San Diego

Here in San Diego, new job, working on the new digs, more later.

DotCom Reunion

Do other dotcommers do this? A bunch of us from Zelerate got together tonight on what is essentially the anniversary of the company going bellyup, to laugh and drink and swap stories about what we've been doing since.

Funny Thing About Packing

1. The more you pack, the more you find to pack.
2. Re-using boxes from previous moves has the added benefit of amusement, when people like Janis have written things like

"dishes, glasses, mugs, dead body"

or

"secret plans for nuclear device"

on the boxflap as a label.

 

Honorably Mentioned!

Yours truly was a semi-finalist in The Writers of the Future Contest! For a story I wrote called The Song of the Ghost Ship, which I'm going to do a little editing on and send off somewhere else. But, alas, I think doing that may have to wait until after I've relocated. Which means I'm now sitting on something like 6 stories, waiting to find out what my new address is. That sucks.

I digress. The WOF contest is conducted quarterly, so I'll be entering again, and hopefully with even better work.

I will, of course, not receive any monetary award for being a finalist of the semi variety, but this was a real jolt to the ol' ego, and I'm pleased as punch.

My Favorite Four-Letter Word

Work. As in, I have some again. I've just accepted a position with a San Diego company to do internal web application development as part of the MIS department, and I'm really looking forward to it. Moving will be a pain [my, my, another 4-letter word, I'm just full of 'em], but that's to be expected. I gave 30 days on my apartment, brought all the flattened boxes in from the shed, and will go buy the following shortly:

a) several rolls of packing tape;
b) one bottle of champagne

and start packing up all my books -- always the biggest part of the process.

I am really looking forward to this. Really really.

Oscars

Congratulations to all the talented artists honored with nominations by the Academy for their film work this year. May you have many more productive, exciting, and daring years to come.

The Price of Hubris, Apparently, is a Tower of Babel

So, I finally stepped down off my personal moral pedestal about accepting financial help from government institutions and filed for unemployment about 10 days ago. Ish. Shudder.

Right. So, I'm minding my own business after sending someone, somewhere, a government-y form, and telling my work ethic bloody independent minded "we take care of our own" streak to shut up and pass the Top Ramen, when I get back an answer, of a sort.

Oh, yeah, sure, of a sort. I get four, count 'em four (4) things, documents, packets, forms, whatever, in the mail from wherever these things come from within the great State of California.

In Spanish.

You read that right. Spanish. Which amused me rather at the time, because I know a lot of Latin from being a scientist and just interested in languages, and I can recognize a few things in Spanish. But it's not like I know it or anything, and it is most certain I can't read Bureaucratese in what is to me an unknown tongue. I admit to an edge of irritation too, at having to figure out who to call in order to rectify the situation. But this, all this, I set aside to fly to San Diego for a hopefully-unemployment-negating encounter.

I find now that one of these linguistically inpenetrable documents included a message telling me to expect a followup call today, which of course, fell on deaf ears [blind eyeballs? whatever], to inquire about a couple of my answers to the initial form I filled out.

I remain blissfully ignorant until the phone rings this morning and I answer, all of which goes something like this:

irritating[*] cell phone ring

me, fumbling with CD player to pause music

me, dashing for cell phone on windowsill, pushing button with my little pink paw and saying, "Hello?"

SOMETHINGSOMETHINGtoofasttohearSOMETHINGSIDRA VITALE?

This is Sidra

Hi, I'm calling from [something EDD department] regarding your interview today.

Huh?

That was me, the witty one.

And, of course, this is how I find out to expect a phone interview with someone from the EDD, today. The subject of which was actually pretty innocuous, so now that I reflect back on it, I'm kind of glad I didn't know to expect it. 'Cause then I would have just worried.

We get things straightened out regarding my need for documents in a language I actually know, and this lady [whose name was apparently transmitted during the intial blast of incomprehensiblity at the beginning of our call] asks me the questions she called to ask, and explained a few things, but only after chastising me for "waiting so long to return my something-something form". To which I very politely did not answer "bite me", but instead explained the minor issue of a language barrier and that I had been out of town chasing down a job, while my voice said, all on its own I assure you, a matter of tone and timbre I had nothing to do with, "back off, strange woman calling me on Saturday morning to talk too fast while I'm trying to listen to Itzhak Perlman play Mozart". I mean, really, with that in the player, be glad I picked up the phone at all. If it had been Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, I would not have bothered.

