Time in a bottle

I have roughly four weeks left of full pay before I have to start going on the ol' unemployment, which is weird because the time seems to be going by quickly and yet slowly at the same time. I only lost my job about five weeks ago, yet when I read through earlier entries from around that time it seems like ages.

I wonder if I'll look back on the time I'm unemployed and wish I had done more. The last time I was out of work for any length of time it was for six months, and I don't recall getting a whole lot done. I mean, we were very industrious in doing things to make money; hitting thrift stores for stuff to sell on eBay, which worked out pretty well for a time.

We played a lot of The Sims and hung out and made some art and all, but the whole time in my mind is a bit of a blur. This time, I'd like to have something to show for all this time I have. I guess I do, I mean, I did a freelance website (clubwestmedspa.com), my cheapy portfolio site (portfolio.artsick.com), I'm drawing lots of comics (aintthisthelife.artsick.com), and I'm getting quite good at darts.

But I want something big. I don't know, maybe I'm selling myself short, but I know I could be doing more. Man, I tell ya, I need to get serious about this whoring myself thing.

Not actual whoring, of course, but selling myself as a business entity to other people. Though, if it comes down to it, actual whoring may enter the picture. Do it while you're young, they always say!

Unstuck from the mouth of my roof

So we had a windstorm the other night and it whipped a piece of siding nearly off the house. Right now it's hanging by a single nail right over the back door. To be fair I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, it had been kinda loose since the last windstorm we had. I was just hoping there would never be another windstorm. Ever.

It seems that my hopes sown in stupidity have now borne the fruit of forgone conclusion. So I can't really complain too much.

Anyways, I went down to the Home Depot today and got all the tools I needed to fix the thing, except for some kind of hover device which would offset the somewhat steep pitch of my roof. From the outside it doesn't look so bad I guess, but I think it's actually around 60° or something.

I don't have a ladder but I do have roof access through my upstairs window, so I gave it the ol' college try and nearly slipped to my death on the first attempt. Then I changed from my loafers into my tennis shoes and gave it another go. Fared slightly better, I got halfway out the window, but there was no getting past the fact that my shoes and high center of gravity just were not going to cut it.

So Rowan suggested I ask her brother, who's a handy dude, if he'd be able to help. I felt kind of weird though being like, "Oh hey I almost died trying this, but you wanna give it a shot?" But I imagine he has more experience than me, or at least better shoes.

Luckily there's not any rain in the forecast for a while, so I can be content with the further trashiness happening at the back of my house. Ahhh, feels good.

I'm restless, but not without rest

Well January officially sucked in a lot of ways. Lost my job, power went out, furnace froze up, and I got a brick through my car window. I can only hope this is a month-to-month level of suck and not an indicator for the year as a whole.

Ah February, when the honeymoon of a job-free day begins to wear off and you start to run around like a mouse in a humane trap. Oh did I mention I caught a mouse in a humane trap? He kept coming into the conure room through a little gap by the heat vent to grab bits of food they had dropped/thrown onto the floor.

Finally got him by putting a trap right under the gap and I guess he just fell right into it. Drove him out to a field and let him run free. Though now we have another one (or the same one found his way back) in our bedroom, so he must be dealt with as well.

Well, at least it gives me something to do during the day. Not that I have nothing to do, there are tons of things to do around the house. Cleaning, laundry, dishes, tiling, all that exciting stuff. Yet at the end of the day, which is usually around 8 or 9pm, I still feel like I should be doing something. Which is why I'm doing this.

Don't feel like drawing or coding. I'd like to work on my 3D board game, but I need some plans for that, which I might work on tonight. Oh and we got a dart board, so that's been put to use as well. Man, this is pretty engaging.

If you're still reading this, I'm sorry, my fingers are kind of just typing everything that's running through my head at the moment. I need a shave. I like the jeans I'm wearing, glad I did laundry today. I taught myself to play the intro to "Down on the Corner" by CCR last night, so I'm pretty proud of that.

Also, it's really hard to play Hall & Oates songs recognizably on the guitar. I could only get "Your Kiss is on My List" to sound close. Hey, do you ever sniffle and it sounds just like the opening to "Insane in the Membrane", and then you try to replicate it and it just sounds like a sniffle again?

