Movement

Things are looking up for me, maybe.

I was offered a job in Arkansas, but because it was minimum wage and in Arkansas I decided to decline. I'm in the process of being screened for the exact same job an hours drive away but don't know if I'm going to accept that one either. Location is pretty big for me.

I have an interview with another company, one that might pay me like I have a BA, this Monday. The only problem with that one is that they want a fluent Japanese speaker and I have not been a fluent Japanese speaker for almost three years now. I've been hitting the books to keep from making a total fool of myself.

This morning I finally got off my ass and trolled around the various garage sales in the area looking for resellable books. The idea is that I might be able to make a small bit of income from dealing in used book of a focused genre, most probably fantasy/sci-fi and travel/language books. I spent the better half of today figuring out Amazon and eBay, and if this first haul turns a profit, I may serious consider devoting my time to acquiring stock and setting up an online store.

My Nano is lagging, but it has started, and I plan on finishing.

Since coming back from Florida I has spent a minimum of time on WoW, and am hoping for that trend to continue. I think I'm comfortably at a point now where I can do a few dailies, raid, vend, and log out without hours and hours of badge farming or whatever. That means more time to reaquaint myself with coding, writing, etc. Good deal.

I am struggling through Frank Norris' The Octopus. Damn thing is so wordy. And I have 3 or 4 books that I still need to review and note as finished. 52 books this year is probably impossible now. I'm at something like 20.

Guess what this post is about!

Employment!

For the last week I've sent in one submission a day. Hell I don't even remember where I submitted the last few days. Barnes and Noble (I ALWAYS write it Nobel), The Strand, Labyrinth Books, Oxford University Press, etc. The over/under qualified issue is still a big one. I either have to be a student or I have to have 4 years experience. Someone should have told me I'd need to be working full time as a student to get a job I was qualified for once I graduated. But whatever, I'm just going to keep applying. I cleaned my room a little more and am starting to consider selling off my high school manga. The ones I really liked I can keep, but for a spell there I was buying every title on the shelves. It got me a place as a columnest and bagged me preview swag, but not it's all taking up space and will never be reread. I figure I can try out the online book selling circut with my overstock (which, true to its name, is overflowing in this house)

So today I was doing my usual trolling for jobs and checked the Seattle Library system and suddenly there's a job availiable that pays 16-22hr and only requires a GED or higher. There were only two problems, it was a technical position that wanted previous experience troubleshooting electronics, which I only had informally, and the deadline for applications was in three hours.

So it turned out I was underqualified again, but this time in a different area, but with only three hours to decide if I was going to apply anyway I applied anyway.

There's really nothing hard about troubleshooting networks, and almost all of the hard crap about it has to do with the fact that computers are like babies, and the hard part about fixing them is figuring out what's wrong with them in the first place. I don't have formal experience with teaching people how to use computers, but I have a ton of informal experience? Doesn't that count for something?

I suppose I'll find out if it does in a few weeks. If I do get the job I'm moving to seattle and applying to to the MLIS program there. If I don't I just keep sending out my resume.

Update

After much planning my trip out west is finaly prepared. I'm going on a whirlwind tour down the coast, and will be checking out prospective employment as I go. This will be my last big trip unless I end up going to Disney, in which case -that- will be my last big trip. Either way, the push for employment starts in earnest on the 7th, the day I get back from San Diego.

August Update

A month of August has passed already, and not much has happened. Obviously I have been remiss in my posting. It's surprisingly difficult to keep track of what you're doing when you aren't doing much. A quick update:

Denver was great. My initial impressions were all wrong and I fell in love with the city. If I thought I had a chance of employment somewhere I would be moving there, but I will probably apply from affar and see what happens. Spent a lot of time with Fides which was definitely the highlight of the trip.

After Denver there was almost a month long drought of nothing. I was trying to get my Dad to make plans for Taiwan, because for the first time in 16 years he, my brother and I could all go together. We ended up making it there for about 10 days at the beginning of July. The insanity is recorded elsewhere.

After coming back we hit the duldrums again. Particularly in the area of food, we found ourselves wishing we were still in Taiwan. Eating is so convenient there. You step outside and there's a place to eat every five feet. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we lived in the city, so again I found myself swearing up and down that I had to move into a metropolitan area or die trying.

Last week I finally got off my ass and went to NYC with my uncle to scout out bookstores and inquire about employment. I had intended to follow up by now but again I'm slouching. I had lost my resume in a computer wipe, and am building it back, but see to only be able to write a line every 24hrs.

On a lighter note, I was going through a book of photography today when I saw a picture of a leapord labeled 'cheetah'. Unable to let this lie I obtained a second opinion, and then did a quick spot check via the internet. I'm 100% certain the label is wrong, because it's refering to an animal with rosette shaped spots in two tones.

