So I realised it's been a little old while since I last updated.
Have you ever had the opportunity to see a concert that you've been dying to see for months? Nay, years? And then, when you're living in a moment of pure euphoria as the band plays their opening songs, you're told point-blank to record their show?
I did. Chicago, last Tuesday. They were touring for their 40th year together. 40 years. They've put out 30 albums. They. Were. Amazing.
I have some concert footage, although it's rather small and the sound peaks out a lot. My only recording instrument was my cell phone, poor thing. Still....once I get around to moving the files onto a microSD card, I'll host them online for any and all who care.
--
Motif Designs: I've almost bought my domain. I have a query out to a friend to see what he recommends, but I believe I'll be purchasing www.cplumb.name/ with a fuckload of subdomains, that way I can have motif.cplumb.name/ or smallgun.cplumb.name/ or blog.cplumb.name/ or....the list goes on. The place I'm looking at is highly recommended thus far, and very reasonably priced.
The Headwaters B&B contract is almost complete; I've finished the index page and template, and have submitted it for review. If it gets a green light, the rest of the page [Phase I] will be completed (hopefully) within a day. Phase II is a bit more complex and would cost more money. If, at some point, Headwaters wants to venture down that path, I'll be raring to go.
--
National Park Service:
Right, I've been wanting to tell someone about this all day, but don't want to bring it up for fear of sounding egotistical. Tomorrow is my last day of work for the park service for this summer. A quick recap: Personnel kinda screwed me over; Despite the fact that I know the system we were working on better than anyone else in the region and that I taught it several times to other people, I was hired on as a lowly GS-3. This is because I'm a student. My knowledge and experience mean nothing, however. --> AngryKit@Gov't
So today, my big boss had called a safety meeting. We have them every week. She starts this one off by making a public announcement that A.) If I want a job with the Outfit next year, I have one (which is huge), and B.) I was recommend for, and will be receiving as soon as the paperwork goes through, an award for my exemplary work this summer.
Whoa, wait, backtrack.
A fucking award. A public award that I can tout on my resume, a monetary award to go straight to me. This is fucking huge.
Folks gotta understand, Seasonal Employees don't get awards. GS-3s don't get awards. Maybe they get told by their boss "Yeah, good work this summer." They don't have awards passed through official channels to the very top. That's reserved for the term or permanent employees who are in it for the long haul.
Holy. Fuck.
I'm still blown away by this, if you couldn't tell. I mean, yeah, I knew I'd done good work. I'd taken on massive projects and had them done in a handful of days. I've been communicating directly with the folks from Washington DC. I've been supervising another employee. I've been helping to make policy decisions about Yellowstone's web content. I was put in charge of what could very easily be Yellowstone's most popular, most sensitive project: the webcams. I learned ActionScript in a matter of days instead weeks. I've done Flash applets that are more advanced than I should have been able to do, given my time and training.
...and that's just part of what I stepped in to this summer. Not exactly the work a GS-3 seasonal does, is it?
But an award? Someone must have been wicked impressed. I guess it sounds a lot more feasible when I enumerate it all, but still....whoa. Thank you, Craig, for having faith in me and for putting me in for this award.
--
BHG: Going to review Cadre policy and get that posted soon. Need to confer with Gravant on that. Got a good email from Gramps about LHA standards, I need to comment and reply. XOC registries were wiped, which makes me sad as I finally had a SE ship (an Erebos) that I'd outfitted for 26+ million, the most I'd spent on any craft to date. Oh well. :P
--
Small Gun: Been talking to Anna about this. Once I have my domain, setting up the web portion should not take too long. Hopefully we'll get a story arc and character sketches out soon. Not much new in that dept right now.
Until we meet again,
gun
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
back
I'm back from vacay. The flying was the worst yet. Here's what happened.
Bozeman, Aug 17: Wake up at 3.30 to be at airport by 0600, flight at 0727. Flight == delayed until 0900. No representatives present to tell us why. The plane is just sitting on the tarmac. So we're like, WTF? Finally get on plane and leave ~0920.
