Z.Monkey’s Blog

Gwargh!

I have noticed that several people I know have very dreary weblogs. The color gray just reminds me of cloudy winter days when there is no snow on the ground or work. So I would recommend coming up with a better color scheme. Pick a color and use one of the following to come up with complementary colors: http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html, http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html, http://www.steeldolphin.com/color_scheme.html. Or use the Treemeat Goat color scheme. Once you have done this you can modify your style sheets to make use of these colors, or just give me the freaking colors and I’ll make you a god-damned style sheet! Fire and brimstone.

I tried to post something similar to that last paragraph last week but I failed. Apparently if you click on a link while in the post editing dealy (where I am typing right now!) it will open the link in the post editing dealy, thus destroying all of your hard work. Try it!

So yesterday Heidi and I drove down to Cape Ann to check the place out (as this is where Heidi will soon be working). While I do not often like taking road trips because they make my ass hurt and my brain cramp, the company was nice, the area scenic and we avoided major highways, which are the suck to drive on. Plus ‘Wait, Wait — Don’t Tell Me‘ was on the radio… at least for the drive down; check it out they have a podcast [link to show archive]! Downtown Gloucester seems a lot like Portsmouth in case you are wondering though it was so cold outside that we spent most of our time there in a car or a bar (hahaha).

Speaking of the cold, it is currently 53 degrees F in our apartment. The power went out Friday… sort of. The power to our bathroom, heat, fridge, stove, dishwasher and the office went out. But not most of our lights. The god-damned kitchen lights would work but none of the appliances. Now all that has come back on except the building’s heat. I will stop typing now because we will soon we will be heading to the local coffee shop for heat and coffee, plus my hands are cold. There I will try to apply for some more jobs. I’ll also post my job on monster as that apparently works.

My mind is wandering, much as my body was last night. Apparently liquor makes me a sleep walker. Now that Heidi has a new and interesting job, I can feel myself becoming less and less satisified with my current position. Perhaps this will motivate me to actually send out my resume some more.

So last night Heidi and I started reading through Romeo and Juliet together. I forgot how much better those plays are when they are read aloud. I think that reading aloud is good. (well put). When you read quietly you are more concerned with the meaning of the words and not with the meter or the rhyming. Now I am about to be sucked back into work. Woo is me!

Wargh!

Okay… only one more post today. So it looks like Heidi has a new job! Exciting news… though I am a little jealous . Monster, I will give you my resume soon.

Also, you may notice ads on the side. These are not my doing… it looks like eponym makes money by putting ads on peoples weblogs. I have no problem with this but I like google’s method a little better as I get a cut of it. So… I will be charging a fee to everyone who reads this. HAHAHA.

HAHAHAHA… ahem.

So I have started playing with that other weblog site that Dan found and I think that I will now be switching over. There are a couple of things that I want to try to figure out (how to easily transfer over comments, ads, maps, make new post types [articles, reviews, e&c.]) but for the most part the back end is easier to use and, hopefully, the frontend will be easier because of this.

The new link:
http://zipymonkey.eponym.com/blog

If you use RSS shit this is what you need:
http://zipymonkey.eponym.com/blog/index.xml

Yatta, yatta…

Ah… it is refreshing how our administration makes everything so clear cut! Check this out: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/expectmore/.

I learned that the National School Lunch Program is failing, because “The program does not have a reliable measure of the level of erroneous payments it makes. The number of children approved for free meals each year exceeds estimates of the number of children who should be eligible.” Maybe that is because there are more and more people below the poverty line.

The poverty rate in 2004 (12.7 percent) was 9.7 percentage points lower than in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available (Figure 3). From the most recent trough in 2000 both the number and rate have risen for four consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3 percent in 2000, to 37.0 million and 12.7 percent in 2004 respectively.

Good job Mr. President.

Okay today I started with a career development course. There will be 6 more weeks of this so I hope you enjoy this. :p

The first seminar/class was basically an introduction followed by a basic introduction to different personality types courtesy of Myers-Briggs. Before the start of the class we had to take the Myers-Briggs personality test (if you want to take on go here or here). Now I think that whole purpose of this exercise was for us to become aware that there are different types of people because they did not tell us how to determine different personality types (without a test) or how to interact with these different personality types. I guess it is another one of those be sensitive to other people things. If you are interested my results were as follows:

Another way to look at this is:

Here is a description of me:

ESTP: Good at on-the-spot problem solving. Like action, enjoy whatever comes along. Tend to like mechanical things and sports, with friends on the side. Adaptable, tolerant, pragmatic; focused on getting results. Dislike long explanations. Are best wiht real thing that can be worked, handled, taken apart, or put together.

Or:

ESTP: “Promoter”. Action! When present, things begin to happen. fiercely competitive. Entrepreneur. Often uses shock effect to get attention. Negotiator par excellence. 13% of the population.

If I had been a little be more intraverted I could have been this:

ISTP: “Artisan”. Impulsive action. Life should be of impulse rather than of purpose. Action is an end to itself. fearless, craves excitement, master of tools. 5% of the population.

Master of tools?! I missed out.

Good morning. A couple of links I thought were interesting.

I have not felt the desire or need to post recently. This is partly because I, like that guy, feel that nothing I have to say is interesting or important, and partly because I am trying to avoid posting at work, where it is most convenient as I sit in front of a PC all day. The reason I am trying to avoid posting at work is because I am not getting paid for it and, more importantly, I end up only posting about work and news both of which are bummers. No need to rain on your parade… you have your own work and, hopefully, read the news.

So what does one write about when not bitching? I guess I could jump in on this more but I cannot see or plan ahead. I guess my college education has made me capable of looking back but not forward. I have difficulty finding solutions if they haven’t already been found before. Hmm… it seems that I will be self deprecating if I have nothing else to write about. I got nothing else. Bis Spater.

[Update]

I found this shortly after posting. Free downloads if you want to learn some basic German. Perhaps, I’ll download a bunch of these and put them on my iPod. Study, study, study…