I'm back

I've reactivated my blog and it's been awhile.
So Myself is still in Las Vegas. Still working at the same Post Secondary College but have gone through a few position changes and liking my current position very much. 

...in which myself tries to get a life

So its been a year and 3 months since any post. Things have changed a bit. myself no longer takes phone calls for DirecTV®, which is a very good thing, and now teaches at a post-secondaye college. That's the kind of school you see advertising if you are home watching TV at 2:00 in the afternoon or up at 2:00 in the morning. It's an Ok gig for the most part, wish it paid a bit more but then that goes for any job myself would suppose. The past year has gone by and life is still pretty dull. Still trying to scrape by, worrying about the crushing debt that seems to keep mounting, knowing that at my age myself doesn't nearly have enough money put away for a decent retirement. Realizing by my own standards that myself is a brokeass. But myself is going to try to make 2006 be a prosperous and productive year, and be optimistic about it. myself will make a resolution to post weekly, at a minimum. sometimes personal stuff sometimes not.

I'm back

OK so myself is back to his blog. its been quite a while so quick update. Life in Las Vegas is starting to get into routine. Working for tech support for DirecTV®. The BF is going to school and blah blah blah; but enough of that. Now that Myself is in an official swing state, the up coming election is a big thing here. Not having experienced it before is a bit of a shock. The political commercials are something to behold. Actually saw the swift boat vet thing and a weeping mother asking why we rushed to war. Very emotional stuff all around. even the local races are getting ugly. Politics here are hardball compared to Hawaii.

Myself apologizes for the delay but the new life in Vegas makes for little time blogging. What a long strange trip its been... Still no job, and life goes on acclimation to the new environs is taking its toll, but Myself is not yet desperate. so its seems almost like a vacation. after toiling fourteen years at the same job its almost a welcome break. almost. its kind of boring, not having anywhere to go to when you wake up , whenever that is, in the morning, but myself does have to get on the stick and get some kind of job soon, got maybe two months of cash left so we are not desperate yet, yet being the operative word here. but overall its good so far... so in recent events... Ronald Regan has died. So here's my take.. never dump on the dead, but don't beautify him either. depending on your political leaning it was either good riddance or a tearful loss, whatever your view he was the president of our country and he did make his mark. more later after beebop

Quick update #2:
Myself is here in fabulous Las Vegas!, arrived early saturday morning, and went to our new apartment. blogging from a friends house as my comp is being FedEx'ed and will arrive tomorrow. said friend has been a real help in getting D and Myself set up here, took us to brunch at the Palms, and has been our guide. myself is very grateful for his help. So now comes the task of looking for a new job. with what money we have saved it won't last more that a month, so myself has got to get on the stick. Hopefully my vacation pay from my old job will arrive and give us some cushion but, it won't be a big cushion.
also: blogging will be personal for the time being as myself has no comp access and has not been keeping up w/ current events. moving and all, so bear with.

whew, moving is such a huge pain, and expensive. especially when moving from hawaii to the mainland. but just a quick update: staying at my brothers house for the last two days, old apartment packed up & cleaned out, car shipped out. Leaving on a night flight out. looks like this is it. set up utilities at new place. using my brothers comp for now, since my PC was packed up on Monday. sent the PC Fed Ex to new place, since the rest of our stuff will take three weeks to get to new place, can't be without my PC for that long, of course.excited? yes, scared? yes. NEw city, new job new life. myself is thinking things could be worse...

livin just enough for the city

Movers coming next tuesday, packing up, and getting rid of stuff. still had the OLD APTIVA lying around. myself had bought a new PC, what, last december, and still had the old girl getting in the way on the spare room floor for the last 4+ months. (cough..packrat). After six years it lasted longer that my last two boyfriends. Anyways, myself wanted to get rid of it, thought of taking a sledge hammer to it but decided the better of it, yanked the hard drives, and chucked it in ther dumpster. later that night I go to dump the garbage and I see some one had went into that stinking, smelly ass, makes you want to vomit its so bad, and you can still smell it five minutes later stink, and retrieved the tower. It dosen't work. myself lives in the ghetto.

