music 4 Comments

Rediscovery

Since I fussed with my iTunes library earlier this week, I’ve been rediscovering some of the music I’ve downloaded and ripped over the years. Until Aaron got me my 30GB iPod, I didn’t have enough room on my 8GB iPod mini to just add my entire mp3s folder. After he got me the new iPod, I didn’t really think about it. Actually, I didn’t think about it until I started running out of room on my C: drive, and needed to finally move all my music to my external USB drive.

The result is that I’ve been listening to songs I haven’t touched in years. Remember the days of Scour, around the year 2000 or so? When you could think, “I’d really like to hear this song I haven’t heard in years,” then you could go online and download the mp3 from Scour, over the web, with no fuss? I still have so many songs from those days.

The RIAA’s gonna come and get me. Probably shouldn’t blog about how many mp3s I have on my computer, eh?

Anyway, I have my iPod/iTunes set up with Smart Playlists, so I can listen to either my favorite songs or songs that I’ve just put in my library and have only listened to once or twice. My “New / Unloved” playlist has suddenly ballooned from about 600 songs to over 1400. Hell, my old mini could only hold 600 songs total! Damn. But I’ve been listening to that playlist for the last couple of days, and have been rediscovering songs I hadn’t realized I’d missed. Lots of Folk Implosion, some Catherine Wheel B-sides, pretty much my entire collection of awesome ’60s and ’70s songs (Strawberry Alarm Clock, Chicago, The Association, et al.), plus a bunch of albums I’d forgotten about, like Dashboard Confessional and Chris Botti and Dream Theater.

This is fantastic. Great background music for writing.

writing

NaNoWriMo 2007

So, who’s in?

I have Amy, Beth, and Aaron on my Writing Buddies list at NaNoWriMo.org. Anyone else I should add? Post your NaNo username in the comments, and I’ll add you as a Writing Buddy.

Last year, in 2006, I didn’t officially do NaNo; instead, I tried adding to my incomplete NaNo from 2005. I didn’t get terribly far with that. In 2005, I actually started a new story for NaNo, but petered out halfway through November. In 2004, I wrote on a previous story, but didn’t officially do NaNo. This will be my first year actually successfully “winning” NaNoWriMo.

(Like my positive attitude? Me, too.)

I have 1800 words written for my first day. I’ve figured that if I can write six pages a day, with how I have Word set up, I should get between 1700 and 2000 words per day, which should get me to the finish line in plenty of time. It also makes it easier for me to break things into 2000-word chapters, so I can finish one complete thought in one sitting. That’s going to make the month a lot easier to swallow, I think. My plan is to write several different characters’ stories, and tie them up at the end into one big overarching story of how things work in one particular aspect of my future society.

So, again I put out the call: who’s in?

genealogy 1 Comment

Granny (1911-1990)

Granny

The focus of this year’s Halloween Family History Devotional was uploading to Flickr a good part of the genealogy photos I’ve accumulated over the years. There are some others I have in my collection, but they’re more cousins and indirect lines rather than my direct ancestry.

This photo, however, is of my Granny.

I count myself extremely lucky that I got to live in Florida from age 8 to age 11, so I got to spend some quality time with my Granny. By that time, she was 75 years old, with a puckered, happy face and leathery, saggy skin from working in the fields for most of her life. Her hair was long and thin and nearly white, and she would pin it up in half a dozen small, flat curls under her straw hat.

I love this picture for so many reasons. I can see the family resemblance much easier in this younger version of Granny, and not just the patterns of aging in the womenfolk of our family. I also love the fact that she’s barefoot, with a dog barking at her heels.

And, no, she’s not pregnant. She had that peculiar firm-fat belly decades later, and her daughter (my Memaw) inherited the same belly. Granny tended to wear her pants unnaturally high, up over her quasi-beer-gut, with her shirt tucked in, as great-grandparents are wont to do.

She used to tell fantastic voodoo stories, too, most of which I never heard or remembered. The one story I remember, as best as I can remember it, involved a feud between two women in town. The voodoo practitioner in question obtained a piece of her enemy’s hair, put it into a glass bottle (a milk bottle, perhaps?), then peed in the bottle, said her voodoo witchery spell, and put the sealed jar in the oven. When the bottle finally burst in the oven, the other woman started pissing, and couldn’t stop pissing all over herself. The woman ran to the voodoo woman’s house, pissing all the while, and asked her forgiveness so the curse would be lifted.

I know my family tends to take these stories with a grain of salt, being that no one really practices voodoo or believes in witchcraft. Me, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in imagining that it really could have happened. But, really, you’d have to hate someone a whole hell of a lot to make your house smell like burning piss.

