:: Venting Insanity ::

:: Saturday, July 26, 2003 ::

hmm
I doubled my WMD and Weather Pixie. I'll fix it later.

survey says
//name; Jessica-Lynne Sullivan
// birthday; Oct 4
// nationality; American (ancestry: German, Irish, Scottish, French, English, Welsh)
// screen name; too many to list
// hair length; long
// hair color; reddish brown that fades to blonde on the ends... mousy brown roots I need to get fixed...
// eye color; light blue
// piercings; one in each ear (I'm so damn conservative... lol)
// tattoos; want one eventually, just don't have the guts or money to actually get it


favorites!

// color; soft colors... sage, mauve, rose, blue, purple
// perfume; Victoria's Secret Garden Vanilla Lace (unfortunately, it's been discontinued... grr...)
// t.v. show; Twenty-Four
// movie; Do I have to pick one?
// band/singer; {{glances at CD collection}} Too many
// subject; in school? Probably something math, science, or computer related...
// fruit; ummm... this could be taken very strangely. But, for the sake of younger readers, I'll say nectarines.
// month; hmmm... June or July.
// season; summer... pool time!
// holiday; umm... dunno
// saying; dunno that one either.


do questions!

// do you believe in love at first sight? not really
// do you get along with your parents? most of the time
// do you think about suicide? I have in the past
// do you drink? socially, but not to get drunk
// do you do drugs? nope
// do you smoke? nope
// do you think you have multiple personalities? only when I RP


have questions!

// have you ever smoked? nope
// have you ever done drugs? nope
// have you ever drank alcohol? see above
// have you ever gotten drunk? yes
// have you ever made out with just a friend? yup
// have you ever used someone? not consciously or on purpose
// have you ever been used? if I have, I haven't figured it out yet
// have you ever wanted someone you couldn't have? all the time

best questions!

// best person to talk to; my friends
// best relationship; umm.... not touching that one
// best feeling; happy?
// best thing in the world; errr... dunno, I haven't tried or seen everything
// best stuffed animal you own; hmmm... I have too many to pick one
// best thing that happened to you yesterday or today; does last week count? I got a job!


last questions!

// last time you cried? really cried? A few year ago, I think
// last movie you saw in a theater? The Italian Job
// last movie you rented? Shanghai Knights
// last movie you bought? hmmm... that's a tough one. It was a long time ago that I bought any, so I don't really remember
// last song you listened to? I wasn't paying attention, but I know the album that's in the changer right now is Creed
// last song you downloaded? I don't download a lot of songs
// last tv show you watched? Friends
// last song that was stuck in your head? "Frank's 2000 Inch TV" by Weird Al
// last person you were thinking of? Estelle... I was on the phone with her... lol
// last person you talked to; see above
// last person you hugged; Mom
// last person you kissed; kissed how?
// last person you went to eat out with; It was a group
// last person you slow danced with; hrm... that was a long time ago
// last person you yelled at; yelled... um... I don't yell a lot
// last person you called; I returned a call to John S yesterday
// last person who called you; Estelle... see above... lol
// last person who made you smile? Mom
// last person who made you laugh? Estelle
// last person who said they loved you? Mom


love and relationships!

// who is your boyfriend/girlfriend/crush? umm.... don't have one at the moment.
// what do you first notice in the opposite sex? Something that annoys me... if they don't annoy me, I usually notice something on their face
// are you currently in love? No
//first crush; John Horn in 5^th Grade.
// last crush; umm... hmmm...
// first love; Paul
// ideal date; anything that's fun... I'm usually pretty willing to try new activities.

sigh
I'm so tired. It's been way too long since I had a full time job.

how long??
I found out the other day that it'll take six months for my benefits to kick in. SIX MONTHS!!! I told Ken about my concerns in that department and he said, "I'll see what I can do, but, in the meantime, just try not to get sick." I don't know if he was joking, but I said it was a good thing that I got the mono last year already. He sort of laughed.

do i really look that stupid?
And if Diane talks down to me one more time, I'm going to scream. I think I'm going to have to prove to this woman that I'm not as stupid as she treats me. I'm >thisclose< to knocking her senseless.

I asked her to clarify some of Ken's sloppy handwriting yesterday and she proceeded to explain the entire letter to me again like I didn't understand the first one I had done. I nearly died. She makes me feel like I'm really stupid or something. I know I understand it, and I keep saying that I understand it, but she just keeps explaining. It's making me crazy.