Wait a second...I just listened to both "Insane in the Membrane" and "Jump Around"...they both use that same sound, one's just higher than the other.

She came in through the bathroom window

Well, replace "the bathroom window" with "my windshield" and "She" with "A brick" and you have my day pretty much summed up. Yep, first the $400 furnace repair and now a $180 charge to fix my windshield because some dude(s) thought it would be totally rockin' to hurl bricks through car windows.

At first we though it was just us, which is kinda scary, since brick-throwing seems like serious business. But as it turns out around a dozen cars in the area had the same thing happen. Good times.

And I didn't even know about it until this afternoon. We got some furniture delivered today and the guy comes to the door and says, "Hey man sorry about your windshield."

"What about it?"

"It's...it's totally smashed in."

"Really?"

"Yeah, didn't you see it when you went to work?"

"I'm unemployed."

"Oh! So it's not really much of a setback then I guess. Well that's lucky."

The hole in the windshield was almost cartoonish, I mean, it was the exact shape of a brick. Perfectly rectangular. Like when some character runs through a wall at high speeds. So now I have the repairmen coming out tomorrow and I really hope they vacuum up all the glass because I totally didn't. That's just too much for one day.

And I want to be angry about it, but it's more relief that we aren't the target of some nutjob. The whole story (not my story in particular) was on the news, too, and all the people seemed to feel the same way. They didn't say it outright, but you could tell they were all happy that it wasn't that one person from their past who they had wronged.

"Well Gene, I guess I'll take it to the body shop for repairs, darn it! (and thank you for not being Dave Kowalski that guy I ran over in high school and never visited in the hospital)"

Every cloud, man, every cloud.

On schedules

Being out of work has really thrown me off my schedule. You know, like 1) Shower 2) Go to work. Both of those have kinda been thrown to the wayside recently. Well, come next week I'm getting back on track. Here goes:

1) Wake up at 8am
2) Work out (I'm gonna be ripped, yo!)
3) Have tea
4) Sleep till 11am

That's all I have so far. But hey, it's a start.

Tragedies come in threes, yes?

So yesterday I lost my job, which sucks a little but isn't the end of the world. Then last night, around 7:30, the power goes out. Poof, just like that. And just our block. Not across the street, not the next block over, just our single block.

It wouldn't have been so bad except it was around 12° outside and by the time the power came back the thermostat was down to around 55°. Not cool when you have parrots in the house. But, power came back, everything's cool right?

WRONG! Wake up this morning around 7am and it's cold yet again. And our bedroom is the warmest room in the house, but it's chilly even in there. Power's on, though, so what could be the problem? Oh that's right the furnace.

So I go down there, restart the furnace twice causing it to then lock itself out to keep from flooding. I call the oil company, they say they'll have someone out by noon. Noon! And it's 7:30am, around 60° inside, 16° outside.

Long story short (too late!) the guy arrives around 10, which is awesome, and he's this older, kinda crazy dude who, by his own words, "went to bed at 4 and woke up at 4:30." So he's ready for action.

He's so old-school he talks to the furnace like it's a woman and refers to it in feminine terms. "Come on baby, what's wrong with you?" "That's it baby, do it!" "You treat her right, she'll treat you right." "That ain't my child! Who you screwin'? Who you screwin'?!" That kinda thing.

It turns out the line into the house is frozen solid, and not even his Tim Burton designed double-action brass hand-pump can budge it. He then decides to dump into the tank, and force up the line, some de-icing chemical they use in Mack trucks. We wait a few minutes for it to work its magic. Nothing.

It's at this point I show my own mad chemistry skills. "How about if I use a hair dryer on it?"

"That might work, man. Some people try using a butane torch on frozen lines, you know."

"Yeah I wouldn't do that."

"Good thing, it'll ignite the whole tank."

"Oh I just meant I'm afraid to use butane torches. But that other part too."

The tech heads back to the car to make a call, so there I am out by the tank with a tiny little off-brand hair dryer, my hands turning red from the cold (and the periodic hair dryer treatments to keep them from freezing), and I realize after about thirty minutes of this that the guy hasn't come back yet.