But I digress. Granny was always a hardworking woman who cared for her kids. She even faked Memaw’s birthdate by one year when she went into school so she looked old enough to go to school along with her slower older brother, to beat up the kids who would pick on him. Memaw kept that falsified birthdate for her entire life, since she had no birth certificate, and school records were the only proof she had of her age.

I know my aunt and my mom know more of Granny’s stories. I keep hoping that I’ll be able to get one or both of them to write down what they remember. I just know that there was so much more to her than I ever got to see myself.

jobhunt 1 Comment

Second Interview Results

You know, I’m not entirely sure how that went.

I spoke briefly with my potential supervisor’s supervisor, and that seemed to go well. More of the same: Tell me about the Access tracking database, etc. Then I met with two senior team members, who asked me more technical questions: How many tables were in your database? How many columns in the main table? What kinds of reports did you create?

Then I got the SQL test.

First question: Write pseudocode to generate the first 10 numbers of the Fibonacci sequence: (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34)

Took me a second to remember / deduce what the Fibonacci sequence was (add the two previous numbers to get the next number). Then I was all, OK, do while loop / for next loop, something like that. Counter variable going up to 10, sure. But I never figured out how to set variables for the previous two numbers, or to do the calculation mathematically. So, they got part of my logic behind it, but not a correct answer.

After that were a couple of query questions that should have been easy, but weren’t. After those were a bunch of definition questions, some of which I farted my way through (“What is normalization and when would you go for it?”) and some of which I skipped (“What is a transaction?”). All in all, I answered probably half the questions on the quiz, and got some of those mostly correct. Some of them I knew how to answer in the context of Access, but not SQL (“How do you define a one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationship between tables?”).

After the test, my potential supe came in and told me that the test is mainly to see where I stand programming-wise and what my problem-solving thought process is like. He stressed that in entry-level positions, they don’t have much to look at with regards to a body of work, so the test serves to give them an idea of where each applicant stands.

The Powers That Be will be convening by week’s end to decide who gets the job. I’ll keep you all updated.

P.S. – I wore my traditional Halloween dangly bat earrings to the interview. No one noticed. At least Jess noticed when I wore them to Eric and Jess’s reception on Saturday. 🙂

randomness 1 Comment

My Day So Far

8:51am – Alarm goes off, reminding me that I want to go to aikido at 10am. I roll over and go back to sleep.

10:45am – I realize that I need to leave soon to take Sensei’s digital recorder back to the dojo while someone is still there and the door is unlocked. Get up, get dressed, pull hair back, and drive to dojo.

11:00am – Sensei isn’t at the dojo, and a senior student is teaching the class that is just concluding. I put the recorder on Sensei’s desk and beat a hasty retreat.

11:10am – Arrive home. Eat breakfast of Chocolatey Special K. Read e-mails and blog entries.

12:00pm – Attempt to wake the husband. Am shot down in favor of continued sleep. Come back downstairs and begin trying to fix my iTunes library (another story entirely).

12:30pm – The husband awakes and showers. Begin working on Zen podcast.

1:15pm – Lunch: one breaded, stuffed cordon bleu chicken breast, cooked by Aaron.

1:30pm – Resume editing podcast.

2:00pm – Upload podcast. Send e-mail to Sensei with a link and some potential show notes. Begin backing up CDs with drum corps photos and other materials onto my computer in preparation for sending them to the new Executive Director. Alternate computer availability between WinRAR and iTunes.

3:00pm – Backups complete. Take break to watch Aaron play Bioshock. Eat banana.

3:30pm – Receive e-mail that reminds me to check the drum corps forums’ permissions. Realize, after some research, that there is no foul play and that I have b0rked the permissions myself. Rig a temporary fix so that members can actually see all the forums.

4:00pm – Forums unb0rked. Begin packing up CDs in a makeshift cardboard sleeve to be mailed to the Executive Director.

4:15pm – CDs packed. Do some more work on iTunes library. Talk with Aaron. Look over my to-do list. Cringe.

5:00pm – Talk with Aaron while he gets ready for work.

5:30pm – Say goodbye to Aaron. Feed the cat. Make dinner. Blog while eating at the computer.

It sure seems like I’ve been doing a lot of stuff today. So why do I feel like I’m treading water? Aaron says that maybe it’s because everything I’ve done today (just about) has been for someone else, either the corps or the sangha.

Next on the agenda: Go for a walk and listen to the hour-long podcast I just put together (since I missed the actual talk, being out of town). Review some SQL for tomorrow’s second interview downtown. Do some more cleaning and organizing, maybe.

Coming up on one month of joblessness. Hmm.

ETA: This article saved my ass the next day. Everything is magically fine again, without having to right-click on every damned file and browse to find its new location. Fantastic!