She also stands there and tells me every step I have to take to open a file. Like I don't know how. Just tell me the filename and where it's located. I used to work as a software QA person for Nortel. I'm one semester away from my 2 year Computer Information Systems degree. I know how to open a stupid file in Word, lady.

wishing there was a better way
I just wish there was a better way to do some of the stuff they do. I was talking about it with Charity and Diane yesterday. Diane seems to slowly be coming to the realization that I'm pretty computer literate. I started talking databases and tables, and it looked like she really didn't understand me completely. I felt a bit better at that point, since it was after the handwriting incident. That, and I showed them I can type. I can finish a letter in record time, and I just killed the new liturature packet letters we sent out last night.

I had better be getting a raise after my first evaluation. I don't think any of them expected me to be what I am. Between that and the offers I gave to Ken and Patrick about my HTML and computer skills, I hope I get something out of this.

unexpected words
I'm not usually like this. I'm usually the person who doubts herself and has to have other people tell her she's better than she thinks. But, I *know* I'm better than Diane seems to think. I just hope she realizes it before I start to get to the point where I feel like I really am that stupid. If I hear it too often, I start to believe it.

party time
Mom wants me to come with her to Donna's again tomorrow. She's giving a Home & Garden Party tomorrow. She's the seller, though, not the host. What she's doing is having people over with a raffle. The winner of the raffle is the "host" and gets all the host bonuses. Cool, right?

as for tonight
Estelle called. I'm debating going over. We'll see how I feel. I have a bit of a headache and I'm still tired, so going out isn't exactly the first thing on my mind. Plus, I have no idea what's going on dinnerwise. I'd rather not go out and spend the money, and I think my parents are planning something for three not two. I also have to make sure my laundry's finished. If it's not, Mom will have a cow if she can't do hers. {{sigh}}

updates
As you noticed, my navcolumn is a lot shorter. If you check the top, I moved all the extra links off to another page. There's a link up there where you can still get to all of them, so don't worry. No one got de-linked. You've just all been moved to another page for easier maintenance.

I also have to update my quizzes... That's going to be a pain. I haven't done it in ages.

comic blues
I've been stuck on my comic. I think part of it is because I'm working. However, as I've read through archives, I've noticed that I'm not the only artist to have moments of writer's block. Hence, having lots of characters for separate storylines and having those occasional instances of filler pages. I'm trying to think of ways to do that now. ^^;;

I also have to start developing my characters more. While the first few pages aren't really important to having details on the characters, as I go along, people are going to want to know more. I'm going to have to come up with some good character page pics. I need a logo, too. {{sigh}}

Too much to do.

snapple "real fact" #162
The temperature of the sun can reach 15 million degrees Farenheight.

Are you damned?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

You're coming back! And if you are a Hindu you are going to have very specific characteristics:

"The slayer of a woman and the destroyer of embryos becomes a savage full of diseases; who commits illicit intercourse, a eunuch; who goes with his teacher’s wife, disease-skinned. The eater of flesh becomes very red; the drinker of intoxicants, one with discolored teeth...." (Garuda Purana)

Riiiiiight. Sex with nuns... O.O

:: Friday, July 25, 2003 ::

really tired
I have news stories, but I already posted a bunch of them on my forum, so you'll just have to go look there if you want to see them. I'm too tired to post them double.

long day
It's surprising how tired being bored can make you. I actually started playing a game of solitaire today between trying to look busy so Ken didn't get pissed. But, since Diane won't give me work to do, I have no choice but to sit there and pretend to be busy.

Of course, I did get a few more things over the past few days. Now, I write up the dictated letters, put together manuals, file the spec sheets and control sheets, enter them into this archaic method of using a Word document as a database... Yeah. Everything's in Word documents. Someone got the bright idea to write it up that way instead of putting it in a spreadsheet or a real database.

It's the worst method ever.

There's a million things I could do with it, but they've sold like hundreds of machines a year since the mid '70's. There's no possible way of actually fixing the problem unless I work some severe overtime. Maybe I will someday. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, it's extremely confusing in it's current form. They have different customer lists that are sorted in different ways. All they need is a good SQL Db with a few tables and some well written queries to sort the whole damn thing out. I could probably write them a nice little VB program that integrates with Access to make one. I just need to do it when I have nothing else to do. Unfortunately, my spurts of boredom aren't long enough and are interrupted too often to do anything like that in a constructive manner.

I'm still having trouble concentrating on getting Word to use a VB Script macro to automate printing serial number labels. Of course, it doesn't help that don't have any help files installed for me to research it with. The MSDN library website sucks as far as older versions goes, too. Everything they have works with Visual Basic.NET and Office XP. We have Office 2000 and the Script editor is a watered down version of VB 6.0. The documentation is there, but it's hard to fish through the links. Half of them point to the documents' old locations.

anyway
Anyway, we had a huge rush on work at the end of the day again. It's so slow in the morning, it's annoying. The printer didn't deliver the new paperwork for one of our machines until the end of the day, so we were rushed to put together a group of new literature packets to send out to the reps. Then, we had to print up labels and letters, stuff them all into envelopes, and try to stamp them. We stamped the local stuff, but the international stuff has to go to the post office. Ken said he'd do that Monday.