Arrive: Chicago, Aug 17. Flight out of Boze was delayed, so connexion was tight at O'Hare. Luckily, connecting gate was just down the hall. And that flight is delayed too. The delay time keeps growing...and growing....but at least I made the connexion.
Arrive: Hartford CT, Aug 17. Would have been a good landing, had Chris and I not been faced with the Mystery of the Missing Aunt. She was supposed to be on my flight, but I couldn't find anyone who matched the description. So we look and look and finally find out that she never even checked in for the flight. Bum luck there.
--weekend in MA--
Hartford CT, Aug 19. Flights to Chicago are all delayed. Most have been canceled. 7 people made it off my flight (including myself), onto the only flight going to O'Hare that day. Luckily, that flight was delayed for 4 hours when we got on...and another 1 hour on the runway. Finally take off.
Arrive: Shitcago, Aug 19. As before, worried about connecting flight. Emergency vehicles are filling the runways for some reason, still unknown. Heavy storms are blocking the airport. Half of the flights out are either delayed or canceled. One girl across the way was stranded for approx 24 hours. My flight to Boze: delayed until 12am. Not cool. AngryKit. Go get shit pizza and buy books. Flight status moved up a couple of hours. That's good. Moved to a new gate. Delayed again. Finally get on plane at ~10pm. Sit on runway for another 45 minutes waiting to leave.
Arrive: Bozeman, Aug 19. Several hours late. Luckily no checked baggage. Heavy smoke making me cough. Get to car and drive home. Get home ~2-3 am mountain time, but I'm still on eastern time. So it's approx 4-5am for me.
Work the next morning.
If you haven't been able to tell by my syntax, I'm a.) angry at the airlines and b.) exhausted. Which raises the question of why I'm still awake writing. Good question. No answer. Almost done.
--
News:
-BHG: Charter passed, no longer Tactician. Now "Enforcer of the Vanguard." Have to make appointments by Saturday. We'll see how this plan works. New character in the works, backstory almost completed. Excited.
-Small Gun: Character name! Damien Gunn, ex spook forced into hiding after finding out that he doesn't exist. Surfaces in an as-yet-unidentified city and teams up with "Small" an ex-prizefighter.
-Oscar: Still fat, still cat. Purring. Curled up next to me. I like teh kitty.
-Motif Designs: Lost the disk with Charissa's files. Need new copy. Draft for Dr Stevenson underway. Purchase domain this week? Need good domain name. Plan on using RoR to make my own blog. Maybe.
Time for bed for this merc.
Until we meet again,
gun
Bozeman, Aug 17: Wake up at 3.30 to be at airport by 0600, flight at 0727. Flight == delayed until 0900. No representatives present to tell us why. The plane is just sitting on the tarmac. So we're like, WTF? Finally get on plane and leave ~0920.
Arrive: Chicago, Aug 17. Flight out of Boze was delayed, so connexion was tight at O'Hare. Luckily, connecting gate was just down the hall. And that flight is delayed too. The delay time keeps growing...and growing....but at least I made the connexion.
Arrive: Hartford CT, Aug 17. Would have been a good landing, had Chris and I not been faced with the Mystery of the Missing Aunt. She was supposed to be on my flight, but I couldn't find anyone who matched the description. So we look and look and finally find out that she never even checked in for the flight. Bum luck there.
--weekend in MA--
Hartford CT, Aug 19. Flights to Chicago are all delayed. Most have been canceled. 7 people made it off my flight (including myself), onto the only flight going to O'Hare that day. Luckily, that flight was delayed for 4 hours when we got on...and another 1 hour on the runway. Finally take off.
Arrive: Shitcago, Aug 19. As before, worried about connecting flight. Emergency vehicles are filling the runways for some reason, still unknown. Heavy storms are blocking the airport. Half of the flights out are either delayed or canceled. One girl across the way was stranded for approx 24 hours. My flight to Boze: delayed until 12am. Not cool. AngryKit. Go get shit pizza and buy books. Flight status moved up a couple of hours. That's good. Moved to a new gate. Delayed again. Finally get on plane at ~10pm. Sit on runway for another 45 minutes waiting to leave.