Luckily his truck's still there with him it, with his shirt off, drinking some iced tea.

"Oh hey," I say like nothing's wrong, "you think this'll be done in the next hour or so? If not my birds are gonna, like, die."

"Hey man, sure thing, I'll be right out. I gotta go anyways, it's like a sauna in here."

So back he comes, bouncing through the gate, steam rising off him, and he's carrying what appears to be a giant bamboo pole, like he's got an audition with Cirque du Soleil right after this. He jabs it down into the tank a couple of times, exclaims, "We're free!" and rushes back down into the basement.

I can't even make it down before he yells it again and starts putting everything back together. "Knocked loose some ice up there that was in the tank. She's all ready to go now, man!" And sure enough, in about five seconds the whole thing is up and running, no clogs, no muss, no fuss.

"Okay, just one second and I'm going to come back with a bill so large that even employed people would be shocked." And he did. And I was. But boy, it sure is nice to be warm again.

Jooooblesssss

So now I'm essentially jobless.

I work(ed) over at the ol' Circuit City, which went into liquidation today. Sad times. Not so terrible for me, I guess, I mean, I get 60 paid days off (for now), tax refund time is coming up, and, the best of all, since my dad died I get half the estate.

I won't be some kind of millionaire or nothin', but I'll have enough to get by for a couple extra months. Surely(!) that will be enough time to find a job. Even in the worst economy, people still need websites right? That's what they did back in the 30s. Except the websites were more like wooden tables covered in day-old fruit. Not so much different really.

Usually I'm such a pessimist, especially when it comes to other people; but when it's my future at stake, suddenly I'm the opposite. I figure it'll all work out in the end. Usually does for me; I hear I'm lucky, but who knows.

This last job I got the same day I lost the one before, so I guess that's pretty lucky. The one before I got just about right after I'd lost the previous one to that. Of course, I also have a trail of failed companies on my resume, but oh well, I wasn't in charge.

I sometimes wonder, when I'm feeling particulary narcissistic, if me being there caused the company to go under. Not in a direct way of course, I work hard and have a high output, but if in some cosmic way my presence is the death knell. Like I'm the Ted McGinley of the corporate world.

I smell a book title.

Foster's: It's Australian for regional adjustment

I like Foster's. Not the blue one, the traditional can, but the hunter green and gold one. It used to be called "Extra Special Bitter". ESB. Is it bitter? Oh yes. And way better than the regular blue, uh, not-so bitter variety.

But somehow, within the past few months, the name has changed. It's no longer bitter, apparently, but rather "Premium Ale". What they've done is removed the option to choose based on type of flavor and replaced it with a challenge to your ability to taste better flavor.

Obviously Premium is better than not Premium, yes? That's what the word premium means, it's better than those other shitty varieties they have. Yet it costs the same. I find this interesting.

Foster's is almost daring you to buy the version which is, by their own definition, not as good. "Hey listen man, it's up to you, we're giving you two monetarily equal options. Do you want a full-bodied, rich flavor that comes in a can instantly recognizable to every beer snob in town? Or would you rather have 25.4 ounces of hangover in a container which says little more than 'I have no shame.'? It's up to you, friend, we don't judge."

I'm sure the real reason it happened is some lame marketing guy with nothing better to do starting making generalizations based on talking to no one. You know, oh Americans are turned off by the word "bitter" so let's call it "premium" because Americans always want to buy what they think is the best. Or some bullshit like that.

It's annoying because if someone is looking for a bitter beer, it's real easy to choose when it's written right there on the label. Nobody goes looking for a "premium" beer. And I have asked people about this, marketing guy! I have paperwork and multi-colored folders!

If you'd taken your generalizations a little further you would have realized Americans see the word "premium" and it may as well say "just another". That's how jaded we are! You cannot impress us with such juvenile adjectives.

I know this battle is lost, so I just have one suggestion. And this is cross-promotional. Please attach a little packet of ibuprofen to the blue cans because, seriously, they cause the absolute worst hangovers in history.

Oh hey wait now, rename Foster's Premium to Foster's NH for "No Hangover", then charge a buck more per can and watch that sweet, sweet alcholic money roll in! Now that's how to make a profit.

