Good News: I just landed a new job with a medical equipment company called Stryker. I had a 3.5 hour interview with 6 people, but I feel that it all went extremely well. Apparently they felt so too, because I’m now contracting for them. Best of all, it only took me 7 minutes to drive there the other day which is much better than the 1 hour commute I was making before.
Good/Bad News: My best friend Eric is about to finish up Navigator training in the Air Force (if you’ve seen Top Gun, he’s Goose instead of Maverick). After nearly a year of training 1500 miles away in Texas (he and I are California natives), he just found out he’s getting stationed in Omaha, Nebraska. The good news is that it was his third choice of location (better than getting a 17th choice, I suppose) and that he’ll be flying in/out of London and other parts of Europe pretty frequently, which is something that he’ll really enjoy doing. The bad news is that even in Omaha, he’s still 1500–1600 miles away from home, and I just plain miss spending time with him like we used to. Phone calls and iSight video chats just aren’t the same.
Good/Bad News: After being retarded and waiting 6 years to get my wisdom teeth pulled, I finally went to an oral surgeon and got all 4 wisdom teeth pulled yesterday. The good news is that I no longer have to worry about my wisdom teeth coming in directly horizontally causing very painful impacted molars (I’ve been taking Tylenol every day for the past 3 weeks for the pain). The bad news is that even with my medications Toradol and Vicoden (which is a close relative to drugs like Morphine and Heroine), my mouth is still killing me. I’ve been sitting here eating ice cream with a package of frozen peas on my face all morning to little avail.
Bad News: We had to let our house go last week. With my being out of work for three weeks, we weren’t sure how soon I’d’ve been able to find something else considering how competitive the market has been lately here in Silicon Valley. So we signed the “Release of Contract” documents last week, and are currently planning to wait a few months to be sure we’re financially stable again and then start looking for a new home. The lease on our apartment is over in August, so we’ll ideally need to find something else by then. Here’s hoping everything goes well with that.
Good News: For my fellow geeks that are as excited to start using the next version of Tarzan as I am to release it, I just want to say that I’m close to finishing development on the brand-new, completely overhauled Tarzan Control Panel. Besides the new features that I talked about the last time I mentioned Tarzan here, I’ve added the ability to apply custom descriptions to items via the Control Panel, and I’ve also added advanced cache management options — specifically the ability to recache the image/data for a given item without having to FTP into your cache folder and try to discern which item is which. I’ve also begun building the API that will allow people to search for items based on keyword rather than just ASIN/ISBN numbers. It should also be noted that I’ve completely overhauled the caching system in Tarzan 1.2, and you’d have to be Forrest Gump to not notice the significant speed gains that this new system has allowed. This same caching system (as well as a few other Tarzan features) will be making it’s way into the next version of SimplePie as well as Simple PHP Gallery 2 in the upcoming months.
Okay, I’m done writing now. I think it’s time to take my frozen peas into the living room to try to finish up Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
