Face the Book

I signed up with Facebook recently. I'm still exploring it, to see if I really need it. The last thing I need to spend time on is something made for teens or singles looking for fun. It seems to be overwhelming. Kinda like Blogger, it has tons of apps one can add to the homepage. Perhaps too many. It has a great way to look up people you know and infect them with Facebook. Uh, I mean "invite them to Facebook." Perhaps more later...

Titan Attacks

Help! I'm addicted to Titan Attacks!

Well, it's not that bad, but I do have a weak side when it comes to video games. It all started with the console game Space Invaders. I first got exposed to it when I first came to the U.S. as a teen. As a new immigrant and a kid, with little money to spare, I played it only a few times, possibly at the arcade place near Mott St. and Bowery in Chinatown. Years later when I owned the Amiga computer, I played a lot with the clone called Amoeba Invaders. Unfortunately, in later Amiga computers, the game no longer worked, possibly because of different chip architecture. As a Mac owner, my search for a clone of Space Invaders has gotten nowhere until when I stumbled upon Titan Attacks.

The initial waves in Titan Attacks resemble Space Invaders but after a few waves the game is mostly different. Other than avoiding enemies' bullets, you should collect goodies as they fall from the sky. Some power-ups are immune to your bullets but other you must be careful not to blast them apart. At the end of each wave, you get the chance to buy shield, gun power, extra bullets, etc., depending on how much money you've gotten.

At $20 I think the game is a great investment. Going for a retro feel, the game doesn't have eye-popping graphics or heart-pumping rock music, but you get a lot out of the game. As long as you have enough shield, you can survive many enemy blasts. With the original Space Invaders, one blast and your current live is gone. I'm not that good a player and yet so far I've made it to level 30 something out of 100. My favorite power-up so far is add-on, a laser gun to go with your blaster, although it cost 2000 monetary units. I've learned that as long as I don't overspend on shield or other power-ups, I can save enough to get the laser add-on.

I cannot help but compare Titan Attacks to Jets 'N Guns. While JNG has great graphics and music, at $35 it's a waste as I never finish any levels other than the first one. What's the use of boasting x levels of beautiful graphics when I can never get past level one?

Titan Attacks is available in demo mode. Gameplay is the same as the real version, the only difference is that whenever you die, you are taken to the Puppy Games web site and prodded to buy the game. You can just close the web browser and start a new game. I was tempted to keep playing the demo and use the "interference" as an intermission. In the end, I decided to support the small Mac developers by buying software that I enjoy. I can always go cold turkey if I feel I spend too much time on the game.

Family Camping

I had a unique experience last night. For whatever reason, my son loves to sleep in a tent or some kind of crude shelter. At home he would use sofa seats and cushions to build his own "club." He would barely have enough room in the club to sit upright and any movements would put him outside the club, but he enjoyed playing club very much. Finally, last night his wish of sleeping in a tent was realized.

My family joined a few other families in the Family Camping program offer by the NYC Urban Park Rangers. Everything was free, all it took was a phone call to the Rangers' phone system. The site was the Alley Pond Adventure Park in Queens, New York.

The evening started with a BBQ dinner (hot dogs, burgers, and soda/water.) Each family was assigned a tent. I thought the tent would require driving short metal stakes into the grass and making fancy knots with the ropes. Fortunately, it was much easier than that. Two flexible rods served as the spine for the tent. Fit the rods' ends to pre-set holes attached to each of the four corners and the tension in the rods had the tent free-standing in no time. After all the tents were setup, we were treated to a campfire on the grill. (Park regulation prohibited making fire on the ground.) We were provided graham crackers, marshmallows, and slabs of chocolates to make our own s'mores. Making the perfectly toasted marshmallow had to be an art achieved with practice, as most of the marshmallow either caught fire or became blackened. At around ten we headed out on the hike. It was indeed a special opportunity as the park was closed. It was probably not safe to wander alone at night in the forest. Harms can come either naturally or from criminal elements. J had always been afraid of the dark, so he had his flashlight on all the time during the hike. We didn't see any night creatures because of the flashlights in the group. The ground wasn't always even, so it was better to miss the chance to see nocturnal creatures instead of tripping over some root. At the end of the hike, the Rangers wanted to give us a chance to gaze at the night sky through a movable telescope, but it was a new scope and they didn't know how to assemble it. Instead, we went to sleep a little earlier. For our family of three, we only had two sleeping bags, so I slept on a piece of foam cushion. Thanks to the years of living in Viet Nam and the months of living in the refugee camp in Indonesia, sleeping in a tent on the ground wasn't that bad for me. I had cramps in the feet some hour in the night, but that could have come from having my son pinning the feet with his body. According to my wife, most of the time J rolled onto her side of the tent, maybe because of the slope in the campground. Throughout the night, Rangers park employees in pair took turn staying up to be on guard while we enjoyed our sleep. What service!

