Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 | 12:03 pm
I admit to being completely befuddled by telephone extensions on most corporate phone systems. At both my previous job and my new one, the system has been: you dial 5 digits to reach someone internally, or 9 + a regular phone number to call external numbers.
But at my last job, depending on which line you were using on the phone, you had to dial either 5 or 6 digits. I admit that sometimes I just hit 9 and dialed the person’s full phone number, even if they sat two cubes away. I like to think it’s just one of those things I never took the time to learn rather than something I couldn’t fully comprehend.
In other news, for some reason, my return to the blog was accompanied by a tremendous surfeit of new comment spam. All I did was change servers (and the necessary DNS settings) and install a new template. Apparently the spambots noticed the new layout and thought they’d try again. Fortunately, nobody made it past my spam bucket, so there wasn’t any visible pollution. But I may have been overzealous in my deleting, so if you left a comment in the last few days and it never appeared on the post, well… my apologies.
Friday, March 17th, 2006 | 1:56 pm
Week 1 of the new job is coming to a close. I’ve adapted to working downtown, and am enjoying very much the ability to ride in to work via Marta instead of driving. I’m by no means the type to agonize over driving a car to work; I’ve got other things to worry about. But I’m in the group of people for whom it is actually easier to ride the train to work. It takes nearly the same amount of time, and it’s cheaper than the parking alone, not to mention the savings on gas. At my old job, public transportation wasn’t a possibility, because it would have been at least an hour (3-4 times the drive time), and a mile-long walk on one end.
But now, parking at my office is on the order of $80-100 a month, and I thought I’d try to make it work on Marta. The Atlantic Station shuttle picks up at my door, and I’m generally at work 20 minutes later. The trip back is closer to 25-30 minutes, but with traffic in the city, I’d be hard-pressed to beat that by any significant margin in a car.
All in all, I think I’ll be able to continue to use transit to get to work for the foreseeable future.
Sunday, March 12th, 2006 | 2:24 pm
To the four people who read this with any regularity, hello again. It’s been quite a while, in Internet Years, since I posted. The only real reason (besides sheer laziness) for my absence is that I was on a quest for employment. Things weren’t exactly awesome at the old job, and that particular nomenclature should tip you off to the fact that I have a new job. This is not to say that going dark is necessarily a prerequisite for a job search; no, I had my specific reasons this time. Namely, I noticed visitors in my logs from the domains of the precise companies to whom I had sent my resume.
Coincidence? Probably not. And while I’m not deathly afraid someone will stumble upon this happy little place and know my innermost secrets, I do find comfort in controlling the first impression I make, er, myself. I can’t necessarily do that with my real name plastered all over the place and my thoughts spilling down the page.
In summary: Paranoia and Laziness dictate my mien.
A month and a half ago, Heather and I took a weekend vacation to Acapulco with my mom. The photos demonstrate the utter majesty of the view from the hotel where we stayed, but do not accurately tell the whole story. I’ll write more about it later.
I’m off to gather my forms together for my first day at the new job (Monday 3/13) and perhaps relax at the park for a while.
