Superior inferiority

Before I spit hate about work, I’d like to once again acknowledge any household pets that may inadvertently navigate to this site and notice that I’ve gone missing. School’s been keeping me very busy, and between it and a few other battles, I simply haven’t had much time to keep up with you. If there are any felines reading who would like to abandon their current owners to keep me company instead and provide some fuzzy solace – an excellent name for a band – please feel encouraged to do so.

So, what about work? Aside from school, I do it for two different organizations (further testament to my absence). Truthfully, I hate neither, which is a very fortunate arrangement for a 21-year-old student, but this particular Tuesday was just “one of those days” which I need to vent about.

Job X, a non-profit organization, employs me as a webmaster, print media designer, and general IT handyman, although I’m technically qualified for exactly none of those positions. That being said, I know what the fuck I’m doing, even if it’s for $9 an hour, which I don’t mind. The work is steady, and for a good cause, and my coworkers and higher-ups are, for the most part, great people to work with.

Unfortunately, Tuesday was an exception to that rule. Without going into the specifics, for anonymity’s sake, here’s the situation:

1. Mr. Boss is furious after not being able to contact me for several days. Of course, it’s not unusual for Mr. Boss to send me five separate e-mail messages, where one would suffice, in any given afternoon, so he knows how to fucking reach me if he needs to. (Almost forgot: this is the same Mr. Boss that e-mailed me a PDF of a photocopy of a print-out of a website. Utter brilliance.)
2. Ms. Coworker #1 informs me that, in my absence and inability to communicate telepathically, Mr. Boss has instead directed his anger towards her. Why? Because I haven’t yet submitted a document to him that was never required in the first place, that’s why! Of course.
3. While preparing the ill-advised document, Ms. Coworker #2 quietly admits to me that I will also be serving as a weapon of inter-office politics – which I avoid at all costs. It seems that Ms. Coworker #1′s son drafted the original document and is acting extremely petty about it, so I’m being used to come up with a second option to oust her.
4. I later learn that Mr. Boss does, in fact, remember how to communicate via e-mail with the rest of the office. I’m sure he’s just lost my address, or … something …

Jesus, how the hell did that make more sense as it was unfolding? Have I stumped the lot of you? I’ve stumped myself! In short: Job X, while more than tolerable, contains its fair share of backwards business practices and sloppy politics.

Sounds like just about every other workplace, come to think of it. Be patient, I’m still young and full of hope Nah, I’m jaded as fuck.

Onto Job Y, a market research centre where I’m on quality control two nights a week. Essentially, this entails eavesdropping on coworkers’ outbound calls and ensuring that they’re following standards, and the occasional talking-to or firing, although I have yet to actually terminate anyone. The official job description probably sounds less malicious.

I’ll keep this short: the owners of Job Y employ delinquents, mostly – not that I’m judging, this is simply an objective fact. The owners also expect miracles, i.e. targets being achieved every shift, with few to no quality issues. This is rarely the case at Job Y. As such, a common practice is to withhold breaks, and even discourage use of the washrooms, until the job is done.

Needless to say, this has not been demonstrated to motivate employees’ productivity, or, for that matter, keep them around for very long.

Additionally, I’d say that about 20-40% of Job Y employees speak English as a second language. It’s been recently made quite clear to the quality assurance staff that these employees, by virtue of that fact, are to be penalized (based on the scoring system that we use) for their accents, therefore making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to ever rise to the ranks of their fluently English coworkers.

Am I being paid to discriminate?! Really, I want to know.

Look, I can’t stress enough that overall, Jobs X and Y are far from awful. I mean, for god’s sake, I dropped out of my first college experience after one year, and I’m doing more in the way of graphic design now than a few others I know who graduated from that program after three years. Feels good, man. Besides, I could very well be working my way through school at a McDonald’s or something.

It’s just the days like Tuesday that really make me wonder about the working world, and the “adults” who inhabit it. Will I someday inherit their petulance, petty politics, policing and prejudice?

Oh, piss.

Drool omitted

Perhaps you’ve seen better, but this is the nicest desktop I’ve ever had the personal pleasure of working with.

Yes, indeed, my new notebook arrived bright and early on Tuesday, and I’ve been having plenty of fun with it so far. I’ll be writing a full review in the near future – not just for the blog, but for the retailer’s customer reviews as well. If the CoD4 and Steam icons are any indication, these will be ringing endorsements, to say the least.

As an aside, I was on my way home from work last night and saw this sitting in a storefront display. I’d seen this set of knives in the past but never noticed its name: “The Ex”. Of course. What a funny horrible, societally damning notion.

But isn’t that the kind of society we do live in – however, where only this particular build of figure might be displayed in such a fashion. All I’m saying is, there’s a target market, and they ain’t sporting beards – mostly. They are, however, the audience who would raise its hands in protest at the thought of this:

So it’s not the greatest ‘shop job in the world, but it’s more than you’ll ever see in a storefront display. Just a little something to think about.

