iBrasten

Serenity in T-3 hours.

I’ve literally been waiting for this movie for a year.

See all you Browncoats tonight…

First thing’s first…  My sister’s wedding was wonderful!  It all seemed to come together well (she may have a differing opinion), and it was completely and totally her.  Her husband - my new brother in law - is wonderful for her and encouraged my sister to make the wedding whatever she wanted.  And that she did!  I have some good video and will probably post clips at some point.

Work is good!  I think everyone has that ‘oh-my-god-what-did-I-do’ period of time when they start a new job.  I’m starting to come out of that.  I can tell this job is going to be both challenging and extremely rewarding.  I’m not a fan of massive corporations (at least not as an employer), and this corporation is MUCH larger than I originally believed.  I probably can’t say much more about what I do, as their policies on such things are much more restrictive than my last employer’s.  But, all in all, I think I’m going to like it here.

I had forgotten what college was like.  I had my first class last night, and I’m not more terrified and more mentally alive than I have been in a while.  From 6pm-8:30pm Monday and Wednesday I’ll be sitting in a dingy little classroom in North Seattle learning Pre-Calculus.  This is a step back from where I was at 5-6 years ago, but math credits apparently don’t satisfy requirements after a certain amount of time, and I hardly remember anything anyway, so it’s good.  I’ll be spending most of tonight doing homework, I’m sure… re-reading the 6 pages of notes I took.   I’ve missed school, I’m glad to be back.

My grandfather passed away last weekend.  It’s been very sad for me these last couple of days.  I love my grandpa very much.  I hadn’t seen him in a little while and that saddens me.  We’ll be spending some time in Mt. Vernon on Sunday celebrating his life with the family.

One last thing…  I’m officially engaged!  No doubt Jessica will be posting the complete saga on her blog, so I’ll be light on details.  It happened Thursday evening, but we’d been keeping it under wraps until my sister got back from her honeymoon.  We finally told my family on Saturday, and I just haven’t gotten around to posting since then.  But now you know!  We spent 3 days in Portland last weekend (SO. MUCH. FUN.) and I was planning on doing it then, but as always happens, plans got entirely messed up and I had to do it later last week.  When Jess posts about it you can read all the details. :)

So that’s it.  Back to work for me. :)

Espresso guy: “So, I’m confused. You have a Sun Microsystems shirt and an Apple hat.”

Yes. Welcome to my world.

It’s amazing the little things that give you pause. Today, just before leaving work for the last time, I turned in my timecard. An ordinary action so I thought, one that I’ve done exactly 119 times before. But this time was different. Reaching in to my time card file, I discovered I had one left.

Five years ago I was handed one time sheet. One only. Thinking ahead (something I was not known for at the time), I realized I would soon need another time card, and another, and another. So, I photocopied this time card – 5 or 10 copies maybe. And for five years, every time I found myself down to one time card, I made copies of it for later use. But today for the first time, I didn’t. I just used it.

There’s more to the story, though… See, as part of that forethought mentioned earlier, I realized I surely couldn’t get by for very long if I was making copies of copies of copies. The quality would degrade drastically everytime I made a copy. So I set the original in the back of the file. Working from the front to the back, the last time card I ever had left was the original to photocopy. It made great sense and worked well.

But now you can see why this time was different. Today’s time card, my last one at this company, was in fact the original one I was given. After 119 photocopies, I finally turned in my last time card—and it turned out to be my first one.

It’s just hitting me that I have tomorrow and Wednesday OFF. As in, NOTHING to do. I’ve never had that many week days off before. Being a contract worker, I don’t get vacations, so I haven’t taken more than a day off in 5 years.

What should I do???? I dunno…

Apparently I was being paranoid. :)

They had going-away cake and everything for me… it was very fun. Shared a little bit about what I’d be working on at my new job, etc… It was nice. :)

Time Magazine does fantastic articles on Apple. They understand that the story isn’t the product, it’s the process. For a very interesting look into how the iPod nano came to be, read Time Magazine’s recent article, Stevie’s Little Wonder.

“What’s really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple’s incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don’t have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling,” Jobs says. “And look at what’s happened. That same innovation, that same engineering, that same talent applied where we don’t run up against the fact that Microsoft got this monopoly, and boom! We have 75% market share.”

