Category Archives: Uncategorized

My new favorite job listing

$$$ TOYOTA CAR/TRUCK/AUTO SALES $$$

DON’T LET THE PRESS FOOL YOU !!!WE HAVE MORE CUSTOMERS THAN WE CAN HANDLE! WE PAY UP TO 35% COMMISSION. $1800 MONTHLY CONDITIONAL GUARANTEE . SEVERAL OF OUR PEOPLE MAKE SIX FIGURE INCOMES!!! MINIMUM GUARANTEE. BILENGUAL A PLUS. IF YOU CAN THINK ON YOUR FEET AND COMMUNICATE WELL, WE CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO MAKE BIG $. CALL NOW! OUR CURRENT SUCCESS STORIES INCLUDE BARTENDERS, FOOD SERVERS, SHOE SALESPEOPLE AND RETAIL/NORDSTROM/MACYS SALESPEOPLE. LET US HELP YOU MAKE REAL MONEY!

Big start, the all caps is enthusiastic, they clearly do intend to shout… I like that if you’re bilingual it’s a plus, and they don’t spell bilingual right… the particularly weird thing to me, anyway, is that they’re disclosing what a salesperson’s commission makes, when generally car dealers want to cloak the whole thing in mystery.

1. Medical, Dental, Vision benefits available.
2. 401K retirement program.
3. Manufacturer bonus $$$ on various models.
4. Liberal “spiff” and demo allowance programs.

If you’re like me, you skidded to a stop right there. Really? They have a liberal spliff program and they allow you to drive cars? And there’s a minimum guaranteed income? How can this job even come up on Craigslist? It should be like the Vegas jobs where people bribe the hiring manager.

And then I realized “ooooooooh, spiff, like on-the-spot cash bonuses for sales. Right. Of course.

5. Top producers receive free trips to Hawaii, Las Vegas, etc.
6. Access to Seahawks and Mariners tickets.
7. Paid Vacation.

Nice.

DON’T WAIT! CALL NOW!

Aaaaah! Don’t startle me like that! I thought we’d settled down to talk like reasonable people!

EOE/Drug-Free Workplace

That line’s a lot funnier if you still think they’re handing out joints.

This is only going to get cooler

When I was fairly young and impressionable, I think I lived through a time that was staggeringly good for technophiles. We went from Pong to Atari 2600s to Super Nintendos by the time I was in college. Computer games went from things I had to type in line by line out of books or the backs of magazines — and this seemed entirely reasonable — to Star Control 2, available at retail stores boxed, playable on a desktop PC.

Right now, because I have issues with work-life boundaries, I’m using VPN and remote desktop to get into my box at work on a connection that’s 2,500 times faster than the first modem I ever used. I have a complete and functional desktop that belongs to a docked laptop, a not-that-super Dell model that’s still a couple pounds and incomprehensibly more powerful than the first PC I used (or every computer I ever used until I touched mainframes at college) — and from there remoting again into a lab server to do some troubleshooting, and that lab server isn’t actually a piece of hardware at all, it’s all virtualized… my mind swims just thinking about it.

I’ve always had faith in this march of progress. My dad once told me to always buy the largest storage devices I could, because “mass storage is never massive enough”. I started using 8″ floppy drives that held 80k if I remember, and today I carry a 16GB USB key and I can buy terabyte (well, not reaaaallly) hard drives for under a hundred dollars.

Of course I’m writing science fiction. I don’t know how I couldn’t.

15 rewrites to get 846 words back

I re-wrote one story 15 times this weekend, starting with trying to shorten it up substantially while pounding a piece of it into shape, torturing my main character brutally, and generally working my butt off.

Here’s what happened:

Unsellable story rewrites

Alternately, that’s about 40 words pulled out an hour over the weekend.

Dropbox rox

I need to be able to share files across machines, often really fast (go present in conference room 15N New Orleans…) and I’ve ended up using a lot of the different tools out there.

So let me just spare everyone some small amount of pain: if you need storage out there on the Internets that you can use wherever, without hassle (without having Microsoft rebrand it and foobar your system) in a way that just works like you need it to, go check out Dropbox. I give it Derek’s seal of approval.

I put in my sell order on SBUX today

I heard they chopped all their assistant managers. Assistant managers used to be the people on their way to opening their own stores, and with no stores to open, they cut the whole pay grade… which means there’s a whole class of their most competent people chopped so they can be replaced by people who suck but are lower on the pay scale.

This is Circuit City-firing-their-senior clerks low, and I want no part of it any more.

This makes me sad. For all my ranting about the Clover, I remember Starbucks for bringing good coffee to the armpit where I grew up and kicking off the quality revolution. I’ve held that stock forever.

I’m such a film schizo

Is it wrong that my reaction to reading this Netflix description

After the face of the planet is overrun by bloodthirsty vampires, special ops squad leader Commander Tao (Steven Seagal) must extinguish the menacing bloodsuckers and save the future of the human race. But for those who have survived and taken refuge in an abandoned hospital, hope is running out — as well as supplies and food. Jeff Chase, Emma Catherwood and Skye Bennett co-star in this action thriller.

Was both “this sounds like the worst movie ever made” and “I should move this to the top of my queue immediately”?