Tuesday, September 24, 2013

I Gave it a Title

I've been instructed to blog and it's been a while, so here it goes. I've been really enjoying my web programming class. There are tons of improvements to HTML5 over the previous version of the spec and I've never worked much with CSS, but am finding it beyond useful. I was very weary about using Dreamweaver because I remember it being a horrible monstrosity that butchered all of the code and added extra metadata to every page header. Keep in mind that I haven't used Dreamweaver since it was a Macromedia product. Dreamweaver CS6 is as intuitive and responsive as the rest of the Adobe suite, so I'm pretty happy with it. I'll be dicking around with Javascript this week, so we'll see how much I like that. One thing I'm not happy with is iOS7. All of my iPhone using friends are ranting and raving about how amazing the update is. I admit that it is gorgeous in an Android look-a-like sort of way and they did add some very important and useful (but not easily accessible) features. The update itself runs fine on my phone and is as responsive as iOS 6 on my aging device. I don't like what they did with the calendar. Instead of opening a day in list view when I tap on it so that i can easily add my my work schedule to it, it opens in an hour-by-hour view so that I can't easily see what time I work because it only shows a few hours at a time. The podcast app is also almost entirely unusable now. It crashes 30 seconds into the episode and COMPLETELY hangs the phone for another 30 seconds. I'd really like to get a MotoX when my contract expires, unless a better android phone comes along. As much as I appreciate the uniform experience of iOS, it's just too streamlined and simple for me. Jason and I have been looking into buying real estate for a while, then we stumbled across a condo in the 15 and Utica area. It was built in 2004 and is in pretty good condition. The inspector seemed to be impressed with the place and told us the life expectancy of all the fixtures and HVAC equipment. The seller decided that it no longer comes with appliances (the process of getting to the bottom line of contract is a story in itself) so we will have to save up for some decent ones. It's a short sale, so it's going to take a while for the banks to fight over the paperwork, which will give us plenty of time to save up for some good appliances, but at the end of that period the bank who owns the property may decide that they no longer want to take the hit and back out of the sale. We'll see. Work has been the same as it always is and there's not much else going on right now.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Look What I Can Do!

I haven't really worked on my number guessing game since I blogged about it because I've been busy with a million other trivial things. I've been working long hours with little sleep between shifts and closing a lot recently. By the time I get home I have hardly any energy and usually lay down and do nothing for the rest of the night.

Despite my Photoshop class progressing incredibly slowly due to some of the students not being terribly familiar with Apple computers (or computers in general), I did pick up a few new tricks today. I decided that it would probably be a good idea to update the game's buttons before I embed them into the file. Each button has three different states, which you can see by rolling the mouse over and clicking on them. Yeah, I've been picking up some things in my HTML class as well.

All in all, class is going well for me so far this semester. I've been getting my homework done really early in the week, which gives me time to do other important things. Such as procrastinating so that I mysteriously don't have time to read the books I spent so much money on. I'm sure they're fascinating books and I find the nutrition book to be pretty interesting, but I just don't have the attention span to sit down and read. I'll try to catch up on them on Sunday and Labor Day, but I'm not terribly optimistic that it will happen.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Why Buying a House is Bullshit

It appears that the real estate market is in a state of (artificial) equilibrium. Instead of prices being artificially inflated by good economic times or having bottomed out due to economic hardship, buyers and sellers are splitting the difference and meeting half way. No one is paying the absurdly high "original selling price" of property, but no one is getting a particularly good deal, either. Generally, equilibrium is the best that can happen to any particular market and ensures fair prices and decent competition.

Of course, model breaks down when corporations enter the scene. Corporations have the ability to break the normal rules that make capitalism an efficient system. They can undercut competition by purchasing merchandise in bulk from vendors at greatly reduced prices. They can sell loss leaders below cost to get people into their stores because they know the markup on other items will more than make up for it. They can break major labor and antitrust laws while hiding behind an army of lawyers. Most importantly, they can hold onto assets that cost them millions of dollars while being cushioned by the vast volume of their stronghold in the market. Corporations only care about making quick money for their CEOs stockholders. This is clear from the way hourly employees get treated and some of the ridiculous money making policies and procedures these corporations have.

