Off to Kansas City tomorrow for the world's fastest interview (interview wed morning at 10am, leave KC wed afternoon at 4pm, bizzare).

Dunno what to make of any of it.

It's fucking hot in Austin.

What a bizzare life I'm leading now; i used to wake up, go to the gym, go to work, come home, eat dinner, and go to bed. Now, I wake up sometime, eat some stuff, work on some things, and maybe go work at an indian restaurant for a few hours. It's a strange shift; I feel like I'm .. I dunno, living out my life. It's elapsing, like a play, or a show, or a book ..

I'm going to Kansas on Tuesday for 1.5 days to interview with Sprint PCS; not a clue what it involves, but I've always wanted to have a ranch house in Kansas with the wizard and the lion (the tin man kind of confuses me; why does he have an oil can for a head, if he needs oil?)

Jess & I made pizza tonight. And I made $60 in tips at lunch.

So there.

So yeah, uhm, I got a freelance job working at fateworks.com, implementing an already-designed UI. Would seem kind of brainless, except that some of it needs a bit of love and attention, so - its not so brainless, afterall.

So I'm off unemployment :)

Keeping the job at 'da pit, because I like the free lunch.

Also got an offer to flydown to interview at Sprint PCS in Kansas City; haven't scheduled anything yet, but I think I'll wander on down and see how much fun cell phones can be.

hmm, today is the 1 year anniversary of the first round of Trilogy layoffs; kind of silly.

Jess and I woke up early and got a lot done; we went to central market and got a whole chicken to roast in a smell-up-the-whole-house-with-culinary-delights sort of way, and she is now cleaning the house with a toothbrush, quite literally.

I'm going to spray ants with raid. It's a war, dammit; I'm taking over their socialist regime.

Rest in peace, Layne Staley.

I think I did some serious damage to my liver last night. A slow stream of alcohol, all throughout the evening. Blaphrg.

Jess & I started at Thai Passion, where we enjoyed the fastest-prepared thai food ever created. Then we walked down to River City Tattoos to see if Nick was working, but alas, he wasn't. So we headed back to The Ritz and played pool; Petro and Carrice joined us, as did Eric and Josh and Peninah. Nicely loaded, we then went to some bar that I don't know the name of, and then I woke up nicely tucked into my bed this morning.

I've just returned from my two hour long Mandatory Unemployment Can Be Fun When You Use Protection seminar, in which an overly-hyped, uneducated, front-mulleted woman named Burnadette proudly informed us of how great the resume writing seminar is, and how, if you notice on your calendar in front of you, the seminar is repeated every wednesday, but try to come on time, because the rest of the class can get restless if they have to wait for you. She proceeded to read every word on the slides to us, which used clever cartoon characters to let us know that "85% of all job searching successes are due to networking".

When the temperature in the room hit 66 degrees, and everyone was equally uncomfortable, a yinzer-ex-car-salesman explained to us that "scanning machines" are now used to distinguish resumes from one another, and if you dont watch out, the machine may misspell your name, which is a 70% problem among job seakers.

Finally, a woman spent 7 minutes explaining how she had to wear bifocals so had trouble reading and would we mind very much if she misprounounced some of our names; she then handed out a "job match", courtesy of their system (which uses an acronym, which, she happily explained, means the first letter of every word), and we were free to go.

Two hours of my life.

Finally, a good night's sleep .. it poured last night, and the rain was hypnotic; I actually feel refreshed, alive, this morning.

Zeldman's got a new article on doctype, and it's quite useful; it reminded me that all the pages on smallbear.org define their doctype wrong, linking to the relative w3c uri instead of the correct, fullpath one.

stupid mistake, easy to correct; although, interesting that the default in both Homesite and Dreamweaver is to push an invalid path ..

