Mind's Soul Deepest
 

Ok I don't know about that title. It's just been (quite) a week since the last entry. Which I wouldn't have thought but it was. In the last entry I went on about the study session at Apple. Then I worked on my short story and didn't add an entry. Wed., yesterday, I got an email saying "we filled all the spots". Then at 4:30pm I get a call saying, "we have more spots, can you come in and interview tomorrow?" (That’d be today).  Seems they had filled all the spots but two additional spots had opened up so they called me in. So I said yes. And I was there at Apple at 10:00am this morning.

Ok lemme digress a moment. I just got through watching the Disney movie Miracle a few moments ago (it's about the amazing defeat of the Soviet Olympic hockey team by the American team in the 1980 Winter Games). Not that I'm drawing comparisons or being dramatic or anything. Actually why not? The Soviets had the best Hockey team in the world in 1980 and Apple has the best customer service in the world, right? And here I am with no call center experience? Limited other experience? American hockey team in 1980, me...both dramatic under dogs...("oh shut up, jack ass")

But where was I?

Right. I show up for the interview around 9:50. They always run late so I wasn't a lot worried really. And as usual I was still waiting in the lobby at 10:25 when finally they were ready. Now the last time I did this I was in front of a panel of at least 5 people along with the employment agency representative. This time it was slightly different because there was only one Apple employee there along with the agency rep. I'm sure that helped quite a bit.

What also helped was writing out what I was going to say and getting my head pointing in the right direction. Thanks to this blog. Blogs: isn't there anything they can't do? Not, I'm thinking.

Now then: I must say the woman interviewing was quite attractive. Perhaps that made it easier, but more likely it was the no 5 person firing squad. And the experience of the previous interview. So she and the rep ask several questions of me. Why work for apple? What sorts of people do you think buy apple? What kinds of people use apple (which I mis-understood)? Luckily nothing about Apple's culture and fitting in. What a BS question. I think I did nail the "five attributes of a good tech support" question though. I didn't even have the answer thought out ahead of time, but I was able to come up with five good ones. Seem easy now really. You know: patience, authentic knowledge, empathy, never giving up (tenacity), not taking abuse personally. I think that was all of them. Seems so obvious now, no?

So either or both of two things: they just needed a warm body to fill all the chairs, operating on the assumption a few people will wash out and I would have to really, really hose the interview to not get it or...I just really nailed the interview (for once). I prefer that latter since I should probably not belittle myself nearly as much. Or if you prefer: the latter because I prefer diluting myself into thinking I interviewed that well. No wait. That's belittling myself once more. Ok forget that last part.

So to summarize: As of this moment I work for an out-sourced agency working for Apple computer, for all intent and purposes I working for Apple computer. I never would have thought such a thing a possibility really. And yet it has happened. May or may not be the reason I rented the movie Miracle tonight. It's like irony or somethin'. Or whatever the opposite of irony is. What makes sense maybe?

Tomorrow I have an orientation at 8:00am that is supposed to last several hours. And I think it's paid and everything. Unless I'm mistaken the earliest work day for me would be Monday, as opposed to Saturday if that happens to be where my schedule falls. I have a hardware refresh on Saturday so I'm hoping that's the case. Though I do have classes anyway so perhaps those will be at regular times for the first few weeks anyway.

So now maybe I'll have more to write about. I've been having so much trouble as you can see... I'll document my experience as I transition to that apple guy. Hey I'm not the Mac guy quite yet. They'll have to indoctrinate me to the company culture first, then I'll be the Mac guy. But probably not even then. I've never actually been in a real structured corporate environment. I think high school was the closest thing and that didn't exactly go too well. Socially that is. I think I'm too much of an independent thinker. See I'm already experiencing self-doubt. That's either healthy or not too good, I couldn't tell ya.

I guess I've wasted enough time now, I'll go to bed since I have to be up so early.

  ¶ 7:19 PM 0 Comments

    ¶ 2:45 PM 0 Comments

    ¶ 9:00 PM 0 Comments

 

So I've been doing this blug for more than a year a now. I was looking through my archives for no good reason. I did take some lengthy breaks but I'm still doing it a year+ later. And I almost have some sort of system worked out wherein I know what I'm doing.  

