Thoughts from a reclining positon.

December 8, 2003

Ahhhh…a crisp December night, and here I am lying in the living room in front of a roaring fire with a hot cup of coffee.

As much as I can, at least. Lying in the living room is certainly true, but “roaring” isn’t a good adjective to describe the fire. Since we have a gas fireplace and artificial logs, any fire in there is mainly for show and certainly not for warmth. It just means that we don’t have to stock firewood anywhere around the house, that’s all. The night isn’t terribly crisp, either. It’s probably about 45 degrees outside right now, so there have certainly been colder nights–even here. I guess in Portland, that’s about all I can get.

Today was spent working on my own computer after nearly four solid days of working on my Dad’s. I brought back some spoils of war from his house–cast off computer parts–and I decided to put them to good use in my system, but when all was said and done and after a couple hours of struggling with hardware, all I could use was a hard drive for overflow files and a network card in another machine. I deiced that I would erase everything on my computer today and start over, however, and that always takes a day of solid work and then another week of piecemeal work to get everything fully back up to speed. Since my desktop computer is no longer my “primary” machine, however, I wasn’t as focused as I normally am on things like that. Basically, I have too much software and too many games, and it takes a friggin’ long time to get everything running. So much configuration…it boggles the mind.

…and so now I’m back to my “primary” machine–my laptop–where everything is already set up the way I like it. I use quotation marks around the word “primary” because I use my laptop each day more than my desktop, but it’s hard to think of a slower computer as my main machine, especially considering the amount of money that’s been collectively pumped into my desktop computers over the last seven or eight years. I’ll get over it. I just recently got rid of all my receipts from old computer purchases, and I should have added them up before I got rid of them just out of curiosity. Frankly, I don’t think I want to know. When I was working full time at Stream five years ago, I dropped a lot of cash on things like computer parts, but that was back in the day where an upgrade really made a difference in how computers performed. Hardware is so far ahead of software now, though, that I can afford (not financially) to not upgrade my computer nearly as often and still get good life and performance out of my machine.

Tell that to my four year old, 800 Mhz laptop, though, and compare it to my 2 Ghz desktop. I have double the amount of RAM in my desktop as I do in my laptop, and four times the amount of video RAM. Only about four times the amount of disk space, though. I make do with what I have, though. I’m happy to have this laptop at all.

The job hunt is still a big negatory. I keep saying that I need to email my friend Meagan’s cousin who works here in Portland and who I sent my resume to, but I just haven’t done it yet. He said he was going to call me the next day, maybe over the weekend if he got busy because he wanted to talk to me before he passed my resume along, and that was the weekend before Thanksgiving. Yeah, I’d say it’s definitely time to give him a gentle poke to remind him I’m still waiting to hear back from him. That’s my strongest lead at the moment. I sent out some resumes the weekend after Thanksgiving, but in the traditional employer follow-up, I got none at all. How typical. One of the resumes even went to someone who I had spoken with in person before, and I reminded them of who I was (they had lived in Beloit and we had spoken about it for a while), but I heard nothing in return. I mean heck, even just send a “thanks but no thanks” letter like I’ve gotten before. My favorite example of one of those was the rejection letter I got from Stanford when applying for colleges. I had no delusions about getting in and going to Stanford, but I applied simply for the sake of applying, plus there was the off-chance that they might decide to make me a fourth-generation legacy for legacy’s sake alone. Regardless, I had met the admissions director the summer before I sent in my application at the Stanford Sierra Camp my mother and I used to go to every year, and I included a note with my application reminding him who I was. When I got my thin envelope back from the admissions department, I knew I hadn’t gotten in (as I said, I had no delusions anyway), but inside was a personalized rejection letter from the admissions director. And I don’t mean personalized as in it started off with “Dear Andrew”, but rather he mentioned my letter and the conversation we’d had the summer before. It pays to know people in high places, no? I mean if you’re going to get swatted down, might as well be by the head honcho.

That’s why I’m always so surprised to never hear anything back from employers, because I have that story in my brain. Of all the tens of thousands of applications that went in to Stanford every year, he took the time to have a letter personalized for me. It’s not like it was written in his own hand, but he certainly had to say what would go into it to SOMEONE. How hard is it to fire off an email saying “We got your resume, thank you”? The Internet revolution in finding employment works both ways, you know. It makes it easier for searchers to find potential employers, and it makes it easier for employers to contact searchers. And I don’t mean an automated receipt email (i.e., “Thank you for submitting your resume, due to the volume of resumes we receive blah blah blah, please do not respond to this email”), but when you’re sending it to a specific person. You hit reply in your inbox, you say “Thanks”. How hard is that? Ah well, I guess I have a lot to learn still. I was raised to always say thank you for everything, though my mother practically had a cow when I refused to send someone a thank you note for something I thanked them for in person–twice. Once upon receipt of the gift certificate, and once after redemption when I told them what I purchased. Two heartfelt and sincere thank-you’s in person negate the need for a written version in my opinion, no matter what Miss Manners may say in the end.

