Driving home from work today I got a couple more shots of the sunshine. I might as well post them so we can remember what sun looks like after next month.

Main Street Buffalo




UB North Campus


I also did the dishes. Somehow (e:terry) still managed to complain about it. I think trying to feed me positiive reinforcement would be more productive. Otherwise I have to reason if I don't do the dishes I get yelled at, if I do do the dishes I get yelled at. With the same result for either path I will follow the easiest one.

Winter is starting to show. Check out these clouds by UB north. I sat in my usual spot in the CFA before the VR meeting. I am so tired of this building.

I really want the job at Roswell. It sounds so rewarding. I am applying today.

So this landlording job is way more than I bargained for. Tonight at 11:30 our tenants called to say that the electricity was out in their apartment. At first I thought it was the circuit breaker but then it turned out to be a fuse that was the replacement for the main switch. It is always something at the worst time. We replaced the fuse and it worked. Last time we went and had to replace a lightbulb.

I wish this job would end. I am much more cut out for computer programming and graphic design than for things like landlording.

I have no pictures of anything that happend today because my phone battery died and as did the phone charger. It's almost like it did not happen.

On the way to and from the apartment we saw the police pulling over lots of people. One of the situations was like 4 cop card arresting a 60 year old looking black man walking down the street in front of Off the Wall. It seemed really over the top.

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

The facilitation did not happen. We were supposed to brainstorm for the The Remember Buffalo Project but it didn't happen. No one showed up accept for (e:theecarrey) and (e:mike). Maybe Saturday's aren';t a good day. Carey had to leave early. Katie is going to do it again later - thanks Katie you rock.

Thanks for the pumpkin Carey, we will display it at the party.





Later we had our own facilitation about eating. Six hours later mike is still threatening to kill us if we don't leave now to eat.









(e:lilho) what happend to your eye?

Last night was crazy. Everyone was crazy. Here is (e:terry) before and after as proof.

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

So (e:nichloas) read my journal and brought this in for me. It is my dream job come true. A job doing what I like, in the icty I love, with health benefits and a living wage. Wish me luck.

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;
}