The next morning I got up around 6:30 because I thought that was when we had to get up. It turned out 7:30 would have been OK. Supposedly, we had to be out of there at 8. Breakfast of yogurt and OJ was served, but we missed it when we came back from brushing our teeth. Again, I didn't mind the odor in the park's public restroom, but the others in my camping party did and brushed outside the bathroom.

The experience is probably not much of a big deal for someone who camped out for real in the wild. Throughout the night, I could here airplanes flying overhead and cars zooming on the nearby Grand Central Parkway. For me, however, it was a great experience. I did go camping with a Vietnamese youth group before, but I think I slept in the car. To have employees of the City cook for us, lend us tent, provide materials for s'mores, lead us on hike, and so on, it made me feel better paying my taxes. Had we camped on Friday night, in the morning (Saturday), we could even join a demonstration of wall and rope climbing, although I doubt I am in good shape to do either.

The only minor quibble I have with the camping program was the lack of info on the web about it. The Department of Parks only said that it was held in Zone 1 of the park and provided a general map of the place. I had the wrong idea that the Adventure Park was near the Alley Pond Environmental Center, but in fact the two are separated by three exits on the Cross Island Expressway. The entrance to the park is right underneath the Grand Central Parkway and looks more like an entrance ramp to the Parkway. Most people may thought so and keep going past it. When we visited the Rangers in their office to say farewell and thank-you, we got some brochures and flyers about the program. Those literatures have the proper driving directions etc., but the web site seriously need to provide better info.

Board Games in Playground

I recently visited the house of a cousin on the wife's side, in New Jersey. As typical of the suburban Jersey homes, the house has a big backyard. Even better, Cousin left the yard unfenced so that the kids in the adjacent houses were free to roam about the combined yards. It was nice and left me again thinking of someday moving out of crowded Brooklyn. However, lately something I saw on Fridays at Columbus Park in Chinatown made me feel better about living in the big city.

My son still has music class on Fridays. With the extra daylight hours and no Boyscout meeting to rush home for, after music class I normally take him to Columbus Park to let him roam about. Lately, the Department of Parks has some program whereby they provide board games and other equipments for the kids to play with. There was Connect Four and a bunch of other board games to suit every kid's taste. For the artistic ones, there were paper and markers and such. It was nice to see my son mingle with other kids to explore the various playthings provided. On different Fridays, my son would play with different kids at the park. Only in the big city, with many people squeezed into apartments, would you find such programs to bring people together. I should also note that Cousin had to give up taking her kids into Manhattan for music class because it was too much of a hassle to drive into the city on weekends, but there was no qualified music teacher in Jersey.

Congestion Pricing and Telecommuting

It's good to be able to work from home. Up to now, I have been mostly apathetic about Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. The plan will charge extra money on drivers who enter Manhattan at certain hours below 86th Street. Proponents say that it will succeed because more people will consider taking mass transportation, but opponents claim that NYC's mass transit is already overtaxed. As I don't drive during the week, or actually rarely drive into Manhattan during the week, and my work hours is 10 to 7, I don't see too many people on the train, so either way it doesn't affect me directly. However, according to a recent Metro article (http://www.readmetro.com/show/en/NewYork/20070709/1/1), part of the congestion pricing plan will include expansion of telecommuting program. Purely from my techie point of view, telecommuting is the answer to all this urban congestion. Surely not everyone will be able to handle telecommuting, such as people who need physical contacts with clients or those who are technically-challenged. For the rest of us, we should be given the choice. I already enjoy the benefit of telecommuting and would love to see it used more widely, just because I think it's a great practice to have. Of course it's easy to abuse the privilege but let's handle that case by case. Too often advances in data transfer ends up costing U.S. workers their jobs. It's time to make use of technology to benefit the U.S. workers.

