jordanriane

Category: Personal

  • Busy Bee

    Oi, so I’ve opened up WordPress several times to update my blog with updates on how work has been, but each time I either forget, get distracted or just don’t want to write about what I’ve been up to. I’m finally just forcing myself to post right now just because I know I’ll keep opening up WordPress every dayl.

    I’m currently on my third week of work, and it’s been amazing. I’m not a morning person by any means, but so far I’ve been doing a decent job of waking up at 6:40AM, and being ready to walk out of the house at 7:35AM. This is where it gets a little complicated. There’s a Metra train that runs a few blocks from my house, however, the last exit is about 2 miles from where I work. I’d have to take a 7:27AM train to get to work at 8:30AM. So instead I drive 13 miles east to another station that leaves at 8:08AM and arrives downtown at Randolph/South Water St at 8:48AM. Work is a block away, so pfft to walking far! 😛

    Lately I’ve been stopping at the Starbucks at the corner for an iced Chai latte, but that’s a $4.40 expense I’d rather not have. So I’ll make it a Friday-morning treat instead. I’ve got a nice little setup at work, definitely better than the shit I had at the job I worked a few months ago (I mean seriously a 15″ monitor, wtf? 512MB of ram to multitask with Photoshop, Illustrator, and other programs? HA!) My workstation has a 19″ widescreen monitor, and the desktop has Vista Premium, 4GB ram, 500GB SATA drive, 512MB video card, and a bunch of other shit I don’t utilize.

    Work is just your standard 9-5pm. I usually go out to eat lunch at Subway, Qdoba, Noodles and Company, and some local dives. Most of that is within 5 blocks of me, but lately I’ve just been wandering around aimlessly during lunch to see what I can come across. Last week I went to the post office at the Aon Center and discovered a plethora of other places I can hit up.

    Outside of work I haven’t been up to anything else really, since I’ve just been so focused on work. Lately my only concerns have been trying to redesign Holdfire and atourworst.org, so maybe this weekend I can have one of those done, or near being done. We’ll see!

  • Downtown Working Girl

    Well, I had an interview on Friday with a webdesign/seo company downtown Chicago, and ended up getting offered the position during it. So of course I accepted! I’m starting Monday around noon since he has to set up my desk and computer, but it’ll be a 9-5 salaried job. I’ll also be commuting downtown via the Metra rail, which means that I have an 8:09 train to catch in the morning. It’s such a perfect location. I’m going to be a block north of Millennium Park, which of course if any of you have been to Chicago, is where the huge-ass mirror-like bean is located at. Which is also where my train stops at too, so I only have a short one block walk to my office’s building 🙂

    I’m actually ecstatic that I’ve finally gotten back into the full-time job market, because freelancing started to take a toll on me. I was spending less time working on projects for clients and more time doing nothing (see: watching tv, reading books, working on startups). At least now I have a steady income to rely on which I’m quite happy about. But most important of all: health insurance! Now I won’t have to worry about paying extortionate fees for any appointments or emergencies I’d have. YAY!

  • What can go wrong, will go wrong

    Do you ever feel like when something good happens, one thing or many things go wrong that can circumvent the good? I suppose sometimes it’s some sort of morbid self-fulfilling prophecy, or hell, Murphy’s Law. And oddly enough it always involves my car.

    At the end of last week, I had a phone call for a job interview downtown. The interview is set for today at 1:30pm. So last night I decided that I wanted to run out to pick up some more shampoo and conditioner, as well as take a look at getting a new pair of shoes for the interview. Well, I hope my cheery ass into the car, turn the key in the ignition, and press my foot on the brake…

    Oh, but wait, what’s this! When I press down on the brake, all I hear is the pressure from doing it. I’m supposed to hear the brake unlocking the gear shift so I can take it out of park. Since I’m a stubborn bull, I sat there for 15 minutes pumping the brake, turning the car off and on, and cursing the piece of shit to oblivion. No dice. My mom ended up pulling into the driveway, so I hopped in her Escape Hybrid, and went along my merry way.

    As my family and friends know, anything that goes wrong with my car, I have my dad look at. It was already 9PM (and dark) so there wasn’t much he could do. So I did what any nerd would do. I googled the problem. I ended up finding a Yahoo! Answers page, which mentioned popping off a little cap, and manually override the gear shift lock. OH WUT.

    So this morning, I wake up and the firs thing I did was go to my car to see if it was coming out of park. No dice. Cue me starting to panic, wondering how the fuck I’m going to make it downtown for this interview. So I hopped back online and googled more, then I finally came across the Owners manual for a 1999 Ford Escort (ZX2) (pdf link). Page 96 explains that if your gear shift is locked, there’s an override that you do for it.

    I grabbed a mini-screwdriver and marched my determined ass back outside to get this piece of shit in gear (lol @ pun.) I found the little cap next to the gear shift, which oddly enough, I have honestly never noticed before despite having this car almost four years. Popped the cap off, stuck the screwdriver in and got the gear shift unlocked. WOO!

    That little issue is fixed, and I’m hoping to God that nothing else happens between now and my interview at 1:30pm. I don’t think I can handle anymore “surprises.” Although if something does happen, it’s just further proof that A.) I don’t need a full-time job, B.) I’m going to be stuck finding my own work for the rest of my life, C.) I need a new car.