In the case of real estate banks act as corporations, holding onto properties until the market improves to their liking and then holding out for the best possible price. This is why short sales take so long and why HUD sales have a set bidding period. This is also why the market has reached equilibrium before the economy has. Most of the homes for sale right now are bank owned. Many banks don't even pay taxes on the properties they own and can hold onto them until they feel the market is working in their favor. The bank doesn't care about buyers, tenants, or the health of the market; the bank only cares about making quick money for their CEOs and stockholders. This is clear from the fact that the housing market crashed to begin with.

Because banks can't really buy (or foreclose upon) houses in bulk in the same way that a corporation buys from it's vendors, they need to make more money per unit to keep their profit margin up. This is where the hosing and retail markets differ. While corporations ultimately drive prices down with their practices, banks seem to be driving prices up with theirs. That's why it is so difficult for a non-prospector to buy property right now. Even though Jason and I have enough money saved up to put a decent down payment on a place, we will never quite catch up to what the banks expect, or be able to compete with investors, sitting on a pile of cash.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

The end of August

I'm really enjoying my classes so far this semester. I'm taking web programming (read:glorifies HTML and CSS) and nutrition online, which I haven't really learned much from yet, but it's still early in the semester. I like that I can do all of the work from my own computer, but I don't like the mandatory forum discussions. I just don't feel that talking amongst peers is essential to my learning process. Saturday mornings at 8 I have my intro Photoshop class, which has the potential to be really interesting, but hasn't been so far.

One thing I haven't been enjoying is the buying a house game. The entire process is stupid and I'm growing bored to the point where I can't bring myself to care much about it. Jason is on it and seems to really want a condo, so I guess I'll play. I'd prefer the privacy and yard that a house would afford, but Jason seems to be dead set against it. I wouldn't mind buying a somewhat older house and maintaining it. What I don't want is something exactly like something everyone else has. Bleh.

On a side note, Anne asked me to help her with her computer (we called ATT and the moron couldn't handle resetting her password) and dig a hole in her yard. I did this and we buried her recently deceased guinea pig and hamster. I stayed around for cookies and ice cream and she told me stories about her life. She has some pretty interesting ones, if you can get through the dull ones first. She told me she would give me whatever beer was in her refrigerator and "maybe even some of her liquor." I'd say she made good on her offer.


Sunday, August 11, 2013

This Week in Real Estate

So, Jason and I may be buying a condo on Tuesday.

We've been looking at the different real estate in the area since last year and we haven't found anything that was nice and within our price range. Then Jason stumbled across a place for about $75k, which is in our budget. It's 1550 square feet, in a nice secluded area, and is in good condition. It was forclosed and being sold under a HUD loan. I'm not entirely sure how the process works, but the bank collected bids until midnight yesterday and will review them all tomorrow. I honestly don't know what our odds are, but I'd like to think they're pretty good. We qualify for a conventional mortgage and can put down 3% without asking for a concession from the seller.

The place does need some minor work: patching holes, painting, replacing a few doors and shower heads. The princess pink and eggplant purple rooms definitely need to be repainted and the shag/berber/what-the-hell-were-they-thinking carpet definitely needs to be replaced. We'd need to get appliances right off the bat, but this means that we cane get the appliances we want right away and not deal with the inefficient crap we have now. Of course, we'd have to finance the new appliances, but Sears always offers 0% APR and with the amount of our budget that we currently put toward savings, I know we can pay it off in almost no time.

Of course, this is all dependent on the bank accepting our bid and our mortgage going through, so we'll see what happens.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

I'm Thinking of a Number

A few months back, just before I went to Chicago I picked up a book called Game Design with ActionScript. ActionScript is the language in which Flash games are written, so I figured I'd work on learning it in my free time between work and helping my parents. While it is similar to python in that they are both object-oriented languages and use indentation to separate different levels of functions, they differ greatly in the way they process images and random numbers. As a learning exercise, I made an incredibly simple number guessing game.



So, you may notice that there are no buttons (specifically a restart button). Actually, there are two buttons programmed into the game. The images for these buttons reside on my local hard drive and aren't embedded in the .swf file. Without the images, the computer can't create a sprite and with no sprite, there is no clickable button. I'm still unclear on exactly how to do this, and was surprised that they weren't embedded automatically, but it will be my next thing I do.