Russell Pedersen Playground Re-visit

It is nice to work from home. Yesterday, in the morning Wife took Son to Tae Kwon Do practice then to a friend's house. Then they decided to go to some playground and asked if I could come. Luckily, it was already late in the afternoon. I started the day early so it was almost time to go. About an hour later I was done with work, and already home. No commuting. No taking the PATH to Hoboken to wait around for a long time before the train would go toward 33rd Street. It's probably about five minutes in Hoboken, but altogether, from the time taking the train from Pavonia to Hoboken, sit there and wait, then finally head toward 33rd Street, it always feel like a long time. Of course, you would need to catch the train at the right time, otherwise you would have to wait another twenty minutes for the next train. With telecommuting, as soon as the computer shuts down, I'm done with work.

The place turned out to be Russell Pedersen Playground in Bayridge. I already took Son and cousins there last year. It has plenty of parking space, usable restroom, a set of bars and beams suitable for Olympic competition, and of course it shares the block with Fort Hamilton High School, so the track is nice. I actually ran 2 miles on the track, 1 mile followed by a rest then another mile. After a while, everyone was hungry so we all went to Eighth Avenue's Chinatown for dinner at some Malaysian place. If I had to work in the office, at most I would join the group late at the restaurant instead of having all that quality time outside.

iGoogle

Making so-called homepages out of the various services offered by a search engine is nothing news. Yahoo! may have been the first to offer the option. It's nice to have in one browser window all the links you normally access through various bookmarks, yet somehow I never bothered with it.

By chance, I came across Google's iGoogle service. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if the Gmail preview gadget can circumvent the firm's blockage of webmail. And indeed it can! It's still just a preview, as trying to open any messages would surely bring up the tsk-tsk message, "Thou shalt not read personal webmail at work". Still, it's nice to see what's in one's Gmail inbox. Theoretically, if there's a message that I really want to read, I can access it on my cell phone - no, it's not an iPhone, I wish. Not that I know for sure that would work. I sent email from my cell phone before but never bother with surfing the web with it. It probably costs a few bucks to squint at web sites on the little cell phone screen.

My iGoogle has a theme, nature, I believe, gas prices, news, calendar and time, joke-of-the-day, and weather. The contents are really just Google Gadgets so you have an almost endless source of things to populate your homepage with.

ATPM 13.07

Issue 13.07 of the online magazine ATPM has been out, at last. I took on a bigger role with this issue by trying to come up with a cover image but things didn't work as I expected. Originally, I used 3D Maker to try to make a flapping flag with the word ATPM on the flag. It didn't quite work, not to mention the end result was a QuickTime movie, which was difficult to incorporate into the magazine. I went to plan B and, still going with the flag theme, this time it was the U.S.A. flag with stars replaced by the ATPM blue apple. On the foreground, I superimposed the word ATPM as a running sparkler - actually an animgif made from PersonalPaint. I like to make use of old technology where possible and thought this would be a perfect chance to use PersonalPaint on the Amiga, or rather in Amiga emulation mode on the Windoze PC. Alas, PersonalPaint's bitmapped technology didn't translate well into the modern world. The animgif may be fine but the still image was too jaggied for the ATPM editors to tolerate. There's so much PersonalPaint could do, or rather there was only so much time I could devote to exploring it. I couldn't find a way to anti-alias the jaggies and kerning had to be done manually. To make the letters more prominent, I would have to enlarge the image and doing so would exacerbate the issue with the jaggies. In the end, Lee Bennett, one of the Photoshop experts in the ATPM staff, re-did the cover image completely in Photoshop. I still got the credit for the concept but it was Lee and his friend who saved the day. It was mere days before the publication date, but thanks to delay to include iPhone coverage, Lee had a few extra hours to do his magic.

