days and nights

I got an email from a reader. She asked me what I do for work. Well, here you go. My work life in short (kinda).

My formal education ended pretty much with High School. And that, as I am sure you all understand, was not much of an education at all. After I graduated, I went to college off and on for a few years, but quickly found myself becoming bored of the same stuff that was boring me in high school. The education was simply not advanced enough and wasn’t dealing with what I wanted to learn about most. Cool shit.

After 3 mostly bad years of college with only two good semesters included, I dropped out and went to work. I started on the phones as a technical support rep for AOL. You want to talk about boring and annoying? I was there for ten months, then promptly decided that I was going to quit when I was offered a job to work as a software testing engineer for American Express. My career was on track finally. Well, maybe not.

American Express was a fine company to work for. They treated me very well, though the pay was less than spectacular. I happened to be a problem for the company though. I thought I was smarter than I was and started to branch out on my own a bit. What it came down to was that I was lazy. I didn’t get my work done when I was supposed to. I was released from the position after 3 months. It was only a temp position, but it still gave me a bit of a wakeup call.

Just after that, I decided to start my own company. It was a computer services company that was mostly based around the concept of building custom computers for high end users. That was how it started at least. I quickly came to find out that high end users tend to build their own computers, and would much rather not have me doing it for them. After realizing that obvious point, I started to branch out into the home user market and soon into the small business market. It was actually starting to work out rather well when I hit burnout. I had worked harder on this business than I had on anything before in my life. I needed help, but had recruited the wrong people to assist me in the venture and it had caught up to me and killed me. More to the point, it had killed my business. I took some time off while keeping the business running when I met a new business partner of sorts. After knowing him for about a year, we decided to merge our companies and he took over all the business that my company had generated over the 3 years I ran it. I went to work for him as a consultant and accounts manager after the transfer of assets went through. I stayed with this company for about a year off and on but decided to finally quit that position and begin working in a new direction.

I had made a big decision to start moving towards systems administration as a career and hobby. I was starting to play with Linux at the time, and had decided that was the direction I wanted to go with my continuing self education. I started buying books the next day.

During the transition phase when I was ridding myself of the monkey on my back I called business, I started working for Teleperformance USA. I was involved with the MSN project and had taken a position as a phone technician with them. After several months of doing that, I saw an internal job postion about a position opening up in the Philippines. It was a six month to one year position and it sounded like a nice escape to greener pastures. I applied for it and was accepted for the position just a couple weeks later. I had 6 weeks for training and to say goodbye to my family and my girlfriend of 18 months. Needless to say, she was not happy.

Six weeks later, I left for Manila to the tune of much sobbing from the girlfriend and sounds of my voice promising a prompt return. My work experience in Manila is a blur to me now. My time there consisted of working 12-15 hours a day and partying as much as I could. I went on frequent “walkabouts” throughout the city and was even contemplating setting up shop there on a permanent basis as my girlfriend at the time had shown some interest in coming over to be with me there for a while.

By my second month in Manila, I had been promoted because of my hard workand assigned my own team of agents. I had begun looking for a condo or apartment to rent or buy and was considering accepting an offer for a semi permanent position there that had been forwarded to me. It was a five year contract with a great bonus structure associated with it and ample opportunity to fly home to see my family when things were slower.

I was on the verge of accepting the position when some very nasty rumors started to flow about me. Somehow a rumor was started that I was having a sexual relationship with a member of my team. As I was planning to marry the girl I was dating at the time, I can safely say that it was a bunch of horse shit. I denied it time and again and decided finally that if my company was not going to stand up for me in something so simple as that, I was not going to work for them anymore. I walked into the site directors office later that day and told him that I was going to be leaving for a variety of reasons. I will write an article on this portion of things at a later time.

One week later, I was on a plane heading home. It was supposed to be an 18 hour flight, but felt like only a few minutes. I took two sleeping pills and had a Guinness before I left. I had a small amount of time in Japan to get something to eat, so I got a pastrami sandwich on rye (IN JAPAN!) and had another tall Guinness. About 16 hours later, I was in San Francisco and 2 hours later, in Salt Lake City. I remember that it was 92F outside and I was freezing cold because there was no humidity in the air. Bad day.

A few weeks after returning home, I started working for Orbit Irrigation as a Contact Center Trainer and Lead. That position continued for about 3 months until there was a massive restructuring of the sales division of the company.