So it's the last official day of work. We found an apartment on our trip, quite a nice place, for what myself consider's the cost, but being from Hawaii where $700 a month buys you a 600sq ft hovel, a 1025 sq foot apt with alarm, central air, coomunity pool, basketball workout room, and security comes as quite a deal. Myself was able to stay away from the blackjack tables for the most part, even won a couple hundred to boot. All in all it was a successful trip. but a few things myself has noticed are markedly different. such as:
every other car is an SUV of some sort.
every other woman seems to have fake tits
people honk their horns with a quickness myself has never seen before
rain appears to be a major meteorological event, and while myself is aware that this is the dessert, devoting ten minutes of local news broadcast time to the mere chance that it will rain in the next day or two seems a bit much.
there seems to be a lack of sole ownership restaurants, and a glut of chain/franchise eateries.
finding good pho is going to be tough as well as good sushi.

myself knew about lunch, but myself also got a card and $140 bucks, and my sup bought me a polo shirt, nautica heather gray. guess now I gotta send something. I felt a tad guilty for not bringing back omiyage from the Vegas trip, but i was thinking of just disappearing from work. I never interacted much with the other workers, and pretty much kept to myself, but a few came to chat, throughout out the day, make small talk and wish me luck, so I was pleaseantly surprised. Now I gotta send something for sure. I'm thinking cookie baskets, two of em.

a day in the life

6:30AM - Alarm goes off - hit snooze bar
6:39 - alarm goes off - hit snooze bar
6:48 - alarm goes off - hit snooze bar
6:57 - alarm goes off - drag mild to fiercly hungover ass out of bed and get ready for work.
8:00 - arrive at work. check which phone messages i can ignore (looks like my mom already called), check email, delete 60 spams about viagra, penile enlargement, breast enhancement, financial sucess etc.. read Get Fuzzy Dilbert, Doonesbury.
8:30 - check last night's jobrun
9:00 - read blogs/netsurf/check stocks/pay bills
9:30 - do actual work
10:00 - remember to call mom back
10:32 - gotta go mom, answer call from departmental user saying her new printer can't print her encumberance vouchers, tell user to call systems
10:33 - smoke break
10:40 - continue work
11:05 - answer call from user, says he got locked out after trying to log on, tell him to call systems
11:30 - talk to boyfriend on the phone
12:00 - lunch
1:02 - back to work
1:20 - make fun of officemate's 80 minute lunch
1:21 - continue work
2:00 - success! program finally works
2:01 - go on YW
2:20 - hit alt-tab when sup walk into office
2:22 - hit alt-tab after he leaves
2:45 - wonder what Chotto Matte does that allows him to post so much throughout the day
3:00 - smoke break
3:10 - read more blogs/netsurf. look for something to post to my blog.
3:45 - continue work
5:00 - leave office
5:30 - If not working second job, go jogging at Ala Moana park, along the beach while the sun sets, or go home and jog down the ala wai, or go to gym and oggle guys while working out.
else arrive at second job, sell Crazy Shirts(TM) to tourists
7:30 - buy way overpriced, mediocre dinner at mall food court
8:45 - inform tourist that I can bring you another pair of shorts, so you really don't have to come out in your underwear
8:46 - be thankful i have a REAL job, and don't do this for a living
10:00 - leave work,
10:15 - arrive home, shower, complain to boyfriend that he drank all the beer
10:30 - beer run
10:45 - drink beer, watch TV and/or play NetHack, or some suce other time waster on computer
11:30 - try to get boyfriend to have sex, if successful have sex, else
12:30 - finish beer
go to bed

So today was Myself's second to last day at work. D and Myself are taking a week to go to LV, find a place to live, put in an application or three, open a bank account, that kind of stuff, scouting trip/vacation. Hopefully mostly preperation for the move than gambling at blackjack and all the other diversions there, like gambling at blackjack. The last day of work, after 5 years at this desk, 9 years after the transfer from another desk. 14 years in the same system. Myself can't say it seems like yesterday because it doesn't, it feels like a fucking long time. Myself was getting lazy, and will admit it, inertia was what kept me going for the last two years, that day to day sameness, when the weekend and holidays are your only distant solace, on those terminal mondays and tuesdays. Trudging through the work week just to make it to friday, holidays were an much welcome bonus day off, (shit that's depressing). But its all over. In 14 days Myself goes back to work for one last day, (thereby getting paid for the month's first pay period), and that's it. Myself then has 15 days to pack up his life and move to Fabulous Las Vegas.

Being that tomorrow, April 1st, is April Fools Day, myself issuing a warning about internet hoaxes. Firstly, myself will not be posting any kind of prank, hoax, joke, etc.. but, other blogs and sites will have various pranks. ThinkGeek.com has sold thing like a USB George Foreman Grill, caffeinated meatloaf, and an infinite power generator. It just goes to show how you really don't have to all that bright to use a computer.

