wewt!

Since our last installment, I have snapped a couple of pictures of some of the higher points of my day.  This is what I like to call “Job security.” As long as you fine folks keep behaving like such, I should be able to ink out some sort of living.

Aside from the foul smells, most of this doesn’t really bother me. It’s fairly interesting to see how people live. The only real sad thing I keep thinking of is that they had an infant living in absolute filth. Very sad. It’s like watching the little starving Ethiopian kid on TV with Suzanne Summers.

So without further ado…

[Show as slideshow]

Aside from about 10 pairs of latex gloves, the only other casualty of the day was my sense of smell. Oh the smell!

Good times!

Six is an arbitrary number that I just pulled out of my head. I have no idea if there are six reasons yet.. but I will not revise this title, unless i come up with like 20 or something.

1. You love to litter

It doesn’t matter what it is. Aluminum cans, food wrappers, beer bottles and cigarette butts; everywhere. One can literally spend a half of the day picking up trash, and the next day it’s like we never even tried.  For one, cleaning out your car shouldn’t mean that dumping everything into the parking lot; including the contents of your ashtray. Seriously, where the fuck did you grow up?  I mean, really.  You look at us like we’re degenerates for being the guy with the rubber gloves and the little picker thing walking around the building picking up garbage as you chain smoke; We look at you as white trash because you don’t care enough to not trash your own home.

2. Those security cameras? Yeah, they’re real.

We’ve seen you break into the vending machines, steal people’s laundry; hell we even saw you give that guy a hummer. Your first instinct in such a situation? Walk right up to the camera so we can get a good look at your face, while you try to decide if the camera is real.  Newsflash; it is. Even better, they’re networked on the internet, so as if we don’t see enough of your mugs in the morning, we can make fun of you in the evening.

3. The no pets thing…. We really meant it.

It’s not that we hate animals. In fact, most of us have our own pets. I have two dogs myself.  However, much like everything else in your life; you can’t be trusted with an animal. We’ve already seen what you do to the parking lot, do you honestly think you care enough to clean up after an animal if it pisses on the floor?  Mistakes happen, and sometimes even the best pet owner will find a stain on move out.. However, dog crap ground into the carpet doesn’t fall under this umbrella.

4. Lightbulbs, they stay with the apartment.

Much like you’re not allowed to take the toilet with you when you leave, the lightbulbs stay too. We made sure each and everyone of them worked when you moved in, least you could do is not steal them on your way out.  Come on people, they’re $3.96 for 12 down at Lowes.  There’s ~17 lightbulbs in a two bedroom apartment, including the fridge.  The only ones you didn’t take were the ones that were already burnt out.

5. Drywall and your fist, an introduction best not made.

I’m not sure why it is, but it seems that a high number of adult male apartment dwellers love to play “Human Stud Finder.” Some win, some lose. In any event, no matter if you find the stud with your fist, the maintenance guys always lose. Our only consolation prize is that if you do happen to find a stud, you might break your hand and learn a valuable lesson about physics.

6. What you do in your apartment is your business, as long as you shut the door and the blinds.

We give you a door because well, they come that way. We give you blinds so that when you’re walking around your apartment in the nude, we don’t have to see. There are some exceptions to this rule, of course. However, thus far;  I have not seen anyone naked in an apartment that was a positive experience.  I’m just sayin.  Also, when answering the door, clothes would be nice. Hasn’t happened to me, but it has happened. Purposefully.

So anyway, that’s six for now. I’m sure there’s more. Good times.

September comes around..

I haven’t written anything since before I left Texas. It’s been 3 months since then.. A lot has happened, but it’s hard to even pinpoint what those things are. Both Megan and myself are still unemployed. Both of us have tried, but the job market her is just crap. Kinda sucks, since we both had decent jobs in Texas.

I’m working on getting a consulting business off the ground, and looking for the next big thing. I have a couple ideas, hopefully something will work out. If you’re in Shepherdsville or Louisville and you need someone to work on your computers, network or website; Check out my site FIVE OH TWO.

I guess that’s about it for right now.

Got this voice mail the other day from Fox. While the message itself is mildly humorous, Google’s transcription of the message is epically bad. I actually donated the message to Google so they could use it to improve. No, really I did.