 

The only thing I have to write in this post is non-sensical political whatnot. For instance some some terrorist mother-fuckers took a Philippine guy in Iraq hostage and threatened to chop his head off if the Philippine "troops" (actually there were no combat troops) weren't withdrew within some amount of time. And for some stupid reason the Philippine president actually did it. Nice job Philippines! Now they took a bunch more hostages! The stupid terrorists think they're winning! What fuck is the matter with you Philippines?! I'd say you're complacent in the murders of further hostages for doing that. You never give in to terrorists that just make it worse. Why the fuck don't you know that?  

 

And what about that Sandy Burger thing? He's the national security advisor from "the prior administration". He was looking at the new 9/11 congressional report ahead of everyone else, some documents marked "classified" or "top secret", and took some with him: in his pants. Now what the fuck is wrong with this guy anyway? Some kind of pick-up line at a local bar or somehin? "Hey baby wanna see the documents...in my pants. Nah, I don't get it either. Couldn't he just check out the documents? Why put them in your pants?  

 

As outlined in this story the people running the archive even suspected him and went out of their way to specially mark all the documents they knew he was going to look at. In particular is one memo about a really lucky break stopping a terrorist action on December 31st, 1999.  

 

So what am I going to say, eh? That he was trying to steal some documents to keep the truth of about the "prior administration's" lax policy on terrorism, trying to cover it up maybe? Maybe he's just a creep? An idiot? A moron? What kind of Security Advisor steals top-secret documents anyway? How secure were we during the 1990s anyways? This guy was in charge of security? The pants guy?! That's a good nickname, Sandy Pants. Good old sandy pants. Old, creepy, stupid, stupid sandy pants.  

 

I have often been contemplating about the middle-east, Israel/Palestein in particular, and how Palestine is merely being propped up by an irrational hatred of Jews and Israel. And how without the constant holy war against Israel with the suicide bombers and the grieving, crying people in the streets carrying a casket after Israel retaliates such a country, as Palestine would essentially crumble. Well thanks to the giant wall Israel put up to protect themselves, effectively I might add, from suicide bombers such a thing seems to be happening. Without maurders to mourn and holy wars to wage the populace is realizing what a hellhole they live and attacking their leadership. So, obviously, the holy war was just a convenient scapegoat/distraction to keep the populace from doing what they are doing now.

Now this brought me to another thought: is there something analogous going on with the venomous, untrustworthy Democrats? Is all this constant pour the gas on the flames 24/7 hatred for the President really a convenient distraction from the Democrat's own problems. Without Bush to hate would that party in essence start to crumble? I'm just one guy typing into the darkness with presumably no one reading this but it seems to me if you're really in a positive state of affairs you would not be acting so stupid and saying such vial hateful things so often. If you were happy and confident in your success you would in fact be acting cool and calm and at least half sane in arguing your point of view and convincing the populace at large your point of view is the valid one and the opposing view is in fact the wrong one. Instead it's just insane hateful babbling.  Not that I'm an expert or anything.

In other news I finally took the second A+ test today and scored a 613. I needed a 505 to pass. So only 108 points to spare on that one. Close! It did cost me $145 but hey, it's only money right? At least now I actually have money as opposed to before where I didn't have any. I was lucky to have $100 in my account at any one time never mind more than $145 to pay for an A+ test. But that's not important. What is important is that I am finally; at long last, A+ certified and can perhaps get a semi-decent job. For the record there were several typos and mistakes in the questions not to mention questions that seemingly had no correct answer. Of course I did have trouble sleeping last night so I was half asleep while I was taking it.  Even half asleep it was a very easy test. It was 80 questions that took me about an hour. Now, why didn't I do that 18 months ago? Don't answer that :-).

 

  ¶ 7:00 PM 0 Comments

 

"5 more minutes..."

This past week has been quite the hectic schedule. I started working on Monday, everything was going as planned. I was doing another hardware refresh for another location of the "famous brand phone company". Then, mysteriously, one of my co-workers, possibly the best and fastest worker of us all, had to leave. Wasn't sure why really, he just left after a couple hours to work. I haven't learned that much from experience but I have learned not to ask when that happens.
 
So I finished up the night and left relatively early (having started at 5 p.m.) at 1:30a.m or something like that. On Tuesday my co-worker who had left early mysteriously called me up and explained somehting of what happen. I won't go into details but needles to say it's a small world and coincidences never fail to astound some times.  Long story short he wasn't working with the rest of the crew and I the rest of the week.
 
This job was only supposed to last Mon., Tues., and Wed., however various troubles kept coming up not to mention we were a person short. So Tuesday night/Wed. morning I got home around 4:30 in the morning and did some serious sleeping. Then I got up and went back at 5:00 p.m.
 