Music Wars Scene 28:
in which the Empire says: I'm Gonna getcha (yet again)

Here's comes the next round of RIAA Lawsuits

The Recording Industry Association of America stepped up the pace of its lawsuits against music swappers again, with a renewed focus on university students.
The trade association said Tuesday that it sued an additional 532 anonymous individuals, including 89 people at 21 separate universities. This is the third round of suits since the RIAA was forced by the courts to file suits without first using subpoenas to learn the alleged file swappers' true identities.
"It's important for everyone to understand that no one is immune from the consequences of illegally 'sharing' music files on (peer to peer) networks," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "Lawsuits are an important part of the larger strategy to educate file sharers about the law, protect the rights of copyright owners, and encourage music fans to turn to these legitimate services."

So now the message is to turn to "legitimate" services, which is an improvement from the "you people are all breaking the law, and should go to jail" strategy.

so Myself joined another discussion board, at The Honolulu Advertiser I started posting in the remember when thread, which was fun then decided to try a post or two in some os the current events threads, and it seems to lack a bit of, well decorum? no thats not it, restraint, is more like it, maybe civility to some degree, I guess I was thinking that it would be more like YellowWorld but I guess not, so myself might have get a bit less civil on the 'tiser board.

why is it..

that myself can get a round trip ticket from Honolulu to Las Vegas for $350 but a one way ticket costs $500? what the hell is up with that, and its all the airlines, every single on of them. Of course the obvious solution is to book the round trip and not use the return flight, but that seems wrong. I suppose forcing customers to book round trips makes scheduling easier, knowing in advance what seats are taken and if everyone booked by making one way trips it could get confusing, but why charge such a heavy premium? Is it really that necessary to have round trips, the majority of bookings, I suspect are roud trip anyway. I guess it's the bird in the hand thingee..

yet another reason NOT to use Microsoft Outlook®

link

Microsoft says people who use its Outlook program for e-mail and calendar functions need to download a patch to fix a critical problem.
The issue affects systems that are running Outlook 2002 -- part of the Office suite of applications -- along with Windows XP.
The update is available on Microsoft's Web site.
In unpatched systems, the way the program handles URLs in e-mail could allow someone without permission to run code.
Specifically, the problem deals with how the program reads "mailto" tags in HTML-format e-mail.

This is but one of the reasons myself does not use Outlook. Every hacker and wannabe hacker will write exploits for Outlook because so many people use it.

THe Big Move

So I guess the time has come to talk about some personal stuff. It seems Myself will be moving from Hawaii to Las Vegas. It's been a long time heming and hawing over it but its gonna happen. Going take a week off work in April, go up there w/ the bf, find a place to live, take an interview, put in some applications, and try and get a feel for living there. I've visited quite a few times, Las Vegas being the #1 place that people from Hawaii go to for vacation, (Myself can speculate why but that's for another post). Already gave notice at my job here, booked the plane tickets, having the movers come to check my current place out for an estimate, the works. It's a rather frightening aspect, never having lived anywhere else, leaving my very comfy gov't job of 12 years, leaving friends, family, and everything familiar, going from someplace where I know where everything is to somewhere completely new, thankfully I do have one friend in LV, Knew him when he was stationed here in the Air Force, so we will have some local knowledge to draw from. it's also exciting too, and myself is looking at this as an adventure, discovering new places meeting new people, new experiences. I realize this is going to cause a lot of stress on our relationship, but i think it can stand up to it. we've had a few rough patches over the last four years and made it through. So I will be posting progress on the BigMove and events occur, at least its an excuse for posting, which has been slacking lately, I know, I know.

So to that end. Myself gives you:

In Other News

Link

A 27-year-old lady presented with persistent cough, sputum and fever for the preceding six months. Inspite of trials with antibiotics and anti-tuberculosis treatment for the preceeding four months, her symptoms did not improve. A subsequent chest radiograph showed non-homogeneous collapse-consolidation of right upper lobe. Videobronchoscopy revealed an inverted bag like structure in right upper lobe bronchus and rigid bronchoscopic removal with biopsy forceps confirmed the presence of a condom. Detailed retrospective history also confirmed accidental inhalation of the condom during fellatio.

Sources indicate the patient was heard to say "So that's why everyone was calling me latex breath"

culling the herd

Seems like Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ may have some unexpected consequences:

link
NEW BRITAIN -- Police say that a woman drove her car into the water at A.W. Stanley Quarter Park in an apparent attempt to re-enact a scene from the movie, "The Passion of the Christ."
An anonymous New Britain police received an anonymous call early Saturday morning that a woman had driven a Chevrolet Lumina into the brook at A.W. Stanley Quarter Park. Police said the driver, whose name has not been released, is in her 40s, married, and has children.
"She drove her vehicle partly off the bank. Just the front of the car was in the water," said Sgt. Darren Pearson. "According to the officers on the scene, she told them she was attempting to reenact a scene from the movie, ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ which she said she had recently seen."
The woman was taken to the hospital for evaluation, but apparently escaped injury, police said.
Pearson said no charges will be filed.
Although police could not say which specific scene motivated the woman, they believe she was attempting to be baptized.

also this:

CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- A woman died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday while watching the climactic crucifixion scene in "The Passion of the Christ" at a morning showing in Wichita, Kansas, a television station reported.