Fantastic Restaurant Idea #1

Why can't I order a meal to eat-in? You can get to-go and delivery orders till you're blue in the face, but I've never seen anywhere offer phone-ahead dine-in ordering. You can call ahead for reservations at some places, but why can't you just go ahead and place your order then?

I understand some places have daily menus and all but why can't I call up, for instance, Curry House and say, "I'm on my way there now and I'd like a big-ass dosa."? People are always bitching about how long it takes to get the food wherever they are, this would cut that right on out.

And it's not like it'd be that hard to do. Just do it the same way you take a to-go order. Give a name, a time, and there you are. Maybe you can do it, just nobody does; I don't know.

Hell, it would make restaurants even more money because you'd have a higher turnover rate on tables in a given time. Man, if I had a restaurant you'd have to call ahead or it's a no go.

"Party of two, of course sir. And what did you order this evening? Oh, you haven't ordered yet? Perhaps you could wait at the bar until you've decided." It's fucking gold, man!

It's a new year, a new desk

Okay the desk isn't new, but it's in a new place. I now have my work desk in a place I can actually work now. That means I can get distracted by a whole new set of things to work on. I have my pads of drawing paper, all my pens & inks, my lino blocks and cutting tools, all manner of balsa and X-acto knives, the whole deal.

Plus it's January, and I can start fresh without guilt on so many projects I can't even begin to imagine. I still want to build my 3D board game, work on a comic, make some block prints, and do some for real drawings. And work on the website to make it not so devoid of content.

Oh man, I love the idea of a new year! They should do this more often.

OMG, like, two little boxes are flying around the screen!

So I figured out how to convert the random movement script into a Mootools class, so that's pretty good for a Sunday. Basically, if you don't know what a class is, it means I can create tons of them quickly and easily without overwhelming the user's machine. Good times.

Right now it's just two blue boxes floating around an empty space, but hey, you can only go up, right?

Anyways, I've got it at http://existence.artsick.com; the link at the top does nothing for now, but I'm working on it.

It, uh, works in FF3 and IE7. If you don't use one of those, maybe it'll work, maybe not. The world is your oyster.

My Javascript is like school on Sunday

So I've actually sat down and begun working on the ol' game of existence, and the first problem (or "opportunity" if you're a fan of optimistic delusion) I've run into is that of classes.

Now, my vision is of a screen filled with hundreds of objects all interacting with one another and doing all sorts of cool interactive things, so it wouldn't do to have a bunch of duplicate functions all running at the same time. Very bad for the processor. So, of course, were I a for real computer science dude I would have busted out various classes by now.

You know, I do try. I like classes, I mean, a few years ago when I wrote a basic chess program in Flash I had to learn about them and found they were pretty powerful. Sure my knights moved in more of an S fashion than the traditional L, but hey man, they moved.

So now I'm trying to write classes in Javascript, which is for me an exercise in frustration. I mean, I get how to do it, it's just not doing what it's supposed to. This is a fault I have when programming, that I feel computer errors are just that, errors made by the computer. I'm telling you this, why aren't you doing that?!

I should explain that for my first object I'm just trying to get it to fly around the screen randomly, bumping off the screen edges and such. I have a hard-coded version working just fine, so I'm just trying to convert those functions to a class-ified type. I'm very close. So close, and so frustrated, that I'm considering moving all the class stuff to Mootools and working from there.

I don't know, though, I have a habit of cycling through solutions and getting them all built up and complex and then just junking them for something simple. But, perhaps, in this case simple is not the answer.

I guess I'll find out soon enough. Ah well, back to work.

Got my feet on the ground

So I walked into the bathroom at work today and noticed one of the stall doors was closed. I didn't like that, especially because it was the one on the far end (it offers 50% more privacy than all the rest). I always check for feet when I walk in there so I know what's what, but there were no feet showing. No feet and the door's closed, what is there to make of that?

Normally I'd just walk to the closed door, open it up and walk on in. But then today I thought, "Hey, what if there's a guy in there with no legs? Oh man, that'd be horribly embarrassing for the both of us!"

