🏷️ work

So as some of you probably remember I was so stressed out when I found out that Erik, the new Prof at Canisius, did not have his MFA, something that I was told was a pre-requisite for the job and I spent tens of thousands of dollars and 3 years working non-stop on at their request. When he told me he didn't have one, I was seriously blown away as it seems like every school in the country expects an MFA for any art teacher. Either an MFA or a PHD. I guess Canisius doesn't have very high education standards, they care more about business. I suppose that should have been obvious considering the blunder with Mr. Wolfe a couple years back. He seriously had no idea what he was talking about. THere was even a point when students filed a petition to have him removed.

The final straw was at the faculty meeting last week when the new fantasy full time lab director position got pushed back from spring 2006 to fall 2006. It really made me lose hope. I mean I gave them five years of my all and I just wanted a full-time job with health insurance. Considering that education cost about ~30,000 a year for full tuition/dorm students I can't believe that they are too poor.

Reading my journal about the sadness concerning the sitution [inlink]paul,3909[/inlink] prompted @nicholas to bring me a newpaper clipping with jobs [inlink]paul,3910[/inlink] , which lead to the interview, which lead to the job. Thank you nick, you will have a special place in my world forever.

So this is the message I was talking about getting last night on my previous entry [inlink]paul,3959[/inlink].



I barely slept last night because it was all I could think about. When I woke up at 9am, which I better get used to fast, I called and found out I did in fact get the job. I am so excited because the job itself sounds really fun, not to mention that it pays really well and includes health insurance, which everyone knows was my pre-requisite for a job.

Thanks @ajay and George Johnson for writing me recommendation letter although @ajay, yours never arrived according to Roswell.

Now (e:strip) and rememberbuffalo can finally have there own server!

So here I am sitting at work till 9 and no one is around. I know that roswell called but I have no idea what they said and it is driving me crazy. @matthew apparently knows but didn't feel like it was important enough to tell me by email, or to call my office. Apparently, an anonymous "Roswell called" in the chat was good enough. Thanks.

We used to be able to get our answering machine messages via the internet. The problem was that we could not hear the people leaving messages as it was just voicemail. It was good in one way because i could get the message from anywhere. It was bad because we would just ignore them most of the time as we never heard the people actually speak and plead for us to pick up the phone.

I wish that he could have given me a little more feedback as to the situation. Now I have to sit here for 3 hours and just wait, while driving myself insane thinking about it.

So I had the interview at Roswell today. I think it was very successful. The job sounds fun and challenging in a good way and it's all about reducing paper in the workflow, which I am all about. I am so into web application development. Especially since AJAX makes the web so much more fun to work with.

I really think that soon, most applications will move toward web-based solutions. It would be cool to make a web based operating system. Maybe next year, haha. Wednesday night I am teaching xmlHTTP with Sherbert 1.0. I have a couple fixes to make before class but I think it will be a great introduction to AJAX.

One of the guys who interviewed me and who would also be my prospective boss is the husband of a childhood friend who I haven't talked to in a long time. So even if I don't get the job I at least get a chance to reconnect with an old friend, who I haven't seen in about four years. Guess who it is @iriesara, it's Chrissy Galla.

On another note, @lilho cut my hair last night for the interview and about an hour before it was about to begin she calls to ask what I am wearing. I told her brown pin stripe pants, a sweater and a suit and she said, "You are never going to get the job without a suit." Nothing like getting totally stressed o ut just before you leave. I think it worked out ok without one. Maybe with this job I could afford to finally buy a nice suit!

I was hanging out on elmwood today with @lilho and @terry and katie when we saw @mike's car by @jason and @joshua's house, so we called him. Him and @jill were at blokbuster. I hadn't been in a blockbuster in a long time. It reminded me of when i worked there as a young aduly.

