End of an era

On Thursday, I found an announcement on the net that brought an end to
yet another one of my childhood favorites. It was the closure of
Mother's Cookies.

After reading the announcement, struck with shock, the thought of
making an Animal Cookie run didn't occur to me until I was in bed that
night. I then considered getting dressed and attempting a late night
trip to Safeway. Unable to fathom a supermarket shelf without plenty
bags of those frosted pink and white cookies, I decided to wait until
the morning.

The next day, I walked into my local Safeway before heading to work. I
picked up a basket intending to fill it with no less than three bags.
I walked to the cookie isle and the reality hit me. There were no bags
of Animal Cookies to be found, only a gaping hole in product where
they once lived.
Saddened, I headed to work.

Getting near the office, I decided to make another attempt at the
Safeway across the street from work. This time I was a bit less
hopefull. Sure enough, no clearer could the end of these favorites be,
the shelf here too was recently wounded by the loss.

I fear now for a few of the remaining local favorites. May there never
be an end to my beloved It's Its or bread from the French Italian
bakery in North Beach.

Work, work, work, I still need a phoney baloney job

I am working on finding work while trying to keep out of non-growth or dead-end positions. Doing this while trying to transition careers in today's economy is getting a little tough. That plus the job market here in the SF bay area is making the transition tough.

If I had spent less time in my previous industry, I think I would be more tempted to take the easy route and take a spot that I would hate and end up working way too many hours at. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the occasional over-time. After having worked more than seventy hours a week for nearly nine months to finish a project off with over eighty hours a week working grave yard hours (7pm to 10am or later) for the last month and a half, I am weary of an industry that treats over-time as a deadline solution.

Now, I have made the decision to try and shift back to retail carrying my management experience over, hopefully, to management type of positions there. Time will tell how successful this will be. I don't know if this is going to be a new long term path but at this time I am hoping that it will provide a fresh perspective on work for me. I have to remember to keep my opinion on work being just that and not a way of life out of the interviews.

Why is it that some employers want people who tend to the fanatical to work for them? Do these hiring types really think that fanatics make good workers? Come on, how on earth are people supposed to connect with some psycho that lacks rational thought at the work place. Am I really the only one who finds those people unsettling and are nice to those people only in the hopes that when they show up with "guns a blazin", that I am spared? I know that many of the individuals that I associate with, who will remain unnamed to protect any future employment for them, agree that a job is a means to acquire the tools for happiness and not the ends. Why must we all be obsessed with what we get paid for and not just do things to make us happy for the joy of it. I appreciate being a contributing member of society, I also like doing things just for the love of the process (like a blog that noone will read).

Well that seems like a good note to sound off on. Till next time my lack of readers!!

The Dark Knight- a little too long for me

I went and saw "The Dark Knight" last week. I can't say it wasn't any good, I did like it. I don't think it lived up to the hype. It was entertaining but seemed to run a bit long. I do not like having things spoiled for me so I will not write about any specific plot items. What I ended up pondering was something I have been wondering about for a while.

Are Christian Bale's top front teeth all fake? I'm sure there is some documentation somewhere regarding this and honestly, I don't care enough to look it up. But, throughout the film, I found him covering his top teeth with his upper lip *a lot*. When we finally got a good look at them, they seemed both a little small and an odd color, a sort of translucent blue. How good can a movie be if I step out of the film and wonder about the lead actors dental work? Oh well, I can say with confidence that it was definitely not the worst movie I have seen.

If you get the chance...wait for it to be released on DVD/Blu Ray, pay-per-view or your home distribution of choice. I still can't justify >$10 for most movies these days.

cafe notebook culture

Do me a favor. The next time you are in a cafe and there are people on notebooks there, see if they have headphones plugged into the notebook. I don't know if it's just some sort of convergence at this particular SF cafe or I just never noticed before.

