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Since I actually do check my logs, and since I have a sinking suspicion about people from Asia Pac (203.91.193.5 and 203.103.233.159) on August 28 searching for particular things, I had to redo some of my pages because I probably mentioned something that I shouldn't have. It was a momentary lapse that won't happen again.
So that Google will promptly reindex, the pages are
00229.html wasn't about you, obtw.
I'm still figuring out this middle school youth leader gig I have been saddled with. The kids are okay now, but all bets are off during middle school. You don't have any idea what they are going to do from one minute to another. My pal, Rob, says that he has two teenagers at home living in the same body. He even has another name for the monster person who shows up. The boy has yet to hit that ever-important growth spurt to put him at six feet (a little over 1.8m) yet. So he has yet to see the evil twin come out and stay. Which will happen.
Do you remember middle school? We had Intermediate School for grades 6 & 7, and then Junior High for grades 8 and 9. Freshmen were junior highers with us. The kids I have are 6th, 7th and 8th. Or children, monsters and pre-high schoolers, all very different. Any week I can come in and have a weirdo taking the body of one of my sixth graders. I have no expectations whatsoever of the 7th graders. And my grade 8ers have yet to really become teenagers, the blasted late bloomers. So I can look forward to doing nothing but busting heads, which I'm particularly good at. Who would have thought it from my past?
Just so that my life is not any easier and my innate indecisiveness will continue to cause me trouble, they have countered with a different proposal.
Well, maybe I'll get some consulting out of this.
I was invited to come to New Jersey Saturday for the day to interview about a job running a new subsidiary of a US$150M company. It went well, but much more quickly than I would have liked it paced: I got an offer by the end of the day.
I was excited, of course: I've only had two offers since leaving INFOSEC back in May 2003, and both to run someone else's company. The other one fell through in part because the money wasn't there but too far in the future. There was some money involved in this, but less than I made at INFOSEC, at least at first. Even if I met the US$2M income target in the first year, I would still make less than the base salary of the software architects I used to work with. And this in a more expensive part of the country. The relocation funds would be spotty, and I would accumulate a few thousand dollars more debt to get out there. Should I meet a US$20M annual target five years out, I would get a 5% equity stake in the subsidiary. The job involved creating a company to sell Indian software development services to American companies, but that was their entire vision. And they had no experience in software development.
So it wasn't a spectacular offer. You know where this is going, don't you?
Almost two years after losing the job at INFOSEC, I get a real interview for a real job that has real salary. Even if it's with a startup. Thank goodness they went and talked to a recruiter that we both know. A job as COO of an IT outsource company with money behind it, good people in front of it, and an opportunity to travel to Bangalore and Delhi.
So, I leave tomorrow to spend the day in Newark. Beautiful Newark, New Jersey, home of . . . um . . . a little help? Home of crime? Last time I was in Newark — admittedly more than ten years ago — a friend of mine had married a gal we both knew who was at the Metropolitan Opera Academy or some such and they were living in the International House near Grant's Tomb. Newark was, to be polite, a cesspool, at least from what I saw. Fast forward to today and she burned her voice out singing on broadway, they've moved to KC where he writes novels and teen comedy screenplays and she Mommys and works as a church music minister. I'm minimally employed so some things are the same, but I'm not single so some things have changed.
But still: this job's in New Jersey.
I've been meaning to write something up here, mostly just to keep my habit of typing. I've been lost in the Content Management System universe lately; I'll summarize my findings over at Echo Software this weekend, if you are someone who cares. I'm put together a pretty decent method for using Mambo to run a church website. I'll write that up and post the files to mamboforge.net as manasclerk. It can go with my old work, except I'll probably make it donationware: you use it, you have to donate to one of my causes. Or pay me personally twice as much if you don't like them. One of them is always the Salvation Army, for whom a pal in Belgium works, so most folks don't usually have a problem.
But what was I moaning about? Oh, yeah, why I haven't put anything up.
Well, I've been in darker moods than usual lately. Considering my usual, that's pretty bleak. I'd call them George Bailley moments except I don't have life insurance. Like I can afford that any more.
Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who brought us the disastrous "Contract With America", and Hillary Clinton, who almost single-handedly destroyed my chances for affordable if slightly lackluster health care, have joined together at least in their political lives.
