SIM cards, Silence and Job Searching

The word of the week is  persnickety.

October 15 - What a day…

Urk. I spent a lot of yesterday and most of today finishing critiques of five chapters of writing for my writer's group. The other three authors in my group are very talented and I feel VERY grateful to be able to meet once a month to get my own work critiqued by them. Which means I put a LOT of effort into going over their work to find things they can use to improve it, if they want to use my notes. But it meant that by the time today was over, I was very VERY tired; if yesterday was a blur, then today was just one long page of writing that had my head hitting the pillow at the end. Very simple, really.

So let's go and compare my four-month novel-writing marathon with a couple of folks with similar dedication, who built… the Batcave - out of Lego. It took Wayne and Carlyle a total of 800 hours over three months and here's what they had to say:

This project marks the first collaborative build between Carlyle and Wayne, with several more queued for future development. The features of this build include the Cave itself with what we think is the most “cave-ish” cave ever constructed. Added to that we have an operating turntable for the Batmobile, a moving costume/weapons selection wall and the BatPlane Lift. Surrounding all of this is the remarkable lighting effects that bring our BatCave to life.

The photos are incredible; have a look at them all over onFlickr, they'll blow your mind!

October 16 - Tech and Me

My sister made an astute comment the other day: tech and I don't seem to get along. After some consideration, I have to say that I think she might be onto something. Case in point: the new PVR external drive I've installed is… persnickety. I have to turn off the PVR a few times a day to keep it happy, otherwise it starts 'skipping' after live-recording a channel for too many hours in a row; weird. 

Another case: my new Samsung Galaxy III keeps 'losing' the phone part of the phone. If I don't reboot it at least once a day, people will call and go directly to my voicemail. I've tried to replicate the issue and can't, which is strange from a technical point of view. Right now I'm looking to see if perhaps a WiFi app or two might be causing the issue, which if the case means it will be fixed if I uninstall them. Having to keep checking to see if my phone's connected to Telus network is really strange and if it persists for more than a week, I'll have to bite the bullet and sit on hold with Telus support for a few hours to see if they can diagnose anything. Worst case scenario is to exchange the phone, which isn't a really great thought as I really like it. More than the Motorola RAZR HD LTE that came in the mail today.

Did I mention that? Yes indeedy: UPS buzzed at the door this morning and dropped off my prize! It's a very cool phone, almost identical in specs to the SIII but heavier and with less RAM, as well as missing a few of the 'human interface' features of the SIII. But: the back's made of freakin' KEVLAR! I'm going to think it over this week and decide if I'm going to keep it or not. The Kevlar feels like braided smooth rubber, which is easy to grip, as well as adding strength and durability to the phone. We'll see!

October 17 - The Sound Of Cylons

We did some interesting things in Grades 4,5 and 6 of my enrichment classes. Some of the projects I remember vividly, like The Hobbit study we did that I've mentioned previously. We also studied some popular songs, classics in their own right: one such was 'The Sound of Silence' by Simon & Garfunkel. At that stage of my life, music was a strange and wonderful thing for me. It was something that I couldn’t produce on my own save for the vaguest attempts on a piano and a flute, neither of which went nowhere despite the valiant efforts of my late grandmother who spent years trying to help my fingers dance on their own but to no avail.

'The Sound of Silence' stuck with me though and I've always loved the many facets of the song. The rhythm, the words and the thoughts that are associated with the melody all speak to me on many levels. That's why I enjoyed the riff on the tune below, which I think my ten-year-old self would also have liked:

I think 'sound' is a good word for today, as the people upstairs spent ALL day moving things around( and OUT, I hope! ), meaning I spent the whole day under headphones - with a headache, to boot. I did get out in the AM for a nice walk to Thrifty's for some healthy foodstuffs, before the rain set in for the rest of the day. It's been raining a LOT here for the last week, which I hope means Mama Nature's getting it out of her system and we'll see some clear, cool days fairly soon.

October 18 - Still Not Working

There's been no news on the job front.

I've applied at a few places, and heard zero back. Not a peep.

With my next few resume`s I am trying to get enough info to target the cover letters, so I can hopefully get a callback from someone. This was covered as 'just part of the process' at WorkBC, as in 'you will send out a LOT of resume`s and get FEW calls back, expect it' but it still stinks. Having a FBook account and a LinkedIn profile will help, but so far they're not paying dividends in terms of leads. Yet.

