Category Archives: Work

What's awesome about Twitter? I'll tell you what's awesome about Twitter.

Web

In which I like social media, and I don’t care who knows it.

First of all, I am a Sprint customer. Second of all, my contract’s up for renewal, which means I’m finally eligible for a new phone and I just got my tax return so maybe I could splurge a little and get a really cool one.

So I google “Sprint Android” and I click the top hit (which goes to sprint.com/android, and should take me right to the place I want to be), but instead I end up at the front page of the Sprint website, which is a customer service/sales/billing hell and so not a page containing a list of the Android phones I want to look at. In fact, I’m probably three to four levels above where I want to be.

All of which means that they’ve got a dynamic link fuck-up that’s probably costing them money. Plus, I’m irritated I have to manually drill down to the Android phones when I’ve already been online for nearly a minute and I should already be fucking looking at them. Continue reading What's awesome about Twitter? I'll tell you what's awesome about Twitter. →

TEN YEARS.

Web

In which there’s a birthday!

goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today! goblinbox.com is ten years old today!

Feel free to buy me stuff.

And now, Libya.

Web, ,

In which another country’s dictator tries to disconnect it from the world.

Have you been paying attention to Libya? (And Bahrain? And Yemen? Algeria?) Well, it disappeared from the Internet tonight:

“Renesys confirms that the 13 globally routed Libyan network prefixes were withdrawn at 23:18 GMT (Friday night, just after midnight Saturday local time), and Libya is off the Internet. One Libyan route originated by Telecom Italia directly is still BGP-reachable, but inbound traceroutes appear to die in Palermo. A minority of our peers report some surviving paths through the peering connection between Level3 and Telecom Italia, but traceroutes into those prefixes fail, suggesting that the Libyan cutoff is complete.

“We wondered whether anyone would repeat Egypt’s strategy. Tonight, it appears that we have our answer.”

Continue reading And now, Libya. →

Did I mention that I'm a QA contractor now?

Music, Work

In which there are two good things.

Good thing the first is that yesterday I signed an NDA and a contractor’s agreement and filled out a W9, and Monday I start breaking software for money. Yay! I know no details at all about the project’s expected longevity, but who knows – I might get lucky!

Good thing the second is that today is the Bronze Blues & Brews festival in Joseph, OR. The festival ends at ten, and Coyote Kings (featuring: me!) will be the only band playing in town tonight. We’ve already invited tons of the musicians who are booked at the festival, and it should turn out to be the Best Jam Ever.

Possible really good news, people!

Work

In which there might suddenly and unexpectedly be EMPLOYMENT.

Right now, I’m literally doing nothing but waiting for school to start in five weeks. I’m drawing EB, and my worker retraining application was approved so I’m not even job hunting, and I applied at WWCC and for financial aid months ago so I don’t even have that to keep me occupied.

At school, I’m slated to take a 1-year curriculum, custom-tailored to help me sit for a bunch of basic tech certifications, like A+, CCNA, and the MSCE. I lit upon this path not out of any great desire to collect paper but because the job market is still in the crapper and I’m pretty certain that the last two jobs I didn’t get were because the workforce is overqualified and the other applicants had certifications I lacked (even though very, very few can match my experience). I figured the community college would be a good way to keep myself off the market for another year of economic recovery while simultaneously making myself more hire-able.

Now a good friend of mine has threatened me with employment. He’s just started a new job at a VoIP software company and needs to build his QA team, stat. He told me today that work might start as early as Monday, and in point of fact he’s off in a meeting right this minute finding out if he has a budget for contract help yet.

As a contractor I wouldn’t receive benefits, but the pay is adequate for having to file a stupid Schedule C. Since the dev team is in another state, I’d be working from home. Hours are what are euphemistically called “start-up hours,” meaning well over 40 per week. (I’ll probably have to redesign my computer area to incorporate a chair, since not even I can sit on the floor that much without having my feet go to sleep.) Software testing should not only be interesting and engaging work – halleluia! – but here’s the icing on the cake: no dealing with end-users! None! I’d be testing and reporting and logging all day! No idiotic support calls, no billing, no metrics!