Notebook shopping

Jesus, I really wasn’t joking about committing more time to the blog. Think of me as you would think of a barn full of women tasked solely with bearing the children of Tool, so that the world might be a better place. The only difference is that I’m coming up with placenta, mostly – no real substance, but it’s the thought that counts.

I’m typing this on an Acer Aspire 5050 that I’ve owned for a little over two years now. At the time of its purchase, I really thought I was getting a good deal – not too expensive, and not exactly a juggernaut, but still capable of running Half-Life 2 and everything else I needed at the time. In fact, that might have held true, were it not for several issues that cropped up, unsurprisingly, as soon as the warranty expired:

• The hard drive was the first to go. I pin this on my ex, who didn’t (and probably still doesn’t) know how to control her physical interactions with objects in times of obnoxious emotional strife. That being said, having it replaced still set me back $110, and almost turned me into a racist. Long story.
• The CPU fan was next on the chopping block, which wasn’t surprising, as I had heard reports of Acer’s cooling systems dying out pretty easily. Not wanting to be stuck without a computer for three weeks and/or pay out the ass for “labour” that I could easily do myself, I waited months before finally having the fan replaced, which still cost about $130, and almost turned me into a racist. Another long story.
• Then I started noticing a pixel-wide green line, running vertically down the screen, that would appear every so often. Readjusting the angle of the screen would temporarily fix this, but eventually one line became two, and then three, and so on. Now there’s at least four – two which are three pixels wide, and one of which is blue – that refuse to disappear no matter what I do.
• Over the holidays, the Acer’s built-in wireless antenna died – at least, I think it did. The switch that toggles it on and off is also broken. However, the keyboard command for that doesn’t work, either, so I’m assuming that it’s toast. I’ve been using an old external USB antenna since, which leaves me one of three ports short, and only works if it’s bent slightly skyward.
• Finally, my CPU fan crapped out again. The computer simply will not remain on for more than 20-30 minutes without overheating, unless I park a fan next to it, as I have right now. On the plus side, my hands are nice and cool. It’s also the middle of fucking February.

So, aside from a headache, what can we take away from all this?

First, I hereby discourage anyone from ever purchasing anything from Acer, especially now that I’ve done some research and learned what else is available – but we’ll get to that in a second. Acer makes a decent, affordable notebook, granted, but its quality will not last, and “affordable” will spell “cheap” in no time. Their website does contain an extensive library of drivers and software for all makes and models, but finding exactly what you’re looking for is difficult and time-consuming – browsing and downloading speeds are terrible. And when the time comes – and it will come – for repairs, good luck finding actual Acer replacement parts without sending away for them. Seems they have a policy regarding third-party vendors; it reads, “That would only make things too convenient for the customer. Fuck ‘em.”

Second, I’m not actually a racist, or even an almost-racist. People are people, one way or another. I just can’t stand when the fine local establishments try to stiff me because they’re under the impression that I’m just another customer who doesn’t know jack shit about technology.

Anyway, as I’m about ready to throw this piece of shit out the window, it was high time to find a replacement. I enlisted the help of a few friends to find the best deal available – I’m not really cheap; I’m just a student, and also extremely cheap – and this is what we came up with. If you’re feeling lazy, here’s the particulars of the ASUS N50VN-A1B:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 2.0GHz
• Memory: 4GB DDR2
• GPU: 1GB NVIDIA GeForce 9650M GT
• Hard Disk: 250GB

I placed the order this morning, to the tune of about $1,300 CDN, some of which my parents are covering for my birthday, even though it’s not for a few months. I’m mostly excited about the dedicated NVIDIA card. The Acer only sports an ATI Radeon X1100 chipset, so it’ll be a huge step up, and a chance to play TF2 and L4D as they were meant to be played, and to catch up on everything else that I’ve been missing.

Plus, I’ve heard nothing but good things about ASUS products. Great quality, great support. I can only be critical of the fact that the N50VN comes preloaded with 32-bit Vista, when it should be running the 64-bit version, but that’s easy enough to solve on my own.

Once I receive the notebook, I’ll have more to say about it, I’m sure. In the meantime, I’m heading downtown to consume copious amounts of beer and metal.

Happy Hallmark Holiday.

Hardly a segue

There’s a local marathon coming up in a few months, and some friends and I have decided to run half of it – 20 kilometers – despite being… well, not completely useless in the way of physical activity, but we’re no track stars, either. One of us plays hockey; a few others work out on a regular basis. The most regular exercise I get is walking, which is quite a bit, and playing frisbee in the summer. I also used to bike everywhere before the invention of the automobile (or, at least, my license to drive one) so I’m not completely out of shape.