iWait

Last Friday, after dropping off my son at his music class, I walked about half a mile from Chinatown to SoHo to take a few shots of the iPhone frenzy outside the Apple Store. Lately, I've developed an interest in producing panoramas without the hardware, i.e. without a panoramic camera or lens. The picture above was made from four separate photos. I've learned that panoramas can be made more easily and more convincing if the individuals photos don't have objects in perspective. I actually took a total of six pictures but couldn't use the first two as they wouldn't blend well. Because of the building entrance (near the center of the photo), the long line of prospective iPhone owners was broken up shortly it rounded the corner. I got too easily discouraged and didn't snap more pictures. Perhaps I'll make up for it by capturing the Leopard release in October. Instead of my measly camera phone, I'll bring along a bona fide digital camera.

The panorama was put together using Photoshop Element's Photomerge feature. It did a pretty decent job, even if I had to manually place two photos. I tried other dedicated panoramic software, namely HuginOSX (open source) and DoubleTake (shareware), but didn't quite get it. HuginOSX looks totally incomprehensible to me, while DoubleTake, although raved about by a few bloggers, didn't work well with the set of photos I threw at it. It could be because of my photos.

Berhala Revisited

I showed my son the drawing I made of Berhala and told him that it was a beautiful island, with beach, palm trees, and so on. He mistakenly thought we were there for vacation and said he wanted to visit it some day. I had to elaborate and explained that we were there as refugees, with little food to eat and lacking many basic needs, like electricity and running water.

The drawing was made on a dry erase board so eventually I had to wiped it away. That's why I scanned it into the computer. The digital copy will be THE original. J decided to reproduce my handiwork on paper. He did a decent job, too. I did tell him about a doctor who for some reason built his own little cave on the mountain. He remembered that piece of detail and showed the house on the mountain on the left. He even made sure the two public toilets were there. He went further and added a rowboat with the oars outside. I am glad to know he has inherited his drawing skill from me.

Google Docs Redux

I originally played around with Google Docs just to see if it can really someday replace Microsoft Office. I'm among those who love to see Microsoft's monopoly be broken to bring them down. I hoped that Google Docs would succeed one day, but didn't see how that would come about.

Recently, I have the idea of trying to collaborate with my siblings on documenting our journey from Viet Nam to the U.S. Lots of time when we get together, the talk would gravitate to how we managed to survive the boat trip out of Viet Nam, the living condition on the various Indonesian islands served as refugee camps, and our early days in America. Naturally, as we got older the details got murkier. So, before we all become senile, we decided that we should write it all down. Easy said than done. Surely, I can type up something, and I believe I did write it in my PDA. But then one of my sisters live in another state and can only visit us once a year at most. We need a mean for us to collaborate over the Internet and Google Docs is the answer.

My out-of-state sister already has a Google account so it was easy to send her an invitation to our Great American Novel that I've started. I'll just have to help my other sister and my brother open a Google account and then it's all up to them to contribute to the project.

The project will have details like exact dates, or as exact as we can recall, and other personal info, so it's highly unlikely I'll ever publish it for the general public to see. It'll remain a personal project for the four of us to read/edit. No need to give all those crooks on the Internet additional info.

However, from time to time, I'll share some snippets like the one below. Refer to the picture above for the physical features of Berhala Island as described in the text.

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Of all the Indonesian islands that we stayed at, to me Berhala is probably the most memorable. It was the first island that we had a place to call home. We were lucky to bump into Grandaunt Luck, whose family was scheduled to be moved to Galang. Instead of selling the hut that they've built for themselves, they let us have it for free. It wasn't much of a home, but there was a front yard with a well to draw water from, a wooden bed for us to sleep on, a shower, and a kitchen area. Everything was made of some forms of woods and coconut leaves covered the roof and the "walls".

