sorts of shows that the network couldn't help but give a second season because they have had such bad experiences canceling certain shows in the past. They managed apparently to wrap the whole show up in two seasons. A wrap up that probably would have taken three to five seasons had ti succeeeded, shoved into two epsidoes. 

The final episode, entitled epitaph 2 apparently, appeared to be a continuation of an earlier episode that was never aired. So I guess it was kind of an ad in a way to buy the DVD sets so you have a better idea of the whole over-arcing story line. Epitaph 2 was way out of the normal episode formula since it's set ten years after the effective end of what the title references...the dollhouse. Effectively it was like a zombie apocalypse with characters from Dolllhouse. Lots of characters that weren't seen before, obviously sets and back drops unknown to the series, so on and so forth. 

Really I have a feeling it is to launch a comic book based spin-off sort of a deal to continue the story line. Well since the last episode jumps ten years the comic could cover those ten years leading up to epitaph 2 or it could just as easily continue from the end of epitaph 2 and show how that all plays out. I mean I am actually glad they did epitaph 2 instead of some phoned-in lets just write it, get the pay check and move on that some any other shows *cough*friends/seinfeld*cough*.

I never thought Dollhouse was Wedon's best work. I mean after Firefiy, Doctor Horrible and all those brilliant Buffy/Angel episodes I really would have expected him to some how pull out all the stops with over-the-top brilliance...but instead it was just kind of mediocre. Or maybe he just tried to get it started and then let the staff writers/producers take it over, I don't know. I'm pretty sure there were a lot of people left over from Angel that came to this show actually. And there were a lot of mediocre Angel episodes, to be sure.

I've hardly left bed for like 20 hours and I'm still tired some how. Strange. This day that was predicted to be raining all day, is currently sunny and 55 degrees or so, so I think I will go for a walk. Also, I can only wonder if my writing has improved from writing...33 posts in 33 days. I hope so.

"Or not, then"

Okay so I don't really want to talk about this any more with anyone. Can't exactly have a complete blog without mentioning it slightly: that job I was supposed to start today, well it didn't go so good lets just say. Actually it went fine, I showed up on time, got my picture taken met who I was supposed to meet, everything seemed fine. Until the lady that I would be working for and/or with mentioned learning "A.I. packages", those things I would eventually be showing her all about.

That's about the time alarm bells started going off and I had to explain to her oh by the way, I do ghost but not that ghost. So to cut to the chase I'm being paid for eight hours of work despite leaving within a half hour of arriving.on site. Well that was certainly a great experience. So, important life lesson: never, ever accept a job you haven't talked to and/or interviewed with the actual company involved in the employment. Why I didn't know better I don't know. Actually do I know: why would you go through the expense of hiring someone one if you weren't sure of exactly what you were getting? Wouldn't that be expensive?? Wouldn't that be an incredibly expensive lesson to learn? What rational one or more companies would possibly get all the way to the send-the-new-guy-over stage and have minor details like his actual specialty be in any way shape or form unclear? I guess the second half of the lesson is the presumption, no matter who which companies are involved, of some form of competence. Don't have assume incompetence but at least don't assume everyone knows what they're doing at all times. I was at least smart enough to not cancel unemployment. I really should have waited on telling all those staffing services I had a new position though. Seriously. Now I'm likely off everybody's list for the foreseeable future. 

Actually both the company I showed up for as well as the staffing place people were very apologetic about wasting my time and the staffing service account manager guy promised to line up some interviews for me as soon as he could. I don't think I'm really in the right state of mind to inform much of any other staffing services. 

This did, of course, make getting to the also-interview I had today that much easier, I didn't have that annoying job to distract my getting to the interview on time. Which I did.

I don't actually know how well I did. I still had the leaving after a half hour thing heavy on my mind when I went in. Luckily I had the where-with-all to not mention directly or indirectly the events of 9:30 this morning. I answered the questions as best I could and that was about it. I guess at this point they'll either like me or not like me enough I will move on to the next stage. The interview did last 25 to 30 minutes, not the hour it could have lasted or at least that's what the note said: to expect it to take an hour. I don't know if it taking half that time is indicative of anything one way or another.

I guess I've written about this shit long enough I'll write about something else. Namely I saw Avatar for a second time last night. This time in "Real3D" instead of Imax, since my viewing angle was for screwy in the IMAX thing. I'm not sure but I think the 3D isn't quite as good in Real3D as Imax. Or maybe I'm just not remembering very well, I don't know. I also think I like it a little less after a second viewing and 3D or not I certainly will not be buying it on any form of home video.