If the work proved to be permanent, I’d have to pay back the UI money I’ve received since June 20th, drop out of school, and close my financial aid application. But you know what? That would be fine with me! In fact, the only way this could suck would be if the work proved to be contract-only and temporary, and ended only after I stopped filing my weekly UI certifications. (I should be able to keep my claim open for months if I have to, as long as I’m not officially offered a permanent position as an employee.)

Anyway, if you know of any employment deities, could you please take a moment and send up a thought for me? I’d sure appreciate it!

This is the job market today, bitches. Srsly.

Finance, Work

In which I complain about living in a state with a 9.1% unemployment rate.

I just read a job listing at WorkSource. The job is called PT ORDER ENTRY SPECIALIST II.

The description says, and I quote verbatim, The FT Order Entry Specialist II will check accuracy of and enter orders for equipment and parts, balance daily order reports, request closing reports and acknowledgments daily, provide various bookings and shipments reports, maintain integrity of open and closed sales orders. Review initial sales orders for completeness and accuracy and input into log book. Perform file maintenance, update sales orders, balance the “shipment to customer” with accounting daily. Track and verify customer purchase orders for each piece of equipment ordered. Produce weekly order and shipment reports for both business units. Monthly, generate and mail verification of bookings totals and reports to appropriate personnel. Provide support for product specialists and field sales as required.

Yeah. It’s glorified data entry and report-running. Anybody could do it.

What’s fucked up is the part where they list the necessary qualifications to be considered for the job: Two year Associates degree (A.A.) accounting degree, plus four years business accounting experience.

A fucking associate’s in accounting? To enter sales orders? Are you fucking kidding me? Four years’ BUSINESS ACCOUNTING experience? Really? With that kind of qualification, you’re a fucking ACCOUNTANT, not an order entry specialist. Jeez.

~+~+~
I was idly looking at job postings because I haven’t received my EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) ruling yet, it’ll take the EB (extended benefits) people two days to call me back, I’m totally broke, I haven’t been awarded any financial aid for school yet, and:

The EUC program expired on June 2, 2010. The U.S. House passed legislation to extend the dates people can apply for and receive EUC benefits, but the bill is currently stalled in the Senate. The Senate is not expected to take the bill up again until July 12, 2010 or later.

If the bill becomes law people will be able to apply for EUC until November 2010 and receive benefits until May 2011.

Long story short, I don’t know yet but I might not be able to do the school thing if I don’t get EUC and/or a financial aid award.

Which would suck, because I was really looking forward to a year in community college, taking computer science classes with twenty-year-old geeks.

~+~+~
I haven’t paid my rent, I’m a month and a half behind on paying my settlement company, I need new glasses, I want new books, I need to pay my dentist, and my dog’s eating shitty grocery store brand kibbles.

My debit card is ten dollars overdrawn, I’m about to disable my Netflix and eMusic accounts, and the only reason I can drive anywhere is because there’s still half a tank of gas in the truck from when dad was here and filled it up. (I don’t drive much.)

G’ma lets me eat her eggs and bread and has offered to buy me groceries when I run out of my own, but I Do Not Want to cost her money. I’m stalled on my little data entry project for NLW because the Amazon Seller’s Desktop application isn’t working and their ticketing system is backed up. My next paying gig isn’t until August.

Long story short, I was surfing WorkSource because a part-time job right now would be freakin’ excellent, and data entry is my bitch.

Now please excuse me while I figure out the best way to spend my last $20 at the grocery store. I’m thinking tofu, ramen, and beans. Maybe some lentils, too; they’re cheap protein.

Hopefully poverty will help me dominate next week’s competitive diet stats!