The hut was in a dead end street. A few times native Indonesians who wandered into the cul-de-sac would pretend to be visiting and stand around and engage us in broken English. Broken English on both sides, of course, because we ourselves only had a year of English before leaving Viet Nam.

Not too far from us was a stretch of sandy beach that, on the left (if you face the ocean), led back to the boat landing area. Unlike the neighboring Letung Island, Berhala was too small and insignificant to have its own dock. Rowboats would just beach themselves to let the passengers off, then the rower would push the boat back into the water and hop on the boat as the boat reached deeper water. To the right of the beach is one of the two mountains on the island. One time, along with a few other kids of the same age, I went all around both mountains. The mountain nearer to our hut, in whose shadow we lived, ended at the public toilet facing the Tulai Island. I'll arbitrarily call this toilet #2. There's a smaller stretch of beach there, but with the public toilet right there, I doubt if anyone ever bother to wade into the water. The second mountain started where the short beach ended and ended at the other public toilet, the one that faced Letung Island. Again, I arbitrarily assign the #1 designation to this toilet. Somewhere between the toilet #1 and the boat landing was an underwater walkway. On low tide, adults and teenagers could walk from Berhala to Letung. At the deepest point, the water was up to my chest. Back then I had to be already at least five feet tall. I used that walkway at least once. The island's natural beauty was pretty much intact and I was able to see the coral underwater in many places along the walk.

Crossword Express

It's been more than a week already and I still don't have the offer for the File & Print job. I guess I'll just have to wait for the bureaucrats to do their bureaucratic business.

So a few months ago, I had a renewed interest in doing crossword puzzles. Naturally, I wanted to make them myself. It's one thing to do them and it's quite another to make them. Years ago when I first started playing the puzzle and wanted to make them, I found it to be very difficult. Making the classroom puzzles, in which the shape of the puzzle is not a square and words are not continuous, with one-letter boxes with no definitions allowed, is easy. Making newspaper style where there's a symmetry to the puzzle, with the shortest word length of three, is much harder. I recall buying a DOS crossword maker on 5.25" floppy disk. I even filled out some form, wrote a paper check, mailed the whole thing in, and waited a few weeks for the ware to arrive. I do not recall ever trying the software seriously. I don't know what happened then, I was a single guy with an undemanding job, with no family and few other responsibilities.

Flash forward to the year 2007. This time around I need a Mac program to make the puzzle. There are not that many choices, really. Again, to make classroom puzzles there are a few choices, but I can even use online program like http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/CrissCrossSetupForm.html , no need to spend any money. My search ended with Crossword Express OS X (cwe OS X). While the interface is somewhat awkward and not pretty, it's a strong program that allows for customized dictionaries in addition to standard ones. Choose an existing grid or make your own, plug in some words that you want to be included with their definitions, then cwe OS X will fill in the rest for you. For my purpose, I needed to make a puzzle that includes words about my office life, the CNA exam, and computing in general. I entered the relevant terms and definitions into three separate dictionaries, then used cwe OS X's Construct Special Interest Puzzles feature to make the puzzle. I chose my three custom dictionaries as three sources for the program to draw words from, then whatever open is filled with words drawn from the English dictionary. cwe OS X actually can handle up to four custom dictionaries. If I had more time, I would have created a dictionary just for words related to the Mac.

The puzzle below, printed to poster size, is the current occupant of the whiteboard I usually decorated with my cartoons. I had much fun making up the definitions. For example, "You should get yours up-to-date" is the clue for RESUME. I'm not sure if the acronym PODS made it in, but I know I define it as "It's supposed to help you plan your career, if you are still here a year from now." PODS is the web-based tool to carry out performance review, which in my opinion is just a waste of time. Ideally, the puzzle should be about 21x21 in size and not have one-letter, undefined "word". Unfortunately, such puzzle would contain very few references to the three custom dictionaries. If I have more time, I would define more terms for the custom dictionaries, perhaps then 21x21 puzzle would be better. For now, I have to be content with this Huge gride and the many one-letter undefined words.

For security purpose, I've Photoshopped the picture that represents the puzzle and clues to not have some references to corporate info.

