Checksum Arcanius

Today was my last shift at Blockbuster. I had a pretty good time talking to the customers, coercing them to buy popcorn as the active seller, and flirting with hot girls. It was fun. The girls is what I’ll miss the most about Blockbuster, actually. Microvision is rather dominated with men. Afterwards, I went to see “Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind,” an interesting film with lots of space for interpretation. If you are well grounded and want to think, go see it.

I’m still wroking on this early schedule thing. Maybe dinner tomorrow with Scott, Dan, & Family. I don’t share quite everything here either.

Life is pretty good. My last Blockbuster shift is tomorrow, its midnight and I’m tired, Math final went well, I was 8th at BCC int eh AMATYC test, Photo Finals went decently, and life is pretty good. TRC is getting lots of money, but so far its mostly internal. We really need external donors. Enter Kent Chaplin, who gave em the names and numbers of representitives of GM, VW, and Subaru in the US. This weeekend, I get to come up with an action lan for talking to them about big time sponsorship of the TRC.

Like I said, I’m tried. Night.

According to JD, the Blockbuster District leader over my store, Blockbuster employees are not allowed to let anyone else use the videos that we check out on our account. I say to that phooey! If its on my account, I’m still responsible for any late and missing movies, and how is it any of Blockbuster’s business what I do with the movies I rent after I walk out of the store? As a customer said, I could spin it like a top if I wanted. Of course, Jon pointed out that it is an employee benefit, so Blockbuster can determine the conditions of the benefit. On the other hand, I don’t get much benefit out of it unless I can allow my friends to use my rentals… In fact, JD’s last meeting with our store really left me with a bad taste in my mouth about Blockbuster in general. Lakemont has been identified as a “SWAT” store, which basically means a lot of stuff, gets stolen from us. And since 70% of theft is internal, we’re all being treated like suspects, getting new background checks (although I just had my hiring criminal background check two weeks ago…), and having to sign zero-tolerance theft paperwork, which I technically violated by letting a friend use one of my rentals. And I do feel a little bad about that, because it was not a thing of integrity. The honest thing to do would be to refuse to sign the new theft policy paperwork given my new understanding of the regulations. Of course, this was before Microvision hired me, and I did the rental thing after I got hired. It’s amazing how much job security changes one’s outlook.

I went to the Puget Sound Blood center today, since they called me a few days ago to schedule an appointment. It turns out they were off by nine days, since I’m not eligible to donate again until the 22nd. It was a fun drive, since it is such a beautiful day, and I was singing in the truck most of the way there. On the Trip, I also came up with an idea for my final project for photography. I’m thinking of doing either Night Shots or a combination of day and nighttime shots. Then I will mount them on white and black paper or cloth. In fact, I think I’ll start taking the day pictures now, in case I decide to use them.

The TRC is getting some great news as a result of winning the PNW regional. Sponsors seem to be coming out of the woodwork. Well, not entirely, but the ASB suddenly gave $5,000 unexpectedly, and a map software company looking for name recognition may do the same. At Chaplin’s, I’m going to ask him to talk to Subaru and Volkswagen about corporate sponsorships for the Club or FIRST in general. Things are looking good for us. And nationals are right around the corner. As is my brother’s graduation, Steel Conflict, and lots of school.

Speaking of school, I got this really good idea recently. One of my classmates in my Math class is doing some independent study of a math class not normally offered at BCC. I’m going to talk to her to figure out how she accomplished that, then ask my current professor, who I like a lot, if he might be willing to guide me through independent study of linear algebra (not being offered next quarter), and differential equations (being offered, but I’ve heard bad things about the professor). And maybe there’s some more math I can learn in the meantime. Then my scheduled classes will be tennis and soccer, and maybe photography’ still have to figure that one out. Dan is taking Photography II through BCC’s continuing education program, which reportedly has access to a much nicer darkroom. I figure I might as well get my art electives out of the way so I can take “real” classes (that is, toward a technical degree to be determined) once I get to the UW (knock on wood).

And that brings me to the final subject (I think), which is this Microvision Internship. For Larry, a mentor of mine, it was an internship that got him motivated enough to make most of his classes a breeze. He actually realized he was better at what he did than most of the people already in the field, and everything came pretty easy after that. I’m hoping for a similar experience here. But even if I don’t like the work, it will be valuable information for me to use in my search for what the heck I’m going to do with my life.

I interviewed today for the Software Test Intern position at Microvision. About an hour ago, I recieved a call with the good news that they were offering me the job. I start Monday and I am very excited. I will be working in the Flic division, which are portable wireless barcode scanners and application, testing out the scanners in pretty much every concievable manner possible.

I am terribly tired, and I think I need to sleep if I am going to think normally ever again, which would be useful for the calculus midterm I have tomorrow.

Dave let me know about an internship opening at Microvision, maker of heads up display systems and barcode canning systems. The position is as a software tester, and I believe I am well-qualified despite my not having completed a computer science degree. With the good word of Dave, I already have an interview scheduled tomorrow at 1:30. I need to get some sleep so I’m not too much of a zombie then, but tonight Blockbuster did a physical inventory and then I played some counterstrike, where I started out slow but picked things up till I was taking out an entire team of terrorists (5 players) on my own after the rest of my team died… accusations of cheating quickly followed. The only way to deal with that really is to agree that you are cheating, but not in so few words. Then they mostly shut up.