And here I was hoping I could go and do it... {{sigh}}

phone calls
John S called today! Yay! We talked online the other night, but he hasn't been home a lot. He spends a lot of time at his girlfriend's house. Of course, I'm not so sure what the deal is with that. He doesn't seem like he really *wants* to be majorly loyal to her. I'm getting hugely mixed signals here, and I'm not sure what to do on that.

snapple "real fact" # 161
The first TV network kids show in the U.S. was "Captain Kangaroo".

:: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 ::

too tired for a real news post
I'll post links about these stories later for you all to look at.

news delay
Well, since I didn't post yesterday, let me just start off my news post by saying, "Yay!"

Got that over with.

Anyway, now the big thing everyone is discussing is the fact that they're going to release the pictures of Saddam's dead sons (hopefully, they'll have enough sense to at least keep the picture of his dead 14-year-old grandson out of circulation). There's a lovely image, I'm sure. While my morbid curiosity will probably try to find a way to see them anyway, I don't think they should be put on TV over here. There's probably still people out there who would rather not see them.

shooting close to home
New York City Hall saw an interesting event today. A former politician shot and killed his former rival (who was currently in office). It happened in the Council chamber of the building, up on the balcony level. Talk about random stuff... O.O;;

forum stuff
Of course, I have thread on these stories on my forum. You're all welcome to go take a look.

Kuro!! I love you so and worship you and *drool*
...You kill people. I love you so...You
magnificent, deceptive bastard..I salute you!!


Which One Piece Baddie Are You?! [Piccies!!]
brought to you by Quizilla

I have no idea who this is... I was bored and found it on Angie's blog.

slow progress
Well, I'm slowly getting more things to do. It only seems to happen when I ask them about stuff. Otherwise, they almost seem perfectly content not to give me anything to do. It's a bit frustrating, actually.

I offered my help to the IT guy, Patrick. He's a regular assembler at the plant that happens to know computer stuff, so he took that on in addition to the rest of his job description. Since he may have other things going on, I figured he could use the help if he's busy.

I also told Ken (my boss) that I have HTML knowledge. While I know I won't nearly have as much office time in the future as I would need to do a full overhaul of any websites, I will have the time to play around a bit with the existing one (add information, new products, news releases, etc). I told him that it would probably save him money instead of paying the contractor every time they need something done.

Today, I was upgraded to the fax lady. Now I handle sending leads out to our reselling agents. I'm also still learning how to decifer the handwriting of the guys in the back. It's an interesting lesson in hieroglyphics.

some family advice
My cousin (Tom/Greg... he goes by both names, but Greg is mostly just family) and I spoke for a long time today during lunch. He was giving me some advice on how to handle things if Ken got too crazy. Apparently, he really works the front girls. Just yesterday, Charity was in with Ken crying about something he'd done to piss her off. He finally came to her about it, and she told Diane, Kathy, and I that she just spilled her mind about how she felt.

Ken's trying too hard, I think. He wants to be his employees' friend, but, at the same time, has this whole I'm-the-boss complex. It's kind of hard to tell what mood he's in, too. And there's a lot going on behind his back. Everyone talks in hushed voices half the time, and we're always looking over our shoulders when we start chatting about things, even if they're not work related.

second thoughts
Had I known it was going to be this disconcerting, I probably wouldn't have taken the job in the first place. Of course, now that I'm in, I'm leary about leaving because I don't know when I'll be able to get something else. So, I'll stay as long as I need to (or can handle it... depending on what comes first). Tom even said it was no big deal if I left. He's only been there a couple years himself. And he doesn't have any long term plans about staying, it seems.

Not that he doesn't like the work. He enjoys what he does and the people he works with directly. It just seems that upper management (namely, Ken and Casey) makes it difficult.

hosting fun
I have to find some good Delta Force maps. I started hosting Task Force Dagger last night. I think it's working pretty well. I even had a visitor. Unfortunately, things got screwed up because of crappy weather knocking our power on and off, but, once the power was steady, the game ran fine.

snapple "real fact" # 172
The eye makes movements 50 times every second.

(finally got a couple of Snapples again so I can start putting the caps I get up again...)