Arrive: Bozeman, Aug 19. Several hours late. Luckily no checked baggage. Heavy smoke making me cough. Get to car and drive home. Get home ~2-3 am mountain time, but I'm still on eastern time. So it's approx 4-5am for me.
Work the next morning.
If you haven't been able to tell by my syntax, I'm a.) angry at the airlines and b.) exhausted. Which raises the question of why I'm still awake writing. Good question. No answer. Almost done.
--
News:
-BHG: Charter passed, no longer Tactician. Now "Enforcer of the Vanguard." Have to make appointments by Saturday. We'll see how this plan works. New character in the works, backstory almost completed. Excited.
-Small Gun: Character name! Damien Gunn, ex spook forced into hiding after finding out that he doesn't exist. Surfaces in an as-yet-unidentified city and teams up with "Small" an ex-prizefighter.
-Oscar: Still fat, still cat. Purring. Curled up next to me. I like teh kitty.
-Motif Designs: Lost the disk with Charissa's files. Need new copy. Draft for Dr Stevenson underway. Purchase domain this week? Need good domain name. Plan on using RoR to make my own blog. Maybe.
Time for bed for this merc.
Until we meet again,
gun
Friday, August 17, 2007
Short one
And not that you probably care much about my underwear
I'm gone until Monday Aug 20.
Bum luck for all of you who want to keep tabs on me.
Until we meet again
gun
I'm gone until Monday Aug 20.
Bum luck for all of you who want to keep tabs on me.
Until we meet again
gun
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Bag!
Whee, I just bought a bag! Last year, I used my sister's old bag, which was a POS, pardon my French. By the end of the year, two zippers had broken, three pockets had ripped out and, most importantly, my laptop was no longer safe. As in, the bottom had succeeded in ripping out....most of the way. And so, I bought a new bag! Hooray!
Okay, so I've been reading A List Apart and all I can say is "Wow." Seriously smart thoughts bouncing around over there, and they're especially relevant to me as an up-and-coming web developer (I hope). One of the things an article mentioned is the need to keep your readers interested. I realised that that's a problem I have never addressed: There's no reason for you all (if there's any people within that 'you all' group :P) to care about what I have to say, the way I've been saying it. So...yeah, gonna try to keep people interested. Somehow. :P
--
Small Gun: Alright, so I sorta lied in my last post (not off to a very good start, am I?). There's no story just yet for Small Gun, but I've talked with Anna about it and we want to start. Check here for me bouncing story ideas around for the coolest story known to man. For serious.
Video Games: So last weekend, I was watching GPhoria late at night. Can I take a moment to say how incredibly disappointed I am that Gears of War won Game of the Year. Yes, it's hardcore. It's got purty graphics. And yes, you have a chainsaw on your gun. But really? GotY material? I think not. I would say that, of the list they had as nominees, God of War 2 was the most deserving. And I say that not as a Sony fan but as a gamer. There was a game that made me care.
It's rather disappointing to see how GPhoria runs its awards: A group of games is selected and then, instead of having the pros who are supposed to be doing this for their living, they have fans vote. Fans are hardly indicative of whether a game is GotY material. It's indicative of if the game is popular, or if there's a bunch of worthless fanboys plugging for one game on a system, no matter what. All consoles have them, and all of them need to die extravagant, needlessly painful, entertaining deaths. Maybe then we could get on to what makes a game not good, but great. Knights of the Old Republic, you know what I'm saying. Halo: better wait in the van for the hairy men with drugged candy to have their way with you, you POS.
In case you haven't noticed, I have a bit of pent up anger about good games getting the spotlight over great games. :P
--
And thus begins the story of ___ Gun (first name undecided as of yet, make suggestions!), an ex-spook turned private detective, who has always received flak for his name and hates people who point it out. <-- More to follow when I actually flesh it out.
