Today was my second day of work. I arrived home and found in the mail my paycheck for Day 1. I gotta say, that, so far, I like the way they work.
My (unusually large) training class also has several people that are coming from Ames. Today our car-pool grew from 3 to 4. Hooray for cheap!
Oh, yeah, and I’ve read 160+ pages about securities markets in the last 20 hours. What’s not to love?
Archive for May, 2007
Well That Was Prompt
Tuesday, May 15th, 2007Caught in the Spam Filter
Sunday, May 13th, 2007Re: Thank you for your application, we accepted your appication
Too bad, I have a job now. And my employers know how to spel.
So you asked for another email from Megan?
No, but I’ll always take emails from my sister. Although I didn’t know she’d changed her last name and started sending junk-mail.
Offer: Scotty Pippen Black Men’s Basketball Shoes
Who knew Nike was making race-specific shoes? Will I be a better baller with these? Maybe if I were a little bit taller.
Does Steve Nash have a shoe deal?
R is for Ridiculous
Friday, May 11th, 2007From foxnews.com:
MPAA Adds Smoking as Film-Rating Factor
MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman said his group’s ratings board, which previously had considered underage smoking in assigning film ratings, now will take into account smoking by adults, as well.
That adds smoking to a list of such factors as sex, violence and language in determining the MPAA’s G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 ratings.
Film raters will consider the pervasiveness of tobacco use, whether it glamorizes smoking and the context in which smoking appears, as in movies set in the past when smoking was more common…
Descriptions on sex, violence and language that accompany movie ratings now will include such phrases as “glamorized smoking” or “pervasive smoking,” Glickman said…
(Activist Kari) Titus said film raters should be as tough on smoking as they are on bad language to minimize the effects of on-screen smoking on children, including her own 5-year-old daughter.
“I don’t want her using that language, but last time I checked, she’s probably not going to die from that,” Titus said. “If she starts smoking from these images she sees in movies, chances are she’s probably going to die early from that.”
Kari, if your daughter starts smoking because of images she sees in movies, I think that cigarettes should be the least of your concern, especially if her mom is a spokesperson for Breathe California. I don’t want to be a busybody or stick my nose where it doesn’t belong (ahem), but maybe you should worry about parenting. I have no evidence, but I’m willing to wager my net worth (roughly -$4,000 right now) that friends and parental involvement (including keeping an eye on who the child’s friends are) play a much larger role in determining a child’s risk to participating in unhealthy activities.
Or, how about we just rate movies based on anti-social behavior and participation in unhealthy activities. Yes, they’d all be rated R, but at least that would keep young kids out of the theaters. Maybe then they could do something healthy.
Like watch TV.
Money: It’s a Hit
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007So, if you haven’t heard, I got a job. No, a real job. A paying job.
I will be commuting to Des Moines (motto: Our roadways were designed by drunken 4-year-olds – because that’s who uses them!) to answer the phone-calls of customers who have their retirement plans with my employer, a global financial institution that provides various insurance, banking, and asset management services. And let me tell you, boy am I excited. Sorry, there was supposed to be an exclamation point there, but my keyboard refused to be fraudulent. In all honestly, I am becoming less enthusiastic every day.
First reason: the way my life has been going, I am having creepy flashbacks to May 2003 when I was about to start my first job with a large property and casualty insurance company, which was a 1.5 year experiment in self-flagellation (oooh… somebody’s read the DaVinci Code). Starting with the interview, I have been getting a vibe that this is going to be more of the same. On the plus side, I get benefits starting immediately (which is INSANE – nobody does that), and they are paying more significantly more than I made at the other place – after TWO PROMOTIONS. So there is that.
Second reason: I have a mound of paperwork, approximately 7 feet tall, that is supposed to be filled out before I start. I would much rather do this while ON the clock, especially since some of the SEC stuff looks about as detailed and exciting as a prostate exam (I’m guessing). Accordingly, I have been putting it off. On the plus side, they are paying me to get my Series 6 license, which is useful in many jobs, as well as just a general résumé enhancer.
Third reason: As things are shaping up, I already have enough to do to give me a very busy and fulfilling summer without the addition of 40 non-flexible hours of work per week. Plus side: I get a ridiculous amount of vacation time. Rebuttal: I can’t use it while in training… for the next THREE MONTHS.
Forth reason: I did some rough calculations as to how I’m going to spend my salary, by month.
