And thus ends one saga, and another begins.
I put in my separation notice at my current place of employment today. That other company made me an offer that my current employer couldn't match. About $4 more an hour, guaranteed 40-hour weeks, 8:00-4:30 Monday through Friday shifts. I'll be able to sleep like a normal person again! This new employer is projected to double in size over the next five years, so there should be several opportunities to move up and grow professionally. Just what I need. Financial security.

I don't have any bad blood with my "old" employer or the people that work there. I'm just in need of money, and they can't deliver. There's also no chance of me moving up unless someone quits. It's a shame, really, because I like the place. I may go back and work a shift or two a week once the holidays get here, mainly for the camaraderie. That's assuming my new job doesn't suck up all of my time.

It was tough asking for and putting in my notice. A lot of jaws dropped to the floor. I guess some people thought I was gonna work there forever. More people will miss me than I expect. But I need the money a lot more than I need the discount on the goods we sell. So... that's life, I guess.

My last day is May 15, which is three weeks from now. My plan is to work two weeks and have the third week be the week where I use all of my personal holiday time. I put in a request for a week off before I was given a job offer, but I put in my notice before I got my vacation approved. So I wonder how that's gonna work. If they choose to stiff me, I have plenty of sick time I can use instead. :) They can pick their poison. Hopefully they won't be dickish with me and just give me that week off like I requested. Then I can relax and get some new business casual gear for my new workplace and stuff.

So what is this new job? It's located in Keene, NH, the one place I never ever wanted to work. Funny how that shit works. I'll be working as a sourcing analyst for a wholesale distributor. I can't give you a real good explanation as to what a sourcing analyst is, though. But it's a lot of busy work and number crunching, so I should do well. There's also some price negotiation involved with third party vendors. That won't come naturally to me, so that could provide some amusing situations when I first start. We'll see. I'll try and be a little more descriptive of the job once I start working and have a better feel for the position.

I haven't decided if I'm gonna move to Keene right away or hold off for a few months. I'm currently leaning to the latter. That way, any money that would have went to rent or other bills can be put towards my last remaining student loan instead. The sooner I get that paid off, the happier I'll be.

So that's that. It looks like whoever was controlling the VCR playing the tape of my life finally realized after a few years that the film was paused and hit play again. :) Son of a...
Looks like my layout woes are not quick fixes. I may have to overhaul everything and start from scratch again. That's gonna be a bitch. I like the simplicity presented by the grayscale look, but I guess the positioning is too much for all browsers to handle properly. It's a shame, too, because I know how to code and adhere to standards. Too bad the browser people don't. I'm so tired of having to make "hacks," too. To the Garage?
My car is acting weird. Not sure if it's related to the repairs made upon my vehicle when it got dinged up a while back, or if it is something else. When I go from 0 to 60, it's all good. But when I'm going 70 and have to coast down to 50 because the guy in front of me is driving below the speed limit, I can't get enough acceleration when I get to a point where I can pass him. The engine just revs a lot and accelerates very slowly, almost like I'm hitting the gas in neutral. I have to slow down to 45 and then accelerate to get back up to 70.

So I'm thinking something is wrong with my 4th or 5th gear. I was supposed to get the transmission fluid flushed and replaced at 30,000 miles, but the mechanic wasn't able to get the fluid shipped to him in time. Next time I need an oil change, he can do that at the same time. I'm under 34,000 miles now. I doubt 4,000 extra miles on the same transmission fluid is the problem. I don't know squat about what's under the hood of my car, so who knows...

I'll need another oil change soon (every 5,000 miles), and if it continues doing this after my next pit stop, I'll have to flip through my warranty booklet and see what I can do about it. To the Theatre!
Gonna see Lewis Black in Concord at the Capitol Center for the Arts in a few weeks. He's the best. Comedian. Ever. Hands down.

I figure I need the time off, because I have become so burnt out from the hours I've had to work over the past month, I'm not even sure how the hell I wake up each morning. I have been running on fumes for the last few days. So yeah. I got plenty of sick and holiday time, so I might as well use it all should the other company hire me. :) Plenty of vacation time, too, but they have to pay me that if I leave even if I don't use it. Fear.