Oddly, this political marriage does make sense. Gingrich is approaching the twilight years of his life. He evidently wants to be known as a Great Leader, one who joined America rather than the man who destroyed the leadup that the Republicans were enjoying against Bill Clinton. But he's also an incredibly big guy. I caught him once on conservative radio where he kept on telling the host "No, that's wrong" and corrected the course to more nuanced statements about the liberal agenda. While remaining conservative, he acknowledged his opponents' ethics and worth. They were wrong but they weren't traitors. Like a US Senator used to be before the current batch decided to become Congressmen.
It's after midnight, I'm babysitting a reinstall of WinXP Home for a buddy of mine from SciFi night, typing this in a wordprocessor because this old Blueberry iMac still runs OS 9.2 and NS 7.1 has the text scrolling continuously in one long line. I'm sure that I could figure out some solution to this - it's all Mozilla in there anyway - but I can't bring myself to care. Maybe I should just fire up IE 5. Yep, nothing like the old Blueberry. It plays CDs, so I get to listen to some Vigilantes of Love from the same era. (JMMJ, do you still remember that St Patâ??s day that I blew you and Baron off when yâ??all were about the only people there to see Bill and Co. perform at St Maryâ??s Bar & Grill?)
I've been spending way too much of my time accumulating new computer skills. I've installed Mambo on one of my other hosted servers. I needed to learn how to use a content management system (CMS) and this looked like the best one to learn on. Iâ??m pretty task focused so I needed to have a problem to solve in order to learn anything. Iâ??ve been poking around with Plone and Zope before that for about two years and nothing to show for it. Except that I can install it on a Windows server, something I just donâ??t ever use. So I decided to tackle another problem that Iâ??ve been putting off, the lackluster website of the Church of Powerpoint.
I've come to a conclusion that, while startling to me, has been rather self-apparent to my brother and some of my oldest friends: in order to get out of this spiral of career failure, I have to get in touch with my inner jerk. You can substitute other words for "jerk", of course: I continue my efforts to clean up my speech, so in with "jerk".
For most of my life, I've been the characteristic "nice guy". You know the one: the guy that you hang out with but never date; the one who actually shows up when you need to move out of your second-story walkup into a third-story walkup; the guy you stay with when your apartment falls through and it takes another 30 days to line one up; the type whom you actually find useful at funerals. Yes, yes, it was magical. I have worked most of my career as a nice guy. Very pleasant to work with, a wheedler rather than a demander, partly because the roles I get into have little authority to make demands.
But all my success came from being a jerk.
BWAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA!
Almost a week later and that line still busts me up.
I really need a steady job....
Or a lobotomy. Although arguably I've already had one if I find Invader Zim that funny. Or anything by Jhonen. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, anyone?
I suppose I should be working. But I've put in my 60 hours this week already and I'm tired. So why not talk about the kids in the youth group?
I go to a PowerPoint church. You know the ones: we have a rock band and a big screen in front with lyrics but no notes. I keep on trying to sing tenor anyway. The tolerable facet is that we have a rock band, not a "worship team".
What's interesting is how the leadership forget about kids.
I was just wallowing in the despair of my own situation, but had to see a pal of mine to watch the last couple of episodes of the Last Exile set I got for Christmas. We're not even halfway through, so I'm not sure how to get more on deck. It was good, we watched some of the extras on the Nausicaa DVD, prepping for a Nausicaa party later on.
We turned the DVD off and were about to leave when we realized that NickToons was running Invader ZIM. And it was the "Hastergeddon" with Ultra-Peepi!
"Don't fear the Peepi! Fear me!"
I almost spewed.
And the Barry White "Peepi" song as Ultra-Peepi swaggers down the street: fabulous.
There are 70 deaths in this episode. High death count always means quality children's entertainment. That and fart jokes.
The Closet over at Room With a Moose has the pilot in zipped AVI if you've no idea what I'm going on about. Not Ultra-Peepi, which qualifies as Five Spews Onto the Television, the code named after my brother's actions when he decided to eat a bowl of cereal while watching Saturday Night Live and saw the Whiffle Missle skit. The Pilot, which I don't believe ever aired, is more a Three Spews show.
You know, ZIM reminds me of that other great classic of cartooning, EEK! the Cat from Disney on Fox. Lots of mayhem in that one, too. Nothing like mayhem and lots of cartoon explosions.
So, thanks to Jhonen Vasquez for being exceedingly weird.