Author: cosmo

As I continue looking for a new employee, I get to wade through the usual emails from Indian consulting firms, freelancers across the country, and generally unqualified applicants. Every now and then one really stands out… in a bad way.

Today’s is a woman who sent a video resume. I guess it’s her talking about how awesome she is, or maybe a movie of her writing code and drinking Dr. Pepper. I’ll never know because…

Wow, RealPlayer? That’s so 1998. Before Flash, before QuickTime, before HTML5, there was the choppy always-buffering RealPlayer. I can’t believe anyone’s using it any more, much less a company whose business model is (apparently) to allow you to upload your videos to share with potential employers. And even more so, a candidate who wants to be seriously considered for a job that uses web technology.

So the hunt continues.

Ahh, everyone loves the security questions that online vendors put in place to “protect” us. Here’s one I’m stumped on right now…

My library card number? Who the crap knows their library card number?

Since this is completely inane, I’m going with my fallback as suggested by my friend Dustin:

That one’s always fun when you’re on the phone with customer support and they have to ask you “Who’s your daddy?”

Although a phone number ending in -0999 is fun to say when people ask, it turns out it makes it really hard to spell anything. I was poking around the internets tonight and found a little program that takes a phone number and tells you all of the words you can spell with it.

Yeah, so those are pretty awesome and easy to remember. And seriously, this program thinks “SC” and “SB” and “PB” are words? I suppose you could argue they’re state abbreviations and chemical symbols, respectively, but hardly useful for spelling a phone number.

About two years ago I registered a Google Voice number for Zing Studios that ends in -ZING. Too bad I don’t remember the first six digits.

Laralee is on her annual pilgrimage to Burley, Idaho to visit her mom for a week. The kids are with her, leaving me a lone man at home. So I’m taking care of the usual chores– I even did some laundry this evening!

Aside from the nightly adventure of putting the chickens (yes, the chickens) into their coop, I need to let the rats loose so they can get a bit of exercise. They’re pretty darn funny because after being locked in a cage all day, they’re really really excited to get out and run around our bedroom. I close the door so they’re at least somewhat contained, and they spend twenty minutes exploring all of the nooks and crannies* around the room.

Roxy is the funny one because she’s young, energetic, and– if I can be blunt– not very bright. The window is open to let in some cool night air, and there’s a box fan blowing. She loves sitting on the windowsill, so she keeps trying to get up there. It’s about a two-foot jump from the floor, and she’s attempted it a couple of times but can’t quite make it. So she whacks against the wall, recovers for a second, and then hops across the carpet looking for something new. Coconut, who is older and presumably wiser, knows better and chooses to climb my back instead, perching on my shoulder as I type this. Crazy rodents.

So for now it’s fun bachelor time, but in a day or two I’ll be missing everyone (the house is sure quiet!) and awaiting their return. It sounds like they’re having a good time up in Idaho, though, so all’s well.

* Does anyone ever talk about just a nook? Or just a cranny? It seems like it’s always “nooks and crannies”.

I don’t even know what this means, but it cracked me up.

Kyra bought me 8-packs of my favorite candy bars for Father’s Day. Awesome.

From an article by Eric Hammer-Lahav:

Man, that’s dead right. I login to Facebook about once a month, only to find a long list of weird one-sentence posts that don’t make much sense. I suppose they’d be more sensible if I was tuned in daily to the musings and random mutterings of these long-lost friends, but honestly it’s not that interesting to me.

Yesterday I took time off work (part of my “gradual retirement” plan) and spent some quality time with Kyra. We had lunch, ran some errands, and then decided to tie-dye some shirts.

It started out in the garage, soaking white t-shirts in water and soda ash (?) and then pouring dye on them.

After we finished, we bagged the dyed clothes and let them sit for about 16 hours. This afternoon we pulled out the bags to see what our creations turned out to be.

It was sort of like opening a Christmas gift– we had no idea whether the shirts would look like a mess of color or wicked cool. As it turned out, some were cool:

But some were kind of… uhh…

And the socks? Let’s not talk about the socks, except to say that tie-dyed socks aren’t nearly as cool as they might seem.

So now all of the goods are sitting on the trampoline drying in the sun. Then we have to wash them and hope the colors don’t bleed or fade too badly, and finally have some fun new shirts to wear.

I hate Drupal caching.

Today: the first– and last– photo of the Space Shuttle docking at the International Space Station.

Never before has such a photo been taken, and since the shuttle fleet is being retired this year, it won’t happen again. Kind of a shame. I’m not too broken up about the end of the shuttle legacy, but I feel like we’re at the dawn of the commercial space race and in the next few years we’re going to see some pretty cool stuff like this.