Late night musings with a mad man

It is 11:00pm, and I consider this late...what has happened to me? It wouldnt be uncommon for me to stay up to 2 or 3 each night to get back up at 8 and function fully. I find (and it really seems to be the theme of this blog, when I have the time or desire to write) that during my 'growing up' of sorts, things have drasticly changed in a matter of months. I dont know if I like the things that come with change - More on that shortly.

Change, as it is happening for me seems to touch everything within me and around me. There are the obvious things: New Job, New Place, New Living Arrangement, New Challenges, New Bills etc. For the most part these things are good, minus the bills - those suck and dealing with the utilities suck. I actualy overall find myself happy in my new situation.

Because of these things I have also gained a new insight on people and events from my life. This is where I start running into trouble and find myself unhappy. I find myself unhappy because I look to the past and see people who mean a lot to me and thats where they stay, in the past. Despite all the contact I attempt to make with old friends and co workers, all history and convorsation beyond the initial ten minute "what's new?" sticks striclty to the time before I moved on to the next part of my life. All the while since Ive moved on, it always feels like they are stuck there, rehashing the same jokes, stories, living as if the progress of time has come to a stop. I see people who still obsess over the things we used to obsess about years ago.

Is it that uncommon for people to move on? Why should I feel guilty that I went on to new things?

Adulthood?

My feelings of unemployment came to a crashing halt about a month ago as I started my new job. Working so far has been both a blast and a huge frustrating/fufilling challenge. I definatly got thrown into real work with a steep learning curve. Im getting the hang of it tho. For those of you who dont know my company is a consulting group and who does various IT consulting for different goverment groups. I work with a pretty fun team who remind me a bit of the atmosphere of TSS (nothing is sacred) but not to the full extreme of say people like leander. It was nice to get a paycheck, especialy since the bills werent waiting for them to pay me.

I have my own cube, which for a lot of people a cube sounds like a prison, but to me its a little oasis. Its my space and its private, but not so private that you cant go without talking to people. I still need to get some more things in my cube, so far I only have a plant, a photo and my ITIL certification. Whitney (http://short-stack.net/) posted something about cubecraft, which looks like it could be a lot of fun and, not to mention, cheap!

Ive found a lot of neat stuff in the town to do as well in the surrounding areas so if you are looking for a cheap vacation come on up or over, we have a guestroom, and we live next to guest parking!

Feeling unemployed

I have a job lined up, and have had it lind up since around March/April. The weird thing is, right now I feel like Im unemployed in the classical sense (not the new, recession caused sense). My start date isnt until June 15th so I hav several weeks of nothing ahead of me. I had thought that getting unpacked and settled would take a lot longer than it did. Now that we are, and the tv is set up, I feel Ive exhausted my quota for ER, Las Vegas and Law & Order repeats.

Weve spent our time finding things to do: took a drive out to where Im going to work, found the farmers market, found the local organic farmers guild/ store and resturant. But still these things only last so long.

Next week we are going out to california to visit Danielle's sister in SanFran. It should be a good trip, especialy since tickets were half price. Ive never been out that far west. I hate flying tho.

This down time has given me a lot of time to sit back and reflect an all of those who are really unemployed. For me atleast there is an end in sight. I can only imagine what its like for those with no end in sight.

Abingdon, here we..are?

Well, the last two weeks have been hectic at the least. After completing my senior project (which, has not seen the light of day on the real internet yet due to the guy who owns the domain name messing up), graduating, entertaining parents, grandparent, uncle, and future inlaws, moving two places and combining them into one super place, we are finally here and mostly settled.

I got to drive a truck up here, we rented one from budget and got the next size up for free because they didnt have any 10 footers. This was a good thing because we pretty much filled the whole 16 feet. After trucking all of danielles stuff up, I started to unload it all lazily, not really knowing where to put most of it. I noticed our water was still off, so I called around and figured that mess out (Our water company turned the meter on but forgot to hit the actual valve. I then tried to sort out our power issues (they decided that 2 phone calls from duke energy, and 2 letters that all stated that we never missed a payment or were late, was enough to waive their 300$ deposit).

Our good friend Fletus came up during the day and helped to offload most of the truck with me. It took a lot shorter amount of time to offload it than to load it up, which is kind of weird I think. Once offloaded, we began putting together all the furniture we got from Ikea, with one exception, the bed. Apparantly in our rush to get the truck away from I85 before 5pm rush hour traffic, we forgot to check for the crossbeam to the bed, meaning we couldnt sleep in it the first night. Danielle arrived later that day to help put things where they belong, then had a cookout.

