I got the call about the web content job at BSU today. I got the job, and apparently I get more money for it than I originally thought. In addition to this, I think I get a newly renovated office space to work in. I also know I like my boss, whom I've spoken with a couple of times. She's nice and competent, and I don't imagine she'll ever tell me that I need to work harder to sell reader's advantage cards.

This hasn't been the case for a long time, but I've been so busy this past week that I haven't blogged. I've been doing things.

Last Monday I was in Muncie for an interview about a web content producer grad position. I think it was a good interview, and I'll hear if I got it or not in the next few days. After that, Gerry and I went and drove to downtown Muncie to find dinner. If I ever need photo-reference for the city at the end of the world, I'll know where to go. I thought certain parts of Toledo were depressing, but this might top that. We did eat at a good restaurant, though. I had a grilled sandwich that I anticipate eating again sometime in the next few months. And there were boats hanging from the ceiling, in the eventual case that Muncie is wiped from the landscape in a flood.

Tuesday through Thursday, work, yadda-yadda.

Friday night after I left the library I went to Cebolla (pronounced seh-boy-ya) for dinner with several of my college friends. It's the second best Mexican food in town, which is still quite good. I ate cheese enchiladas and caught up with two of my old forensics comrades, and life was good. I came home and later my brother and I watched Duck Tales at three in the morning, and it was every bit as cool as I could've hoped.

Saturday evening was my last day at Barnes and Noble, which is both good and bad. I'm happy to be closer to leaving for grad school, but I'm going to miss my co-workers. I went to Henry's with three of these guys after work and they gave me a proper send-off. We talked about books, mostly. These are some freaky-smart guys with literature, which is why I like them, because it gives me something to aspire to and they recommend really good books. We toasted to my success in continued education, and then to The Da Vinci Code and mediocrity.

Today my brother and I went to dinner at Taco Cabana- the highlight of this outing is in his blog. After this, we went to check out the new Mitchell's bookstore that opened where Million Story Books used to be. It is only the second day of business for them, but I wasn't all that impressed. The books were scattered and disheveled, even though we were two of maybe four customers in the store, and the staff were just standing around. Also, it isn't the most efficient use of space. The science section is right in the front, and for some reason they sell luggage. And the fiction wasn't even alphabetized right, and biographies were mixed in all crazy-like. In short, I don't know what they hope to accomplish with this store, but organization really ought to be a priority. I kept feeling that it's just not Million Story, which made the place feel sad, like a dead bird. That sounds dramatic, but it really was a somber feeling in there.

I'm going to turn in my resignation at the library this week. It's not at bad job, but I don't think I'll miss it as much. I'm not all that attached to it.

I had quite a night last night. As per the mission statement of this blog, every time I do something interesting my small but distinguished audience gets to hear about it.

When I got home from work last night, my brother informed me that the Three Rivers Festival's most essential Junk Food Alley would not last for the duration of the festival, but only half. We had planned on going on Tuesday, but all we would've found then is an empty space and a few bloated carnie corpses (they always leave a few). Our goal was to find something fried and delicious, and this year did not disappoint. First, though, we took a walk through the carnival.

This was the first bright shiny novelty to catch my eye. Most carnival rides are titled "serpent", or "racer", and are painted to reinforce these names. The theme here was film. Apparently, sitting in a teacup and spinning around is just like being in the movies. I think "ciak!" is Italian for either "action" or "motion sickness".

I liked this shot with the lights and the sunset and the helicopter. There was a similar scene in Apocalypse Now, so of course I had to pay homage. There are always helicopter rides every year, but the ride is really expensive. I think Gerry went on it one year, and I didn't want to so I sat on a bench and got to know Wes. Good times.

I hoped I would get a cool tracer effect here, but no such luck. I include this image anyway because Michael dubbed it the dumbest ride there because it holds you upside down for a long time. I agree, that is pretty lame. "Metal fatigue" spelled upside down still means the thing. After I took this picture, some peasant did a slurred impression of someone asking me for fifty cents. Ahh, carnivals.

At this point, we made our meandering way to the food. Last year, we ate Milky Way candy bars dipped in funnel cake batter and fried and covered in powdered sugar on a stick. If your religion doesn't include some mention of this, you're being seriously gypped. After solemn consideration and perusal of the various fried-dough-capable neon trailers, we decided on...

Fried Oreos.

Served hot and delicious, these were our fried indulgence of the evening. Even as they lay cooling on my lap, I could smell how sweet they were.