For Wednesday we had even more computers to do and even fewer people to finish them. And various vital servers continually going down didn't much help that matter. It was just my lead, another tech and the local I.T. guy that would stay around and help us. Now my lead tech, brave as he is, didn't go home at 4:30 in the morning like I did, he had stayed until 10 a.m. so he had very little sleep.
 
Wednesday was supposed to be our last day but it wasn't going too well. I stayed all night and come 6 a.m. I still hadn't left. Once you've been up all night it's much easier to continue to stay awake. By Thursday monring the lead had recieved maybe 6 hours of sleep in 48 hours and was getting a little delirious. Thursday morning he kept saying "we're just out of here 9am" then it was "out of here 10am" then it was 10:15, I could barely see straight and I left. I asked him if I could come back and he said ok. I went home and got a couple hours of sleep. I finally got back there around 4:30p.m.  to find out my lead hadn't left until after 11am and only then because the local I.T. had to force him out.  And he got back by 3:30, so he's braver than I am.
 
Finally we worked from that time until about 11pm Thursday night. And of course we still hadn't finished. On Wednesday night we also brought in a couple extra techs to try and help us out. A lot of the night was spent showing them how the whole thing goes and what to do when. They helped some but it was still a slow process.
 
All-in-all I worked about 42 hours in 4 days, and one of those days was only 6.75 hours. At $15/hour I hope I have a semi-decent paycheck coming in the near future.
 
So that's been my last week and a large part of the reason I didn't make any entry in the blog (I was only home long enough to sleep).
 
Haven't really done anything else. Most of the weekend was spent sleeping or watching movies half a sleep possibly. I did try to do a slight upgrade on my sister's old celeron PC on Sunday, however that bitch-of-a-computer was driving me nuts so I finally put her RAM back in and put it back in her room. HP Pavilions were not designed to be worked on, that's all there is to it.
 
I am also contemplating what do with SuperVCR mod and what is now my spare computer since I just attempted a save of that HDD. I had accidently deleted the NTFS partition and created a DOS one in it's place, but hadn't yet formatted. I found a program that said it was help save the data and this software lived up to its promise however while I could view the files I could not actually copy and paste the files to another location without buying the full version. Wishing I had known that sooner I did find the ability to create an image of the HDD and do what is essentially a HDD dump. Unfortunately I did not have an extra 40 gigs laying around so I had to tell it to do "multiple files" which I couldn't customize to anything other than 650 megabyte chunks. So I filled up two partitions with 50+ 650 MB chunks of this HDD image. Had I known that what I was going to do I could probably have just ghosted the drive to another HDD or somethin', at least then I could enable compression (another feature only enabled with the full version).
 
Once the thing was done imaging I formatted the drive and compied all the chunks to it. So I saved all the data it's just in a form I can't actually use at the moment. So I'll transfer all the chunks to DVDs and save them for another day when I might have the time and inclination to finish such a project.
 
Yep, that about covers it.
 
 
 
 



  ¶ 2:24 PM 0 Comments

 

"Kiss my glorious golden ass..."

The last 5 or so days have been quite the experience. I started working again, and it hasn't been that bad. Last Wed. I worked 9 hours starting at 5pm (left around 2:30am). Thursday I again started at 5pm and worked 12 hours until 5 in the morning. Friday I spent recovering. Saturday I started work at 8am and didn't get to go home until around 11:30pm. I did get two meals however. So that was around 15 hours minus meals was about 13 hours. But it wasn't that bad.

Wed/thursday I was doing a "hardware refresh" for a famous phone company. I could say which one, it doesn't matter, but I don't feel like it. Lots of automated scripts involved and auto-mattic backups to servers over fast networks, what great fun. Part of it was the servers and different portions not working and other bullshit. One of my co-workers is actually semi-famous. At least in my mind because he is apparently one of the people behind a rather sizable LAN party in my greater region (along with its associated web site). For once, someone who knows more about networks and computers than I do.

On Saturday I was at a famous investment/securities firm branch doing basically the same thing except that the computers needed some sort of update from a server in St. Louis. The problem was 10s of branches of this particular firm were doing this update at once, causing the server to crash. So all the techs (me and about 4 or 5 others) had to just sit around as the lead was on one phone call to the next trying to figure out what was going on and how it could be fixed.

Finally it was decided the East Coast and the branches furthest behind should go first which meant a lot of waiting on our part. But about 9pm our time we finally got it all going and were able to complete it rather quickly. Had somebody in St. Louis done more planning it would have been done in less than 8 hours but hey pay for 13 hours works just as well. A lot of that was on the clock not doing much of anything.