Trying to get my best friend to go with me, but if that doesn't pan out, it'll make a dandy Mother's Day gift. That's right. Two birds with one stone.

There's plenty of tickets if you want in. You'll find me in the second row of the upper right balcony. To the Opera!
Looks like Opera 8 is out. And it fixes all of my Opera issues I had when running my firewall program at the same time. Hella cool. Now I just gotta take care of the non-firewall-related issues, Opera-related or not. And since I can't go hiking this weekend nor clean my car (the forecast calls for rain), I may finally take the time to work out those last kinks. Of course, I've been saying that since I put this site up, so who knows if I will actually follow through for once.

Download Opera 8. Make the CEO swim the Atlantic. I'm sure most people downloading it are just doing it for that purpose instead of using the software, but hey, to each their own. Yard Sale
Looks like my house is in need of a third computer (well, fourth if you want to include my eight year old paperweight of a laptop), so I'm selling mine off to my mother and putting together a new one for myself. I'm keep some of the better parts (duh), but I will have a spare video card...

I think I'm gonna do away with my ATI Radeon 9600 XT AGP graphics card. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, it plays all the latest and greatest PC games everyone is playing nowadays very nicely. I can get smooth framerates in 1280x1024! I still have all the software and crap that came with it, too.

I'm jumping on the PCI Express bandwagon shortly. So, if you want it, come get it. Otherwise, you'll find it on eBay soon. Yipee!
Had an interview today. A repeat interview. It was with the same company I had an informational interview with a couple months ago but they didn't have an open position at the time. Now they do. And they remembered me! :) Normally when a company says that they'll keep you on file for x number of months, what they really mean is that your resume will be put through the shredder by the end of their shift. It looks like these guys do things a little differently. It also helps that I have someone on the inside. :)

I didn't get interviewed by the same people, though. My first interviewer was kinda so-so, but I think the second guy I interviewed with thinks I'm worth the investment. So we'll see. They are the sort of company that don't like to keep people waiting for weeks before hiring them. No sense in keeping me waiting when I could be contributing to their "greater good," after all.

I also saw one of the guys that interviewed me the last time I came in. He saw me in the hallway, shook my hand and remembered my name. That is quite awesome! Who knows how many people he deals with daily as an HR guy, and he remembers Jerome from early February? I must have left a good impression for once.

So yeah. We'll see how that goes. Not sure how much it will pay, but I'm sure it'll be sufficient. Plus there are plenty of opportunities to move up. And then maybe I can kick this website into high gear. Zoom zoom. And so it has begun...
The reason for purging my camera pics is to get ready for a new lineup of awesome picture taking. Most of my shots I took were of nature or from up top of various mountain peaks, courtesy of various geocaching adventures. Well, it's a new season, and I'm ready to get my fignuts on.

I started today, in fact. I went to some historic bog in Hopkinton. It was a short and easy trip, and definitely not one of my smartest trips. Seriously, who goes playing in a bog? IN APRIL? Oh, my sneakers! How soaked they are! Luckily, my sneakers are like eight years old and falling apart, so it didn't really matter.

Funny how I can convince myself that spending $300 for a video card is a justifiable purchase, but I won't go out and spend $60 on a pair of casual/outdoor shoes. (Note that I do not have said video card, but I'm pretty friggin' tempted. And I'm not much of a gamer anymore.)

I didn't take any pics, but there really wasn't any decent views. I did find a random black mailbox where two trails met. It must suck to be the postman for that part of town!

If the weather's decent, I intend to hit at least four caches up around Mount Sunapee probably this Saturday. And perhaps in a month or so, I may have a semi-local partner in crime (or two) to join me on my conquests to get lost in the woods. Hopefully they'll enjoy the experience enough to do it regularly. :) Geocaching is more fun with other people involved. And when it's raining. And when you can't find it and you start going crazy because you visited the same 30 feet of land about 50 times looking for the cache. Good times. Oh, the wreckage! The horror! Aie!
I purged all of the photos that were on the card of my digital camera. Most of the pics are useless, but there's a few I wouldn't mind sharing with the masses. However, I'm trying to figure out the best and easiest way to do this. Should I just give text descriptions and links? Or should I use thumbnails displayed in some sort of tablular format? I kinda want to make a mixture of both, but I'm lazy and either solution requires more work than I really want to dedicate. Bah.