Other than all this I would like to complain about adobe flash. Which seems kind of cliche on some level. At this point it seems kind of redundant or something to complain about them. I was trying to watch a video on Hulu. I got all the way to the last segment after the last commercial break and something just broke. There was no video, pushing escape wasn't doing anything, it just stuck. So I logged off to force flash and Firefox to quit. You would think a vital commercial interest like Hulu would have every possible incentive to make that sort of thing work as flawlessly as possible. Maybe I do have something of a non-standard setup with this long standing Firefox portable, but even so it seems kind of messed up. All I wanted to do was watch the stupid Always sunny in Philadelphia is that so much to ask?

Well I'm still a little tired from waking up at 6am in preparedness for my non-existent job so I'm probably going to rest a while more and find something else to do. I'll have to re-read this entry in a year to see just how chaotic it really was.

For this entry I'm going to spend most to all of it preparing for tomorrow's interview. And perhaps indirectly prepping for the first day of the job. You know, that other minor thing happening tomorrow.

The lady related to this interview I have apparently forgot to send me some minor details about tomorrow's interview so I had sent her email mentioning that if there was anything left to send to be sure and send it before 7am California time since that was around the time I would be leaving (I happen to know she's on the east coast). I sent that email either Saturday night or Friday night, can't remember now. Probably Saturday. In any case she responded tonight with some details. Namely that the interview would be of the "behavioral" variety. She also mentioned a link to a web site that kind of summarizes and explains what to expect in a behavioral type interview. 

Keeping in mind it's not as though I have never been in a behavioral interview in the past. In fact I think I have done relatively well with them. My interview performance the last several months has prompted me to want to prepare, so lets go through some things here. Also, I should probably think of some questions for them for the inevitable do you have any questions for us? that will come up.

I'll just go through the included bullets points one by one as best I can. The first one is integrity. I'd like to believe I have some fairly solid integrity traits some where inside. I think I would define integrity as holding to principals even in the face of adversity or an obvious easier and quicker way out. Right?

Lets see, examples... well I did for instance screw something up at the place I worked with a particular batch file. And this just so happened to have corresponded with a network outage. So the people that ended up calling me were asking about the thing I screwed up as well as the network outage. I could have said it was all the network outage although it seems obvious that would not have held water for any length of time or I could have just come clean right then and there. Which is what I did actually. Okay I'm not sure if that's a good story I want to bring up in this particular interview or not. Not sure they'd let me use batch files after that. Not sure they would let me any way. 

Another example? 

I'll move on now to some form of question about a bad situation I was able to resolve or otherwise turn into a positive. I think I know this one. I was manually installing applications on literally a thousand PCs and was extremely frustrated. It was one of the most frustrating things I have done for the longest period of time probably in my entire life. I did learn a lot about silent installs and launching applications via HTML hyper links that I don't think I would have. I turned something incredibly frustrating into something that ended up teaching me a lot in other words. Not sure that's a good example.

Or on a more positive version about a success story example I could talk about those batch files I wrote that would register an ocx then install some MSIs all one-after-another. The OCX of course being a dependency on which the MSIs depended. Actually I also wrote a batch file that would do a DIR command on three different folders, re-directing them to a text file then set up a scheduled task to run said batch file once an hour every hour 24 hours a day. Also deleting the old text file if it was there. That was definitely a success story I think. At least, the guy I wrote it for seemed to appreciate it quite a bit.

The next bullet point actually was "personal accountability" which I think is some how connected with personal responsibility which I suppose if they use the term I could bring up in an effort to draw a distinction but I would not mention any politics directly of course. Just that the two concepts are related in some subtle way and that my "personal philosophy" I make every effort to live up to is that of personal responsibility. 

I would say personal responsibility is more something you do yourself voluntarily, whilst personal accountability is the result or consequence of an action. In other words if I screw up personal accountability is my being held responsible for the screw while personal responsibility would be my one-hundred percent truthfulness readily admitting the screw and accepting the concequences. It's a subtle dinstinction (in my my mind) but it is still there.

Next, bullet-point-wise is Passion for excellence. I don't actually know what that is. Other than simply stating I'm going to be "balls to the walls" amounts of effort every day to provide the best possible customer experience (in some many words) I don't really know what they want to hear out of that one.

Next is teamwork. Well I did create that way of converting a thumb drive into a bootable PE environment via the WAIK. I created and made available a Ghost image of it then created a word doc explaining how to re-image the thumb drive. There was the above mentioned installation of software on the thousand PCs as a team effort. That was a tough thing actually, everyone having separate excel spreadsheets and then having to combine them all. Actually there's lots of instances in which I attempted in some way to benefit the team at multiple jobs. Although those efforts were not always noticed by the ones that mattered most.

Track records of success? I guess I kind of mentioned that with some of those examples.about batch files and so forth.

Well I could probably keep writing for another hour but it's getting late so I think I'll just go to bed now instead. Obviously there will be a post of some relevance tomorrow.