I promptly went to work on the phones again. It was for a somewhat large company that ran Internet services. This position was short lived though. I got a job offer from the best company I have ever worked for. Konnections is a small ISP that does web hosting as well. They are currently one of the largest ColdFusion web hosts in the world.

I worked for Konnections for nearly 3 years. I started on the phones with them, but it was a whole different type of job than AOL or MSN. It was more geared toward systems administration and hardcore troubleshooting which made it an instant hit in my book.

After about 6 months of working on the phones for them, I was promoted to the position of System Administrator. I had begun working towards that years earlier and had finally obtained my goal. Konnections was moving their headquarters to Dallas, TX, and offered me a position down there. I moved about a month later. When I got down there, my learning started. I started working in a datacenter on a frequent basis and was the lead Linux admin for the company. Good times!

After 2 years down there, I moved back to Utah for various personal reasons. I began working for an aircraft manufacturing company two days after I got home. I was hired to be the Director of Information Technology. I worked there for 3 months and was offered a position with my current company as a writer.

My job is to take consumer security software products and rate them according to a set of conditions that are determined based on the products that I am testing.It isn’t quite so romantic as it sounds.

The real question is this: How did I get to this place? I am an administrator that is writing for a living. Who knew huh? So there you go. You know what I do and how I did it. There will of course be more information as I get the story finished, but until then, this should help.

If this doesn’t wow you, I don’t know what will… The changes in the characters mood along with the awesome graphics combine to make this a very cool little movie. I still feel like game studios need to put more time and effort into making mouth movements more natural while a character is talking, but that really doesn’t take away from how impressed I am with this video. I highly suggest you take the time check it out.

I was told that it may actually have nothing to do with the game itself, but is more of a technical demo for it. Either way, what a cool little video…

I started watching Journeyman last year and fell in love with it. I would love to see the show come back. The way it was written and performed was genius. I find that the networks have started a trend of unbelievable stupidity since the Jericho debacle.

In case there are some people out there that don’t know, Jericho was canceled after its first season. The people were up in arms about it and forced it to come back. Instead of giving it a budget to work with though, the network chopped their budget and forced Jericho to go into a “single room shot” mentality. This made the show extremely hard to film and made the production value of the show go down considerably. I fear that NBC may do the same thing to Journeyman. This would be a horrible way to ruin one of the best shows on TV in my no so humble opinion.

Journeyman deserves another chance. It was a great show that entertained me to no end (until now!). I would beg for NBC to bring Journeyman back, but I am sure those egotistical, rabbit food eating, cock chomping bastards would just ignore a plebeian like myself. In the event that one of them do read this though, I really want Journeyman back. And if you bring it back, I will stop calling you names for a one year period until you cancel it again like the little retarded twits you are.

Really what it comes down to is that good TV is hard to come by. This whole Surviver/reality TV age has ruined TV for those of us with an IQ above 80. While I understand that the great majority of the US is full of people that have the IQ of a mildly retarded person, I would still love to say that I watched a show that was SOMEWHAT intelligent in its presentation and content.

I will keep this short and sweet since I am up against a deadline today that will take me until next week to complete. Easter is not meant to be Christmas. I don’t WANT you to give me a gift for Easter. I don’t want to BUY you a gift for Easter! What I simply want is ham, turkey, stuffing and a load of mango… The mango is just for me. Nobody else qualifies for mango.

Regardless, my whole point here is that Easter is not meant to be a consumer driven holiday! We have Christmas and Valentines Day for that. Lets leave it to a nice day to get with family and enjoy their company. Hell, even throw your religion into it since that was where it came from in the first place. No more gifts though. Your budget for Easter is for eggs, some dye if you want, and candy. Hell, even that is too much. Kids should be just fine with looking for a white freaking egg!

Tradition is great. Especially when you might be on the cusp of creating one. Let me explain.

I have been of the opinion that throwing a baseball or football around with someone should be done at least once a day. The reason behind this you ask? Because it is relaxing, somewhat physical, and it gets us away from these stupid computers that we sit behind all day long. If you want to get to the real reason though, it is pure. There are no food additives involved. There are no drugs involved. It doesn’t take an act of congress to get a pool or community center put in to do it. It simply takes two people and a ball. Maybe a couple baseball mits if you need them. In fact, you don’t even need grass for this. You can use a sidewalk, a parking lot, an empty hallway or room, or even the street.