Until we meet again,
gun
Okay, so I've been reading A List Apart and all I can say is "Wow." Seriously smart thoughts bouncing around over there, and they're especially relevant to me as an up-and-coming web developer (I hope). One of the things an article mentioned is the need to keep your readers interested. I realised that that's a problem I have never addressed: There's no reason for you all (if there's any people within that 'you all' group :P) to care about what I have to say, the way I've been saying it. So...yeah, gonna try to keep people interested. Somehow. :P
--
Small Gun: Alright, so I sorta lied in my last post (not off to a very good start, am I?). There's no story just yet for Small Gun, but I've talked with Anna about it and we want to start. Check here for me bouncing story ideas around for the coolest story known to man. For serious.
Video Games: So last weekend, I was watching GPhoria late at night. Can I take a moment to say how incredibly disappointed I am that Gears of War won Game of the Year. Yes, it's hardcore. It's got purty graphics. And yes, you have a chainsaw on your gun. But really? GotY material? I think not. I would say that, of the list they had as nominees, God of War 2 was the most deserving. And I say that not as a Sony fan but as a gamer. There was a game that made me care.
It's rather disappointing to see how GPhoria runs its awards: A group of games is selected and then, instead of having the pros who are supposed to be doing this for their living, they have fans vote. Fans are hardly indicative of whether a game is GotY material. It's indicative of if the game is popular, or if there's a bunch of worthless fanboys plugging for one game on a system, no matter what. All consoles have them, and all of them need to die extravagant, needlessly painful, entertaining deaths. Maybe then we could get on to what makes a game not good, but great. Knights of the Old Republic, you know what I'm saying. Halo: better wait in the van for the hairy men with drugged candy to have their way with you, you POS.
In case you haven't noticed, I have a bit of pent up anger about good games getting the spotlight over great games. :P
--
And thus begins the story of ___ Gun (first name undecided as of yet, make suggestions!), an ex-spook turned private detective, who has always received flak for his name and hates people who point it out. <-- More to follow when I actually flesh it out.
Until we meet again,
gun
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Wow, it's been a while...
A.) I don't think anyone actually reads this, which makes me sad.
B.) As a direct result of A, I doubt anyone will notice that there's a new post here.
C.) As a direct result of A and B, I doubt anyone noticed that there haven't been new posts since early May.
D.) The actual substance:
BHG: Still Tactician, still kicking. That's something, I guess. Sairi's gonna get a new bee-eff, though.
Oberlin: So CIT asked that I return for work/training on the 21st. That would be cool, and I'd love to move in early, but man....I bought my plane ticket back a month ago. There ain't no way I'd be changing things without a wicked good reason. Luckily, they understood and let me off the hook.
I'm formally declaring myself as a Comp Sci major when I get back in the fall. I suppose that means I'll have to switch advisers to someone out of the Politics department. I was accepted into the CS151 class, which means I'll actually have to buy my books this year. Thanks for letting me mooch, Eliot :P
For the moment, I'm still planning on doing Japanese as a minor, but I've been giving serious thought all summer to exploring mathematics as either a double-major or a minor. Mathematical philosophy == pretty awesome. But, as with all of my grand sweeping decisions, we'll see.
Motif Designs: This is finally taking off. I have 2 solid web contracts running right now. One of them I have a pretty clear path forwards. It's pretty much rebuilding an existing page from the ground up, while clearing away the 85% crap in the code and design. Hopefully, once I'm through with it, it'll be mostly identical in looks, but 10x better in feel. Keep your eyes open for that once I get work done on it. (Ie, I'll post a URI for it...there's no sense in giving you information that will soon be invalid.)
The second contract is a bit muddier. I have an unclear idea of my personal path, an unclear idea of my client's path and and unclear idea of what I can and cannot do with it. I gave him a wireframe yesterday, but feel fairly dissatisfied with it the more I consider the next step. I think I'll be abandoning the layout I presented for a more useful one for the project. I'll be sacrificing prettiness for usability, though, so it's 100% worth it.