The film was stopped and a nurse in attendance went to the woman's side, KAKE-TV in Wichita reported.

"It was the highest emotional part of the movie," a spokeswoman for the station said. A crew from the station was at the special showing, which was sponsored by the ClearChannel Radio chain.

in other news:

A 27-year-old lady presented with persistent cough, sputum and fever for the preceding six months. Inspite of trials with antibiotics and anti-tuberculosis treatment for the preceeding four months, her symptoms did not improve. A subsequent chest radiograph showed non-homogeneous collapse-consolidation of right upper lobe. Videobronchoscopy revealed an inverted bag like structure in right upper lobe bronchus and rigid bronchoscopic removal with biopsy forceps confirmed the presence of a condom. Detailed retrospective history also confirmed accidental inhalation of the condom during fellatio.
via Tbogg

what started out as a bit of civil disobedience, is beginning to spread into a nationwide issue. First San Francisco on Valentine's Day, no yet, then it continued, for a week! Why can't you get an activist judge when you need em? grumble grumble, oh yeah, because they're all for it! Vermont, Hawaii, New Mexico, New York, Mass. Its on all the network news, the talk shows, President endorses the FMA. Myself says, I just want to go about with my daily stuff, have a good job, be with the one you fall in love with, and have one or, three really good friends, and live happily ever after. you know, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

approaching weekend

also is bringing a heavy storm, rain, 40+mph winds, maybe clearing sunday, and unfortunately, my bf's friend is visiting from San Diego this weekend, where she also just left a pretty bad storm. bad timing fo her visit.

do it once do it twice

it appears that the University of Hawaii professors may be going on strike...again:

HONOLULU -- University of Hawaii students are worried about the possibility of a walkout by professors as the union announced it will deliver a strike notice to the state Monday.

...snip

UH professors went out on strike three years ago for two weeks and students remember that. Now, UH faculty members have reportedly voted 92 percent to turn down the university's salary offer.

"We have pretty much come to the conclusion that zero (percent increase in the first year) and two (percent increase in the second year) will not make it," said Lynn Yankowski professor at Maui Community College.

Now the notice to strike is a procedural formality, saying we reserve the right to strike if negotiations break down. That being said Myself finds it a sorry state of affairs that University professors have to resort to this is order to get a fair wage, the state is, of course, saying that there is no money to be had for raises, and the union, of course, deosn't believe that. Now this may be premature as a settlement can still be reached, but does the state want to be the laughing stalk of the nation again? There is also the bigger question of wether univsity professors should be unionized in the first place, which myself thinks is an uncommon thing among state run colleges, but nevertheless that's the situation.

I'm sure you've heard of what's been happening in SanFrancisco over the valentines day weekend. So being that Myself has a personal interest in all of this, here's my 2¢ worth. Firstly I'm all for it, Marriage, civil union, call it whatever you want it's just a word. I am going to go around and say: Hi this my civil-union-partner. Cmon it going to be husband.nor will anyone, for that matter say: "hey didja hear Jon and Bob got a civil-union?" And I further don't care of any church recognizes it, Myself is more concerned what the civil/legal/financial benefits are. Words change before the 70's the word "party" was a noun and only a noun. Cocktail party, political party, party of five. What began as slang usage of the word party as a verb as in "let's party" eventually became so mainstream that it was incorprated as a regular definition. Think the word "byte" was in the dictionary in 1970? A computer science dictionary maybe, but Websters? no way. Dictionaries change to accomodate societal usage not the other way around. Marriage is just a word. Slippery slope? When there is a big enough advocacy for polygamy, incest, man on dog, as there is for gay marriage, then sure why not, but don't hold your breath. The only thing Myself is not so keen on is making this a key issue right here, right now, because equal rights is an inevitability the way things have progressed, in 10-15 years this would have been a non-issue, but today there is going to be a backlash that might not turn out so good. polls show that people under 30 overwhelmingly support gay marriage but those 50+ overwhelmingly oppose it. If we just wait it out we will eventually get there. But there are those who see this as an opportunity, don't want to wait or can't wait for whatever reason so the struggle is on. We have had to fight and struggle for every little bit of equality, tolerance and acceptance we have gained, this one is going to be the toughest.