I also plan to add sound, a guess history, a visual strike counter, and a few other features to the game, just to get a feel of how the language works. If you want to see any features, leave a comment. I do read and appreciate all of the comments I get here. Expect to see more as I dick around with it in my free time.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Midnight Chocolates

There are a number of posts that I've been working on for almost a week now, but I can't seem to make any headway on any of them. They're all about more technical topics, but I think they'll make interesting reads whenever I get around to them. Instead, here's a list of my preferred brands of chocolate in order:

Lindt
Lindor
Hershey
Godiva
Cadbury

I greatly enjoy the both the sea salt and red chili chocolate bars that Lindt produces. Of course, I enjoy most of Lindor's truffles, especially the dark and white chocolate varieties. I enjoy a good, cheap milk chocolate Hershey bar, but not their white chocolate. I know Godiva is a high end brand, but I generally don't like their products. They just seem very mediocre to me. I try to avoid Cadbury if at all possible, and I like local places such as Champagne Chocolates, The Sweet Tooth, and Ingram's Candies.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Goings On

I've got a lot on my plate right now between work, school, and my personal goals.

Work has been interesting lately. We're down a few people. A lot of people. And a few managers. A lot of people are leaving for one reason or another, and I keep getting more work piled on top of me. It's nothing I can't handle, but it does put me in a position where I have more to do than time usually permits and I have to choose what doesn't get done. The people who work in my department right now are great, but there are only four of us, so I've been getting stuck working long hours in the middle of the day. I guess that's what I get for agreeing to full time status, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant.

Being generally antisocial, I prefer to take my classes online even though it usually costs significantly more money. This semester I'm taking three of my classes online and one class on campus on Saturdays. Online I'm taking Intro Web Programming (it's been a while since I've written any HTML or CSS and I'm not familiar with HTML 5) and Nutrition (to fulfill my Phys Ed class) during the first 8 weeks and a basic C++ class during the second 8 weeks. I was leery about taking a six-hour Photoshop class once a week, but I'm gambling on getting the same instructor that I had for my inDesign class because she was really strict and I liked the way she taught the class.

I spend the bulk of my off days cutting my parents' lawn and doing minor repairs to their dilapidated house or hanging out at Rose and Sean's condo. I should be reading and working on my ActionScript more, but I just haven't been able to find the motivation. I picked up a really interesting book called Uncertainty in Games and another simply called Designing Games that I've been trying to read in my down time, but more and more of my down time is being consumed by catching up on sleep that I never seem to get enough of. I do have three days off starting Sunday, so I'll see what I can do.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

A Brief Guide to Prank Calls

I have what I would like to think of as a good sense of humor. It may be a little dry or twisted at times, I do enjoy a good joke. Unfortunately, many of the people I come into contact with are unable to make or even recognize a good joke. Working at a fairly well known retail establishment with an easily available phone number I occasionally find my phone ringing with an anonymous number, which almost certainly means that I'm about to pick up on a prank call. Many of them are downright awful.

The first step to making a successful prank call is to have some sort of plan. It doesn't matter if it's a detailed script, a list of possible responses to things I may say, or a general idea of where you'd like to go with the prank. Bonus points if you can remember it without writing anything down. The point is that you should know what you're trying to accomplish with the call well in advance of picking up the phone. Please don't have people in the same room feed you lines, either. It's really annoying when I have to hear the same lousy joke twice.

Next, don't make the call anonymous. Like I said, an anonymous call is almost always a prank and Caller ID is a standard option on both wireless and desk phones. Spoofcard.com (also available as apps on your smartphone) will let you make completely anonymous calls and present any name and number you give it, for a nominal fee. You could also use Skype to make outbound phone calls for 2.3 cents a minute. While it's not necessarily anonymous, the call won't be tied to your phone number, and simply closing the application will prevent me from calling or texting you back.

Save your punchline for the middle of the conversation. Don't start by asking me if we sell crackers because your parrot is hungry or nervously asking me about the largest fish we sell. Start by asking me to repeat my name, as this will put me on edge. I will assume that you're going to be difficult and will be more likely to respond in the way that you want. Ask a related question or two, but don't give the joke away immediately. The point is to get me interested in the conversation and shock me, not to say something random and hang up.

On the other hand, don't take more than 30 seconds to make some sort of point. That's roughly how long it takes me to get bored of the call. There's no need to tell me a contrived life story, unless that is pivotal to the joke. Again, the point is to shock me, not to bore me to tears. If you beat around the bush for more than the allotted time and I know that it is a joke, I will hang up. It's that simple.