I wonder if I can put on my resume for library work "Dedicated to finding the correct answer for everything, even when no one gives a crap."

Denver, Day 1

It's 10:30 and my first day in Denver is over. After spending the day before in a sweaty rock gym shouting over club music loud enough to clear my chronicly clogged ears and coming home at midnight to pack franticly for a 7:00AM flight, I managed to sleep the majority of the way to the city. The stopover in Dallas was perfect. Just long enough to grab something to eat and get onto the next plane.

As we were decending into Denver Airport I started to finally realize what was going on.

Denver is in the middle of nowhere. I know I joke about how Hamilton is for all intents and purposes in the middle of nowhere, but Denver is actually in the middle of nowhere. I went from the most densely populated state in the union to the 37th, and apparantly more than half of Colorado's entire population is in the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area. I've flown over this area of the US a number of times now, and have always been facinated by the vast tracks of quilted farmland stretching out on both ends of the horizon, with nothing but a few pitiful dots of forest and some jagged rivers for diversity. This time I ended up landing in it. At that point the 'what the hell have I gotten myself into' part of the trip hit me.

It was about 2PM by the time I was into the city and ready to explore. Some quick stats of day 1:

Beggars seen - 6
Ratio of people who asked me for change compared to those who were just hanging around with signs - 1:1
Libraries Found - 1
Bookstores Found -1
Libraries and bookstores that informed me that the chances of my getting a job there were worse than 0 - 2
Pictures taken - 5
Times I've gotten lost - 0 (A miracle and an anomoly all at once)
Overall opinion of the city so far, after 3 streets, and a few hours (from 1 to 10) - 3

Like Jersey and Hawaii, the state of Colorodo is in a hiring freeze. The chances that I will end up in a public library are very slim at this point, and besides, there would be an LIS to get first. I still have a number of bookstores to check out, and the college campus. There's apparantly going to be a festival on Saturday, so I'll go there too. I think at this point a lot is depending on the campus itself and the vibe I get there. This city is so tiny I don't know if I would be able to manage living here for any length of time, but life is nothing if not a series of interesting challenges!

The Photos from Today:

I wasn't very dilligant in playing the tourist snapping at everything. The area the hotel is in looks a little tougher than the metropolitan heart of the city, and so I took the inconspicuous route for the time being.

"Yaki Soba Tofu" I guess you could call this that. It wasn't bad. The tempura was surprisingly edible, considering how picky I am about tempura.

Some guy in the Japanese place playing with a twin lens reflex camera. After passing laundrymats, liquer stores, and similar institutions of the baser elements of city life, seeing someone with a TLR was my first whiff of something interesting in the city.

Interior of the Japanese restaurant. The menu was injet printer fare, did not look like any Japanese menu I had ever seen, and the man in front of me was asking if Kirin beer was some sort of Japanese lager. I had some misgivings.

A view of the Denver skyline. That's pretty much all of it. Behind that is the Rockies, which is a much more impressive view. The image of nothing but flat farmland on one side of you and a gigantic wall of snowy mountains on the other commands an apprecation for the amazing diversity of the country and geography in general.

Starting up the Rest of My Life

Well, I have been home for something like two weeks with very little done in comparison to my grand plans. I realized that the most recent version of my resume had been wiped with the change from Vista to Win 7, and haven't sent any applications for job out yet. My excuse is that I'm waiting until after the trip to Denver to get going on all of that stuff.

Denver is the one thing that I said I would be doing and actual am going to do. On Sunday I'm getting up at the godforsaken hour of 5AM to catch a plane, and will be landing in the Mile High City some time around 2PM. I'll be there for a week to explore the city, check out the campus, and try to decide if it's a place I would like to live for the next 4 years or so. I'm not sure I'm ready to settle for any longer than that, but in 4 years, who knows? After that I'll be checking out Seattle/Oregon, and then maybe some place in the south. St. Lewis perhaps.

The Kindle

I have been eying e-readers

Progress indeed

The Kindle and Snobbery Via the times. They are missing out on one important fact here. At $300+ per, you don't need to know what someone is reading on a kindle to know where they stand on the literary snob meter. The fact that they put down 300 dollars plus to read when you can pick up a good book for 25c at a library sale is itself a good indication of the type of reader that they are.

I wouldn't want a kindle anyway. I don't want to marry a single company just to use an electronic device. I don't care how convenient (read:easy to spend more money) they make it. I was looking at the sony reader and the cybook, and there is the possibility of reading on my DS which would be nice considering I don't use it for anything ever. In particular I'd like to try out this 100 Classic Books Collection.