Anyway. I'm supposed to get new forms sometime soon...and I will oh-so-solemnly immolate the little bits of dead trees if they arrive in Vietnamese.

The moral of my story? Oh, there isn't one, don't worry about it. Except maybe to study more foreign languages, kids!





[*] All cell phones have irritating rings. But, you knew that already.

Oh, Stupidity!

Check out the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, from Business2.com.

Waiting for the Shoe to Drop

But in a good way. I had the best interview I've had in years with a delight of a company [they build telecom hardware and as a result do voice over IP stuff, among other things, and I can tell I'm going to be obsessed about that very topic for some time to come -- it makes so much sense what they're doing? In light of the kind of robust distributed computing you can do these days? And the Internet? Boy, honey, does it ever.]

Anyways.

I liked them. A lot. And the feeling was seriously mutual.

I flew down to San Diego on Monday night, stayed with Janis [inagurating her new hide-a-bed couch, like, actual grownup furniture, I almost couldn't sleep], went in and interviewed Tuesday, flew home that night[*], and have been poking around online looking for apartments in San Diego ever since. Looks pretty serious, kiddies. I love the Bay Area, but when the chips are down [and as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the ol' career, the chips are always down] I go where the jobs are, bay-bee.

The Interview [cue dramatic music, roll tape, aaaaaaaaand Action!]:

Met the head of MIS, whose minion I will become if all goes well, and we talked over several internal support tools he wants built/maintained/improved. This is a web application development position I was interviewing for, by the way. Much of what we discussed involves standard issues of interdepartmental communication that I've tackled before. One of their biggest things with which they want to deal right away is a problem I've already solved, and have the code, open source, on my laptop, like, right this second. I've been remiss and haven't stuck it up on SourceForge yet. My bad.

Chatted with HR, very nice lady, for about a half hour.

Moved onto the Veep who I actually met in a hallway at a different company, which just goes to show that a small small small small world it really is sometimes, and we hit it off like ham and eggs. We chit-chatted on quite a number of things.

I got a great author recommendation out of the head of MIS, CD, to wit, Guy Gavriel Kay, who wrote a trilogy, and I paraphrase, which does not suffer by comparison to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. That's a pretty impressive statement, so I schlepped to the library yesterday and picked up the specific trilogy in question and started it. So far, so good.


And here I am now, not-quite-twiddling-my-thumbs, waiting.

[*] A gentleman celebrating his 81st birthday experienced chest pains during the flight, and paramedics came aboard for him after we grounded in San Jose to whisk him away. On his birthday. Bleah. I do hope he's all right.

The 911 Call

That's the name of a screenplay, by yours truly. I just finished the second real draft [after the first round of mentor comments] after having a stack of marked-up copies sitting to my right for months. Anyway, I'm pleased with the level of improvement. I've definitely worked up the dialogue in the last act way better, and so I'll probably print it out and send back to J&M and ask them to put their Actor/Director/TeacherHats back on and give me more feedback.

Cool TV

Better yet, awesome TV. I was never a big Law and Order fan, I've watched it occasionally, that was about all, and I was kind of put off by the spinoffs. I've seen one or two eps of SVU and 2? 3? episodes of Criminal Intent, with Vincent D'onofrio and Kathryn Erbe. This past Sunday's episode, about a felon who gets killed and 400K of robbery money that had never been recovered, absolutely knocked me on my cute li'l tuckus.

I am in awe. Beautiful writing and stellar performances, there were two segments that stood out so beautifully -- one when Erbe and D'onofrio pull a good cop/bad cop on this woman who is the key to their investigation, and piss her off so impressively to get her to reveal more than she intended, and the very end when D'onofrio is "talking down", so to speak, the guy responsible for murder.
Compassionate, apparently guileless, it was just amazing.

Well done, folks, well done.

Funny

Unattributed:

"The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than
the British or Americans. On the other hand, the French eat a lot of
fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Conclusion: Eat what you like. It's speaking English that kills you."