Make the joke obvious. Unless you want me to assume that you're simply a mentally handicapped individual, make the punchline of the joke clear and concise. Don't suddenly start to mumble, giggle, or yell into your phone when you get to the good part. A lot of prank calls start out well but are ruined by failure of the caller to deliver a half decent punchline. If no one is laughing at the end of the call then the joke was bad and you should feel bad.

Don't be surprised if I play along. I know I'm a mere retail employee, but that doesn't meat that I'm not quick witted. If you ask me if we sell Orca whales and I say yes and offer you detailed pricing information, don't hang up. If you ask me if we sell crackers for your pet Polly and I say no, but tell you that there is a great cracker plant just south of Springfield, don't hang up. If you ask me if we have any animals that would be suitable to be placed into your anus and I say no but direct you to Tractor Supply where they sell cocks during this time of year, don't call me a faggot, and don't hang up. I get just as much entertainment out of the call as you do so try not to disappoint me.

I hope that by following this guide, you too, can not suck at prank calling.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Morons, Assholes, and the Terminally Irresponsible

It's totally cool that you call in 15 minutes before your shift to get a tattoo. It's not like they really need you to be there or anything, considering the amount of work that you somehow manage not to do during your three hour shift. The other cashier will just get stuck covering your shift anyway, so who cares, right? There's no way she has anything to do or any place to be. It totally doesn't put strain at all on anyone else and you're completely not the reason that someone would be so frustrated with their job that they would get worked up over something stupid at quarter to midnight.

It's also totally cool to be a white trash, racist cunt on Facebook. To your credit, you're the same white trash, racist cunt in real life. While you do have the right to say whatever you want on Facebook and I have (and exercise) the option to hide your ramblings from my wall, it's still incredibly inappropriate to be a dick about something when you have no clue what you're talking about. Until you can make an informed opinion about the topics of abortion, civil rights, gun control, politics, or race you don't need to run your mouth about them in a public meeting space. If you want to be a massive cunt about everyone and everything start a blog. That's what I did and it has worked pretty well for me.

I am so frustrated with the state of humanity. I feel like I'm surrounded by nothing but morons and I'm drowning in their stupidity. I am by no means the smartest person who ever lived, but I honestly wonder how some of these people manage to find their front door in the morning or the power button on their computer in the evening. I get so easily frustrated with people and they never seem to understand why. It kills me and I don't know how else to deal with it, which was the original intent of this blog. So I guess I'll start writing in it more and see if I can calm down some.

Anger Management

The last few weeks of work have been really stressful for me. We are down between two and three managers at any given time, peoples' hours have been cut since the full time law changes, and some of the people who are scheduled to work don't bother to come in anyway because their other part time job is more important to them. I've been doing a lot of extra work in addition to the extra work I usually assign to myself in the form of a never-ending task list and the mountain of work of which my job actually consists. I like to keep busy, but I get the feeling that the more I do at work, the fewer people seem to appreciate any of it.

The thing that frustrates me most about the job, or any retail job for that matter, is that people who come in to shop don't show any sort of respect for my time. Nothing annoys me more when people waste a significant portion of my time, then demand a particular kind of respect. Of course, if I was dealing with these people in any sort of non-degrading situation I would have colorful words for them, but at work these words are reserved for my coworkers via long ranting text messages. I'm an introvert and I can't stand people being in my personal space (I have a very large bubble) for more than a few minutes unless they're decent human beings and will actually listen to my advice.

By the time I get done with work I'm so burned out that I don't really have the energy to do anything of the things that I need or want to do. I'd like to blog more, but I simply don't have the energy. I'm also in the process of learning Actionscript and porting some of my python games to Flash, but I haven't had the energy to work on that since I left Chicago (that was a month ago, but will probably get its own blog post pretty soon). If I'm lucky enough to get two days off, I spend cutting my parents lawn and the other cleaning the parts of the apartment that I consider to be mine (the rat cage, the kitchen, my laundry, etc.)

I'm off tomorrow and I'll see what I can accomplish if I make myself a list and try to stick to it.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Yes.