I had an appointment with Kent Chaplin, of Chaplin’s Automotive Group, today, but he had to cancel, so I will have to arrange another time to show him the video (available at the TRC’s Website) and hit him up with my plan for Subaru and/or Volkswagon to donote $50,000 or so to the TRC.

As requested I have put up some of the photos I have taken over the years with my SLR.

“Don’t Follow” by Alice in Chains should have been included on their greatest hits CD, perhaps as a bonus track if nothing else. Its an incredible song, and so different from the rest. The End played it – while I do miss Linkin Park there, I can get plenty on my own, and without their new format, I never would have heard this song again, and would have been forgotten forever.

Lakemont Blockbuster closes at 11:00, which is very nice indeed – makes for another blog entry at least.

Its been a few days. During these days, I’ve gone to bed too late, gotten up even later, and barely made it to school some days. I have also accomplished a lot. I developed my first roll of film, got Linux working – mostly – on the new laptop. Right now I’m compiling a 2.4.22 kernel, since the 2.6 kernel seems to be, while working, full of annoying missing modules and just not as friendly yet. I need to get ahold of a non-spyware version of Windows XP for the other 55 gb of the hard drive.

You may recall that I recently began using iTunes for Windows. It works well for buying music, but it is a terrible media manager. I tried importing all of my music and the program froze. I was forced to shut it down and feed it my music in smaller chunks. Quickly, with hundreds of songs, the library because unusable. So the store works alright, and the burning and other options seem nice, but as a media player is is crappy. Winamp, on the other hand, has been constantly upgraded from the good old days of 2.x, the version I, until recently, still used. Nullsoft, the developers of Winamp, began charging for a pro version of their version 5 video/music/everything else player. I didn’t want an everything player. I wanted a highly customizable music player, and winamp 2.x was good, but with plugins harder to find, support dwindling, and the entire project moving in an unfortunate direction, I decided I had to find something better. iTunes clearly couldn’t handle my needs, so the search began. This one ended relatively quickly with the installation of foobar2000, a highly customizable, extremely extensible, sleek, small, beautiful music player with built in support for global hotkeys. In short, it is everything I was hoping for and more. Congrats to the designers of this fine peice of software.

This is the third major software package that I have radically changed in the recent days. First I switched from Microsoft IE to Mozilla Firebird. Based on that incredible success, I tried, and adopted Mozilla Thunderbird as my mail client. Now I have migrated from WinAmp to foobar2000. I suggest to anyone with similar minimalist yet highly functional tastes as me to do the same.

Today my first class was Tennis; I seem to have a problem getting there on time. Most of the people in the class are beginners, but I did get a nice-looking girl as a partner; we’ll see if anything happens there. For a first-timer, she was pretty good, drawing on her badmitton experience I suppose. The teacher, whom I met at the Bellevue Club, mentioned that he saw me there yesterday, which is indeed true. It was my first stop there in over a month. It was strange, all the tables seemed very small; in fact the whole resturant seemed very small. And really, it is a small resturant, but the effect was still strange. I was looking for my last paycheck which, apprently, HR has, but I did not figure this out until after I left, having failed to find either Michael or Kytta. I did get to see Erica, Heidi, Jessi, Will, and Joe again – It was very good to see them again. Hugs from three pretty girls is certainly a perk of leaving the place on good terms. I will try again soon to pick up my paycheck.

Last night, two salepeople pitched an air filter and a surface cleaner (not a vacuum – its a medical device, you see) to us. We were impressed both by its ability to suck up what our vacuum missed and by its price tag. Within one week we will decide if we want to go for it. The salespeople were my age, and apparently the company is hiring; I’m going to give them a call and try to set up an interview to explore the possibility there. The hours might not be the best, but they said it was flexible – so we will see.

I just recompiled the Linux kernel again – it certainly is faster on this P4 2.8 Ghz than it ever was on Blackbrick, the P90 laptop that I bagan using Linux on last year. It looks like this kernel jams on boot… but wait, this time it made it. Interesting.

Somewhere between Linux and Windows is the optimal operating system. I have a 3 inch book to help me figure out if FreeBSD is that happy median. Complete control within a standardized system – so things work without trying too hard, but you can tweak things endlessly as needed for specific needs. Just that book is so intimidating. Speaking of books, I have quite a few I still have to begin and finish: The Bourne Ultimatum, Wild at Heart, Red Planet, A Beautiful Mind, and The Mind of Wall Street, just to name some that are in sight of me right now. But before I finish any of those, Timeline will have to go. Its just that much more itneresting.

Since this entry is pretty much just stream-of-conscience, here goes some more random information – I came up with a name for the new laptop: “Kleinoscope.” It combines the idea of the 3-D mobius strip known as the Klein Bottle with what I think is a much better sounding name. Too bad its not too colorful (yet), or the Kaleidascope connation would fit as well. The computer has a few interesting problems – the first is that its power cord doesn’t stay in as well as it should. It never falls out on its own, mind you, but jostling and make the cord fall out, so I have to keep an eye on it or it will randomly turn off from time to time, usually in the middle of compiling something while I’m away. Also, the PCMCIA port looks deflected and the left lower side doesn’t taper like it should. Also, its missing a 9-pin serial connection. Its hard to complain about much else though; its a solid machine with USB 2.0, DVD+RW, Firewire. Of course I’ll need windows for most of these features to be used in the way I wish to use them, thus I am looking for a non-spyware version of Windows XP and I’m contemplating even officially buying the Home -> Pro upgrades.