Archives for April 2007

Today is one of those days I wish I could phone the blog in, so to speak. Mental telepathy would be even better. Problem is, I have too many blogs. I updated the business blog with comments on Social Networking. The Move Us To Idaho blog has fallen behind. Research on Idaho shows that it is being californicated. I need to do a soapbox topic on my opinion on how to protect students in schools and maybe one on how I feel about Rosie O’Donnell (but I don’t think people will be happy with my Hitler parallels and her). It is my soapbox though.

I haven’t done a update on the search for a used car – yes we found one and I need to get the pictures of it up.

Something that I’d really like to cover is Megan’s interested in attending a 4 year college – YEAH!!! I’m really happy with the idea. I think she wasn’t interested in it at first because she was a little afraid of the unknown. After being homeschooled for 4 years, transitioning back into mainstream academia could be a little frightening. But she’s afraid to talk to her father about it – it’s another money thing. There already is a precedence set for changing a course of study – D2 changed her path too.

I hope she can have a meaningful dialog with her father about this – even he has made mention of her need to attend a 4 year college.

We’ve been trying to find a used car to fill the gap after trading both of our vehicles in on the truck. That move to lower our monthly car payments. For the most part having one vehicle is working out very nicely – but we do need to have some sort of back up. Jeff’s been doing tons of online research and has found some fairly nice Volvo’s. We’ve been out and about looking at them and checking CarFax on the most of them. We found a nice one on Friday – but it had one problem, those low miles were because the Odometer wasn’t working. So much for that car.

So Jeff keeps looking and points out it’s too bad we didn’t have some place to stay in Atlanta because there are hundreds of used Volvo’s there. Oh well…..

I don’t know how to get it across to Megan, just because her father is paying her rent, paying for her car with insurance, paying her tuition and giving her a weekly “food” allowance doesn’t mean he has money to buy her curtains. She needs to understand he’s entitled to spend his money how ever he wants to, even if that means going on cruises and buying a travel trailer. She really needs to appreciate every little thing she has because it’s all been given to her.

Lord knows we never could have afforded any of this for her. For starters, we would have gotten her a used car and expected her to find a part time job to pay for the insurance.

I guess she will only learn to appreciate things when she has to work long hours at crappy jobs just to keep a roof over her head. But then there’s her father….

I had a really fun phone interview last Friday. The questioned were geared more towards finding out my personality but did have a few techie questions thrown in.

Do I consider myself to be artistic? An appropriate question for the interview. I was upfront and said that I don’t consider myself to be an graphic artist, that I’m normally work with a graphic artist or a team of graphic artists helping them make their work web friendly.

The guy interviewing me said he looked at my work and told me I was a brave soul for building a website for Big Orange fans (University of Tennessee) and living in Alabama. If you don’t live in the southeast that might not make sense but the interviewer liked it.

What are my 5 favorite movies? The Lord of the Rings and then said that counts as 3 right? He laughed. Then I mentioned Phantom of the Opera, V for Vendetta and the Shrek movies – I like the computer generation on them.

What type of music do I like? I told him I’m rather eclectic in my tests since I grew up listen to Armed Forces Radio we got everything. I figured I better not tell him I like Rob Zombie.

What was the last novel I read? I had to confess the last book I read was a tech manual.

Do I think Microsoft is evil? That one made me laugh. I explained that even though my dad raised me on Macs I realized it’s a PC world so I learned to use both.

Intermixed in these questions I was asked, What is my favorite development tool? Dreamweaver, but that I’ve used Front Page and was one of the original beta testers of the product. I also mentioned I can use Notepad as needed. He also asked if I knew anything other than HTML/CSS like PERL ect. I said while I couldn’t write javascript, php, cgi, or mivascript from the ground up I could break it and fix it.

His final question was do I consider myself a geek? LOL – I told him I’m a geekette.

I did get a follow-up call on Monday. Yes, they were looking for some one with more graphical talents even though I had all the technical skills they were wanting.