Ten-Point Rubber Band Star

top-of-the-arch

When I made my first million through Blogger and Google AdSense, my eldest sister wants to get into the act, too. Her blog is at http://top-of-the-arch.blogspot.com , has been raking in tons of money ever since. I simply don't know how she does it...

Seriously, no one I know has become millionaires with Blogger and AdSense. However, it is true my sister has a blog at the link mentioned. Her jumping on the blogging wagon was indeed influenced by my blog. She was already writing regularly for the local media and was thinking of having her own web site to promote her writing, so blogging, for free via Blogger, was the sensible next step.

Whereas my blog entries are not long but more frequent, sis' are long and entered weekly, but very detailed. Armed with Wikipedia and other meatspace reference materials, her entries give her adoring fans exact names and dates, background info etc. Especially when it comes to contact sports. Sis loves football and hockey, plus a dozen other sports. Once in a while, she also sprinkles in a story or two about our early days in the U.S., so if you don't get enough about my early days on U.S. soil, you can get the same story from a different perspective. There were stories that I didn't know at all, whereas there were others that I had an idea of. I suppose if I am her younger sister, we could have a heart-to-heart sister-to-sister chat, but such as the case, I'll just get the story a nugget at a time through her blog.

Do visit top-of-the-arch and click on those context sensitive ads to help finance my sister's goal of seeing the home games of all thirty NHL teams. It'll be a treat if you share her passion for sports, but I'm sure there are other stories you may find interesting.

Google Street View

I love maps. It might had started when I took English class in Viet Nam, in preparation for our eventual departure from Viet Nam as boat people. The English class was actually just the living room of a neighbor. There was a big table in the center but perhaps because there were too many students I found myself most of the time seated at a desk in the same room. Under a clear sheet of glass on the desk was a world map. When I was bored or didn't feel like following the class, I would read the map. The one year of English class we had really helped us later on as we settled in the U.S., but for me I also learned a lot about world geography.

I've used Google Maps from time to time, either online in a web browser or from the Mac app (Google Earth). Google Maps was recently improved with the introduction of Street View. Let's say you plan to travel to some city and want to have a view of the place at street level. With Street View, you can pick the location and have a 360-degree view of the location, as if you are standing there. Not 100% like being there, as the views are usually from the middle of the block and at the intersections, but it's still good. Right now, Street View doesn't cover every street there are, but I suppose that will change. In my neighborhood, so many family houses have been razed to make room for condos. It would be nice to have the old views saved via Street Views for posterity.

Street View is an issue for privacy advocates. In the news, it was mentioned that some pictures in Street View showed a man picking his nose, protests at abortion clinic, homeless people, etc. For me, as a dweller of a big city, that's just the typical street scene, but I can imagine it can be a big deal for people from smaller towns. Google does offer an easy way to report any offending pictures. I wonder if Google already has an army of Photoshop experts to doctor the images to remove the offending elements. Or would they just have the photographers re-visit the locations?

The Tooth, The Whole Tooth, Nothing But The Tooth

My son lost his first baby tooth while we were on vacation in China this past April. It came out relatively painlessly. J is very afraid of pain so after many days after the baby tooth got loose, he still didn't want to force it out. Then the adult tooth reared its head and it was time for the baby tooth to go. J came up with a plan himself - eat an apple while watching a movie. We just picked up in Guang Zhou a whole season of Ultraman Dyna on VCD, so that was the movie of choice. I had to play around with our relative's Windoze XP PC to have the movie play just right. So J enjoyed his movie and nibbled on the apple every now and then... and poof, it actually happened. The tooth came out, stuck to the apple. J bled a little bit but otherwise there was no problem. Whew! That night he put the baby tooth under his pillow and I got to play tooth fairy. I slipped him $20 U.S., which he gave to Mommy for his college fund.