Things have been incredibly busy at work. I won't go into too much detail, but we are down two managers, sometimes three. The company has also been cutting hours since full time status has been lowered to 30 hours. A few new people have been hired, and while all of the part time people have been getting fewer than 20 hours, our store is somehow always short staffed. I've been under a lot of stress and pressure to do a lot more things than my job normally consists of, so I've been coming home beyond exhausted.

Jason and I have been saving up to buy a condo in the area. We looked at one last month, then met with a mortgage broker to find out how much it would actually cost to buy something and to get pre-approved for a loan. We got approved for more than we actually plan on spending, but with the way the housing market has been improving and considering that condos are a hot commodity right now (prices have more than doubled since this time last year), we may end up spending more than we had originally intended. Even so, I guess it's a decent investment and we can find a way to make money out of it.

Despite taking low level classes, I've been enjoying school. I learned a lot about design from an InDesign class, and have been really liking my astronomy classes. I plan on taking some chemistry classes in addition to my required Photoshop and programming classes. I've also been reading a lot of game design books and have a long list of books I plan on buying when I have money again.

All in all, I've been extremely busy and getting run down very quickly.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

A Penny for your Thoughts

Apparently, this is the most amazing thing ever written. Enjoy.

Our journey begins in the change return slot of the Coke machine in the northernmost hallway of Lakeside Mall. In it lies three magnificent quarters and a measly penny. This particular penny’s name is Franklin, not that anyone had ever cared to ask him. No one would even look at him for more than a moment as they removed him from their less humble change and dropped him back into the slot. In fact, he had been in this particular slot for almost a month now.


Being just a penny, this sort of treatment was nothing new to Franklin. He always found himself being kicked behind a piece of furniture, buried under a sea of much larger coins, or lost in a junk drawer somewhere. Once, he spent an entire fifteen years tucked under the rear passenger floor mat in an old, beat up Volkswagen. No one ever seemed to miss him or even notice that he was gone. Of course, Franklin didn’t want to be treated this way. He wanted to be respected like the other coins. He wanted people to notice that he existed.


One day, someone did notice him. It was a coin collector who happened to remove the four coins from the Coke machine on this day. Taking a quick look at Franklin, the collector could immediately tell that he was special. Franklin didn’t know this, but he was a rare 1955 Double Die penny. Franklin now spends the bulk of his time in a velvet lined showcase, admired every day.

Monday, January 21, 2013

To Recap the Previous Post

I don't want to be a drone, working 40 hour weeks, putting money into a 401(k) and having good health insurance, waiting until I'm too old to do anything meaningful so I can retire. I really don't. I want to do something. To make a difference somewhere. When I die I want to have a little blue plaque on my door telling people I lived there. I don't want to be stuck in this boring, mundane life.

Sunday, January 06, 2013

The New Year

I've been having a very hard time explaining to Jason why I'm not happy. I sometimes have a hard time understanding it myself. How do I explain to people with completely different sets of values why I don't find my life fulfilling? I don't want a shallow and prestigious job where I make all the money I could ever want to buy all the superficial things I don't need. I just want my life to have at least some sort of meaning and maybe for someone to take me seriously once in a while. That's it.

I've performed the same actions at work every day for almost five years. Cleaning and maintenance tasks, catching fish for customers, an occasional repair or installation of something. None of these tasks have been useful on a fundamental level. Habitats and work areas continue to get dirty, machines continue to break down at their usual rate, products and services sell as they normally would. Overall, I've accomplished nothing aside from saving the company a little money by doing the job of multiple people.

I'm going to school for a degree in something that isn't going to be particularly productive. Video games are now generally considered to be a mainstream form of entertainment and their production is likely to greatly outpace movies in the future, but at the end of the day they're just that: entertainment. If I do land a nice job working on video games nothing is going to change. I'm still going to feel as useless as I do now. It's not going to help anyone. No one is going to benefit from my work. If I didn't work on whatever projects I will undertake in the future, someone else would do just as good a job as me.

I don't really do anything else. I don't voluenteer to help anyone or belong to any kind of orginizations. I can't afford to build buy the materials to build anything worth building. I barely talk to the people I see every day and those who I consider close. I'm tied to a job that doesn't make me happy in a physical location that I can't stand so I can't travel more than a few hours away to see what's out there. I don't have any real creative talent to make any sort of art.  I can't even find it in myself to blog more than a few times a year anymore.

I need to do something, I just don't know what.