August 29, 2007 - Reading time: ~1 minute

... for real this time.  I came to Texas for work as a temporary sort of thing, the idea being that I would stay for three months on this contract working for NASA (via Jacobs), then come home to Atlanta and be unemployed again.

But work is actually pretty fun.  It has its ups and downs, and I've already started picking fights with some of my less reasonable superiors, but I get to play with neat hardware, see fun sights, meet interesting people, including astronauts (who aren't crazy, though some of them seem to have ego problems) and so on.

So I'm going to stay in Texas and work for NASA.  There are still some logistics to work out, such as moving all of my furniture here and renting out my house, but I'm well on my way to being a registered Texan, and I try to not let that depress me.  I have one co-worker who recently relocated to here from Idaho, and another from Indiana, and they seem to be adjusting reasonably well so perhaps there's hope.

July 21, 2007 - Reading time: 2 minutes

I bought a couple of these the other day; I'm addicted to dual head (at least at home) and a shelf fell on one of my (wonderful) ViewSonic VP171b monitors a while back (despite a pair of huge scratches on the face of it, the damned thing kept working perfectly, not even a stuck pixel, for about half a year before it started acting up).  I went to the store planning to buy another pair of ViewSonic monitors, but they didn't have two of any 19" ViewSonic in stock (though they had one of several different ones).  So I looked for a Samsung: same deal.  Hitachi?  Philips?  Toshiba?  Oh, wrong kind of store.  So I ended up with a pair of these LGs.  They sure look nice on the shelf, and they have this cool IR power button (which is actually really uncool in other applications).  As I was pulling them out of the box, I was comforted to notice that the two panels had nearly sequential serial numbers.  I was irritated that they didn't come with DVI cables (despite claims on the instructions that they did), but that's OK because I still had the cables from the ViewSonics.  Plugged them in, turned them on, and ... whoa ... color temperature was probably 2000K off on one of them.  Also, the 2ms pixel speed is total BS.  No height adjustment.  No swivel adjustment.  Appalling color shift off axis (and the color shift is different on the two monitors).

I'm really disappointed in these panels.  For the price they are really rotten products.  Bah.

July 21, 2007 - Reading time: ~1 minute

My parents called the other day and said I have <i>another</i> jury summons, this one from DeKalb county (haven't lived there for a loooong time).  I guess my number really came up ...

July 9, 2007 - Reading time: ~1 minute

My mail today consisted entirely of six bills and a jury summons.  <i>*sigh*</i>  I'm thinking of asking alternate-universe Elliott, the one who has been employed for the past 4 months, to help me out paying those.  At least I can dodge the jury bullet ...

June 30, 2007 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Dialup B L O W S

June 30, 2007 - Reading time: 2 minutes

A lot has happened recently!

First, I got a new job.  Finally.  I'm working for Jacobs as a contractor for NASA.  This promises to be a really interesting position, but it's a three month contract.  After the three months is up, maybe I stay or maybe I get the boot.  The job is at the Johnson Space Center.

Yes, the Johnson Space Center is in Houston, which also means I've moved (at least temporarily) to southeast Houston.  Texas never really struck me as being the sort of place I'd want to live, but it's actually quite nice down here.  We'll see how that develops.

Since I've moved, I have to do all of the stupid moving things, including setting up utilities.  I hate moving, and this is one of the reasons why.  The only outstanding utility is DSL; my regular DSL provider couldn't help me here, so I went with AT&T yahoo! service instead.  I'd tell you how it is, but I don't have it yet ... I ordered it on Wednesday, as soon as I had a phone number, and they shipped me the self-install kit via UPS 2nd day air, but ... the activation date isn't until July 10th, so I've got this kit and it's just sitting here.  I still haven't figured out why I got the modem in two days but have to wait two weeks for activation.  In the meantime, I'm using my speakeasy dialup account.  Speakeasy still rocks, by the way.

Rather than move all of my stuff here for three months, I decided to rent furniture for the apartment.  I used CORT, and that went pretty well.  I have decent furniture, though it's a bit more expensive than I would have liked.  In three months, if it looks like I'm going to stay here, I'll probably go ahead and hire movers to get the rest of my crap to Houston.  Then I figure out what to do with the house.  Hmmm.

May 22, 2007 - Reading time: ~1 minute

So I wake up this morning and smell smoke ... again.  It was bad enough in downtown Atlanta that it slowed down traffic.  The weather forecast for today says "Patchy Smoke."  What is this, California?

May 10, 2007 - Reading time: ~1 minute

My proof of this: latex-based paint.  It looks great on paper: cleanup is easy, the paint is easy to apply, the dried product is water-resistant, and it doesn't smell bad like oil-based paints.  What's not to like?  I'll tell you what.  My house hasn't been painted in 5 years, and doors still stick to their door frames.  I nearly need a crowbar to open the closet doors (I just leave one of them open all the time), because the paint on the door sticks to the paint on the frame.  Also, latex paint won't stick to any other kind of paint, except on really porous surfaces like drywall.  So if you had the good sense at one point to paint with oil-based paint, little bits of your latex paint will peel off every time you touch it.  Surely there's a better way ...