Here’s the message.

Here’s the transcript. I was really hoping the embed feature would have the transcript in it, so it would highlight as it plays.. but no such luck. You’ll just have to imagine it.

WTF

LOL.

The National – High Violet

I seriously have a love hate relationship with this album. I can’t tell if I love it or if it’s really boring.  I’m still not sure, but this song rocks my world.

Silversun Pickups – Carnavas

I always liked Lazy Eye, but I never knew much of their other stuff.. This album is pretty damn good, and I listened to it a lot at work.

Death Cab for Cutie – Narrow Stairs

Amazing album, start to finish. This isn’t the best version, but they have the official version of this song disabled for embed. Losers.

Ten years ago today, I bought my first car. I had two vehicles before that, both of which I have fond memories of, but today I picked and purchased the first (of many) car of my own.

It was a 1996 Honda Civic CX Hatchback in Midori Green. The car was basic as could be. It didn’t even have a radio. I though this was because someone had took it out when they traded the car in. Nope. No radio, no speakers, nada. I had a radio for it, I wasn’t expecting to have to buy speakers too.

The very same day, I had the car totally disassembled. No need to wait!

[Show as slideshow]

I kept the car for about a year and a half. I sold it to my friend Dustin, who sold it to some guy in North Carolina, as I recall. It’s probably riced out now.

You know at the bottom of those emails from your tech support people, where it asks you to take a survey and you might win something? Yeah, they use those ratings for something. I wrote a little script so I could cut and paste my most recent ratings and see my average.  We’re expected to stay above a 9.0. I’m just on the edge. I got rep bombed with some 1′s.

 $ ./rate.pl -n
Sean's Hack-O-Matic Rating Hack! HUZZAH!
#       Rating  Total   Avg
========================================
1:      10      10      10.00
2:      10      20      10.00
3:      10      30      10.00
4:      10      40      10.00
5:      9       49      9.80
6:      1       50      8.33
7:      10      60      8.57
8:      10      70      8.75
9:      9       79      8.78
10:     1       80      8.00
11:     9       89      8.09
12:     10      99      8.25
13:     10      109     8.38
14:     8       117     8.36
15:     10      127     8.47
16:     10      137     8.56
17:     10      147     8.65
18:     9       156     8.67
19:     9       165     8.68
20:     10      175     8.75
21:     10      185     8.81
22:     10      195     8.86
23:     5       200     8.70
24:     10      210     8.75
25:     8       218     8.72
26:     10      228     8.77
27:     10      238     8.81
28:     10      248     8.86
29:     10      258     8.90
30:     9       267     8.90
31:     8       275     8.87
32:     10      285     8.91
33:     10      295     8.94
34:     10      305     8.97
35:     10      315     9.00
36:     10      325     9.03
37:     10      335     9.05
38:     10      345     9.08
39:     10      355     9.10
40:     10      365     9.12
41:     4       369     9.00
42:     10      379     9.02
43:     10      389     9.05
44:     10      399     9.07
45:     5       404     8.98
46:     10      414     9.00
47:     10      424     9.02
48:     10      434     9.04
49:     6       440     8.98
50:     8       448     8.96
51:     10      458     8.98
Rating Average: 8.98

Here’s the code, just for those who are curious:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Getopt::Std;
getopts('hn');

if ($opt_n) { $nolog = 1; }
if ($opt_h) { print "USAGE: $0 [-n]\n\t-n = no logging\n"; exit; }

# Eat it, Yoshi!
@ratings = `cat ./rate.txt`;
$history = "history.txt";
# Setup variables
$total = 0;
$rate_total = 0;

print "Sean's Hack-O-Matic Rating Hack! HUZZAH!\n";
print "#\tRating\tTotal\tAvg\n";
print "========================================\n";

foreach $line (@ratings)
{
        chomp $line;

        # If a blank line or a comment (#) skip the line
        if ($line eq "" || substr($line,0,1) eq "#") { $currentline++; next; }

        # DURTY DURTY
        ($spam, $ham) = split/Rating: /,$line;
        ($rating, $spam) = split/\]/,$ham;

        # NO NUMBER? NO CARE!
        if (!$rating) { next; }

        # If ticket had multiple ratings, let's not cheat ourselves. Conquer and divide... (and average!)
        if ($rating =~ ",") {