Cool stuff, mang.

Work

In which it is July the 7th and I haven’t left the house all damned day.

Okay, first of all, NLW hired me to do some data entry for her AND the Ritzville blues festival gig is this weekend, so I’ll be able to buy foodz, like refried beans and tortillas and stuff, which is A Very Good Thing. Not to mention that my rent and bills are all late.

Second of all, I have a lunch date tomorrow with a local woman I met on Twitter who needs a web site built. That one will be for charity, but it’s not like I a.) don’t know how to build web sites and b.) HAVE SEVERAL METRIC FUCKTONS OF FREE TIME.

Third of all, the boys over at Cocky & Rude totally nagged me into doing an online group weight loss thing so now I have to drink a lot less alcohol because god hates me and filled alcohol with EMPTY CALORIES OMG WHAT WILL I DO WITH ALL OF THESE EMOTIONS?!?!

I woke up yesterday morning from a dream about a shapeshifter who was embedded (as a cow, of all things) in some off-world ranch operated by bad guys. It was there to shift into bipedal form and then help an agent escape. The shapeshifter’s real form was this awesome bizarro giant shrimp thing. AND it was a romance, although how you’d Do It with a giant shrimp escapes me. The cow was REALLY WEIRD LOOKING. This is why it’s better that I rarely remember my dreams.

So far today I’ve only had 550 calories and I’m star. Ving. Excuse me while I go hork down a couple tacos and half my physical volume in lettuce.

A provisional 'yes.'

Work

In which I’ve completed phase one of the Back To School project.

A week ago I went to a training benefits meeting at WorkSource, and they gave me an application to fill out.

In the last week I did just that, then attached about 17 pages of appendices, applied to WWCC and for financial aid, met with an advisor, and requested transcripts from my former schools. It was a pain in the ass, really.

Today I went and submitted my completed application. The soft answer – I won’t have the hard one until Friday – is that I’ll probably get CAT (commissioner-approved training), but not EB (extended benefits).

The yes-to-CAT response means I’ll be able to continue getting UI benefits (without having to do the work search part) while enrolled in school. The no-to-EB part means I won’t be getting an extra 20 weeks of benefits.

It’s lucky, then, that I changed my mind and applied for a 1-year certification course instead of the 2-year AAAS I’d been more interested in, because this answer means I wouldn’t have had enough benefits to pay my bills while in school.

If I am approved for EUC (a Federally-funded additional 52 weeks of benefits) next month, I’ll have enough time to finish those three quarters of school and find job before I run entirely out of benefits altogether.

The weird thing about the application process was that I submitted my 25-page application on paper to a guy who typed it all into an e-version and submitted it. “Why didn’t you just give us that version?” I asked, pointing at his computer screen.

“We’re in a pilot program,” he answered. “They used to fax the applications in, and it could take up to three months to get a response. Now it takes 48 hours.”

Oh, well. At least they’re getting somewhere, albeit slowly.

Hopefully I’ll get an official yes for CAT on Friday. If I do, and get financial aid for tuition, I’ll officially be a student!

Meta. It's all meta.

Introspection, Music, Whining, Work

In which I tell you about my weekend. And the crazy fluctuations in my state of mind. (Seriously, watching your mind do whatever it does is EVER an exercise in weird.)

Friday night I went out and got drunk for no good reason. I hadn’t intended to get drunk, but I was sitting at the bar having a really nice conversation with one of the regulars and Amy kept pouring the way she does, and, well: shit happens. Saturday I had to get up about three hours earlier than I usually do and if it was a little rough, well, that was my own damn fault, wasn’t it!

Curt & Shelly came and picked me up and they gave me an egg biscuit and hash browns from McDonald’s the very minute I sat down in their ride (and OMG I srsly LOVE THEM for that). The drive to the Benton Franklin County fairgrounds was uneventful; we didn’t need to be there early because it turned out there wasn’t going to be a sound check after all. I was, hangover-style, a little agro that I’d had to get up when I did. We milled around aimlessly instead. Steve bought me a coffee. I love him, too.