I'll start with some shots of my car when I got involved in a fender bender a month or so ago. As you'll notice, there ain't that much damage. It was mostly aesthetic. Not sure how the dealership figured it would cost nearly $3,000 to fix. But that's my insurance company's problem, not mine. :)



Other pics forthcoming, once I come to a conclusion about layout. AMD wins best CPU manufacturer honor...
... from an Intel-sponsored computer trade show. Insert mayhem here. A Solution to Locked Keys in the Car
Haven't been able to test this myself (no cell phone and I lost my spare keys), but according to this forward my mother sent me, this could save you a lot of time and hassle:

Hard to believe!

For those of you who have a car that can be unlocked by that remote button on your key ring: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are home, and you don't have "OnStar," here's your answer to the problem! If someone has access to the spare remote at your home, call them on your cell phone (or borrow one from someone if the cell phone is locked in the car too)!

Hold your (or anyone's) cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the other person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk, or have the "horn" signal go off, or whatever)!

(Editor's Note * It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a cell phone!) Distance doesn't seem to be a factor.

UPDATE: FALSE. Courtesy of Jon and his too-lazy-to-try-out-himself attitude. More links, but not really a "link dump."
I was gonna do another link dump, but it looks the other half of my links are rather dumb, out of date, or have met their end by the "File Not Found" demon. How sad. But I guess a small handful is better than nothing at all:

-- This might be in bad taste, but it's still funny nonetheless.
-- No Pants Day is less than a month away! Are you prepared?
-- I can't really say much about this story without giving it away. So just read it. It's funny.
-- SupportOurRibbons.com: one of the projects my boy Jake has started. You can also check out one of his older pieces of work, Freevil.net. 49 1/4 hours. 4 days.
No 5-day work week this week. Which is really nice. I was getting a little tired of the whole overnight thing. Or maybe really tired, since I've slept for multiple hours twice since Friday morning.

My work on "the project" is done, although the store itself won't be complete for another week or so. I'll have to visit it in a month and see how it all turns out.

It's a good thing I didn't have to work Friday night into Saturday morning, because my people back at my headquarters wouldn't give me this coming Sunday off. That's bullshit, huh? Work two weeks of overnights and then be up at 5 AM on Sunday? Doesn't allow enough time for much sleep adjustment. Bastards. Damn you, ZoneAlarm!
I was going to go around and completely overhaul my css coding for Opera 7, but it turns out that the layout problems I have are based on my firewall program. When I turn off my firewall, everything is more or less ok. When it's on, well... it isn't. Go figure.

I still may do some work tonight, though. Just not as much as I originally planned.

I'm aware of the following bugs. If you know of any more, let me know by posting a comment, please:

IE 6 -> bottom border of tabs
IE 6 -> the search box on the left isn't positioned right
Opera 7 -> tab positioning (reads mozilla code)
Opera/Mozilla -> main content box doesn't line up with titlebar thing perfectly at all times
IE 5.5 -> everything (anyone using this still?) 66 1/2 hours in 5 days.
Plus whatever mileage and toll money reinbursement I get.

I've had 2-week periods where I worked less than 66 hours. To get that in one week -- plus the overtime -- that makes for a sweet paycheck.

I'm glad this is only a 2-week stint, because I don't think I could go on working all night and sleeping all day every day for the rest of my life. I don't need the cash flow that badly. And I really would like to have some sort of life outside of work.

I wonder how many hours I'll rack up next week...

What's also fun is working until (for example) Saturday morning, but to me, it is still Friday because I haven't slept yet. And technically, it is already Sunday in Australia, so I can be seen as being 2 days behind. Son of a...