                @multirating = split/\,/,$rating;
                foreach $mr (@multirating) {
                        # For each rating, you need to increment your count to keep the average correct.
                        $total++;
                        # Add the new to the existing
                        $rate_total = $rate_total + $mr;
                        $current_average = sprintf("%.2f",$rate_total / $total);
                        print "$total:\t$mr\t$rate_total\t$current_average\n";
                }

        } else {
                # Incremement for the average.
                $total++;
                # Add the new to the existing
                $rate_total = $rate_total + $rating;
                $current_average = sprintf("%.2f",$rate_total / $total);
                print "$total:\t$rating\t$rate_total\t$current_average\n";
        }
}

# Average the totals, round to 2 decimal places
$avg = sprintf("%.2f",$rate_total / $total);

print "Rating Average: $avg\n";

# Log it for historical tracking.
if ($nolog) {
        print "Logging disabled\n";
} else {
        &HistoryLog("$avg");
}

sub HistoryLog
{
    my($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);

    open (LOGFILE, ">>$history");

    printf LOGFILE "%02d/%02d/%04d %02d:%02d:%02d => %s\n",
    $mon+1, $mday, $year+1900, $hour, $min, $sec, $_[0];

    close(LOGFILE);
}

Extricate.

It has such a nice ring to it.

I found a DVD with a bunch of mp3′s that I had backed up.. In there, I found a bunch of old Louisville indie/punk/hardcore/whatever.. So I’m rocking out. Lots of Metroschifter and Falling Forward. You can see what’s going down by looking at my Last.fm widget.

Sold a couple more things on craigslist today, including one of my car stereos that’s been in a box for over year and our grill. The grill I just wanted gone, getting paid for it was just a bonus. I didn’t want to take it back to kentucky, and I didn’t want to just throw it away. Sold it for $50, which I figured was fair enough. I didn’t even flinch when the guy paid with a check. I figured I could play russian roulette for $50.. As luck would have it, the check was good, and Bank of America (where it was written from) didn’t even try to charge me some astronomical fee to cash it, as I am no longer a customer of that institution of lending.

On to slightly more depressing news, I bought some boxes today. I spent $87 on freaking cardboard boxes. I didn’t even buy a bunch. One bundle each of small and medium boxes. Good thing I’m trying to throw away everything I don’t think I’ll ever miss! Trying to break my packrat ways.

Closing on a brighter note, spent about 2 hours on the phone yesterday speaking to people (whom shall remain nameless for now) that I’ve had previous business relationships with, and we’re hoping to do some business together soon. Be good to hit the ground running when I arrive back in Louisville.

I’ve been cleaning up my data, cleaning up my possessions, now I just need to clean up my financial affairs, and I think the rest of 2010 will be ok.

Another work week has come to a close, and here we are…. During this last week, I’ve given my notice, I turned 30, and I’ve had a serious motivation issue. Of course, my motivation, or lack there of is nothing new at all.

I felt like I struggled this weekend with my ticket counts. I only had 45 or so tickets on Sunday, and Saturday I didn’t close my 40th until right at 10pm. Granted, both days were slow, but still. Today wasn’t particularly busy and I closed 56 tickets. My ratings have sucked, largely because I’m just not getting any. I got 1 rating yesterday out of 46 tickets and it was a 1. Today I posted 56, and I got two ratings, a 9 and 10. Anything 2-9 is fucking worthless to me. 1′s suck, but I’m more of a yes or no, white or black kinda guy. Just so you know, at the job, you’re expect to maintain a 9 or higher rating. With today’s 9 and 10, I’m at a 8.6.

When I was leaving work, it was starting to lightning. As I drove home, the lightning got progressively stronger. On the beltway, the lightning got awesome. Cloud to ground. I wish I had a camera fast enough to get some shots.

By the time I got to 1960, it started raining, hard. I had the top down. I managed to get all the way to my apartment complex before I really got wet. If the gate had been open, I probably would have been fine.

So now it’s Friday (monday) night.. I watched the season finale of House which was pretty awesome, now I’m killing my Netflix queue.  Good times.