Yes, it’s a low-rider school bus. This also came from the Dream Cruise a while back.

Phone interview yesterday. I botched part of it, but as far as I can tell, I nailed the rest of it. We’ll see what happens.

Ed and his family came over last night. They showed up a bit earlier than I was expecting, so I hadn’t started cooking dinner yet and there was a pen stuck to the chandelier with a very strong magnet. I’d done that while cleaning up, thought, “I need to move that before my guests get here,” and then gotten distracted by other things like scooping out the cat box. Ed’s daughter noticed this and I thought, “Oh duh.”

We had steak and potatoes, except for Ed’s daughter who had a hamburger because she doesn’t like steak. Fuzzball meowed a lot. Ed found the laser pointer and amused Fuzzball for a while, which she enjoyed. Ed’s wife took a copy of my résumé, which she said she’d show around to various places. She works for the Gilbert city government, and governments need people to do computer junk too. If the job with WeFlyPlanes doesn’t work out, maybe I can be a civil serpent servant.

Apparently, stupid things are happening at the old company. Too often, management treats Dilbert cartoons as if they were a HOWTO.

A 1934 Ford from the Woodward Dream Cruise a few years ago.

Yesterday, Steve took a short video of me talking about my skills and catching stuffed penguins. It was meant to be a 45-second pseudo-interview that’ll eventually go on Josh’s blog. So we got the MPEG-2 downloaded to his ‘Doze box, and none of us could figure out how to use various commercial programs to edit the video stream or resize it. I guess I’ll have to try cinelerra or something a bit later on and see if I can do better. In one of the takes, I said, “Hi, I’m Matt. I’m a skilled Linux system administ–loud noises and someone just started up a bloody lawnmower.” This is why the pros record the video and then record the sound later.

Preliminary interview with one of the recruiters today. Whee!

A heron, with ducks, from years ago when I still lived in Michigan and there was a small bit of marshy land behind my apartment.

Went to trivia last night with Zach and Nathan and Sara and Kelly and John and everyone.  We came in second.  The bar had just remodeled their kitchen, so there were only about 6 food items available.  This annoyed a lot of people, some of whom named their team, “If we have to eat this s___ then the beer should be cheaper!”  We were “Mongo only pawn in game of life”, continuing the Blazing Saddles theme.  There’s a small prize for the best team name, which is why everyone changes their name every week.  I don’t think we’ve ever won it.

A recruiter called me yesterday wanting to set up a preliminary interview.  Yay!  Who knows what’ll happen with that.

Ed’s coming over Thursday night for dinner.  That should be interesting.  He got laid off at the same time as I did.  And he’s worse off than I am, since he bought a more expensive house than I did and has a daughter.  I bought cheap and only have to support myself and Fuzzball.  Sigh.  Oh well, steak, potatoes,  and companionship.

This is probably one of the oldest drawings I’ve scanned in. Very little has changed. I heard something that sounded really strange: Apparently if you’re eligible for unemployment in 2 or more states, you can go to Massachusetts and apply for unemployment there. I don’t know what combination of laws made that possible. It also seems odd to me that unemployment benefits vary so widely among states.

Applied to several jobs yesterday, of course, and will apply to more today, and more tomorrow. I hear that there are a lot of people who say things like, “I have extensive experience in Python,” when they really mean, “I have written ‘Hello, World’ in Python”. Sigh, resume inflation (like grade inflation).

Trivia night tonight. That should be at least a chance to get out for a few hours.

Another old drawing. I guess the trouble is that I only have 4 or 5 more of these old drawings, and will have to come up with some new things to post after that.

The header images were all created with Xaos, but using that to create images for the one-post-a-day seems wrong. There are a few photos I’ve taken that are semi-interesting–maybe I’ll crop sections out of those and use them.

Fuzzball woke me up at 5 am. One of these days, she might learn that meowing loudly in my ear before the alarm goes off at 6:45 leads to her getting put outside the bedroom. Ah well.

A very, very old drawing that I scribbled in a spare moment and scanned a while ago.

Mostly, this is here because I want to have at least one new post every day. Yep, this is not going to be a stagnant blog.

This blogging system has a few warts in it. Most of the links to archives, categories, recent posts, and so forth will not work if you have certain themes installed. I thought it was a problem with mod_rewrite, and it turned out that the theme “cutline-3-column-split-11″ was completely hosing the URLs. (And the great battle to separate “functionality” from “how it looks” drags on.)

This talian-10 theme doesn’t seem to do that. However, it had some strange design decisions in it. Things that were marked italic or <em> were set up such that they’d be placed on a separate line and indented. Italics show up reasonably often; you have to emphasize things at times, or write about book titles. And when your italics break the page up, that makes it difficult to read. I don’t know why the theme author did things that way.

However, I’ve figured out how to make it not do that. And I’ve made the links blue, since I’m old-school enough to want all the links to be the same (default Netscape) color. Also put in additional image DIVs in the CSS so that the archive and search pages will have different images on them. It’s interesting that the cutline theme had that logic in the PHP header with an if-else chain, while talian-10 has separate PHP pages for “page”, “archive”, “category”, and so forth. TMTOWTDI–it’s not just for Perl anymore.

So now it’s time to get some theory in CSS now that I’ve had a little practical experience.  “Theory first” just doesn’t work for me….

Fuzzball sitting on the couch with her toy. I rescued her in August 2005 after she’d been abandoned by her previous owner. She only weighs 6 pounds, loves to play, and loves people. You’re lucky you don’t have to hear her meow, as she’s half Siamese and inherited the Siamese voice.

She loved that toy so much that she chewed it into tiny bits, and I had to buy her a new one.

So I’ve been laid off, after almost 7 years working for the same company. This is annoying. So it’s back to job hunting, though I’m out of practice. Several of the folks at PLUG have offered to help me with that in various ways—you guys rock. I’ve signed up with LinkedIn (my profile on that site). I’ve sent off a few resumes. Nothing yet. That’ll come, I hope.

About 1/4 of the company got laid off, including the CEO and the head of marketing. What’s more, 2 people who had been recently hired were told on their first day of work, “Hey, don’t bother coming in. Your job’s been canceled.” These people had, of course, already quit their previous jobs. These decisions are all about money (not enough of it available, so they have to fire people) but the timing was horrible for those 2 people. OK, it could be worse. It could be raining. (It is raining right now, which is just a little odd for Phoenix in February, but whatever.)

I’ve been preparing for something like this since … oh, 1999. The dot-bomb crash was happening then, and since I was reading ATSR and ASR, I read about the crash happening to other people. This gave me a strong desire to have multiple months of living expenses saved up just in case the job goes poof. So I’m OK for now. Small comfort, but there. And I’ve been kicking this long-neglected website since I have a little more spare time….

This is a test. This is only a test. If it had been a real blog post, it would’ve been filled with vapid navel-gazing and speling errors. Right? Right.