All this means I haven't done much of any work on any of my projects. I did run into a read/write problem with my flash drive at one point but I found a utility on the manufacture's web site that effectively solved this (some sort of firmware reset I'm guessing). I'm still not sure a flash drive is really equiped for the required read/write operations of a loading OS. But I will at some point have an answer to this.

I had some amount of trouble adjusting to that all-nighter I pulled thursday night. I was so tired and my sleep pattern so off I felt like was hung over or recovering from the flu or something. I slept from around 6am to around 1:30pm and finally had to get up. Which may not have been that great of an idea because I finally started waking up around 12:30 am and I had to be at work by 8am. So I didn't get to many hours of sleep Friday night.

Now even though both my Friday and Saturday nights were ruined I did in fact prefer this to going to bed early so I could sell soil as I did for 8 or whatever number of weeks. For the record.

I'm so tired of the news. Now I'm not saying the guy with the billion+ worth of wife doesn't feel my pain, I'm just saying he's full of shit, a liar and grossly seperated from real life and reality. Of course that's just the nice way of saying what I really think. Oh yeah, I'm sure he cares for the poor people, the other half of the "two americas" whatever that means.

Sounds a lot like some soviet leader some how. What's his solution to the "two americas"? Socializing all industry? Standardizing all incomes? Everybody makes $50,000, irragardless of how much work or what work is done? Will that solve the "two americas" problem Kerry? He sounds a lot like he'd rather be living in Canada to me (or cuba). Socialist paradise and all that fun stuff. Celebrating socialism while complaining about incomes.

Also, what's the deal with the U.N.? All this curruption and whatever. Are these the people we're trying to get to help us? Did anybody here about the guy in Iraq who had information about the U.N. curruption and was "coincidently" killed in a car bomb in Iraq? Sounds a little like a mob hit to me but what do I know? Not that I expect any high-and-mighty protesters to notice this sort of thing or anything.


  ¶ 2:05 PM 0 Comments

 

"A good beer and a couple polkas"

In other news I'm still working on the win98/USB drive project. Actually I ran into a bump: I thought I was doing everything correctly in so far as a bootable OS but when I zipped and put the files onto the USB drive I ran into several problems ranging from no registry found to various corrupt files. So I took the zip files from my successful bootable 98 CD project and tried using that. Well so far it appears successful though I do have to do something about extra space to install the stupid drivers. And I need a utility for creating a RAM disk while in Windows. For some reason XMSDSK gives me an error about using it while in Windows.

Now on the subject of the other project, SuperVCR Mod, I have done further work on the VCR case and received a 20 year-old BetaMax VCR. So if I ever finish SuperVCR Mod I'll begin work on SuperVCR Mod 2: Beta's Revenge. Also I'll actually update the blog dedicated specifically to SuperVCR Mod as opposed to just talking about it on this page.

I certainly haven't mentioned politics in an entry in quite a while. But today is special. Or rather yesterday would have been special but I didn't bother with an entry yesterday. Namely had I bothered with an entry yesterday I would have said Kerry is way too dumb and predictable to pick anyone other than the favorite of Edwards and that I'm virtually certain Edwards will be picked. And low and behold Edwards was picked. But it's not an incredible prediction, only a report of the obvious now.

Now why did he pick Edwards? What I've been saying all along: he doesn't really want to win. If he wanted to win he would have picked someone to counter-balance his scary commie-liberalism with someone half sane with an ounce of caring for the future of the country. But instead a fellow scary liberal commie. That happened once before, in 1984. This election probably won't turn out like that, but as of today Kerry has officially lost the election for sure. If it was a toss-up up until now, it's now for sure. Kerry lost the election (past tense).

The other thing I'm wondering is why these Democrats still whining and moaning about the last election (get over it) aren't damn-near brainwashing all those old people on how to use the ballots. And they damn well better start right now! Fucking slow learners theys is... And this is the initial run for those fancy computerized (and paperless) voting systems. Those people in Florida better make it fucking mandatory those fucking stupid old people can do those fucking voting machines in their fucking sleep. I don't want to hear any bullshit about those fucking stupid people who couldn't figure the fucking instructions and an 1/8th of an inch arrow or whatever the fuck.

Ya, I'm a little pissed off.

Now this is a pretty short entry. But I have work tomorrow, albeit starting at 5pm, so I may as well go to bed.
  ¶ 11:10 PM 0 Comments