At noon, Romagossa Blu kicked off the festival with a bang, and then Vaughn Jensen went up and smoked. Coyote Kings went on at 1:30 and three songs later I went up and joined them.

UnTapped

Playing festivals is great. The stages are huge, the crowd is way into what you’re doing, and there are actual professional sound people at the board. Monitors! Lights! No schlepping!

There was a wedding on stage directly after our set. I got to sing ‘At Last’ for the happy couple, then bluesman Billy Stoops officiated the marriage of (our friends and fans) Nancy and Steve right there in front of everybody. It was cute.

After the set I changed into comfy clothes and promptly started drinking the free beer from the craft services tent. I spent most of the day backstage because I could (UnTapped doesn’t take your VIP pass away after you finish playing, like other festivals sometimes do) but I did wander around enough to have seen absolutely everything. UnTapped has tons of beer and wine makers and lots of food and a scattering of other vendors. It’s a really cool festival.

A few of the NW players I met told me they’d heard of me, which was, as you can imagine, immensely gratifying. I was encouraged to move to Portland; I was encouraged to start my own band. In short, I got a lot of ego stroking, but – because the mind is a terrible thing – I somehow managed to feel self-pity anyway.

I know, right? WTF, Mush? Fun blues festival, stage time, free beer, beautiful weather, good friends, and my internal dialog is fux0red. This is what happens when one doesn’t deliberately choose the upside.

My (admittedly not accurate) perception was that the musicians got younger as the day went on. In the early afternoon we had guys pushing 60 but the kids in the headliner’s band all looked like they were still on the fresh side of 30. I was having, in the back of my mind, one of those completely negative “since I wasn’t headlining at 26 it follows that I suck” thought processes. Why? It’s stupid, but lemmie tell you what: all that crap about the negative psychological effects of unemployment? Appears to be true. After not getting yet another job, I’m having a glass-is-half-empty crisis in the form of a really insidious “I’m totally mediocre” mental litany.

It doesn’t help that this is my second long-term bout of unemployment in the last five years, either. Stupid job market!

I met a metric ton of musicians, including the superawesome Miriam (of Portland band Miriam’s Well) and her bandmates; Chicago tenor player Eddie Shaw and his son Vaan (who is a really cool dude); trombonist Ed Earley; and the headliner, Hamilton Loomis (who was not only a smokin’ musician but a really, really nice person), to name a few.

Loomis’ set was not at all what I’d call blues; his has been described as a “blues-rock-funk-groove-soul band,” and he did charts that broke down into funky Stevie Wonder grooves, charts that were pure rock, charts that were pure soul. It occurred to me that from here on out, it’s all meta. Every song will contain shades of every genre that’s ever gone before, and descriptors like “R&B” and “pop” and “blues” will go the way of the dinosaur. Listeners will be expected to understand music from a global perspective that spans the whole of recorded music.

In other words, it’s so meta it’s actually like this: I have some cheesy pop in my library that features a raga in the bridge, house with a gypsy violin in it, and funk with a banjo solo. There’s really no reason I can’t do R&B-soul-blues-jazz-rock and still get booked at blues festivals, that’s all I’m saying.

Applying this meta concept to the idea of “work”, I’m realizing that my bad attitude is stupid. I’m online all the time, so I know that very little can truly be monetized. All this free information on the Internet is there because people want to do it. They try and try and try to monetize and the vast majority of them fail; overall they do this shit for the love of it. Free ebooks, free TV series, free how-to videos, free games, free lessons, free recipes: some people manage to be offering the right thing at the right time and they break through to monetization, but most of them don’t. And that’s okay.

I do what I do for the love of it: I sing, I take pictures with old film cameras, I publish thousands of words online per year, I share recipes, I comment on tech. These things are fun, and I don’t need to feel guilty – or mediocre – about not turning them into money.