Own this remark? Tell me.

In The Paramecia Department

Don't look at me too funny, but along with my various other obsessions, I have a thing about bugs. No, no, not those kind, the other ones: communicable disease. My fave are the filoviruses [Ebola, Marburg], but I have a new appreciation for the long under-appreciated tularemia and other bacteria as well.

Sigh. So many possible careers, so little time.

If you're interested on keeping your finger on the pulse of the world, disease-wise, consider subscribing to the Weekly Epidemiological Record.

Fascinating stuff. It amazes me that we even manage to live at all, sometimes.

The Weekly Epidemiological Record (WER) serves as an essential instrument for the rapid and accurate dissemination of epidemiological information on cases and outbreaks of diseases under the International Health Regulations, other communicable diseases of public health importance, including the newly emerging or re-emerging infections, non-communicable diseases and other health problems.

The WER is distributed every Friday in a bilingual English/French edition.

To SUBSCRIBE: please send a message to majordomo@who.int with the command "subscribe wer-reh" as the only text of the message. To add an address other than the one from which you are sending the request, give that address in the command, e.g."subscribe wer-reh emailadd@dom.com".

WriterGirl Thoughts[tm]

If you're not interested in WriterGirl navel-gazing, this entry may be a disappointment. I had another Epiphany[tm] about what some of my flaws are as a writer. Oh, I'm sure I'll have plenty more. Trust me.

I can write other people's characters -- I wrote fanfic for some years as well as turning my hand to original work -- dialogue, setting, what's going on in people's heads, etc. Script format, prose, whatever. Some of the funniest fanfic I ever wrote is all [and I mean all] dialogue. I say wrote because I consider myself retired from the form, or at least semi-retired.

And I love writing that dialogue. I enjoy writing in a script format, it's fun, you can do visual things you maybe can't do elsewhere. It's a different genre. I've taken stories originally written in prose and rewritten them as scripts, and vice versa, for fun, for practice, and just because I thought it might work better that way.

Yet, when I write a completely original story, I have very little dialogue. What, I ask, is up with that?

Obviously there's a connection to my tendency to write solo-character stories, and a marked tendency to do terrible things to them emotionally [clears throat]. Now, there's nothing wrong in doing terrible things to your characters, and it may in fact be vital. I believe it was in an afterword to one of her novels where Lois McMaster Bujold remarked that she liked to come up with the worst possible thing that could happen to her character at that time, and then do it to them. I think that's a fine rule of thumb and plan on remembering it. Heh, heh, heh.

So, where did my dialogue go? I dunno. Unalakleet, perhaps? 'Cause it ain't around here.

What I do know, thinking back, is that I've always done it this way, which means it's high time to change and do something else. I'm not sure what, but I think I may have started something by returning to an out and out romance I outlined sometime a couple years ago. I'm not a big romance buyer -- it's not that I dislike people having relationships, I just have this science fiction/fantasy focus and that's where I go for reading material. But the only romance novel I remember reading several years ago I really liked, so why the hell not? Particularly if being "stuck" writing two people who are falling in love and have to, you know, talk, will get me out of this dialogueless mode and into something broader and new.

Ultraviolet

I just spent last night and this morning in an Ultraviolet marathon. Oh, time very well spent, I assure you. I've seen it 3 or 4 times now, and I'm still not at the point where I can watch and talk to myself about editing choices, or direction, or the writing. When it's something I've seen several times, I watch for the art and the craft as much as for the story, because I want to learn how to do it right. This makes me potentially a very irritating viewing mate ("Oh, that was a nice scene", "Look at that shot"), but I swear, I don't do it on the first viewing unless it's a really bad piece of work, a la MST3K.

Ultraviolet does not suffer in that regard. It's just so damn good at sucking me in. Oh, look, a pun.

If you've never seen this UK series, hie ye to Amazon (US, UK) and get it. You're in for a treat. Vampires as public health threat.

Once you've immersed yourself in this remarkable thriller [don't take your eyes off the screen for a second during Terra Incognita], swing round the Ultraviolet Official Site [be advised, the shows theme plays when loaded] and read an interview with Joe Ahearne, the man behind the series. All 4 parts of that interview s/b linked from the main page.