This week a second baby tooth broke off, but it took a lot more effort. The first apple didn't work, neither did the second apple. It was so loose that it could be bent at a 90-degree angle. I let J use a dental floss but that only made the gum bleed. I joked with J about using more drastic measures, like tying one end of the string to the tooth with the other end to a window then slam the window down, but it only got him upset. This kid has no sense of humor when it comes to his physical pain. Finally, during some activities at Boy Scouts on Friday, the tooth came out by itself. J saved it in his shirt pocket and again slipped it under his pillow at night. I happened to have only a $5 bill on me so that was all he got. The next morning, he found the fiver and remarked, "Hey, only $5, but not bad." What a joy to be a kid...

Rolling Hill?

Tech Reviewer?

In Vietnamese, there's a saying that goes something like "When you are full, others invite you to dinner." Over the past few months, I have been actively involved with ATPM.com as copy editor and software reviewer. There is no money to be made, but I do it as a way to support the Mac platform, but I've learned a few things new about the Mac, too. A few days ago, through ATPM I got a lead on a job opening with a book publisher. The publisher is coming out with a Mac book and needs someone to review it for technical accuracy. The position's title is Tech Reviewer and while the money may not be that much, it's definitely something I would enjoy doing. One thing may lead to another and this gig may be a way into other technical writing/reviewing jobs.

Ever since college, I've discovered that I enjoy writing technical documents. At my various jobs since then, I was usually the technical writer for the place. Especially with the current job, my Knowledge Base in Lotus Notes is the source of tips and tricks for many colleagues. The great thing with Lotus Notes is that it's easy to send a link to the knowledge base entry, or if whole article is needed, all it takes is a Forward. When I first started my job search a few months ago, one of the first job I applied to was a Technical Writer job with Google, right here in NYC. Unfortunately, my resume didn't catch the hiring manager's attention. Perhaps with more experience with this publisher, and hopefully others, I'll have a better chance when Google has another job opening for a technical writer.

While I may not get this technical reviewer position because there are others in ATPM who may be vying for it, combined with my prospective job in the File and Print department at my current job, it's all good news.

183 - Omega Up

It's pretty obvious that our jobs as Network Account Administrators will not last long. All around us group by group lost their jobs to either MomBye or Columbus. As people in our group bail out early for greener pasture elsewhere, their vacancies are not filled. Naturally, we have to put in overtime yet upper managers have to ask our manager why there has been so much overtime hours in the past few weeks. Doh!

The story inspired me to imagine the scenario in this cartoon. It sort of harks back to my school days, Engineering School to be exact. We learned lots of formulas and equations. I made this one up about work accomplished in the office. To make the formula look more authentic, engineering-like, I used some Greek letters, ß (beta) instead of B and Ω (omega) instead of O. O can be easily misread as zero anyway.

Way back when I first started drawing cartoons at work, I drew one in the style of The Far Side. It's been a while and it's time to re-visit The Far Side. The characters didn't all turn out like what I envisioned, but I think the kid with the hand raised and the woman look genuine enough.

CNA Cold Feet

I had a third study session with my CNA buddies and even though it was somewhat better, I don't think I am ready for the big day. Originally, I scheduled an exam date of May 25 only because I thought I would have to take it before May 31. It turned out that there was no such deadline. The exam that we took the course for, #677, was scheduled to be retired May 31 and it's not offered any more any way. We are allowed to take exam #686 and that one expires in August. Still in the immediate future, but not as close as May 31. So, with mandatory OT and other things going on, I sure can use two extra weeks to prepare for the exam. I already re-scheduled the exam for June 8.

In other career-related news, a server admin in the File and Print group recently submitted his resignation. He is a good friend of mine and had recommended me as a possible replacement. This is the third time someone in another department quit and told me about the opening. I cannot remember what happened with the first instance, but with the second chance, even though the departing person thought I could hack it, in the end the manager just hired some consultant for the job. This time around, the manager in the other department actually asked for my resume then told me the job posting number. He even said, "We still have to go through the process." Does that mean that had there been no process, I would have gotten the job already? The idea of moving to another department and doing server work is exciting. It'll definitely look good on my resume. No doubt about it, even if I get the job, there's no guarantee MomBye will leave me alone. They can always put some guy in MomBye to remotely administer the servers in the U.S. Hopefully, there'll be a salary increase and I will get to keep my hours, which is not 9-5 or M-F.