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.