Inside view. Michael commented that for the price we paid, they could've at least used double-stuff. They're still good, though.

One of Michael's cookies actually fused together in the frying process. This is dangerous science, here; not to be trifled with. When we were standing in line pondering what we were going to eat, we heard somebody call the various fried cookies and candy bars "heart-attack on a stick." As we were eating, Michael responded to this: "I've had a heart attack, and it kind of sucked. These are awesome." We made our way back to the car as it began to rain slightly, our stomachs full of fried dough and lard cookies. It's bliss, I tell you what.

After we got home, I remembered that one of my co-workers at the Library was having a party. I've known her since middle school, and she said that there would be live DJs there, so I figured I ought to give it a go. After all, the premise was lucrative in of itself- an outdoor party at night in the middle of nowhere with live techno music. I'm no socialite, but I am a sucker for novelty.

I exited the interstate by the General Motors plant and drove east into the uncertain lightless void that is rural Allen county. My invitation said to take the second exit and turn left, putting me in increasingly unfamiliar territory. Still, I pressed on through the directions and pulled into an unassuming farm driveway. There were cars parked on the grass, indicating I had found the place. Still no sign of a party, though. No lights or music, just a quiet farm at ten o'clock at night. There was a grass path with tire tracks on it and a sign advising against driving on the muddy grass. I took this as an indication that the rest of the trip would be on foot.

The walk back was dark and quiet, with a field to my left and eventually trees to my right. The clouds overhead obscured the moon and stars, so the only light I had to navigate by was the ambient light from the GM plant two miles away. I could feel that the soft ground under my boots was grass and occasionally mud, so I took this as a good sign. Tire tracks lead to people, or so my theory went. After about ten minutes or so I came upon a pond dimly illuminated by the industrial light bounce off the clouds. On the far side I could see a bonfire and a lantern, and movement that looked like people. The way around the pond was shrouded in trees. To quote my wise Grandpa, it was "darker than a sack of assholes."

I reached the bonfire circle of partially visible strangers and scanned for a familiar face. My co-worker Levon was the first person I could recognize, so I sat down in a chair beside him and we talked about stuff and idle chitchat. I knew a few people, including the host. This was all well and good, but the real fun started with the music.

Two DJs were standing at a table under a tent. Their equipment was laid out in front of them like something at NASA. Like funky NASA, to be specific. Each had some sort of drum machine with blinking light buttons to indicate which beats and parts were playing. Each was linked to a larger control box in the center with sliders and lights that shifted the sound in different ways. I stood watching as they worked, listening to the thumping music and studying how each guy changed the music every now and then. Though the beats and sounds were pre-programmed, the whole thing came off as one continuous jam session. The free form aspects of it came from the DJ's improvisation and ad-lib. I kind of felt like Mr. Rogers, visiting an unfamiliar place and learning all about it. Like the aforementioned sage, I felt hopelessly square among the cool people around me, but I watched enthusiastically and nodded my head to the beat.

People would periodically get up and dance when the DJs were doing something interesting. Not the lame-ass R&B club dancing that keeps me away from dance clubs, but cool crazy dancing. This is often accompanied by people waving various colored lights around with varying degrees of success. One guy had two glowsticks tied together, but every time he'd swing them around one of them would fly off and he'd have to go chase it. That was kind of funny, but the really cool thing was the girl who was swinging two wires with clusters of LEDs on the ends. Each strand twirls opposite the other, and in the dark with the music it looks really intricate. The lights illuminated her as they swung past quickly with red, blue, and yellow light. I can't help but think that Degas would have absolutely loved this dancing with weird light. Her next feat was holding the lights close to her hands, standing in front of people and moving the lights in front of and around the person's head in a dizzying display. She turned to me and asked if I'd like to try. I gave an affirmative and she introduced herself. Then, lights in hands, she rapidly waved them around in a random pattern, sometimes in opposite ways so my eyes couldn't follow both. It was quite something. I watched the DJs for a little while more, but I had to leave early because I had to work for eight hours the next day.

Like an Orc peon with four trees left within reasonable walking distance of his Orc encampment, I'm getting close to being done with my work at Barnes and Noble. It's funny, because different people have all said "so, I hear you're leaving us" in the same casual way. This leads to me telling them that I'm going back to school at Ball State. Inevitably, I then have to explain what Digital Storytelling is. It feels pretty darn good to be working behind a counter and think about how I could break out in a dance like Christopher Walken in that Fatboy Slim video. Coincidentally, I found this list of things that people ask in bookstores. I've heard most of them, often more than once. I recommend perusing the other lists on the site, too.