Relevant Links
Stevie’s Little Wonder – How Apple killed it’s top selling device to make something better.

My apologies for not writing anything lately. I’ve been in a serious case of limbo the last couple weeks and just haven’t had anything to write about. However, TODAY is my LAST DAY at work!! WOOO! It’s a little strange, I’ve been here for five years, and this is the last day I’ll come in to work here. I wish I could say i’ve watched this company go from a fledgling nothing to a strong company, but I fear the opposite has happened. Either way, I’m out of here in 7 hours!

So far, none of the management has even said boo to me. The owner is out of town, and my direct supervisor hasn’t even come out of her office. A little strange, but oh well.

Here I Come to Save the Day! I bought the new Mighty Mouse from Apple. The “multi-button” scroll-knobbed mouse. It’s interesting, so far. I’m not used to wired mice, though, and I don’t like it. I find myself wishing for my wireless mouse way more often than I utilize the multiple buttons. I’ve never been one to wish for a ton of buttons on my mice anyway. The scrolling feature is really nice though.

From Cool to Uncool, In a Flash… A week ago, I was the proud owner of the finest portable music player on the planet. The iPod mini was the player that everyone loved, or loved to hate. The best selling music player on the planet, the player that every company was gunning for… yes, the iPod mini was pretty much “it.”

Leave it to Apple to not be satisfied with #1. Late last week, they introduced the iPod nano to replace the iPod mini. Suddenly, my iPod mini is archaic. Huge. Ugly. Un-cool. I must - someday soon - fix this little situation of mine. I must own an iPod nano.

Relevant Links Apple’s Mighty Mouse – Multi-button mouse from Apple.
iPod nano – The greatest music player on the planet (RIP, iPod mini, you’ve been good.)

My tabs have expired! I wasn’t even paying attention, and yet, they did. Two days ago. Sooo, I have to drive around today hoping to not get pulled over, and then try to make it to an emissions facility, pass, and go get tabs tomorrow without getting caught. How exciting!

It may be heartless, but… I think the whole discussion over whether or not to rebuild New Orleans is a valid and interesting discussion. Obviously right now there is a lot of loss and pain being felt by a lot of people, I don’t mean to minimize that. Certainly no decisions need to be made on the matter until everyone is rescued (or recovered) and the situation is under control for the long haul. But… I do think there are some valid points in the argument to not rebuild New Orleans in it’s previous location.

Specifically, the city was below sea level. Rebuilding the city below sea level on sinking ground would probably be begging for this to happen again someday. At this point we would be draining a perfectly valid lake where the city once stood to rebuild a city on the lake bed. It doesn’t make a lot of logic sense.

Secondly, there are some serious concerns as to what the ground will be like once the water is gone. Keep in mind this water is horrible stuff. Sewage, chemicals, and horrendous bacteria are soaking into the ground and the surviving structures every day. Draining the water is going to leave all this stuff behind. There are definitely people who know this stuff better than I, but I can’t imagine that’s going to be good to live on.

On the other hand, I’m aware that moving the whole city may be economically impossible or illogical. Maybe draining the city and repairing IS the best thing to do in the long run. But it’s al least worth having that discussion.

On a completely unrelated note… Serenity in T minus 26 days.

Congratulations, iBrasten readers!

Looking back on the stats, August was the most successful month for iBrasten, in terms of readers. We had 226 unique visitors making a total of 1215 total visits. We also averaged around 50 unique visitors a day. Visitors in a given day rarely trigger duplicate unique visitor entries, so that number is probably close to accurate. I know of maybe 10 people who read my blog, only 5 or 6 whom read it on a continual basis (those that you often see commenting), so for those who are obviously reading regularly but aren’t saying anything… SAY HI! I would like to know who’s reading!

Of the more interesting tidbits I learned from my log, someone actually made it to my site by searching for “little bras sexual” at MSN.com. Go try it. iBrasten comes up on the first page. :) I doubt that particular person found what they were looking for, however.

Worldwide Tragedies To end this post, I’d like to say my heart goes out to everyone affected by the hurricane on the Gulf coast, as well as to the victims of the recent stampede in Iraq. One tragedy caused by man, the other by weather, but both causing a great loss of life.