Personally, I prefer to think I save some battery life using my small but effective iPod or iPhone for such things rather than doing the notePod thing. It just seems like overkill for listening to digital media in public. I could be completely wrong and am sharing space with a couple of multimedia editors. In that case, I accept that I am an ass and will move on.

Also, spending more time in cafes, I find myself checking out notebook brands in the cafe. Almost keeping score. Yeah, I get really bored and tend not to be as productive as I could be.

I would love to figure out why some people plug in their system as soon as they sit down. I wait until my battery is almost dead. I find it a good indicator of how long I have been somewhere. "My battery is almost dead. Maybe it's time to move the car/go somewhere else."

ass=me

I was working on a post yesterday when I got a call to inform me that I did not get a job I had interviewed for. The call came a few days earlier than I was expecting and it caught me off guard. I let it get me down. I did very little with the rest of my day.

In the evening, while feeling sorry for myself, I get a call from my best friend. He tells me that his dad just passed away. He is handling this extremely well. He is taking the loss with great strength. I offer my condolences and extend any help that I can. The remainder of our conversation is what I would categorize as standard type of call for the circumstances. If you are not familiar with these types of calls, you either are extremely lucky to have not experienced this type of loss or you are so emotionally distant from all other living beings that I am sorry for you.

Anyway, after the call, I not only felt the loss of someone I held close to my heart even if I didn't see him much in the last decade, I also felt like a complete ass that I took the news of not getting a job so poorly. The perspective between these events, being so extreme, have forced a new outlook on my current employment, or lack there of. I really need to maintain the perspective of not giving too much importance to a job...any job. The people in my life, friends and family, need to take priority and I feel I need to ensure that I put more emotional effort in those relationships than in any job.

Sorry to post such a downer. It's where my head is at right now. Getting some of this written does help with the process though.

Give someone you love a hug!

urban withdrawal

I got up this morning and wanted to get out of the house and write a new blog entry. Entertaining the thought today to get inspired at a coffee house in my suburban hamlet, I found the idea too vanilla. Where might the inspiration come from? Not to fault suburban dwellers for lacking inspiration, I realized growing up in an urban environment I found some of my creativity relying on the surrounding urban "character".

So, I drove to the old neighborhood. Actually, I drove to the bordering neighborhood. What a difference a block can make in the city. To my defense, I am now writing this in a cafe with two people writing in paper notepads, another laptop user, an ultra mobile PC, some twenty something hipsters, other random people and an older woman sporting a mullet. Things you just don't see in the suburbs.

On a not so related note. Am I the only one who makes spur of the moment out of the norm decisions, like driving twenty miles past many many cafes for a cup of coffee, on only a couple of hours of sleep? A time when it might not be the best idea to be behind the wheel in commute traffic. I would think that motivation to travel, attempt to be productive, or generally not get more sleep, would not come to me the morning after getting very little sleep. That doubling of negatives in the last sentence rubs me a little wrong, but I don't have enough rest to clean it up.

May you find your inspiration where you are or where you like.

Why can't this happen in real life

My wife enjoys video games.  I enjoy video games.  We often play games together.

So, my wife bought the new Lego Indiana Jones game for the PS3.  We have played the previous Lego Star Wars games on both the PS2 and PS3.  It would seem that neither of us can escape our games testing pasts.  While playing through, she has found a number of holes in the levels.  Not too surprising.  Well at some point she made a purchase in game in the exhibit hall and ended up going from a few thousand studs to over 4 billion.  It would seem that we were able to make a purchase that we couldn't quite afford and flipped the absolute long float backwards.

I wonder if this was a sign of the writing on the wall at Lucas Arts regarding the large number of dev staff to be laid off at the end of the project or just one of those things that either schedule or the nature of their QA process allowed to get through.  I know that most issues that surface after launch of a title were found by QA and either determined that there wasn't enough time or enough of a negative impact to fix.  It is a sign of the bottom line for a publisher making development decisions.  When it is all said and done, gaming is a business.