Jan, Feb, March, April – Taxes.
May – The car repairs I just had done so that I could commute safely and get better gas mileage.
June, July – Gas. This might be optimistic, too.
August, September, October – Rent, utilities, cost of living stuff, insurance.
December – Therapy for the realization that I have worked hard for an entire year and have little to show for it, followed by the realization that I have lived for [edited] years with similar results.
On the plus side, if you happen to catch me in November, I’ll be one free-spending, happy camper!
Look out world, here I come! Again.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you can commission a study, and interpret the results to say whatever you would like them to. From foxnews.com (emphasis added):
Study: Conceiving in Summer Lowers Baby’s Future Test Scores
…Winchester and his researchers found scores for math and language were clearly seasonal, with the lowest scores going to children conceived in June through August…
For the females in the study the difference was a 1 to 1.5 percent drop, and the results were similar for all groups and sexes conceived in May through August. Winchester noted that even though “it might not sound like a large number, it is significant on a population basis.”
How could a baby conceived in the long days of summer test so differently? Researchers reasoned that the culprit is the more than one billion pounds of pesticides used annually in the U.S…
“The fetal brain begins developing soon after conception. The pesticides we use to control pests in fields and our homes and the nitrates we use to fertilize crops and even our lawns are at their highest level in the summer,” Winchester said in a news release.
Wait… WHAT???
Winchester is a neonatologist, meaning that his area of expertise has NOTHING to do with chemicals or pesticides. There is absolutely NOTHING in the study regarding the effects of pesticides. All of this hand-wringing is based COMPLETELY on speculation, and yet there are easy steps listed in the article to avoid making your child up to 1.5% dumber.
Now, I’m not saying that pregnant women should go around huffing chemicals, but, in the spirit of the study and press-release, I’d like to offer an alternative, and equally viable conclusion: children conceived in the months of June through August often tend to be born in March through May. This could put those children at a severe developmental disadvantage – the school calendar is arranged in a way that makes it likely for them to be 8-11 months younger than many of their peers.
Actually, who are we kidding? I’m sure those “pesty” scientists know as well as I do that the results are the effects of global warming on the baby… er, fetus… in the early stages of pregnancy.
Happy Cinco de Moustache!
Friday, May 4th, 2007Bali. Tonight. 9pm.
(From moustachemay.com)
The Physics of Rock
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007For all you guitar-playing calculator-toting nerd-rock types out there… or really, for anyone who cares… or, for that matter, who doesn’t… here is the best explanation I have ever read for how sound/music – a guitar, specifically – works.
Most(not all, with the advent of CMI’s) musical instruments, and the poor bastards cursed with playing them, are integrated human controlled sound pressure transduction systems. That is, some guy stands in a room, straps on a guitar, picks up a plectrum, strikes a string(or 2 or 6), the string resonates in response to the applied mechanical energy at a frequency determined by a combination of it’s tension, it’s length, and it’s diameter(which partially facilitates it’s range of frequency vs. total tension)a pickup converts that mechanical energy into electrical current containing both frequency and amplitude, it passes down a guitar cable, into a pre-amplifier/Eq, onto an amplifier(these two are often an integrated system, as we know), and out to a speaker(or often a number of speakers in an enclosure) which excurse and create sound pressure changes at the same frequency(s) in the acoustic environ that those speakers are located in.
Those sound pressure changes contract and expand(the actual terms are compression and rarefaction) the air in the room, this energy zips into our eardrums, our eardrums resonate in sympathy and in turn convert these pulses into human electrical energy that gets loaded onto the ‘hellbound express’ and shipped right into the brain.
That’s when we go…. “Dude……YOU ROCK!!”.
Or maybe. “Doooooode…. YOU SUCK!”
Anyways.
I didn’t include a link because even the URL was somewhat vulgar, and also because it is a 79-page, 25,934-word text-file rant on how to record heavy electric guitars, which most of you probably aren’t interested in checking out. The whole mess started out as a post on a message board, grew out of control over the course of several months of questions, long recording sessions, and hallucinogens, and then went downhill from there, most likely because the writer has a tendency, much like my own, to wander aimlessly, like a unicorn through piranha infested waters. Or a top.
Oh, yeah, I didn’t even try to fix the spelling/grammar/typos.
I hope you enjoy this tidbit. I did. And if you don’t, well, doooode…