And so another Christmas approaches where my entire family has voiced some curiosity of what I want for Christmas. This happens every year, though, and I tell them what I say every year: “That ruins the fun of Christmas.” I always end up suggesting something to at least one person in the end, so the tradition continues with them knowing I’ll cave in the end and ask for something from at least one of them. I was easy to shop for as a kid: toys. I loved toys. I would spend what I’m sure seemed like hours to my parents in Toys R Us, and every Christmas I would always get something from the toy genre, frequently something manufactured by Lego, one of my perennial favorites. Man, I had Lego cities and Lego fleets. At my Dad’s I had a Lego parking garage, a Lego space shuttle and launch facility, and several smaller “Town” sets, plus a castle and several smaller “Castle” (the words in quotes being the overall collection name that Lego used) sets, and a huge space base that I always wanted and finally got just towards the end of my childhood fascination with Legos. At my Mom’s, I had a ship (water ship, not space) that belonged in the “Pirate” collection, as well as a fortress and a island hideout from the same. And those were the “big” sets, too, the multi-hundred piece ones. I was stocked at either house. Naturally I could never mix the collections, so I had to expand the different ones in order to keep playtime going. You couldn’t have the space shuttle encountering the Spanish ship shelling the pirates’ island hideout, after all. Plus, those sets were at different houses….

Ah, but back to Christmas. Toys, that’s what I always wanted. As I grew older it became computers. I never got a computer for Christmas since I had a penchant for building my own, but I frequently got parts and money that went towards parts. In recent years it’s become cooking equipment, but I think that anyone who’s planning on that can put a hold on your plans right now. I have cooking equipment that I haven’t even USED yet, for Pete’s sake. Plus a gift card to Kitchen Kaboodle that’s gone unused as well, though that was from this last birthday of mine and not a prior Christmas. When I made pizza last week, I was slightly disheartened that I couldn’t use my pizza stone that my Dad bought me for my birthday, but in order to use it I need a pizza paddle, which I planned on getting with my gift card. Making pizza here at my Mom’s is sort of a struggle anyway due to the size of her counters and the amount of free space. I have different preferences for cooking at both her and my Dad’s houses, but I greatly prefer baking there since he has such huge counters and more overall room to work. So maybe my trip down to Kitchen Kaboodle to redeem my gift card can be this year’s cooking equipment so I can save my Christmas gifts for more applicable things. I doubt I need any new clothes, either, since my closet is fairly full and I KNOW my dresser is. I just got rid of a bunch of stuff that I didn’t need anymore or was too big for me, so I don’t really need to restock my closet.

And so that leaves my family still scratching their heads as to what gifts they might be able to give me. Don’t worry; I’ll probably cave eventually and ask for some DVD set or a game I can’t just download online, and so next year you can ask the same question. I used to be so easy to shop for, but I guess that’s changed in recent years.

Part of me has been hesitant to ask for DVD’s for Christmas, though, because I haven’t felt the same urge to buy them as I did in college. I guess probably because I’m so as limited in choices of entertainment anymore, but also perhaps because I’m not hanging around with people and watching movies as much with my friends anymore. I mean, when I’m buying for myself I have no problem postponing DVD purchases as I have in oreder to save on money, but when I watch with other people I always felt compelling to keep buying. Example: when I dated my friend Heather, she and I both enjoyed the TV show “The X-Files” a lot, and so I purchased the seasons that were available on DVD for us to watch together. As things between us began degrading and we eventually broke up our junior year, I didn’t buy the seasons that came out after that, even though I personally wanted to own them. I just didn’t have the impulse anymore because we weren’t spending as much time together. The same sort of went for one of my favorite shows, “Farscape”, because Heather enjoyed watching those too, but they were much less expensive than season collection of “The X-Files” so I snatched them all up. There are about three episodic collections available I don’t own, but I don’t have anyone to watch them with anymore and I’m pretty much out of the DVD collection business for the time being, so I’ve held off. I even passed up a couple of movies that came out recently I was really looking forward to owning, though I’ll most likely pick them up with Christmas money down the road. So what does all that mean, that I buy my friendship with DVD’s? I hope not. I’ve openly admitted in the past that I’ve bought and/or solidified friendship through other means (never financially, you sicko), but I’ve often wondered if psychologically that had anything to do with my DVD collection.

And while I’m thinking about it, I had a realization today thanks to my sister. We were commenting on how often we get sick, and I stated that I haven’t really been ill in nearly two years with the exception of my bout of strep throat last fall. I’ve had sniffles every now and then, occasional sneezes, but I haven’t been laid up in a long time. I’m sure that Dan can attest that my freshmen and sophomore year I was ill quite a bit, and I always attributed that half-jokingly to my dating Heather, who was ALWAYS sick, it seemed. When the two of us broke up, I didn’t get sick nearly as often, and to my recollection it’s been a long time since I was miserably sick–again, with the exception of that damned strep. But my point is, I’ve been drinking beer more than just occasionally on weekends for about two and a half years now. When I turned 21 I didn’t have much of an appreciation for beer yet, and I have a picture of the very first beer my Dad and shared, but I remember not really liking beer yet when the picture was taken. That came later. My point is, since my taste for beer developed, I haven’t really been sick. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or maybe all the alcohol I drink is killing the nasties in my mouth and body and my immune system has gotten a break. There’s no way to prove it of course, but I’m comfortable with that unscientific conclusion. So let’s all raise a pint for our health!

Well, I seem to be running out of material for the time being. I can only write for so long before I lose either my train of thought or my readers, so I’ll do an abrupt end there. Ciao.

Posted in Beloit, Geekery, General, Movies