    100% of me is leaning towards option C. I like it better.

  • Can you guess this washed up artist?

    I was talking to my boyfriend, Armando, online, and he happened to link me to a video of this artist. I hadn’t heard this band/artist in such a long time, and ended up watching a bunch of other videos on Youtube. Then he shows me the wikipedia page for this person and I about died.

    So, with that being said, can you guess who this washed up artist is? One hint: red hats.

    No sneakie sneakie!

  • Startup Project

    As usual, it’s been ages since I last blogged. Although I think after this week I’m going to try to be more active with this website, as I do miss it. That and the current design and “content” has been pissing me off to the point where I’ve wanted to wipe it clean.

    Aside from ignoring my blog, I’m currently admist working on a startup with Armando. I think I would call him my pseudo-boyfriend? Anyway, that’s an entirely different blog. I’m not going to go into details at all about the startup we’re going to start working on, but regardless, I’m excited.

    So there, you’ve got my monthly update on what I’ve been up to. Expect more. Maybe.

  • Whoops

    I suppose I really am losing interest in maintaining my personal website. I don’t know why I just don’t care about it anymore, but it was bound to happen. I primarily blog in my livejournal since I have it set to friends-only, which weeds on majority of the public from viewing anything.

    Life has been decent to an extent. As usual, work (or lackthereof) is stressing me out. My social life as usual is sub par but it’s never been on my list of priorities. There’s one person who has managed to get a lot of my attention for the past few months. So it’s safe to say that I think he’s amazing, regardless of what my PMS induced moods may make him think.

    Maybe I’ll update this. Who knows. I doubt it.

  • Server Move

    I’ve had a new server on my network for a few months now, and have been procrastinating moving atourworst.org over to it. I’m not really sure why, because it was just a matter of logging into SSH to get the process started. Not like I had to physically do anything!

    Anyway, I finally decided to get it done with today, so it’s now residing on grunt, while it had previously been on oreos. The main decision to move it was because I don’t like using resources that should be set aside for Holdfire Network. Granted, grunt is still a network server, but there’s about triple the resources available on this server, compared to my other ones. I was initially setting it up as my personal dev server, but decided to add it to the company instead.

    That aside, I’ve been putting some finishing touches on a new design that I’ve been working on. The process is a bit slow, since it’s always a pain designing for myself. Sooner or later I’ll get it up, although I’d prefer sooner.

    In other news, I haven’t been up to much other than trying to look around for more freelance work. It’s so frustrating being a freelancer sometimes, when your skillset does not include graphic design. It’d be much easier to find work if I was also a graphic designer, but because I’m not, my scope is a bit more narrow. There was a full time opportunity I was a candidate for, but I didn’t get offered the job, and the owner of the company is not able to give me any details as to why I didn’t get it. I’m a bit miffed that I can’t resolve what I lacked, but I’ll just keep trying elsewhere. I’ve been searching like a mad woman the past couple of weeks.

  • Happy Birthday, Armando

    I’m guessing you still read my blog, because you’re a huge nerd like that. Anyway, just wishing you a Happy Birthday here as well. Wubs!

  • Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

    I went out last night with my friend Armando (so cute!) to see Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Needless to say, the movie was pretty fucking awesome, excluding a few minutes here and there of ultra cheesy scenes that I could have done without.

    Other than that I haven’t been up to much other than work, Halo, a cute boy, and well… Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

  • $4.07 for unleaded gas, and climbing

    When I first started driving back in 2002, I used to pay no more than $1.15 for a gallon of gas. It was awesome because my car only had an 11 gallon tank, and it would be under $13 to fill up my car. Typically that would last two weeks, since I usually only drive to school at that point. Or if I did drive around, maybe I’d spend $25 for two weeks of gas!

    Today the $4.00+ gas finally made its way from downtown [Chicago] to the outer suburbs. It’s been skirting around $3.90-99 for the past few days, with hopes of it going down. On my way to work, I paid $3.88 at Shell (which in the past, used to be the last place I’d ever go to!) with a $25 gift card that my grandparent’s gave me for my birthday.

    While I was on my way home, the gas station two blocks from me is now at $4.07. What. The Fuck?! It’s not even Memorial Day, and it’s so typical for gas to shoot up .25-50 cents more around that time. I’m going to cry when I start paying $4.50+ for a gallon of gas. Namely for the fact that I currently drive on average about 35-40 miles a day for work. That’s 5 days a week. Ughs.

    Other than outrageous gas prices in Illinois, I celebrated my birthday in style by going out to dinner with my family (and my best friend Amy) and then out to Durbin’s (a bar) for some good old fashioned drunk fun tiemz. Didn’t party too hard since I had to work the next day.

    Speaking of which, work has been going along quite well aside from having to work with ASP/.NET. Really, I’ll take PHP/MySQL over that stuff any day. Especially with the client I’ve been working for right now. Their site is.. well, let’s just say there are inline styles, 59 “template” pages, and a database we can’t even use for development. Oh, did I mention we got the project on Friday morning with a due date of Tuesday, with Wednesday for bug fixing? Yeah. :'(