I have this belief that life is structured like this: there’s this job thing you do, and it pays your bills. You do not love it. You’re very fortunate if you like it. It takes up much but not all of your time, and it subsidizes the other things you do. Some people get paid a lot to play at whatever they play at and they don’t have to do the job thing. They are rare and special, and I am not one of them.

That’s my job meta. I don’t like it, but I don’t think I’m eligible to transcend it because it seems that if I was I already would have. So, I believe that I need a job, and I don’t have one, and it’s messing with my head. Since I can’t through any amount of effort on my part cause a job to exist, I need to do something else meaningful to structure my time.

Tomorrow I’m going to visit the WorkSource office and find out what options are available. I’m ready for some options. I’m a displaced worker, I guess, since there aren’t any ISP support gigs around here and I’m 41. I think I might be eligible for grants and scholarships.

I think I’d really like to go back to school. I’d much rather be in class than on the job market since the endless rejection, poverty, and uncertainty is, um, starting to bug the shit out of me.

I mean, sure: I love having nothing but free time. Who doesn’t? I like eating when I want, sleeping when I want, playing guitar when I want, going out when I want: it’s fun. I read all the time, I can meditate whenever I want, or do push-ups and crunches when the mood strikes rather than when I have to. The freedom is great, but apparently I just can’t stop worrying about what will happen. What will happen when my benefits run out? What will happen ifone of the minimum wage jobs I apply for actually offers me a position I really don’t want?

Anyway. Sorry about the digression. All the pics from the blues festival are here, if you want to check them out.

My next gig isn’t until July, but we’ll be playing The Pastime at the Ritzville Blues Brews & BBQs festival, which should be a total blast.

"We think you'd be a good fit."

Work, , ,

In which I just got out of a great interview. (And the gig is only a mile from my house! Guess who can walk or ride a bike to work if she gets hired!)

OMG OMG OMG I might soon be gainfully employed! In my industry, even!

The hiring company is called Integratechs; the gig is at Walla Walla Clinic, which specializes in family and pediatric care. (They apparently use a lot of cutting-edge medical technology, which bodes well for a girl to have fun stuff to learn and support.) The Integratech guy who flew in from Utah to do interviews was wonderful; well-spoken and intelligent. The local department head seems both smart and mellow and laughed at all my luser jokes. I could totally work for him.

I’m very glad I went with my instinct to dress more formally than I normally would for an IT interview; my normal slacker geek clothes wouldn’t have been at all appropriate.

I’d been sent a questionnaire to fill out prior to the interview. I toyed with doing short, terse answers but decided instead to be myself and give long, sometimes-amusing answers. Apparently it was the right approach as they said they’d enjoyed going through my answers. During the interview we more or less went over the questionnaire items in more detail, covering things like prioritizing and dealing with end users in a thorough but refreshingly light-hearted manner. (It’s nice to be interviewed by geeks rather than pure HR people. HR people don’t tend to understand what it is to keep the tech working.) (Although I don’t know that SLC guy isn’t an HR person; he focused on people skills, yes, but not in a pure HR kind of way. He was great at giving positive feedback. Anyway.)

At the end of the interview, I gave them my references – SLC guy accepted the list and thanked me “for thinking ahead” – and I was told that they thought I’d be a good fit for the position! Squee! They usually don’t say that if you’re not at least in their top three. I get the impression they’re doing more interviews this afternoon, but I hope they continue to like me best!

The job would be, on average, 40 to 45 hours per week, and there are the normal benefits of health insurance and paid vacation. A little bit of flex time for personal appointments, etc, too. Very little to no likelihood that I’d ever have to work through a gig. Good atmosphere. Decent pay. Fun-sounding stuff to fix.

I’m VERY excited about this!

Since it’s a clinic, do you suppose they’d let me wear purple scrubs?