Oct. 4th, 2002

camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
Look! Look! It's a working computer built in an IKEA breadbox! Yeah, it's got no floppy, but it's got a CDRW and twenty gigs of storage! It's blue! It's cheap! It's smaller than a breadbox!

I gotta build me one of these when I have the cash!
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
Slept soundly and solidly last night, though not as much as I would like. This despite having consumed half a bag of Goetze's Caramel Creams, aka nuggets of diabetic death, within hours of bedtime. Spent a nice quality stretch of time dreaming, although I don't remember most of what it was about... there was one stretch with me working on something on the computer when my favourite X-Files character, AD Skinner, showed up to check on something. There was a segment involving a sprawling hotel that had formerly been a county courthouse, or possibly the other way around, and there was a ranting mad scientist who had just started to expound why everyone else in the world was unable to understand him - and then the alarm went off.

It's been raining here since yesterday afternoon. We've gone without proper rain for so long that I didn't understand why it was so damn dark when I woke up. All I could think was that I'd set my clock ahead by an hour and it was really six twenty instead of seven twenty - it was dark and I didn't hear anyone else in the house moving around (mornings mean running showers and the enormously loud exhaust fan in the bathroom running whenever the light is on). It didn't help that I'd been snapped out of REM sleep. That's a hellaciously disorienting experience, at least for me. I squinted at the time on my celphone, groaned, and managed to get out of bed within three minutes.

Today it is a dark grey sky day, and it is faintly drizzly. The rain is not falling right now, although it probably will fall off and on all day. I'm working on office stuff. At lunch I have to buy my cousin a wedding present, he's getting married on Saturday. At home I have to make dinner, then work on my Perl homework for Tuesday (barf - I hardly know Perl, I was raised on C++, I'm pathetic), then possibly work on my process reengineering homework for Monday. Seriously considering making my process for the semester (we'll have to write a term paper on whatever we choose) the hiring and/or firing of employees at Virtucon - Dr. Evil's organization. Hey, I have done these classes before. I was made miserable in Managerial Processes because I didn't know we were going to have to spend ALL FREAKING SEMESTER talking about the same stuff we chose for our ethical dilemma in week 2, so I spent a semester learning to ask asinine questions about the different aspects of deciding on whether or not to go all-vegetable in a home-based soap making business. I got A's on my assignments in Business Communications class - the first being a letter to fire someone for cause plus memos to the staff explaining the incident, and the second being a proposal to solve a business problem with either tech or staffing components. I fired the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert for a long list of malfeasances culminating with an attempt to start a conga line on the bridge of the U. S. S. Greenville just before it hit the Ehime Maru. My proposal was from Chippendale Optical Technologies to build an Extremely Large Scale Laser Array for Herr Baron Doktor Viktor Von Doom to burn the Latervian coat of arms into the surface of the Moon (he'd placed a request for proposals in Aggressive Marketing Monthly), and I had technical specs and diagrams from actual laser companies to back up my offer.

I would far rather get an A for something ridiculous that nevertheless fulfills the requirements and shows I understand how business works than for something that I know but only wind up rehashing forever. Talking about what you already know just makes you ill, and let's face it - Dr. Evil's hiring process is blatantly inefficient. He's surrounded by what can only be called frickin' idiots, he's got what, two? Three? competent henches, and his firing process is unnecessarily expensive. With a sufficient set of background checks and the right use of IT technology to weed out the idiots at the door, Virtucon could save... dun dun DUNNNNH... millions by only hiring genuinely appropriate people. Not to mention the amount of time they'd save by entrusting the process to employees who're genuinely concerned with the company mission rather than following procedure and making headcount! I believe I can come up with some pretty persuasive data flow diagrams to explain how the process ought to be streamlined.

That's it for now, I think...

(If anyone's interested in seeing the aforementioned assignments, let me know. I might still have a copy somewhere.)

Today's pulp survival tip is 161. Everyone already knows that you cut the red wire when defusing a bomb, so Evil Villains have gotten a little cleverer about their explosive devices. Cut any wires or threads that have no insulation on them first.
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
After discussing the pronunciation of 'ren' in Mandarin at some length with my co-worker Na (the teacher pronounced the initial sound several different ways on Wednesday, ranging from 'dzhen' to 'zhjen' to 'jzen' and points in between, while I sat in the back and wanted to strangle the man next to me who kept loudly saying 'ren'), I looked up at the traffic outside my window.

Big old 18 wheeler with 'GENESIS EXPRESS' painted on the side went by, headed along 46 West.
And just now, a van from National Dust Control passed by, headed east.

If I see a truck with anything on it about either ashes or babies in the next three minutes... well, I'm just gonna shake my head and sign the rest of the day over to the Angel of Surrealism and leave it at that.

Ahem.

Oct. 4th, 2002 05:25 pm
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (boogly pupils)
VERY LARGE-SCALE LASER ARRAY PROPOSAL
CHIPPENDALE OPTICAL TECHNOLOGIES

Snipped for *your* protection! )
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (boogly pupils)
UBERTECH, INC.
OFFICE OF THE CEO
1 TECHNOLOGY WAY
ANNANDALE, NEW JERSEY 08840

Again, snipped for your protection. )
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
Never let the store gift-wrap the large, irregularly shaped item.

It's a rug. It's 98 inches long by 24 inches (maybe 36, I forget) wide. It's for my cousin's wedding present. The gift bags at Linens and Things are big enough to fit, but have the company logo printed on them in huge letters. They look like baby blue trash bags.

I've gotta rewrap this thing in the morning.

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camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
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