Strange Days

To follow up on the last post, I’ve been offered a job as a web page devel­oper at kodak.com. This is a mixed bless­ing. I’m very glad to have a job, how­ever this is some­thing that I’ve tried to spend the last few years dis­tanc­ing myself from. How­ever, if I don’t take it I basi­cally quit and don’t get the same ben­e­fits as the folks who got laid off. I do feel guilty that there are other people who are cur­rently web page devel­op­ers who have lost their jobs. I’m taking one of thier spots and that doesn’t sit too well.

Emo­tions are very fluid here right now.

We’ve found out about our jobs. I have one, though it’s going to be dif­fer­ent than my cur­rent job. A lot of people have not been as lucky. I just don’t have words for any of this right now.

all’s fair in love and war

Lots of news a poppin’ on other folk’s blogs. Julia and Matt are get­ting mar­ried. Cindy’s preg­nant. And Heather has started spar­ring! Hmmm…. which one of these things is not like the other?

As for me… not too much to report. Tomor­row (Tues) all the folks at kodak.com find out if we have jobs or not. No matter what hap­pens, it’s going to be a rough time.

oh my achin’ butt

The plus side to good work outs is that your feel great about your­self. The down­side is how stiff you are after­wards. I’m feel­ing the last two nights in my arms, my stom­ach, my legs, my every­thing. And the more I learn, the less I know. Ulti­mately, the more I real­ize that I still need to work on my foun­da­tion techniques.

oh my achin’ body

Last night was a great mar­tial arts night. I banged from roughly 5.30pm – almost 10.00pm. Part of the fun was I got to learn more of the broad sword form. But more impor­tantly also was able to employ a few things I’ve been work­ing on while spar­ring (that’s empty hand sparring… we’re not going after each other with broad swords… not yet at least). Some days its really easy to forget how far I’ve come since I started with Sifu Mark. But yes­ter­day I could just feel it. I was able to inter­grate stuff that I couldn’t do even a few months ago. And that’s a great feel­ing. When ever you can acknowl­edge progress do it! It just helps with so much.

Right now the house smells like cook­ies. I’m fin­ish­ing off my entries in kodak.com’s Cook­iepolooza. These should have been done last night, but I ended up going back to work after I got out of class and stay­ing there far too late. Oh well. I’ll be in by 10.00am and I’m plan­ning on stay­ing late again today.

you got to wonder

So I got this note in my e-mail que last week…

————————————————————————-

From: blue16@hotmail.com

To: rockOn_Matt@yahoo.com

Sub­ject: Boom..

Hi again :)) Where are you? Don’t you chat any more? I haven’t

seen you so long.. Well, I’ve got a lot to tell you about. The

Summer vaca­tion was too good to be true. Beach, disco’s, friends..

Unfor­tu­nately, it’s Winter now and the tem­per­a­tures here are very

low. I was ill almost 2 weeks. Quite unpleas­ant :(( Let’s talk

about you :) Are you oK? Are you in love :)) I sent you a surprise :))

There are cool thoughts, espe­cially about love. It’s nice. I’m a

little bit bored of these stupid com­put­ers, but I’m wait­ing for

the reply :)) Bye!

Attach­ment: PcDudes3D.exe .exe file

————————————————————————-

Gee, do you think I was sur­prised when I scanned “PcDudes3D.exe” and found it was a virus. All of this led me to wonder about spam­mers and if people really fall for this. Are there a people out there who react to a note like this in the fol­low­ing way “Oh look, it’s a note from a friend who I can’t remem­ber and has ter­ri­ble gram­mar. And they’re man­aged to tell me absolutely noth­ing to help me under­stand who they are and how they know me. And look he’s sent me a pro­gram that sounds like it con­tains gay porn… let me down­load that right now…”? Sadly, I know there are people out there who must do exactly that. These are the same people who don’t under­stand why you need fire­wall soft­ware. And these are the same people who wonder why their com­puter is always break­ing down. And these are the same people who are prob­a­bly still wait­ing for their payout from the Niger­ian Treasury.

For gig­gles I sent the fol­low­ing note back to him:

“Thanks dude! Great to hear from you again. I tried the soft­ware. It rocked! Please send more…”

Any bets on if I’ll get a return note?

bits

Hmm… Midnight… I con­tinue my streak of late night post­ings. My body’s pretty tired so I’m hoping that I’m about to crash. I didn’t work out too hard this evening. In fact I spent most of the night clean­ing and talk­ing to friends and catch­ing up on buffy… [note: there will no long, slightly dis­turb­ing, stalk­er­ish rants about a cer­tain actress who shall go name­less. I have to admit that it's kinda unsightly to do while dating. Thank you, Tina for bring­ing up my obses­sion at lunch last week.]). Anyway I think part of my non-​sleepiness is due to work­ing out too much (for what that is worth).

Speak­ing of work­ing out and Kung Fu, check out The Kwoon. Basi­cally inside of every mar­tial artist is a ham wait­ing to make it big on the big screen. These guys have pro­duced some movies that can best be described as “Bad Acting | Good Kung Fu” (actu­ally they’re pretty frank about that up front). The acting is atro­cious, the jokes lame, but the cin­e­matog­ra­phy is actu­ally rather good. And the Kung Fu (in this case mainly Hun Gar) is very good. It’s silly fun. Extra points to the person who knows what “Kwoon” means.