Well, the beta release for Megabit is done!  Myd started adding articles yesterday.  We will hopefully launch sometime between today and Friday.  I am pretty excited.  I want to pop open a bottle of champagne, but I am working all this week, so bleh!

I am taking Lindsey out to the nicest restaurant in town to celebrate on Friday though.

I also just found out that my job is screwing me over by over $1/hr in pay.  Our entire pay structure is based on pay scales, and two guys hired at the same time I was are making over $1 more than me in pay. We should all be making the same amount of money. I don't know how long it's been going on, but at $1/hr, 40 hrs/week, 52 weeks/yr, for 4 yrs.....well, it's upwards of $8000 dollars before you calculate overtime & holiday pay in as well.  I hope the mistake doesn't go back that far, as it will be harder to recover.  But, even just one year is shocking.  That's a huge fucking clerical error, that cost me a substantial amount of money. This place is just freakin' ridiculous with how they treat their employees.  I know I should have probably kept better track of things, but seriously I never imagined something like this could happen. 

I had better get some recompense for that.

I have to figure out what to do with my pension when I quit as well.  One of my coworkers says I should put it in an IRA or something like that to avoid the ridiculous amount of taxes that I will incur upon leaving.  Already I am getting 4 1/2 weeks of pay when I quit just from vacation hours alone. 

I just need to stinking get a whole new job & situation.

ashram

Every day, every free moment I am entrenched in the struggle to capture my imagination and bend reality to its will.  I think of late that what I desire can only be achieved by the shear force that I feel inside me.  This is a creative energy that moves beyond me and spins me away on the current, a puppet to the greatness.  In this one thing, I choose to hope.

ashram

Well, I finally got chosen for the random Drug/Alcohol test for my workplace.  Only took four years.  The thought of having to pee on cue is already making my bladder shrivel.

Frankly, the whole thing is really retarded.  They e-mailed me on Thursday that I had to take the test on my "next work day".  I did not work on Thursday.  I came in on Sunday, and I don't think the Occupation Health building is even open today.  So that's out the window.  I guess it will be tomorrow.  I believe I can avoid ingesting alcohol between now and then.  In fact, I could have checked my work e-mail from home(though I never do), and spotted this 4 days in advance.  How spontaneous is that?

Sure, I am a person who does not do drugs and usually doesn't even drink alcohol, but if this test is intended to scare or even catch people that do, then giving them a four day warning is probably not very effective.

Bravo police department.

ashram

I really like this Kate Nash album.  I discovered her on MTV, and I have to say I am obsessed with her voice/accent.  The combination is addictive.

Tonight, I occupied myself at work by watching Casper's wind speed update.  We had winds between 45-85 mph.  Our gusts easily entered into the categories of a Class 1 hurricane and a F1 tornado.  It was shaking the cars in the parking lot at Wal-mart before I went to work.  You could see the wheels turning just a bit.  I am glad the ice had melted in the lot, otherwise vehicles would have just been sliding along it.

A large portion of the city was without power.  I don't know why people call 911 when they don't have power, but an incredible number do.  We can't do anything about it.  We aren't the power company.  We don't know when it will be back on.  No, we can't just fix it.  Wait it out or give the power company a call again and harass them.  Especially don't call at 3 am.  What are you doing up?  Get the fuck to bed.  What could you being doing at this time of night except drinking?  You need lights to get drunk?

Tirade over.

I finished a post for my learning site.  Up to four days now!  I have to think what to do for today.  That was my night.  Oh, and I ate some Cheez -Its.

ashram

Happy New Year!

I spent mine at work, so I hope yours was better.  I wish I was with my girlfriend, brother, & sister instead.

ashram

I am starting a new blog.  It's not to replace this one, and it definitely has a different purpose.  It is called The Learning Man.  I'll use the description I posted on the blog:

The Learning Man is a blog about one man’s goal to learn something new every day, then talk about it.   It is both exercise in writing as well as in discipline.  I would love to have a post each and every day for at least one year.

