Today the HR person from my company called me into their office and told me that after several months of temp-to-hire status where I was the "temp" I am now basically a "hire" once I finish the paperwork.

This is going to be a big load off my mind. It's never easy thinking "what if suddenly find myself unemployed next month", and now I probably won't have to think about that unless I do something really stupid. Getting permanent status is also nice because I've put off so many purchases for so long, trying to save up as much money! as possible for the possibility of not being hired on and having to move back to NC.

I wanted to go to the Layette square concert to commemorate the occasion, but I was feeling so tired I had to pass. But I should definitely find some small way to celebrate this weekend--perhaps I should invest in that bottle of Goldschlager that I was so craving last weekend.

Technical-ese

Tonight I made a big breakthrough in my use of CoreData to build my Cocoa based bulk geocoding app that will let streamline my workflow of converting city commercial establishments into WGS 84 decimal coordinate values.

Plain English:

I'm one step closer to knowing the exact location of every bar in Buffalo and I'm one step closer to improving my pitiful situational awareness that's caused me to miss a lot of cool events. Entering the addresses en-masse and converting them all-at-once will be a lot simpler than locating individual addresses in Google Earth and hitting the "marker" button 500 or so times (once for each bar).

Apparently somone forgot to tell me that in Buffalo when it rains really hard, the roads turn into rivers.

Elmwood was pretty bad. Since my escape route back home was cut off and I was on the north section of Elmwood, I thought that I'd fare better on Sheridan. Since Sheridan's a big, heavily used road I thought that its storm drains would be more effective.

Apparently not.



Yes, those are waves. Lucky for me the moon wasn't out, otherwise I'd never get back home.



It's a bird, it's a SUV, it's a jetski, it's...it's...nope, it's just a SUV.



When roads become rivers, sidewalks become roads. I was not proud of what I did and the grass that I and everyone else in Buffalo ruined. But sometimes ya gotta do what'cha gotta do.

Last night, I was really bored. I don't know anyone in this town, so hanging out with friends wasn't an option. There were no movies playing that I wanted to see save Da Vinci Code, and I'm trying to finish the book before I go see the movie. And I looked over a listing of the day's music acts, and nothing looked very interesting; of course, I don't really know the music scene is like up here and which bands are any good, so I usually look at genre and make my best guess.

By some miracle, I had overlooked English Beat's free concert at Gateway Park (apparently Buffalo has more than just one free concert at Lafeyette Square). After 45 minutes of trying to find the place (and missing the previous band(s), I got to see most of English Beat's main act, which was pretty good and really energetic. I didn't see no rude boys, but quite a few people at the front of the stage were skanking.

Overall, I think I'm proud of myself for not having given into the temptation to either see a lame movie I didn't really want to see or to spend the entire night blasting the ficticious residents of San Andreas.

I had originally dismissed my Foreman grill-owning friends as members of a kookie brand-worshipping cult. But after 4 months of living up here with a harried work schedule and having to make a variety of quick meals, I have come to the conclusion that these devices are in fact "The Bachelor's Swiss Army Knife".