I really do think that the world would be a much better place if everyone would just take 20 minutes a day and just throw a ball around. Though, what do I know? I am just a middle class white guy living in America. My thoughts are worthless now.

Ok. I am a little ticked at the changes to Samba in Fedora 8. Every time I get that crap working, something happens to break it again. Or they send out an update that breaks it. Or there is an act of god that makes my CAT5 melt or something… My god, I don’t care what we do, just make it work again without so much stress on my part!

I am just taking a small break from work here. I have been working on AV all day trying to get the site up and going. It is going pretty fast so far. I have to send it live tomorrow. That is if I still have a job tomorrow. I am a bit worried they might be getting ready to can me for taking so long on this. Who knows though. I am probably wrong. On that note, does anyone else ever notice that no matter how much you get taken care of and how much you try to make things smooth out in life, it just keeps throwing things at you? I am getting tired as hell of that and really wish it would stop…

In other things, I forgot to go get my prints done today. I had an appointment with a detective to have him do it this morning, but I totally forgot. I have to get prins done to get an old thing on my record removed. I don’t understand why, but such is life. I figure I will just go get it done somewhere else when I have the chance. The sooner the better though.

We are moving forward on the business slowly. I am getting our survey cards printed up so that we can start getting some demographic information compiled for the business plan. I am also moving forward on getting some people on our side in the video game industry. I figure that getting a few big names to vouch for us may give us the edge to get angels to invest.

So I got a DUI/DWI last July. I have everything mostly done to fix it except for these classes I am currently taking. I don’t think I have EVER been so bored. A full day of “work” then this. I nearly slit my own throat in the middle of it. I get that these classes have to cater to stupid people. I get that these classes have to cater to cracked out people that have the brain of a peanut. I just wish they had an honors or AP class for all of us who actually finished high school.

Let me explain why I am so annoyed with these classes. Today was my third class, and we are JUST getting into new subject matter. The first two, at 2.5 hours each, were concentrating on a single mantra. Biology + Choices = Outcome. I could have gotten that the first time. There were people TODAY that still didn’t remember it! How damn hard is it to remember this stupid little equation? These are the kind of people that carry around 3×5 cards with instructions on how to tie their shoes, shower, and brush their teeth. I am sure of it.

Into other stuff… My left eye refuses to stop twitching. It is driving me insane! I am getting the feeling it has to do with lack of sleep, but I am not 100% sure. I do know that if it doesn’t stop after this weekend I may see a doctor about it. I have always had issues with it here and there, but it has been pretty bad for the last 2 weeks or so. Such a shame too. It is making my shooting in ball go straight to hell. I was 3 for 9 today for 7 points. I usually shoot somewhere around 60% overall with about 40% on college distance 3 point shots. I have dropped over my last 3 games to less than 35% overall with 27% on 3 point shots. I really don’t know if it has to do with the eye. It might be a mental thing… Just before this dead streak, I was shooting damn near 80% overall. Maybe I just got used to things going in.

Played basketball today. It was a good time except for my stupid knee. That crap drives me insane. Right when I am starting to get in shape again and things are starting to come together, I get to have surgery… AGAIN! I am about sick and damn tired of hospitals and everything that goes with them. Well, except the hot doctors and nurses and such. But the pain and suffering should go. Bah. I am done bitching about it.

In other news, I have an assload of stuff to do at work, but can’t seem to gain any headway on it. I think that it could be due to the fact that I don’t see any endgame with this company. They are simply in it to sell it. While that is noble, I find myself wondering where the hell that leaves me. And seriously, I wasn’t meant to be a writer. While I love to write, the subject matter is BORING ME TO DEATH!

There was a quote that I heard a while back that went something like, “Those that don’t work hard won’t know the pleasure of time off.” That wasn’t even close, but it gives you the idea. The point behind me bringing this up is that after the last several weeks that I have had, this is SUCH a relief to be able to take a Saturday afternoon and just blow it on a little bit of resting and reading. I have not done this for a very long time.

In other news, I am seriously thinking about taking the Logan job. Though if I get a good enough offer out of Dallas, I will be moving back. Who knows… I also have an opportunity to work for a company in South Salt Lake… I wouldn’t mind that, but the salary isn’t all that spectacular compared to Logan or what could possibly come out of Dallas.

Oh yeah… I get paid Friday… KICK ASS!