The really hard part about the second contract is that I have no information to fill the design with. Typesets are fine and all, but they don't give real context to how the page will flow. Images are the same way; I can use dummy images as placeholders, but they're not indicative of how images will fit/flow within the finished product. I...have some thoughts. We'll see if I implement them.
The frustrating thing for Motif Designs right now is that I am in the midst of learning several new languages for publishing web content. I've been playing with ActionScript, AJAX, XML, XSLT, Ruby on Rails, PHP and JavaScript lately, as well as "mastering" the use of DTDs within my XHTML files. This massive expansion of languages is good...but also leaves me neck deep in unknown languages when I'm trying to churn out pages. So that leaves me either: a.) fumbling and messing around with things I know very little of or b.) sticking with what I do know and making a page that I'll be dissatisfied with later. And that also keeps me stuck in my basic knowledge and does nothing to expand my languages in practical application. It's a tricky water to navigate.
Next time on Nothing Personal: Gun and Small team up to take on the biggest bad guys yet! Video game reviews and disappointment in GPhoria! And stay tuned for PhiloKit and my ramblings on web standards!
Until we meet again
-gun
B.) As a direct result of A, I doubt anyone will notice that there's a new post here.
C.) As a direct result of A and B, I doubt anyone noticed that there haven't been new posts since early May.
D.) The actual substance:
BHG: Still Tactician, still kicking. That's something, I guess. Sairi's gonna get a new bee-eff, though.
Oberlin: So CIT asked that I return for work/training on the 21st. That would be cool, and I'd love to move in early, but man....I bought my plane ticket back a month ago. There ain't no way I'd be changing things without a wicked good reason. Luckily, they understood and let me off the hook.
I'm formally declaring myself as a Comp Sci major when I get back in the fall. I suppose that means I'll have to switch advisers to someone out of the Politics department. I was accepted into the CS151 class, which means I'll actually have to buy my books this year. Thanks for letting me mooch, Eliot :P
For the moment, I'm still planning on doing Japanese as a minor, but I've been giving serious thought all summer to exploring mathematics as either a double-major or a minor. Mathematical philosophy == pretty awesome. But, as with all of my grand sweeping decisions, we'll see.
Motif Designs: This is finally taking off. I have 2 solid web contracts running right now. One of them I have a pretty clear path forwards. It's pretty much rebuilding an existing page from the ground up, while clearing away the 85% crap in the code and design. Hopefully, once I'm through with it, it'll be mostly identical in looks, but 10x better in feel. Keep your eyes open for that once I get work done on it. (Ie, I'll post a URI for it...there's no sense in giving you information that will soon be invalid.)
The second contract is a bit muddier. I have an unclear idea of my personal path, an unclear idea of my client's path and and unclear idea of what I can and cannot do with it. I gave him a wireframe yesterday, but feel fairly dissatisfied with it the more I consider the next step. I think I'll be abandoning the layout I presented for a more useful one for the project. I'll be sacrificing prettiness for usability, though, so it's 100% worth it.
The really hard part about the second contract is that I have no information to fill the design with. Typesets are fine and all, but they don't give real context to how the page will flow. Images are the same way; I can use dummy images as placeholders, but they're not indicative of how images will fit/flow within the finished product. I...have some thoughts. We'll see if I implement them.
The frustrating thing for Motif Designs right now is that I am in the midst of learning several new languages for publishing web content. I've been playing with ActionScript, AJAX, XML, XSLT, Ruby on Rails, PHP and JavaScript lately, as well as "mastering" the use of DTDs within my XHTML files. This massive expansion of languages is good...but also leaves me neck deep in unknown languages when I'm trying to churn out pages. So that leaves me either: a.) fumbling and messing around with things I know very little of or b.) sticking with what I do know and making a page that I'll be dissatisfied with later. And that also keeps me stuck in my basic knowledge and does nothing to expand my languages in practical application. It's a tricky water to navigate.
Next time on Nothing Personal: Gun and Small team up to take on the biggest bad guys yet! Video game reviews and disappointment in GPhoria! And stay tuned for PhiloKit and my ramblings on web standards!
Until we meet again
-gun
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