« March 2005 | Main | June 2005 »
May 22, 2005
My Place
Here's my place in DC. 5850 Cameron Run Terrace Apt 407, Alexandria, VA 22303. Due north of it, just on the other side of the interstate, you can see cranes on empty blocks of land. That's where I will be working. Apparently the satellite images are pretty old.
I expect to see all of you soon!
Posted by josh at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2005
Busy Work
So I keep getting asked what I'm doing now that I have nothing to do between now and moving. Usually I just say 'tryin' to pack,' 'just chillin',' or 'nada,' or something equally as non-descript. While this is mostly true, I have been doing stuff that if I actually told them, people would think I was being a complete slackard and wasting more time than 'just chillin.'
So what am I actually doing? Well, the catch-all term is 'sorting.' I have a lot of things/crap/junk to sort. I used to be a very organized person... in HS all my CDs were arranged by genre and then each genre was put in alphabetical order. My clothes were neatly folded in my dresser. I even tried to organize my closet by ROYGBIV. So, I figured since I'm gonna be a government employee, where things have rules, regulations, and specific ways of being done, I figured I'd try getting my life organized and, well, anal, in order to prepare for work. This is all a very daunting task for someone whose attention span is barely enough to watch one episode of Robot Chicken on my tivo... I usually end up going from one of the various sorting activities to another.
First of all, I need to pack all my crap. While I could easily 'pack' everything in boxes, and probably do it fairly quickly, doing so would just result in my crap being transported from here to DC. I don't want that to happen. I mean, I have four years of accumulated junk from this house alone. The last thing I want is to start unpacking at my new apartment and have countless boxes of utter junk. So, I've been sorting everything. I went under my bed, through my closet, through my cabinets, through the attic stuff. I sorted everything into three piles: 1) garage sale junk 2) movable junk and 3) junk junk. Yesterday while cleaning out a box from my closet, I found: receipts from five years ago for electronics I bought at BestBuy, receipts from random things I bought in Rome ('99), and computer components/manuals/cds from my Gateway computer--that I bought in 1998! Needless to say I don't want those things coming with me, so I ended up trashing most of the box. I STILL have a ton of sorting to do before I can ultimately pack.
The things that have been occupying most of my time has been sorting various things on my computer. The first thing I did was clean up my directory structures a bit and put like files together. I put all the software on a dvd to save space... programs like acrobat, photoshop, windowsXP, etc. The next thing I did was I went through 'My Documents' and took out all the documents and articles and such that I no longer needed. I put all the papers, projects, and presentations into folders based on class and year. Then I went through the other user accounts, julie's, melanie's, etc., and deleted all their stuff after making sure none of it was terribly important. I also found 5 gigs of Tom's hiking photos... so I backed those up on DVD + CD.
Wow, this is incredibly boring... moving on.
I've also been sorting pics and renaming them with irfanview. Eventually I'll get around to uploading more pics and sorting the ones that are currently in my gallery.
The past two days I've been doing something really really tedious and boring. Wanna hear about it? Of course you do!!! I downloaded a program called The Godfather, which is an all-in-one mp3 utility. It's integrated to search the free cd database and to tag mp3s. It sorts, renames and catalogs. It's great. I have music dating back almost eight years. And anyone who knows me knows I'm fairly lazy... so that means I have over 23 gigabytes of mp3s... which translates into roughly 4500 songs. The vast majority of which do not have id3 tags nor do they have correct filenames(and by correct, I mean the way I want them to be named). So I've spent about 10 hours over the past two days cataloguing, tagging, d/ling album photos, and renaming my mp3s. I'm about halfway done.
I can't wait to get all this crap done. I'll feel much better once it's all done... Until then my room is in a quasi-clean, quasi-ordered, quasi-packed state... which is really frustrating. But the whole sorting process is rather cathartic... I'm beginning to enjoy it.
Posted by josh at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2005
RSS
So why the heck hasn't anyone informed me of the wonders of RSS? I can put all my favorite stuff, like BensBargains and slashdot on my yahoo home page. I mean, honestly, c'mon people, you know I like to save time and be all efficient and stuff... the least you could do is help an ADD Brutha' out!
Posted by josh at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
Moving on Up
So I finally got my offer letter and 'paperwork' a couple weeks ago. So it's all official and crap.... I'm a patent examiner. And paperwork is in quotes because I don't think you can call something the size of a book paperwork. I have to fill out forms galore. It's literally .75 inches thick... no joke. I didn't count the number of pages, but I would estimate aroud 70 pages. Of forms. Forms full of check boxes and places for me to put inane information such as my eye color, kindergarten teacher's name, number of hairs on my left areola, how many different colors I can differentiate, the size of my erect penis, how many cats I've petted in the past 6 months, etc. Oh well, let the beurocratic, tree-killing (woot, I like killing trees.... not to mention all sorts of Bambis and itty bitty squirrels), paper-pushing and signing government work begin!
I start June 27th... the day after my birthday. I recently returned from a weeklong trip to DC to find a place to live. I had a blast there, driving around, meeting people, and looking at overly priced apartments, condos and houses. I settled on a very reasonably priced apartment in Alexandria, just south of the beltway on US-1. You can actually see the patent office from the complex. It's within walkign distance to a metro stop, and they have a shuttle to it if I need to use it in bad weather, or whatnot. The complex has 3 high rise buildings and is called Riverside Park and it's the largest 1BR I saw... and I looked at a LOT of properties. It just happened to be the cheapest. They had a government discount, and since I agreed to live in an apartment that would be rennovated next april, meaning I'd have to move out the end of march, I got another discount. But I also get first pick of the apartments that are currently being rennovated. Woot. And by then, I'll be established enough, and be making more money, so I can maybe upgrade to an even bigger place. Double Woot!
I had a blast in DC. It was fun being by myself for the most part and being all independant and crap. I navigated the metro like a pro, not needing to use my pocket guide at all. Not that it's hard or anything, but at least I didn't look like a tourist. At least I didn't think so. I probably stuck out like a sore thumb to everyone else. I met up with a couple friends in the city a couple days. They took me to a couple restaurants, etc. I went to a party at a friend's house in Ashburn on Friday night, met some cool people, and probably made some great friends. I even spent time with Joel and Katie on Sat and Sun.
Sunday was great cause we went to Ikea... which is a great home furnishings store. I think we ended up spending like 3 hours there or something insane like that. But since JnK have a new place they're moving to in june, and I just signed my lease for my new place, it was a planning day at Ikea for everything we needed. I was definitely impressed with the design of the furniture... however the quality of them seemed a bit lacking, which is why the prices were fairly reasonable, I guess. I'm not so big on particle board with laminates on top... they tend to fall apart very quickly. But, I will be on a budget for now, so I will have to sacrifice quality for lower price. At least everythign I want will look nice and will coordinate.
Posted by josh at 02:53 AM | Comments (2)