I enjoy learning, even if what I am learning is odd or seemlingly useless.  I can be easily fascinated by the smallest fact or story.  I also loved sharing what I learned with whomever I could find and convince to listen to me.  When I first conceived of the idea for this blog, I was working night shift at a 911 dispatch center.  The evenings were often very quiet, so we were allowed to use the internet.  I spent most of my nights bouncing from site to site looking for something interesting to read or do.  Often, I would find something interesting and spend most of my twelve hour shift ‘researching’ a single subject for my own amusement.  I immediately wanted to share the innane bits of knowledge I had obtained, but had found that family and friends didn’t really care about the latest in web technology or the history of the Pharos Lighthouse when I woke them up at 6 o’clock in the morning.  To settle my need to express these things, I decided to create this blog.  This is a place I can vent my excitement and also get some practice at writing on a consistent basis.

So, short or long, my goal is to post something new there every single day.  I am going to start January 1st(since I just set it up this weekend, I figured why not wait until the 1st?), and I will attempt to post something every single day of a year.  Luckily, the blog system I am using(wordpress) allows me to queue posts to certain dates, so I could create extras to throw up in a bind. 

Knowing myself, this will be an extremely difficult task.  I tend to procrastinate big time, so it will be quite an effort to get things up in a timely fashion.

Other news in ashram land:

-Working on designing a new site for my gaming clan.  This would be a monumental task.  Once again, I don't know if I can meet the challenge

-Thinking of quitting my job, once again.  So, I better freakin' find something else to do for a few months while Lindsey and I wait to hear from the JET people.

Other than that, not much.  Getting impatient to move on with my life.

ashram

The Learning Man

Just watching CNN Headline News, and they mentioned the 5 most dangerous cities in America.  At number 3 is Flint, Michigan.  St Louis and Detroit make 1 and 2.  Flint, MI?  What in the world? 

Has anyone ever heard of Flint, MI?  That would be like if Casper made the top 3. How the hell did it beat out cities like Atlanta and DC by over ten points?  Next thing you know, all the rap videos will be about people from the hood in Flint.  That's crazy. 

What a disappointing list.

Don't move to Flint, Michigan.

ashram

I don't know how many of you have heard about it yet, but trouble is brewing in Hollywood with a possibly imminent Writer's Guild of America Strike. The news is all over the internet, though I just heard about it myself today. The contract for over 12,000 members of the Writer's Guild expires on October 31st, and the union "voted this week by a margin of more than 90% to authorize their leaders to launch a walk-out when their contract expires."

This means that initially television will suffer from things like reruns, more reality tv, more games shows, some newer shows may not get off the ground if they don't have enough stockpiled episodes, or even imported shows from Brittian or other countries. It will also affect the theater as movie production companies produce more documentaries or rely on previously purchased(ie 'bad') scripts they've had sitting on the shelves.

I know you might be thinking now, "WTF does this have to do with games?"

Recently, many game sites and even mainstream media revealed both movie and television studios' concerns that Halo 3's launch might have effected tv ratings and theater ticket sales. This has been a hot topic for the past two to three years as the game industry has grown much larger both fiscally and in demographics. The game industry has demonstrated a great potential for drawing participants from these more "traditional" forms of media.

According to an article on Time.com(ie the magazine), the last WGA strike was in 1988 and "cost the industry an estimated $500 million dollars." Now imagine an impact like that during a major decline in the movie industry like we have now. Ticket sales for the first week of October where the lowest they have been for that week in almost 10 years. I think we can all agree a noticeable decline in theater offerings, as we seemed to have been plagued by sequel-itis and remakes for the last few years.

But the game industry is going in the opposite direction. It's experiencing a huge amount of growth as we move into almost a whole year of major releases. Casual gaming is a booming market that even MySpace is delving into. The new consoles finally seem to be making an impression and expanding into affordable price ranges and beyond the hard core first buyer market. The Playstation 2 just posted its lowest hardware sales in quite a while, as many forecasters see the rise in the adoption of the new systems. The Wii is still blowing off the shelves and reaching new gamers.

Maybe it's just me, but I see such a possibility for the radical shift of our culture's ideas about gaming, and what gaming is in the next few years. As people are more likely to turn off their televisions or skip out on the theater, there is a great potential for that void to be filled by one of my favorite hobbies.

ashram

I am picking it up in just over 7 hours.  All my clan mates are gettin' down with it already.  Now if only those broadband people could come out to my house and hook things up; I would be golden.

ashram

Lindsey & I are going to NYC this week for a clan convention.  I can't wait.  It will be a ton of fun and my first vacation in a year.  More later, including pics.

ashram

http://www.clanaow.com