Category Archives: geekspeak

site-related techspeak, computer crap, other technical garble not of interest to the general populace.

aikido, crafty, gaming, jobhunt 3 Comments

A Quickie

I pulled my groin in aikido on Saturday, while trying to roll. I’m getting annoyed with myself for not “getting” it yet. At least my leg seems to be on the fast track, and feels like it should be healed by Wednesday’s class. It really put a damper on the weekend’s other extra-curriculars, though.

This week, Monday through Thursday afternoons, I’m attending an outplacement workshop paid for by Sky/Huntington. I was dubious about its actual value, but it actually seems like it’s going to be helpful. Among some of the highlights will be resume-crafting, networking and job-searching, and negotiating a job offer. I’m actually looking forward to some of this… plus, it gets me out of the office for half a day.

Rob has requested another manly candle, to be picked up this week. In looking at my records, I realize I haven’t made any candles since February (which was the last time Rob requested a manly candle). Candle-making is definitely a seasonal thing for me, being that I don’t like to have the oven on in the summer, and my timing mojo gets thrown off if I melt candle wax in the microwave instead. Maybe I’ll have to ramp up the seasonal candle-making a little earlier this year, and be sure to give everyone at work a going-away candle with my name and URL on it. 🙂

Update, 11:45pm: Rob’s candle came out well. I used a blow dryer to even out the surface — I should have tried that long ago.

In other news, bumping up the difficulty in Civilization IV really makes a difference: from me beating all the computer players in Chieftain mode to me getting my ass kicked and barely making it to the end of the game with one city intact in Warlord mode. If it weren’t almost midnight (and if I weren’t gainfully employed and due at work at 8am), I’d start another game.

webdesign 1 Comment

Nuts-N’-Bolts

For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why must I have these fantastic ideas like, Let’s put the menu for my portfolio site in the bottom left corner! That way, I won’t be able to use the standard nested unordered list to stylize my menu, and I’ll have to come up with some effed up way to rig it! Yeah, that sounds like fun!

I feel like the answer is obvious, yet it eludes me. I’m sure that a.) it’s just a little late at night for actual mental activity to be successful, and b.) upon a proper Googling later, the answer will present itself.

In the meantime, anyone who’d care to school me on how daft I’m being right now is welcome to take a gander at my portfolio in progress. I just want the goddamn submenus to stay visible. *sigh*

It’s a very basic problem. I just need more sleep to conquer it.

geekspeak

Astronomy Geekgasm (or, Ursa Major Space Station)

I just watched the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis fly over. That was SO COOL.

Earlier this week (or maybe it was this past weekend), Aaron had mentioned that our friend Kris took his three-year-old son, Sam, outside and showed him the ISS flyover. After that, from what I understand, Sam not only wanted to see it fly over ALL THE TIME, but every passing car and truck became a space shuttle.

I can dig it.

Earlier this evening, I got a SpaceWeather.com e-mail stating that the Atlantis had left the ISS and would be traveling behind it for the next visible orbit. Hmm, I thought. I should go out and look at that. So, I punched up the Heavens Above website and discovered that the flyover time for Toledo would be around 10:32pm. The ISS would come up in the northwest, pass through the Big Dipper, then arc overhead to set somewhere on the southeastern horizon.

I went outside a few minutes early, to get my eyes dark-adapted — but I got eaten by bugs and startled by neighbors, so I went back inside to wait out the last few minutes. With one minute to go, I stepped outside and sat on the front step, focusing my sight on Ursa Major.

And then, holy shit! There it was! No, there THEY were. One giant, fat, bright star, being chased by an only slightly dimmer star. They came up through the trees and passed through the Big Dipper, as promised. I felt like, if only my glasses were a little stronger, I could have seen those fancy new solar panels on the station. I was so excited, I not only gaped at the sky like a slack-jawed, grinning idiot, but I ran across the driveway in my bare feet to follow them to the other side of the house, so I could watch the ISS and Atlantis orbit over to the other horizon. As the pair set, they got dimmer and dimmer until, several degrees above the horizon, they both disappeared from sight. As they did, though, I saw another satellite crossing their path — I’m not sure which one it was, but it may have been Cosmos 1455 or TRMM.

That trumped the hell out of Halley’s Comet. (I lied to my Girl Scout leader about being able to see the comet back in 1986, just so they would let me pass the binoculars to someone else already.)

I could easily make this a ritual and watch the ISS flyby every night before bed, chamomile tea in hand. Good night, astronauts… 🙂

By the way… are there any other Trekkers (or Trekkies) out there who have trouble calling the International Space Station the ISS, in light of the mirror-universe ISS Enterprise?

webdesign

Accomplishment

“Task” for potential employer: done.
Time to complete: 10.5 hours.

I’ve never coded someone else’s website layout before. I liked it. Could be that my calling is strictly as a web developer, not a designer. That, plus I’m a grammar nazi. When I’m plugging in content, I *have* to correct comma splices and misspellings. Web copy editor, anyone?

Now, it’s time to focus on following up with other companies to whom I’ve submitted a resume online. I am armed with legal-size paper and a full clip of determination.

I have three months to land a job in my field. Granted, if I don’t, I get to take home a decent chunk of severance pay… but it’s not worth it to waste job-hunting time and possibly miss the job for me, just to stick around and get my severance. You know?

otaku

My Geeky Worlds Collide

So, I was reading the novelization of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home — you know, the funny Star Trek movie with the whales — when I came upon a scene that was removed from the final draft of the screenplay, but was left in the novelization. I remembered reading this before, but it made a little more sense this time.

In late-20th-century San Francisco, Mr. Sulu is approached by a young Japanese boy, who asks if Sulu is his uncle. Actually, he says, “Ah! Hikaru oji san desu ka?” (Which, truth be told, don’t you just use oji for your own family, but ojisan for someone else’s? Not sure about the proper politeness factor on this one.) Then the boy asks casually what his uncle is doing here. I recognized the words tokoro, nani o, and desu ka, and the rest of the sentence made sense with the author’s prose around the Japanese.

At this point, Sulu replies with some vocab that I don’t know, but I can at least recognize the sentence structure. From the English context clues the author provides, he is responding (in antiquated Japanese that he learned from classes on literature) that the boy has mistaken him for someone else. The boy exclaims, “Honto desu ne,” which I think means something like, “Really!”

The boy starts to get all creeped out and back off, but Sulu asks the boy to wait with some other words I don’t know. Then he asks the boy’s name, which I totally understood, and the boy responds that he’s Akira Sulu. According to the author’s English paraphrase, Sulu of the Enterprise then tells Akira Sulu that he will live a long and happy life, to which the boy responds, “Ogisama arigato gozaimasu,” before scurrying off.

I know my Japanese skills are still severely limited at best, but it done my heart good to recognize some Japanese spoken by Hikaru Sulu’s great-great-great grandfather. ^_^