The Jack Noodle Journal

Hey there. I thought I would spring forth and write up an early before work post this morning. Yep. Here it is. Good morning. Hold on a second while I go and get my coffee. It’s kind of chilly in here also. I’ll go turn up the heat.

I think they are saying that we are in for quite a bit of rain today. Dress accordingly.

There is this lady that I keep seeing around town over the last few days and I’m sure I know her from some place. She keeps popping up everywhere. Maybe she is following me. Does that ever happen to you? You have a face that you just can’t place that follows you around during the day. It’s not like I ever knew this girls name, but I think she is from some place of business that I use to work for or by, where I would see her or she would come in. Hmm, I wonder if.. Nope. Can’t place it.

Ha ha! No, the lady is not G. That would have been funny though.
G has popped into the office for some days of freelance this week. Yep. The famous G, star of the Noodle Journals. She seems to be doing good. We went and had lunch at the White Eagle yesterday.

Did you all happen to catch the Simpsons on Sunday? I thought it was a good one. Bart had to go away to hoodlum camp and the camp was located in Oregon. Homer eventually had to drive Bart up to some woods by Portland. There was some jokes made about Oregon and Homer crashed through a log cabin at the end of the show that had a sign on it that said birthplace of Matt Groening. Yeah, if you didn’t know, Matt Groening is the creator of the Simpsons and he really was from Portland. That’s the first time that Oregon has made it into an episode though I think. You know you have arrived as a state when you are cool enough to make it into a Simpsons episode.

Well, I think that’s about it for me this morning. Time to go take a shower and jump on the bus. Not too much going on today except for a day of work.

Oh yeah, the President’s State of the Union Address is this evening. Gosh. That should be interesting. I think I have run out of things to say now days when it comes to Bush. How many years do we have left? Two?

Well, My sleeping came to a sputtering halt so instead of laying there any longer, I decided to get up and start my day. I was sleeping on and off since 4:30 tossing and turning. I’m not sure why I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it’s because I went to bed early last night at 10 and was just all rested up. Hey, there’s no arguing with the body.

At 6:00 last night I felt the house totally shake and I’m like “Hey what are you doing in there!” to K. I said that there was a rumbling and it felt like an earthquake. K says “No, I was just pushing this chest of drawers around here in the bedroom and that’s what you felt.” I say “huh” and continue on with my business.

Turns out it was an earthquake! It was a little guy I guess. 2.8 – 2.9 in magnitude. There was several conflicting reports because the news people were so excited of course. I think one of the reports I heard said that the epicenter was like a block from here over in the Laurelhurst neighborhood?

That is the first earthquake I have actually felt and recognized as an earthquake. I wasn’t in town for the one that happened in 1993 and that little burp we felt from the Puget Sound quake in 2001, I didn’t feel. I know 2.8 isn’t anything for the earthquake record books, but it was good for me to get a little jolt and realize again that I could be swallowed up at any second by the Earth.

I got that little contact email form up there now for you. You can send me messages of encouragement. I think it works. I don’t know about my web skills. I spent an hour or so figuring out the PHP behind that simple email form and then another hour or so make it look and act right. I am definitely out of practice with the web coding stuff. I know I have a BS in web design, but I haven’t done much of it since school ended. Don’t tell the people I have been interviewing with okay?

Maybe I’m not that into web design. I cringe every time someone says “Oh you’re a web designer? So and so needs a website.” Place #2 was a web firm and I’m not heading over there. Place #1 and place #3 aren’t web firms and the work at those places is more production oriented, dealing with visuals and digital photography. Maybe I am more of a graphic designer. I am far more comfortable in the production role. Maybe that’s because I have had more practice with that stuff.

I’ve been wondering about this because that “what do you WANT to do?” question keeps coming up in interviews. I think maybe what I want to do is work on production stuff because it’s easy and I can go home at the end of the day and not think about it. I think a full time day job would be nice and then I can focus on the web design stuff in a more artful fashion on my own time. I also want to beat my record of 4 years at a job. Full time work at a place for longer than 4 years.

Who knows. The question will come up again shortly I’m sure. My on going quest to find the answer to what I want to do will continue.

Uh oh. We just got the call for breakfast at the Laurelthirst so I’ve got to run now.

Good morning to you. Looks like this Saturday brings us some more gray. Last night there was a pretty good winter storm that hit. The wind was blowing rather hard. It’s gray and dark out right now. Did I mention the gray? I’m looking out the window right now and I see a couple of rain drops coming down. January is nearing the end. Did it seem like a long month for you? It felt like January took over and a decision was made that there would now only be one month a year, it would be called January and all the other 11 months would be thrown into the waste bin. Yeah, I guess it seemed like a long month for me. That’s a crazy thought: January the 107th of 2006.

Yesterday I contacted place #2 and told them that I wouldn’t be able to work on their project. The official reason is that I am double booked and feel a commitment to place #3. The unofficial reason is that a commute to Hood River everyday would have been the death of me. Gosh, decisions, decisions. I hope I made the right one with place #2. I told them to keep me on the freelance list for later this year. They seemed cool with that. So now I am down to two job placements. Still no word on place #1.