Fastforward to today (nearly a week later) and all the furniture is set and we are starting to get into a routine. Its nice to have routine for the first time in a long time, itll be even nicer to finally get to start at work in a few weeks. Till then we are exploring the area and putting our last boxes of decorations up and getting the home feel going.

At first glimpse, Abigndon doesnt seem to hold a lot to do, but if you spend some time and do your research. We found a farmers market, and a grocery store that sells local produce, which is awesome! There is also a local winery which we plan on visiting, and tons of outdoors stuff too! I cant wait.

Before I can start having all that fun, I still have to do the adult things like, getting new insurance, a drivers liscense and getting bills paid and switched to this address. No fun! Im still not sure when the student loans are going to pile up on me, but its bound to be soon.

Lots of other things to talk about, but its getting late (well not really, but Im tired), so Ill post a few more, non rambly, organized posts tommorow

The future is now?

Holy crap, I graduate in 2 weeks and Im done with class in a week and 2 days. These past few weeks since spring break have shot by. My project class and strategic management classes have kept me busy and I mostly completed my paper for competition. Unfortunatly my paper was not selected to compete at the national conference in oklahoma city, but I still won an award there for submitting the best tech/geek video.

Instead of throwing that hard work out, Ill be rewritting it (this weekend to be exact) for submission in an academic journal/conference. Who knows if it will be accepted, all I know is Im ready to be done with it.

Im about 90% done with my final project, as I dumped one of the major parts of it that wernt really a requirement for our client. This just means I have to be masterful in how I state what our project really does to our professor who wasnt too pleased that we did it.

In moving news, Ive found an apartment and have applied for and paid for the deposit. Its a pretty nice place, built in 03 in Abingdon Va. After taking Danielle up there a few weeks ago, we both agree its going to be a really exciting place to be with lots of adventure to be had (you know, when Im not working my tail off).

Its just weird to think that Ill no longer be in boone by the 14th, and that Ill be living in a brand new state and starting a big boy job a few weeks later.

Twitter as a weapon

Over spring break I was at my parents place, a good time to rest, while catching up on some emails and other things Ive been neglecting as the tornado of IS project, Strategic Management and paper work came to a stop. While there, my dad worked at home for a bit, and an interesting event happened.

For those of you who don't know, twitter is an online 'micro blog.' Essentially its a blog where you update with one or two sentence updates from a text message or from the website. Its supposed to be a place where you post any profound ideas you have during the day or major successes or problems etc. However, as most people lead mundane lives, it ends up mostly being about what kind of cereal you ate that day.

Anyways, my dad, who is in charge of the North American customer support group for his company, stumbled (I have no early idea how) on a twitter account who had been complaining about the support he received in a single post. From there, he found the mans full blog which had a more in depth post about what happened (in his eyes) and how my dads support group was rude/unhelpful.

Immediately, he was off to the phones calling the guy who handled the support case. He found that the problem had been solved and was due to client wiring the product incorrectly. This information pretty much nullified the clients claims of ignorance from the support tech, but it didn't combat the problem of a negative review still sitting on the net. (The twitter account had roughly 200 followers, and the blog is a featured blog on a popular networking website.)

This is interesting, because when you have consumers using twitter like this, posting their experience, which may not be uniform, or correct, there is no real way to fight it. You cant make an account and have a twitter fight, you cant post on their blog, you cant sue, nothing. Well, you could do those things, but it wouldn't work. This can be an especially huge problem for companies (like my dads) who are not huge industry juggernauts (say like Cisco). I mean, if your company has very specific industry and product segment, and the only thing to come up on a google search for it is some guys negative review, you would be inclined to seek a competitor.

So my question to you is, what would you do if you were in this situation?

Spring Break, Seriously?!?

Next week is spring break? Where has the semester gone, seriously. Having 2 class meetings a week and 3 days of work plus all this travel has made life fly by pretty quickly. As of this weekend my big research paper will be done and sent off to be judged before competition. Hopefully getting this out of the way will give me more time to focus on some of the more fun things in life. Ive been missing a series of AITP social events in favor of working on the paper.

Big things left in the near future:
(Hopefuly) presenting paper at conference
IS Project completion
Graduation
Moving to Va. / Starting job.

The wedding of course is looming in the distant future, but we are plugging along grabbing up a DJ, photogropher and booking our honeymoon (yay!)