Well, wonder of wonders, the computer is fine. The guy at A-plus was able to install a new drive and even recover all the data from the old one. Looks like I can keep all of my digital ephemera.

Now that I have a fully armed and operational machine again, I want to try something a little different with this blog. Since blogger hosts images, I plan on doing more photo blogging. It's something to do as I kill time until/ prepare for mid-August. The only subject I can think of is the Three Rivers Festival's annual Junk Food Alley. That ought to be worth taking pictures of. That, and there are a few places around the city that I want pictures of. There's a really great side-street alley that I walk through to get to the library that I've always liked. Todd and I filmed part of Courier there.

Here's a site that made me laugh. FU-H2. This is good therapy after working at Jefferson Pointe for so long.

I got a call about the computer today. It turns out that my big 120GB drive is kaput. That means I lose a ton of cool stuff. 20+ MST3k movies, seven or eight Smashing Pumpkins concerts of varying quality, and most of the 2D computer art I’ve done in the past few years. Fortunately, I’ve been saving my 3D files on another drive. There’s still a chance that some of the data can be recovered, but things don’t look good.

In better news, I’ve turned in my 2-weeks notice at Barnes and Noble. I like the store and the staff, don’t get me wrong. I’ll probably still go there for books I wish to purchase that I can’t find at Hyde Brothers. I also have an interview (or something similar) next Monday at BSU to find out about being a content producer for the BSU website. So not only is this a substantial financial windfall, but I might get to do something that will count as real work experience.

It’s been quite a week. I worked quite a bit over the weekend at both jobs, so I was already worn out when I got home on Sunday night, when I could feel myself coming down with a cold. My two days off, Monday and Tuesday, I get sick. Then, to add insult to injury, the computer crapped out on me, so I had to drive across town to get it repaired. They’re backed up right now, so it will be Monday before they call with an estimate. Call me Okonkwo, because my things are falling apart.

I’m blogging from my Mom’s laptop now, which is kind of odd. I’ve used it before for blogging, but now I’m faced with a week or more of being a “Mac Person.” I wonder when the mindset sets in? When does one become a full-on Mac enthusiast? If I find myself trying to sell anybody on the many features the Mac has, and the many great games that will eventually see Mac release, I’m going to jump into the St. Mary’s.

Well, one feature does warrant mentioning. When I plug in my iPod, the Mac reads it as an external drive. It even charges the battery through the firewire port. Kind of cool, right? Well, no. For some reason, iTunes is incapable of playing songs in the intended album order. It even goes so far as to rearrange the songs on the iPod. I used iTunes for MS to rip the songs, too, so I know that the track order is all correct. Maybe when Steve Jobs gets done hula dancing in a skirt of money in front of Michael Eisner’s house he could get somebody on this problem. That would be great.

I feel I would be remiss if I didn't pass this link along to the few people who check this site. How to disable autorun. It's a pretty significant security measure, and if you scroll to the bottom, you can download a little applet that will do it for you. Disabling autorun will also defeat the current spyware and anti-copy crap that comes on some new CDs.

As of this writing, I’m reclining on a hotel bed at IUPUI blogging in Word in the hope that I might encounter a wi-fi hotspot at some point tomorrow.

Today I visited BSU to get my schedule straightened out. I’ve been paranoid about missing deadlines, but apparently I’m okay in that regard. It’s kind of nice that I can get into any class in my course of study with no problem. I also paid a brief visit to Gerry, who was in the middle of something of immense importance when I wandered in. Things are looking good for this Fall, very good indeed.

I had dinner at Maggiano’s Italian restaurant. The interior design is really nice, I dare say nicer than the eating establishments featured in the Godfather movies and on the Sopranos. The cheese ravioli was amazing, as was the tiramisu.

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Back home now. I meant to write more last night, but I was pretty tired. As a matter of fact, I'm still tired, so if my prose has the rhythm of a squirrel eating a coconut, there's a reason. I got maybe four hours of sleep due to the three glasses of tea I had with dinner. It turns out that when a restaurant bothers to actually brew tea from scratch (instead of mixing tea-flavored koolaid with tap water) it retains a hefty measure of caffeine. I never learn. All of this was supposed to be blogged and posted from somewhere with Internet access, but that wasn't an option.

