I was reading through previous recommendation letters to make myself feel better and to prepare for applying for the Roswell job. I found this one from lisa. It makes me feel good.

Paul's enthusiasm and commitment to his vision, paired with his obsession for mastering new technologies, makes him an unstoppable force. In all my career history as production and design lead on cross-functional teams developing sites like station.sony.com, I have never had as much confidence in the lead developer as I had working with Paul. His work style is efficient, direct, decisive, and empowering to those who work with him. He is a joy to work with - eager to attain mutual understanding and agreement, patient and engaging when explaining technical concepts, always positive, resourceful and innovative.

I am trying to assemble my team for this brainstorming facilitiation on Saturday so that The Remember Buffalo Project can get started. I am kind of excited about it. I think this project will revolution the concept of collecting historical information in the same way that blogs changed media publication. It just involves much less commitment on the end of the writer.

paulSideKick: My neighbor is getting her master in creativity
paulSideKick: and she does these brainstormign faciliations
paulSideKick: for problems and projects, etc
kerwin0779: that sounds neat
paulSideKick: anyways I scheduled one for saturday at 1
paulSideKick: for the history project
paulSideKick: and was wondering if you were interested
kerwin0779: i am
paulSideKick: whats a dvd toy
kerwin0779: i will know tomorrow if I'll be in town
paulSideKick: You can send me an email when you know
kerwin0779: sure thing
paulSideKick: they are kind of fun
paulSideKick: I did one with her before
paulSideKick: its lots of brainstorming
paulSideKick: and post it notes
paulSideKick: and creativity
kerwin0779: v. cool
paulSideKick: but its a good way to get some ideas out about what direction to go in
kerwin0779: and if you have someone who knows how to facilitate it
kerwin0779: and keep the ideas going
kerwin0779: that's awesome
paulSideKick: ya
paulSideKick: she's good

Nonna's house looks like crap. It makes me feel like crap. That and the fact I have such a hard time communicating with some of our tennants makes it feel even worse. I scrapped all the paint off in order to paint it, and then I could not afford to paint it. I am embarassed.

This is the kind of journal entry I promised myself I would not have after last June.

So those of you that know me, know that I am almost never depressed. At least I had never been unitl last spring. I thought I would get over it but it seems to be getting worse the more money I owe. I know what it is about, but I don't know how to change anything. I just want a full-time job with health benefits doing something I paid all that money to go to school for and am good at. I also want it to be in Buffalo, instead of California. Maybe it is too much to ask for.

I know I am developing some really horrible depression because I am shutting everyone out and inventing all this extra work for myself that is increasingly more complicated to complete in order to prove to myself that I am in fact capabable of doing everything. The tasks get increasingly more time consuming and complicated the more depressed I get. It takes my mind off the fact that I feel like a total failure. Maybe I should just drink beer like everyone else.

Because I didn't get that job at Canisius, I am in such a bad place in Buffalo. I am reminded of it everyday. Worst of all I let down my best buddies. I need to just give up my dream of being a full-time professor in my home town. I am faced with the decision of giving up my career goals and moving on or giving up my hometown. I am not willing to wait until I am 45 to start a full-time job. I am sure I am not ever going to get a full time teaching position job at UB as I graduated from there and they seem to be moving more toward film anyways. Canisius probably won't have another job for a long time, and they didn't want me anyway.

My hopes were so destroyed followed the events of last spring. I still have no idea what made me the wrong canidiate for the position. It made it so bad that most of the people in charge of making the decisions could not even understand what it is I do. I felt I had proven myself with years of dedicated work but that amounted to nothing. I didn't have a history in industry but what does that really amount to. Especially in digital media arts, I think my teaching history combined with my work and stellar academic record made up for it. Moreover, industry experience certainly doesn't necessarily make someone a qualified teacher. I have witnessed that first hand.

The sitution made me hate school at UB because I saw it as such a huge burden of time and money with no return. That's the real reason I haven't completed my thesis. Had I got the job, everything would have been in on time, but I hated to look at it. It represented everything that defeated me.

Everytime I look at it, it reminds me of the crushing feeling of owing $80,000 and having no real hope of ever getting out of debt with becomming the person I never wanted to be. I have two useless degrees. One in German language and this new Master in Fine Arts. The second one I only chose because it fit my career goal and I was prompted by my employer. It was supposed to be the useful degree that wasn't just about learning for the sake of learning.

After the situation someone at work told me that in the future I should be more friendly with the other faculty. I was never very unfriendly though. It kind of made me feel weird. Like was it that I didn't go to their Christmas parties and invite them to my house. I should have just gone and brought terry or matthew. I was jist afraid that would ruin my career. How much worse could it have gotten.

So what triggered this now. Today I learned the new professor does not do game development. It Probably does't seem so significant but it makes me feel really weird about the whole process. Could the job description have been any more explicit about their interest in game and real-time 3d. For a while I thought maybe I didn't have enough experience with real-time modeling (I have lots of experince with real-time modeling and texturing) and that some of my work was too "rendered." Guess that wasn't the case.