I decided my best course would be to slowly walk/sneak up to the door and try to peer through the little space between the door and the, what you call it, column of wall that the door latches into. As I approached, and my viewing angle into the interior became wider, I figured I could stop at the first sign of pants or leg stumps.

Luckily I saw neither, so I went on ahead and swung open the door. Only to find a little tiny man hanging onto the back side of the door! He had a little hat on and everything!

Man, I tell ya, it was just that kind of day.

I've got this idea for a game

I've always wanted to build a game that starts with a blank white page that eventually turns into this multi-faceted, complex game system. I know Spore is kinda like that; single-cell organisms that you guide into a civilization, but I'd like it to be more open-ended. Less logic-driven.

How do you logically program something to have no built-in logic? I really don't know. I suppose it would start with a very basic type of "if...then" reasoning, which it could eventually build upon. Or maybe even an automatic response to stimuli which it then evolves into a type of reasoning based on input.

Like you start it all by moving your mouse in a certain direction, and that draws an object on the screen. And that object is all you have or, rather, that object is all you are. And it slowly transforms and learns and replicates and turns into all kinds of cool crap you can interact with.

Maybe you don't have a particular character, you just kind of Populous-style interact with the environment. I don't know, I don't have it all worked out (obviously) but I think there's something to it.

A pen, a man, a ship: Fraud!

So I go to the post office today to mail some packages, nothing crazy, I do it somewhat often. Anyways, I'm paying with my business card (la-dee-da) when it is brought to my attention that I have not signed the back of my card.

It's 4:30, I'm feeling particularly lazy, so I give it the signature I usually reserve for Kroger receipts. Which is to say, a languorous scribble. Fine by me, but not so fine I find out by the USPS.

"This doesn't match the signature on your driver's license." UHOH.

"Oh, sorry, I just did a quick signature, I can make it look like the one on the license if you want." This I immediately realize is tantamount to saying, "Sorry man, this is my first forgery."

But the guy behind the counter takes it in stride, or he's just trying to get me out of his line as I whip up numerous clever ways to prove my identity.

"My name is on the business card, and these packages are labeled with the business name which is also on the credit card!" My attempts at free-form conditional logic fail miserably.

"Just swipe the card."

So I swipe the card, whatever happens with all that happens, and I'm presented with the receipt. Finally a chance for redemption! I sign it like it's going to free the slaves and hand it back smiling proudly.

"This one matches," he says with what I detected was a hint of relief. Relief either at my success or that he didn't have to call in a takedown but, you know, any port in a storm.

And to cap everything off, on the way in to the post office I ran into my vet. Okay, that's not a "cap" per se since it happened earlier, but it was the undercoating of my whole experience, plus it was less interesting so I left it till the end.

Anyways I ran into her and it's real awkward running into your vet, if you don't know.

"Hey, I know you, you're-"

"The vet."

"Yeah, sorry I forgot your name."

"[name here]"

"Oh right, yeah you had your finger up my dog's ass a couple weeks ago. What's shakin'?"

That would have been less awkward and more interesting I think than the actual conversation, so I'll just leave it at that.

Gone daddy gone

So my dad up and died on Friday night. He went into the hospital on Wednesday and got progressively worse until they finally put him on a morphine drip Friday evening. Good times. On the plus side he didn't really suffer, on the down side he's kinda dead.

Now, he did have cirrhosis and the complications from that are pretty much what did him in. Infection, organs shutting down, the whole deal. But still, the downhill slide happened pretty quick.

I'm not sure exactly what to think of it, you know. You tell people your father died and they usually assume you're out pricing sack cloth to rend, but so far no. I'm mostly like, "Huh", which from what I understand is a weird situation. But still, that's all I got.

The nice part about having a parent die is that people can't tell you your feelings are wrong. That's pretty cool. "My dad died and you want to say I can't make myself a pair of artichoke pants?! Fuck you and hand me some thread! It's what he would have wanted!"

So yeah, right now I guess I'm in a transitional phase. As an added bonus my mom is wigging out and trying to get me to come to her place for Thanksgiving. Bonus part two, she suggested I give up being vegan for Thanksgiving so we could have a creepy trip down memory-that-never-was lane! Fan-tastic.