:: Monday, July 21, 2003 ::

i am exhausted!
Well, I'm back to work officially today. I'm really tired, too. However, I'm trying to force myself to stay awake until bed time. Then, I'll actually sleep tonight.

manual maker
I've been given the job of making the manuals. Not that it's hard. It's just a bit confusing sometimes because I'm not all that familiar with the shorthand the guys use. There's other things I'll be doing eventually, too. I'm also hoping to take over the website. I asked a bit more about it today and I got the wrong impression by what the guy was talking about. Apparently, the server they have is just for their intranet. They subscribe to a website hosting service and have someone else actually work on the site.

Things aren't looking good in that area...

i'm not as dumb as i look
However, there are other interesting prospects, such as educating Diane just exactly how much I know about computers. It's obvious she thinks I'm clueless because she told me, "double click on the folder icon there" and pointed at the screen, leaving a nice fingerprint over the icon. I nearly died.

Of course, they have the worst mouse ever attached to the computer I'm using. I can't stand the thing. It's got four buttons (two of which are on the side and I keep clicking them by accident when I move the mouse side to side) and a scroll wheel. It's very uncomfortable, too. I'm assuming it was 'ergonomic', but the center is so high, it's very uncomfortable to use.

work work work
And there's tons to do. They just didn't let me do any of it. They said they didn't want to overwhelm me the first day. I could understand that because the manuals are kind of confusing right now. But I'm a pretty quick learner, so I shouldn't have too much down time before I'm banging those puppies out. They didn't let me grab any calls today. I don't know... the calls looked really easy to handle. And I'm not really afraid of asking questions. I don't know... we'll see. I just hope I don't always get the pee-on jobs because I look young to these people.

family???
So, Dad gets home and I'm telling him about the place. He asks me... "Does Thomas Wheeler work there?" I'm like, "Your cousin?" He's like, "Yeah, he told me he was working for some small manufacturing place in Riverhead." Well, I met a guy Tom who looked familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place it. And it was driving me nuts on where I knew this guy from. So, after comparing a description between us, we determined that the Tom I met was none other than the Thomas Gregory Wheeler that I'm related to!!!

Dad said that, if I see him tomorrow, I should call him Greg. Since there were so many Toms in our family, everyone calls him Greg at family functions. Heh heh... I gotta see what happens.

snapple "real fact" # 159
The first TV show ever to be put into reruns was "The Lone Ranger".

:: Sunday, July 20, 2003 ::

yuck!
We started cleaning off my grandmother's deck today. Grossness. She and my aunt don't sweep it often, so all the leaves piled up underneath everything and started small compost piles. I'm surprised the deck isn't rotted out. Not to mention all the bugs... O.O;;; Mom and I coated the deck in Raid.

We also managed to find a 32" TV that was able to fit in their current entertainment center. Which saved Dad from cutting the current one and saved my aunt from buying a new one down the road. Also, it was a compromise since we kept trying to talk my aunt down to keeping the 27" for price/space sake. She kept insisting on the bigger one because supposedly my grandmother can't see the smaller one. No one could see that old one... the screen was going on it and it was completely blurred. But, our TV is the same size and Nana could see it perfectly fine at our house.

Sometimes I wonder about those two. You hear one thing from my aunt and something completely different from my grandmother. It drives me nuts.

ladies night... sort of
So, last night, we all got together for a night out. It turns out that the friend Erin brought along was Rob, aka: Nina... if you catch my drift.

He didn't make a bad looking girl, either.

Anyway, we hit Jillian's with Rob. The club was a bit slow and we told him to go out and change. Well, after discovering he left certain important parts of Nina back home, we hit the road so he could go get the rest of his things and then go to a place where he felt more comfortable. We went to a bar around the corner. Nina is very popular in the gay community around here, apparently, because, everytime we turned around, he/she was talking to someone else he/she already knew. It was certainly one of the more interesting places I've ever been to... though getting checked out by the woman who could have almost passed as a man was REALLY weird...

Rob and Nina are both extremely nice. They're not all that different from each other, either. He does excellent make up on himself and the wig is really pretty. And... once you get used to the idea... it's not all that bad. We had a really good time.

Poor Erin got sick though. We left the club around around 4 am... Erin hadn't eaten in twelve hours, so all the dancing activity started to get to her because of the lack of food. She got really lightheaded, so we waited for her to grab an orange juice from the Dunkin' Donuts that was right there before I drove her van home. Between that and an orange, she was feeling back to normal by the time we hit my house (I was the first picked up and therefore the last dropped off), so I didn't feel bad about her driving herself home.

All in all, though, it was still a pretty good night.

tomorrow! tomorrow!
Well, I start work tomorrow. Wish me luck, all! I have to go finish my laundry that I should have done yesterday... O.O;;; Heh...