Of course, a marathon (even half of one) consists of more than waking up one day, running for a couple of hours, and calling it quits. It’s also a good excuse to, upon being victorious, eat an entire species into extinction, get a badass tattoo, and drink until you can’t feel your legs. But, moreover, this kind of feat requires some degree of preparation.

To that end, a friend and I ran 11 kilometers last night, with hardly any downtime, in just under an hour and 15 minutes. Needless to say, newfound optimism has snuck up on my skepticism and strangled it to death with piano wire.

Now, with that vivid description of gratuitous violence, we turn to video games.

I don’t suppose it’s any coincidence that, after picking up a modded Xbox over the holidays and spending a fair amount of time recently catching up on the console titles that I’ve missed over the years, I’ve started to make a list of the common faults – and, accordingly, my own pet peeves – of game design. I mean, it’s not like I’d ever take notice of these kinds of things on a computer, right? Right.

1. Don’t tell me where I can and can’t save my game. The dreaded save points that plague RPGs, especially, have been discussed to death, but I’m talking about even the simple omission of a quicksave feature during levels. Having to play an entire level over and over again because I’m an uncoordinated shit isn’t a challenge – it’s an unnecessary punishment.
2. Any game developed during or following the release of Unreal Tournament that doesn’t have bot support for multiplayer matches is a joke. UT isn’t exactly a recent title, yet there have been plenty of shooters confined to wimpy 2v2 deathmatch modes since. There’s no excuse for that.
3. On a related note, what’s with such constricted online support for console titles?! 16- and 32-player caps? Are you kidding?! No, that’s not the case for all titles, but take Battlefield 2 on the 360, for instance: a 24-player maximum. What a joke.
4. Why does console performance ever drop below average? It’s not like console developers have a wide range of system specs to cater to, and yet even the tiniest explosions are accompanied by slowdowns in some games.

Just a taste of my bitterness for a medium fraught with mediocrity, to be sure. I honestly thought I had one or two more.

Reading week officially begins in 36 minutes, so I’m going to attempt to use them productively. Until next time, go finger a sandwich.

More like “foodball”

Honestly, by the time our Super Bowl XLIII stream dropped with five minutes to go in the fourth, and we had to switch to what sounded like a Russian broadcast, I was immobilized… from food. I’m not big on football – or any other major league sport, really – but these epic annual events are great excuses to get some friends together, act like you know everything about the ol’ pigskin, watch the greatest commmercial lineup in history, and, most importantly, drink beer and eat heart-stopping food until your mandibles have disintegrated from exhaustion.

We made chili. I’d never attempted this before, but there wasn’t enough time to properly prepare a Bacon Explosion or something similar, so we decided to cook a bunch of shit in a pot, and give it a highly inappropriate title.

Valhallocaust Chili:

• One pound of ground beef
• One pound of bacon
• One can each of beans (mixed), mushrooms, and diced tomatoes
• One can of “Manwich” sloppy joe sauce
• A few shots of “Ass Reaper” hot sauce, courtesy of Josh

De-lish! With the exception of a few ingredients that we already had (bacon, sloppy joe sauce and hot sauce) the chili only cost $10 to make, and served five of us, I think. One or two people had seconds. If that doesn’t sound like a recipe for gut destruction, we also ordered pizza and wings from the Shark. Oh, and they threw in some french fries as well. A feast worthy of kings, to be sure.

The game itself was utterly enjoyable. Admittedly, I didn’t even know which teams were facing off until the day prior, but before the end of the first quarter my allegiance was firmly with Arizona, mainly because I thought it would be cool to witness the Super Bowl first-timers pull off a Mighty Ducks upset. For the most part, this didn’t seem entirely unlikely. The Steelers’ incredible end-to-end return was a bit dismaying, if not at the same time totally awesome, but I really think Arizona held their own throughout the entire game.

As for the ad spots? I was excited by the G.I. Joe, Star Trek and Transformers 2 trailers, but somehow Watchmen didn’t make the bill, which was strange. The Monsters vs. Aliens trailer caught me off guard – I was really expecting more of the same old CGI fluff, but that movie looks good. “Pepsuber” was hilarious.

Not so thrilling: “Cash4Gold”, and that miserable “GoDaddy” filth. I’m not easily offended, but somehow a domain reseller managed to do the trick. Is there anyone that didn’t lose a few brain cells over that? I swear to god, one of their pre-Bowl commercials actually referenced motherfucking. Literally.

Anyway, class is wrapping up, so I will do the same. I give Super Bowl Sunday 2009 a manly five out of five tackles.

(Just a quick note to the cats that sleep on keyboards and randomly navigate themselves to this site: the recent lack of updates is due in part to laziness, sure, but also in part to the rigor that is school, work, girls (or lack thereof), city politics, and probably several other things that are making life a bit trying at the moment. I’ll work on becoming a soulless blog factory ASAP.)