I managed to pick up a few useful items for the coming fall. The reason I mention this is that I feel like making a bulleted list.

• iTrip: The iTrip is an FM transmitter for the iPod. It sits atop the iPod and a little red light glows to assure you that it is properly draining the battery power of the iPod like a little plastic lamprey. Once I got it working, though, it actually did broadcast to the radio. The added value of this is that Orrin Hatch hates this sort of gadget with a venom he usually reserves for mixed-race marriages.

• Bathrobe and two pairs of pajama pants: It ought to be glaringly obvious what this is. The bathrobe is a thick black material similar to Emperor Palpatine's robes. Perfect for contemplating stuff, or watching movies. The pajama pants are a lighter material with plaid checks. I doubt the proud clans of old Scotland meant for their fabric heritage to adorn my Ent-like legs.

• 32MB USB drive key chain: My computer won't be on the university network next year, so I need some way of moving data to other machines. For big things, like large .tif sequences, I have my 10GB iPod. For anything smaller, like papers and medium-res images, 32MB is plenty. And it has a little clip on it, the international symbol of usefulness.

In a scant two months, I'll be up to my eyeballs (6' above sea level) in cool tech and like-minded people at BSU. I'm very excited about starting school and a new job. I haven't really felt like this in a long while, this anticipation of something good and meaningful. There isn't a whole lot of that to be found in this town.

One bonus to this is that I get a new mascot. You see, for four years I grit my teeth under the yoke of being a "Cougar." Other Catholic universities get cool mascots, like the "Fighting Irish", or the "Saints." They get thematic monikers, we get an endangered species of cat that preys on weak livestock and gets caught in traps set by dairy farmers. I did my best to avoid any merchandise with the mascot logo on it, as it looked like something a high school would put on a gym floor to hide water damage. I bought a Franciscan cross in Asisi so that I would have an appropriate symbol of my alma mater and not an athletic logo. Besides, the actual school seal has two hands with stigmata. That would look pretty hard-core on a football uniform, don't you think? Imagine this on a field:

Visitor: "We're the Bulldogs! See this logo? We're the Bulldogs! What's that on your logo?"

USF: "We're USF- our logo has the divine blood of the saints flowing from hands crossed over an old Roman execution device that became the religious icon that our school is founded on."

Visitor: "You guys are messed up. We're gonna get killed."

No, alas, "Cougars" won out. But how is a Cardinal any better? Well, to it's credit, it is the state bird. It isn't particularly frightening, unless directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but it's loads better than some of the alternatives.

I haven't focused on this blog too much recently, as I've been kind of boring. I haven't been lazy, but working at the library and housecleaning aren't all that exciting. I'm planning a trip to BSU in the sorta-near future and a much longer stay this fall that ought to make for more blogfodder. In the interim I'll probably just make little posts with links shamelessly stolen from Fark, Slashdot, and Boingboing.

Speaking of which, here's a link to a story that made me mad. I've been boycotting RIAA releases for over a year now, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon. I still happily buy music from non-RIAA labels and artists, such as Epitaph. You'll also notice the RIAA radar link in the right-hand column of this site.

Check out this page if you've got some time to kill and you like great photography. Commute NYC.

Here's an update from yesterday's post about the home renovation project. I got the wall anchors out and found that they were made of cardboard. I guess this is the way things were done in the 1970's, before people had been properly warned about Abba. Anyway, I caulked the holes in the wall and my brother and I hung up the shower curtain. Take a look at it to fully appreciate the novelty.

I'm currently in the middle of a project, but I wanted to post this. My brother and I took out the shower doors in our bathroom because they leak beyond repair. The doors are gone, but before I hang up the shower curtain, I need to put caulk in the holes in the wall where the screws were. The thing is, there's some sort of mystery substance in the holes that kept the screws in place. Not regular plastic wall anchors, but something from the "other" category. But the point of this post is that when I was searching for guidance with google, I found this guy. I think he's my id.

Everything's Coming Up Milhouse!

I'm geeked out over this trailer in a big way. I'm not sure how it fits into the Final Fantasy VII story proper, but in this case, I really don't care. This movie completes the trifecta for coolness- Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Star Wars Episode III, and Serenity. If my head explodes next summer you'll know why.