Yes, it's time to upgrade the black berry. I've been using it with the same OS and mini-Opera browser for years and it was starting to get a little stale. Pretty much every day that I used it for calls or with the browser I would pull the battery out and put it back in to force a reboot. Please it's a good idea to back up things like the address book and if it will back up my mail then that as well.

So I downloaded the latest blackbery "Desktop manager" and kept getting error messages with it not connecting. I wanted to rip out opera before anything else ya see. Really the error was from connecting the black berry to the USB hub I had set up but since one of the suggestions was updating the system software of the device I hit that. Well it didn't really finish because it seemed to be such a faulty connecting between the PC and the device. So part way through the device OS update process it just stopped and wouldn't go any further. So I finally just connected it directly to a USB port of my PC and tried again. As I write this it has gotten past where it stopped on the first attempt and is on a step that could theoretically take up to and including a half hour. I don't know if it will really take that long. The delay certainly won't be on the PC's end considering the core i7 cpu I got in there. I have a feeling I should have just started this before bed and let the laptop do it over night or something. Waiting like this kind of sucks since I can't take my phone with me if I want to leave.

I had some small number of plans today but accomplished very few of them. I did go for another walk around the neighborhood, jogging a very minimal amount of it. And I am planning on getting up at like 6am tomorrow morning as a practice for my coming first-time-in-8-months work week. So I gotta go go to bed way early. Like 9:30 or something. Since it apparently take about an hour to fall asleep. Although I'm tired enough this time it may be shorter.

Apparently the blackberry update is done so I'm going to check that. Well it completed and I ended up wanting to add some "documents to go" and a "task list" or something to the device so I'm right back to where i started from with the current operating taking up to and including 30 minutes to complete. I expect it will take a lot less time than that since it has to do a lot less this time around then last time and last time it took way less than 30 minutes.

I also worked on the "back plane" of my server. By which I mean I took the back plane apart and looked inside. No really indicator as to how I would fix the current issues it is having nor any way to tell if the remaining two bays will continue to work into the future. I think I'm just going to check that peice of garbage and go back to the 5 1/4 - to - 3 1/2 adapters that I mentioned previously.

Of course speaking of my server I need to go back in and start deleting stuff. As it turns out larger and larger capacity hard drives keep getting cheaper and cheaper. So it's a lot easier to simply continue to add newer, higher capacity drives instead of re-organizing. Which isn't necessarily a good idea since it will be a mess taking up that much mroe space. Of course, what I should really do is a combination of adding space and organizing and then mark all the drives as "duplicate data" so it is all redundant on more than one physical drive. Although that will effectively cut the storage space in half at least the data would be backed up with that much more confidence. All my important documents of course are backed up on multiple computers as well as "in the cloud" thanks to DropBox, which I obviously like quite a bit.

How I feel about the new black berry OS will have to wait for tomorrow. Although I just noticed my address book as apparently been wiped out. Maybe I have a copy of it stored some place. It seems like the desktop software really should have made a bigger deal about this will wipe your address book or something to that effect. I think it's going to take a while to re-build that unfortunately. 

It seems like, some how, a lot more of these entries should start out with something other than Today, I. I mean I'm not sure how else I would start a post but it still seems like on some level there should be some other way or perhaps just a lot of vareity of startting posts. Guess I'll have to work on that.

Well I managed to continue my balancing act I've been keeping up since yesterday, at least I think I did. I can only hope I haven't grated on the the lady's patience enough I blew my chances. I did manage to call and confirm the interview time, so I'm glad for that.

I also took apart my server to see if I could figure out why it was skipping one of the hard drives when it got to Windows. Appaerntly  the "back plane" has some non-working spots. Which should have been obvious from the lack of lights in those spots and the lights in the spots that were working. Also the little fans on the back of the backplane don't work any more. So really the thing is pretty much failed electrical-wise. So my choices are to either take the backplane out and then take it apart  to see if I can find any obvious severed lines or any other reason it would be not working or to simply get rid of the backplane and book up the hard drives with some random 5 1/4 - to - 2 1/2 adapters so they fit in the optical drive spots. Only problem is I have no idea where the front plates for this particular chassis are. I'll probably try the take apart thing first and go from there. I mean two out of the four spots work now but who knows how long they will last considering the other two have failed as well as the fans not working. 

Since it was sunny for the first time in seemingly weeks I also went for a little walk/jog around the neighborhood. Actually I did that yesterday as well but forgot to mention it. Today I actually did a few stretches before I went. Not sure yet if it really did any good. Although my joints didn't hurt nearly as much so it must have helped.

Other than all that I had the bright idea to [first wash then] use my sleeping bag as yet another layer on my "sofa couch" in addition to the "mattress" the sofa couch came with and the foam padding from my last bed. As I write this I would say it is actually pretty comfortable.

I haven't done a lot of studying of late for obvious reasons but I guess I have an excuse now. I don't remember what else I was going to write so I guess I will just end this post now.