Just a couple of months to go and my EI's done, which I expected. What I didn't expect was to have ZERO callbacks in the last three months of applications - that's very hard to take.

Looking at freelance work, there's a LOT of competition for writing, with not-so-great pay and LOTS of typing. That's not a road I want to have to depend on for a living, at this stage of my life.

So for now, it's just back to searching with my ear to the ground and getting out there. Someone will bite soon, and I hope it's a keeper…

October 19 - ebay v2.0? 

I used to shop a lot on eBay, back in the day. Finding things I'd forgotten about or trying to find a deal were my two main go-to's for the site, over the years. But things change and after moving to BC, I've visited less and less, to the point where now I go there to find a few things I KNOW I can get at a better price than local shops. Like toner for my printer, or specialized cables of various kinds.

Today ebay announced that they're reinventing themselves and I'm glad to hear it, though not for the reasons you'd think. Sure, ebay wants to keep making a profit and stay in business, but I think they're on the cusp of something new: the release of ownership. Akin to such sites as FreeCycle.com, the concept of owning things becomes moot when your need for them ends, thus necessitating moving them on. This used to mean having a garage sale once a year or just throwing them out, but now sites like eBay allow people to connect with other people who have a need for the things you're no longer using. The best part is that the items aren't wasted AND the people purchasing them usually get them at a discount.

For me, the new ebay will be an interesting place to browse, but I'm no longer a regular shopper. I'm reducing what's taking up space in my home and if I do go back, it will be to sell things, not to buy.

October 20 - Handwriting? What's that?

I'll be the first to admit it: my handwriting is terrible. My letters are cramped, oddly-spaced and inconsistent from one line to the next, wobbling across the page like a drunken alphabet soup. To this day, I'm always correcting and fixing little 'oopsies' whenever I write with a pen, and it bothers me.

But does it matter in this electronic age?

Author Philip Hensher seems to think so. In his book The Missing Ink, he writes:

"Handwriting is what registers our individuality and the mark which our culture has made on us. It is the key to our souls and our innermost nature."

He makes quite a few good points and I recommend reading the full article if you're at all interested in pondering the place handwriting has in our increasingly digital age. For myself, handwriting tends to be the poor stepchild to my electronic post-its, relegated to short to-do lists or notes left on the fridge. I actually can't remember the last time I hand-wrote a letter to anyone.

This past weekend, making the notes on each of the chapters for my critique group, I was again reminded of how awkward my writing is and how much my hand aches as I press the pen like a bludgeon into the page. I have to constantly catch myself to keep the pressure light and not bend the pens as I struggle along with the letters… and I think to myself: when will this all go away? As Hensher says:

"Though it would make no sense to give up the clarity and authority of print which is available to anyone with a keyboard, to continue to diminish the place of the handwritten in our lives is to diminish, in a small but real way, our humanity."

That, I can tell you, will be a day to write about. For good or bad.

October 21 - It WAS free, but…

Yesterday I spent a little while on the phone with Telus, then Rogers. The first was to get my SIII working happily again with the network; as I'd mentioned, it would just 'lose' the ability to see Telus and thus not receive phone calls. After some diagnostics and tweaks today, it seems to be MUCH better!

The call to Rogers was about my new RAZR HD LTE phone, which was supposed to be able to simply take my SIM card from my SIII and work, according to two different Telus reps. Nope. When I put the SIM in, I found to my annoyance that my prize from Motorola is LOCKED - WTH is with that??? So on Monday I'll have to call Motorola and ask them why they send me a contest prize that is LOCKED… that's NOT cool.

While I was out and about this weekend, I had a look at Halloween costumes. Two of them caught my eye, but I wasn't impressed at the prices. Of the two shown above, the 'Dark Prince' with the shiny fake-foam armour was $60+tax and the 'Knight' was only $30… but neither of the costumes were of such materials they'd last beyond one or two nights of wear. For the price, I'd rather just roll my own… and considering that the Cobra Commander costume I desired from last year has SKYROCKETED in price to over $100 anywhere online, I won't be going down THAT nostalgic road anytime soon unless I again make my own, like this guy. He really hit it out of the park:

Maybe I'll just go as a pillowcase ghost this year… or maybe one of these:

Less than a week to go until I see Cloud Atlas at the IMAX and go to a Halloween party - stay tuned!