I also I got an email that they are thinking of starting a masters program. To bad I just spent $50,000 on one in order to try and get the job that never panned out. Now there is talk of some other full time lab director job. I just can't tell if it is for real or if it is that same memo I got almost every semester since I started there back in 2001 telling me that soon there would be full-time work and many even benefits. I just want a full-time job with beneifts doing something I don't feel morally opposed to. Sometimes I think they make it up to get me to stick around.

If it doesn't work out I am going to try something totally new without computers. Maybe I will go back to basics and just get some meaningless unskilled job until I die.

I am so glad I saved this message form that day [inlink]paul,3328[/inlink]. I love my parents even if I don't see them enough. I know they were so dissapointed.

I was busy adding new chat features when I started freaking out because I got it to the point I wanted and then relaized that IE did not support max-width in CSS meaning the the chat images could not be limited in display size. Then after poking aorund on the microsoft site I discovered that IE has it own totally unique way of dealing with things like max-width using a javascript like css expression - something that other browsers don't understand but luckily ignore. Now I love it.


The code looks something like this. I make a class for a thumnail image. every oterh browser ignores the expression. Every other browser follows the max-wdith = 150px The expression is not too bad. I am thinking you could do some cool stuff with it.
.thumb{
width:expression(this.width < 150? "auto": "150px" );
max-width:150px;
}

I ahte being sick. RIgh tnow I have the worst cold. My head is all achey, my nose won't stop dripping, my thorat hurts. Luckily (e:terry) made yummy soup. I am debating if tylenol PM is the answer.



I was looking back at my journal for last october and I was sick at the very same time. Maybe next year I will use that to my advantage and schedule some sort of vacation for this time. I was also sick in February both years, wonder what's up for this February. It is so crazy that I have my colds documented for the last several years. I suppose I look the sickest in February of 04. The previous february is before I had a cell phone cam.

Colds since I started my Journal:
Now 10/09/05 with pic

02/08/05 [inlink]paul,2676[/inlink]
with pic

10/06/04 [inlink]paul,2028[/inlink]
with pic

02/12/04 [inlink]paul,527[/inlink]


I wonder if now that I see the cycle it will perpetuate it even more.

My mother send her usual boat load of crap with my brother yesterday. I got a bunch of my childhood class lists with the names and addresses of the other classmates bat Roosevelt. I discovered something quite interesting. (e:iriesara) and I always thought that we met the first time in bluebirds. But in fact we were also in pre-k togther. I can't say I remember pre-k very well. I do remember some sort of computer like machine that we had to peer through and had bright shapes. It wasn't a real computer. I also remember some sort of coat room and nap time on the rugs. Oh and that one time we made goulasch but maybe that was already kindergarten. I think it was the first time I had ever eaten any non-italian ethnic food.



So Sara's name is right on the crease and hard to read on the scan but you can see her address, birthday, and parents clearly. You can also see her phone number, but I changed hid all the numbers before posting this.

Today (e:matthew), (e:terry) and I went to the Buffalo Historical Society to get inspired for The Remember Buffalo Project . I am so excited now. They had so much information but were missing exactly what i want to capture. The personal memories associted with the historical events, places, and architechture.

There was the great quote about the building of the 33 which divided the city into two sections. The quote said

By the mid 20th century, the automobile and superhighway further transformed the city. Private cars allowed more people to live farther from work. Suburbs became linked to offices downtown by networks of superhighways. The highways divided many of the old neighborhoods.]

Here are some pics from the Kennsigton being built.




What they are missing is the thousands personal accounts that I plan on capturing with the Buffalo memory network

Today I added a linkdump for the memory project where people can add relevent research links and ideas.



They also had this incubator, I couldn't get over how future yet retro it was.



And a great sound clip jingle from Sattlers the department store that used to be on Broadway before broadway started to die. I love the jingle, and I could get pctures now we just need the memories to go with it.

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

It will be so fun to visit all these ghosts on mobile phones and to inspire all the fmaily interactions that the proectw ill require.

Sharing socks with (e:matthew) for the last 4 years, I have seen more holes than in my whole life. In fact I don't think any of my socks ever had holes before I met him. He does have really long toes and toenails. But I think it is because he walks so much or that he lets his shoes run down really bad.

I went to spot with (e:matthew) and (e:terry) and got a grande chai. It was about half full and took about six sips to drink. I think (e:lilho) is right - spot sucks. While she is moving on to starbucks, i am going to move on to Caffee Aroma. Unfortunately, she has something against them.

The blonde guy who works here, that had the broken arm is the best employee. He is always so friendly. He was that way at feelrite too. If I had a busines I would hire him.

I have been stuck on the design phase for the student web gallery at Canisius. It is a weird balance between making it look good and making the design not stand out too much.



on a wider screen



Another issue is that I only work on it about 4 hours a week. Originally my contract had more "work" time built in to do things like this and the checkin database which I already finished but then my boss had this idea to have me work in the lab. Well it is impossible to get any work done in the lab because no matter where I am students and faculty find me and ask questions. Not that I don't like answering questions, it's just I never get time to work on stuff like this.

This is what it looks like now. You can click ont he thumbnauil to the left or right to load pics into the main box. If you want a full 1024x768 size image you can click on the main mage to load it in another window.

The space at the bottom and the top right will be used for other info, etc. Not sure yet. I will probably change it all before it is done.