This past weekend I got the very good news that I have been offered an assistantship job at Ball State. I'm not clear on all of the details yet, those are coming in the mail, but I'm positive I'm going to take them up on the offer.

Yarr! Look over tharr! It be a leviathan! If you have time to kill and a desire to learn about Cedar Point, check it out. I wonder what it is about driving through Ohio that makes he and I want to blog about it in great length?

It's been a good day today. I got enough sleep last night, indicating that I may be acclimated to my new schedule. I had been waking up after three hours of sleep no matter how tired I was, and I usually can’t get back to sleep. I’ve gotten a lot of reading done this way, though.

I went to the Mill this morning before work to get a little something to eat. As I stood in line with a smattering of pastel-clad hand wringing southwest matrons, I decided on a large butterscotch chip chocolate chip scone. (They’re real, and they’re spectacular.) The credit card machine broke when I was about to pay, so I got a free piece of bread for waiting. I was still on time for work, so the point of the story is the scone.

Shelving books was everything you might expect, but there was one point of mild excitement. I was shelving a car repair manual when I noticed someone making strange noises on the other side of the shelf. I ignored it, as I often do to pretty much everybody save for co-workers. Then I heard a hissing sound, followed by a quick inhalation, followed by a low grunt and a hand grabbing the shelf. I could smell some kind of gas, too. It was one of the indigenous bums huffing gas, like, four feet away from me. He walks around the corner and looks at me for a second, as I squat down where I was shelving. I don’t look up, as I’m not quite sure what to do here. “D’hew-hur-eer” the now visible noise says. I look up at him, doing my high school drama class best to look like I hadn’t known he was there. He was a stunted little rodent of a man, with old clothes and a blue bandanna, the type of garb that the destitute welcome wagon gives out. “What?” I honestly had no idea what he said, his eyes focused on anything but me. “Do you work here?” he successfully vocalized. I nodded and said yeah, and went back to what I was doing, and he did the same. After a bit of thought, I decided to tell security. This seemed like the kind of thing they ought to know, that the business and technology section was being used as a crack house annex. I snuck away to the desk and told the guard at the front desk what goofball was up to. He said he would send a guard back to check it out. You’d think that this is where things would get cool, right? You’d expect a Cops-style bust where the grey shirted hardass would chase the bum across the whole building before tackling him and hosing him down with pepper spray. I wanted something cool to happen, but he just went and looked at the guy, who went and sat at a table to read. Well, as well as he could, all hopped up on goofenthal. What kind of security guards are these? The guards in Metal Gear Solid investigate if they see anybody, for crying out loud. And don’t let the blue bandanna fool you, this guy wasn’t Snake. His voice was all slurred from his last two brain cells rubbing together, so I kind of wanted to offer him a dollar of he’d say “Hey- the sheriff is a ni___r!” like the crazy old prospector from Blazing Saddles. That would’ve been sweet.

¡Libros para Libre!

Fair warning about tonight's post: It's about work, a subject I usually avoid because it bores even me.

I've completed my first week at the library, where I push carts and shelve books in near silent solitude, which I enjoy. The repetition makes the time pass quickly, and all the squatting and standing is giving me a great workout. It’s like cardio for nerds, where instead of an aerobics instructor chirping instructions at me, I have the Dewey decimal system, so I move to where the book goes according to the number like some kind of alpha numeric DDR game. The library is quiet, too. Not ninja-quiet, per se, more like Calvin Coolidge-quiet. No annoying music, and what few slack-jawed yokels find do their way into the building mostly behave themselves. My new co-workers are all very nice, too. A group of people who choose to eschew sunlight for books are my kind of people indeed.

For now, I probably won’t leave Barnes and Noble. I work with some really great people, some of whom I may even call friends. I get tired of the BS sometimes, like trying to sell the membership cards and working on a cash register for seven hours with no place to sit. Every time I think I might call it quits, though, I have a great conversation about Tom Waits with another bookseller, or I get to listen to Dave the history buff manager discuss American history, or I get to go out after work with a group of people, and the job is worthwhile again. It’s only a few hours a week, but that’s enough.

Two days this week I worked both jobs, which amounts to close to an eleven-hour day, including lunch break. That’s a long day, but I make a pretty good amount of money on those days. This sort of thing is when I just have to keep telling myself “if I can’t do this, I can’t do grad school.” That’s been my mantra since I first started at the bookstore.

Here's something everybody can enjoy: The Robot. My brother got this in a sudden IM, and I got a good laugh out of it.