I was officially the worst eployee because I know nothing about movies. I had only seen like 10 in my whole life at that point and people would ask me all sorts of questions. For examle, "yu know that movie about the girl with long brown hair?" People seriously expected an answer to those kind of questions. I always referred them to "the book" or suggested the movie in closest reach. I was so bad at that job. The carpet today gave me flashbacks.

Ironically that was my second bad viacom job. The first one I worked at a sports store witin King's Dominion theme park. People would ask for specific team stuff. I woukd always ask dumb questions like, "tell me, is that footballl, baseball, or hockey?" They hated me.

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.

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.

My first job ever involving computer coding was to code a student lab user checkin. It is amazing how much easier it was this time around when I had to make one for canisius. I think it cam eout pretty good. It lets admin users login in the specific lab. Then they can check students in. When students check cue up in the checkout list where a fancy javascript counts down the seconds, displaying how many minutes they have been in the room, updated in realtime.

Once the lab assistants log them out, the student data gets cued into a progress report which can be emailed ot the professors.

I can't believe that I stayed up working on programming till 7:20am. I took a picture so I would believe it myself.



I am mostly done working for the weekend, so it works out. However, I am ridiculously tired. Now I just need to go get a social security card so I can get paid for it!!

Look at my eyes. I took a pic so I would remember what it felt like to think till you are exhausted when I am old. If they give me a problem at the social security office I am likely to go postal. Look for me on the news, lol.

Well, the phone is finally arriving although the guy I bought it from wrote to say he forgot the stylus. That would be okay for any other phone but this one only uses a stylus as input. He is sending me the other one right away. Luckily it will work with the wacom stylus until then, although that is quite bulky. Maybe I will stop and pick up a treo stylus while I am waiting. The only thing I am really disappointed about is that the really amazing nokia SDK for the symbian phones only runs in windows! I haven't used windows in weeks, argh.



On another note, I am supposed to be filling out my tax paperwork for the job at UB but I lost my freakin' social security card and passport. Someone out there is probably trying to assume my debt right now. So I am basically nobody and moreover, I can't leave the country very easily. I am going to go sign up for a new social security card today and to report my passport is missing. It was time for a new one anyways because mine looked so different than a normal one. I got it in Berlin at the Consulate after my bag was stolen from a discotheque in Flensburg.

It had numbers stamped right through all the pages and the picture was glued on. Basically it looked very non-official and it expired this year anyways.

In the mean time, I can't really start my job. I find this to be quite annoying because it is for the same school I have been paying in state tuition at for four years and everything they do is filed under my social security number. Can't they just let this one slide and verify it another way.

Last night we watched part of a documentary about homeless gay street prostitutes in Hollywood. The ones in the worst situation had no papers. You never really think about how important your "papers" are until you don't have them fo a moment and you are suddenly nobody.

So after turning down teaching Realspace Electronics at UB and 3D Modeling at Medaille , today I turned down teaching a course on Digital Culture because it just wouldn't fit in my schedule and it was way to demanding of material to start preparing for only a couple weeks before the semester began. I think teaching isn't really a good deal, especially when I have to pay $706/month in student loans. The course subject actually appeals to me but not so much in the format it is presented, as it is a lecture course. I can do it this year, but I really need a better solution fo rthe future. One that at least includes health insurance before I turn 30.

In this case, it's also about the commute. Once again I need to commute back and forth from UB North to Canisius and I refuse to do it more than one time per day, especially in the winter semester. It is such hell in the winter, waiting for that bus after the subway or worse yet waiting for the bus at UB to take me back to the subway to Canisius to teach. I can never rely on it being on time!

After weighing it out, teaching this class was really not profitable for me as my salary and contract wasn't even going to change much, they offered me 10 hours in the lab instead of 12 per week, yet I would pick up a demanding lecture course of 25 students, the month before school starts. Maybe I will teach it some day in the future. There is always next year.

PS. If someone were to offer me a position teaching more web deisgn, programming, data management, web interactivity type of a class, I would definately say yes.