It doesn't matter how productive I am, really; it's not a function of the amount of things I get done, or the quality of the work. I'm arbitrarily depressed; not in the way I used to be, not that I can't wake up, can't get out of bed, and don't care.. this is different. I'm nervous, anxious; I've been having a reoccurring dream that blue gets out, escapes, falls out the window. I can't seem to sleep through the night; last night, I couldn't sleep an hour at a stretch; I'm angry, bitter, and unhappy, but minute by minute, I'm delighted and enthusiastic. Mood changes, swings, and the slightest event can push a day of sunshine into a torrid hole of grey..

It isn't depression, not like it was years ago, but I'm certainly not happy. I wonder what's causing this.

I'm falling into the routine of being mostly jobless, which is kind of a silly routine of nothingness, but I'm ok with it .. why wasn't it ok when I was doing nothing and getting paid mad loot for it?

Strange.

So I have to go to a "how to get a job" class in order to continue receiving unemployment benefits; the class meets at *hold on to your seats* 7:45 in the morning on wednesday mornings. I can't wait; I have a strange feeling it's going to be as much if not more fun than going to take the GREs.

yay me, the new version of smallbear.org is up .. there are a few pesky side affects, and i'm still figuring out what i forgot, but here it is :) i tested it in ie6, netscape6 and mozilla .. if it looks like crap in another browser, please let me know, or better yet, send me screenshots ..

oh i can't contain myself - a new, much-less-ugly version of smallbear.org is coming in a matter of days, funded solely by the United States Government!

yay for unemployment!

Jess is sewing .. She is heming my pants, all of which are too long. It's very domestic and very cute.

Shannon got his book up on amazon; it would be very nice of you to go buy me a copy. Kind of fun: "Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these items: White Trash Cooking by Ernest Matthew Mickler" .. heh. What does that say about me.

Kind of a slow sunday.

Amazing; I slept until noon.

I haven't done that since I was 15.

Yay me.

Yesterday at lunch, some freakshow asked for water without ice. Fine, whatever, some people prefer no ice. I very carefully poured the water so no ice chunks remained in her glass.

She said, "no, I would really prefer luke warm water without any ice; I don't like cold water".

Now, come on. For a $6.50 buffet, what do these people expect? She isn't at home, this isn't her living room, and I really don't give a fuck about how cold her water is.

She tipped me a dollar.

I punched her in the brain.

Why health insurance can eat a big fat one:

I was recently looking over my past dental claims at Humana's online, awful website, and stumbled upon these bizzare comments:

2/27/02 - Osha - Cost: $16.00 - Covered: $0.00 - BENEFITS ARE CONSIDERED WHEN ACTUAL TREATMENT IS RENDERED. AS STERILIZATION TECHNIQUES ARE NOT TREATMENT OF THE PATIENT, NO BENEFITS ARE ALLOWED.

If I read that correctly, and I very well may be missing something, Humana is saying that that won't pay to have something cleaned before it is used in my body (in this case, probabily the x-ray bite plate). The same kind of crap continues for things like models/casts, fluoride, etc ..

What world do I live in? This was so much easier when my mom took care of things like this.

Yay me, I have a sinus infection.

The doctor said that my sinus' (sinii?) were pushing up on my eyes and down on my teeth, causing both to hurt; they were pushing because they weren't draining as they filled with infected pus.

What a happy image.

Even happier: he gave me a mucus thinner to make them begin to drain, so I will soon be coughing up green shit.

Again, yay me.

sick .. being sick is awful. i'm such a baby and a whiner; i feel so bad for jess to have to take care of me. I wouldn't take care of me.

I've sort of tuned out of everything interesting going on in the world; for instance, I had no idea that my main source of mp3s was about to spring some silly alternate program onto my machine. Or that McDonalds is going to be using foreign cows:

"Hamburger chains typically make their patties by mixing lean beef that's no more than 10 percent fat with low-cost fat trimmings that are a byproduct of packing plants".

*puke*

I think I'm going to make a doctor's appointment, after I find out if I have insurance or not.