Not too much going on here today. I think I am going to add a PHP email form to this here page so that you cats can send me some messages.
I still haven’t quite completed the housework I started yesterday so I should continue with that also.

K and 2 of her schoolmates from the masters program, made a pact that they would treat each other to a fancy dinner per person to celebrate getting jobs after school. Tonight is K’s turn to take the ladies out for dinner. I can’t say where they are going because I think it is still a secret.

I’ll be staying here. I’m not allowed to go to the fancy dinners. I’ll probably microwave some leftovers. I was told to go out and do something with my mates, but I don’t know. It’s so cold and wet outside. Martin talked about going to see that new “Underworld: Evolutions” movie. That might be fun. I thought the first one was alright.

I made it to the post office yesterday and mailed the new DVD of my cousin’s wedding to my aunt and uncle. This one will work in their player this time. I used DVD-R disks this time. I should have been paying more attention the first time and noticed that the first batch was on DVD-RW disks. Of course not all players can read DVD-RW disks! I knew that at one time but seemed to have forgotten.

The first review of the wedding DVD has come in though. Yep. Grandma and Grandpa went out and bought a DVD player because they didn’t have one. That new player obviously reads DVD-RW disks like ours here. Grandma said that it was absolutely beautiful and I did a wonderful job. I guess she called my aunt to talk about it and my aunt had to tell her that all their copies of the disk didn’t work so she hadn’t seen it yet. Yikes. It is good to hear that I am still capable of creations that sweet grandmothers like. I wonder if I can write that into my resume somehow.

Hey there.
Yep, this is my second Friday off in a row. There was a pause in my freelance work. I’ll be going in for more on Monday though.

I have the curtains pulled back here in the laboratory and the sunlight is pouring in. Gosh it feels good. I should go lay out in the muddy lawn and work on my tan. I don’t think this sunlight is supposed to be here for much longer so I should go enjoy it while I can.

So I had a fun night out with the boys last night. I met Joel, Eric and Aaron at the Beulahland for a drink. Eric and Aaron had to go meet one of Aaron’s work friends named Jason at the Magic Gardens so I went along with them. It was this guy named Jason’s 30th birthday and he had been celebrating it for quite a while when we showed up.

Jason and his crew were nice folks. It was fun to hang out with those kids because they had quite a bit of drama going. More drama than I am usually accustomed to. After the Magic Gardens we headed over to the Tube. On the way over to the Tube, Jason messes with this guy on the street, playing around and then this guy wants to fight him. See, drama! It was pretty pathetic. This guy on the street had some sort of chip on his shoulder. I’m not the toughest guy in the World but this guy was more wimpy than me. There was lots of yelling and high school chest puffing. This Jason guy was a pretty big guy and luckily I think he was playing around more than anything else. The chip on the shoulder guy wasn’t very smart because there was 5 of us and 1 of him. The whole thing blew over after a while without fighting. The bicycle cop who was watching the incident didn’t have to call in backup. Now after typing it up, the whole thing seems pretty silly. I don’t think it is very smart to be playing around like that in Old Town though. Come on now, are we still in high school? Are we all from Beaverton?

We hung out at the Tube for awhile and then Eric, Aaron and I ended up at the Beulahland for a nightcap. The Tube is an awfully pretentious place. It’s a different kind of pretension than the Doug Fir. It’s a greasy, dirty, hipster place. Yes those kids are cool in a weird 80’s way. I am more of a Southeast, Beulahland and Bonfire hanger.

When I got home last night I had a whole treatise on human relations planned out to post here based on some of the conversations we had during the evening. It seemed so thought provoking and important at the time. Luckily I wised up this morning and kept most of the human relations observations to myself. I’m such a dork.

It was a pretty fun night. It has been a month or two since I have had that sort of adventure.

Hey, today is Mozart’s birthday huh? That’s kind of cool.

Today I think I am going to take it easy and get a whole bunch of house cleaning done. Yep, do up some chores and get this place polished nice. I was thinking about heading over to the post office to mail out a new copy of the Wedding DVD to my aunt and uncle, but it’s too cold outside. Yeah I think it’s more coffee, nice hot shower and then house cleaning for this guy today.

Back from another day of freelance work.
It was a pretty good day. It didn’t seem to go as fast as Monday did though.

The rain is back. I didn’t get too wet on my journey back home. I think I have timed the MAX and bus ride well enough now that I don’t have to wait in the rain for very long.

Yesterday I headed out to place #2. Place #2 is an hour commute down the gorge. Yeah, an hour. The sun was out yesterday though and that made for a gorgeous drive. The gorge is a beautiful place. An hour there and then an hour and a half back to where K works to pick her up. Yeah, lots of driving for me yesterday. Hmmm.
Well, the driving to place #2 gave me lots of contemplation time. How smart was it for me to give up a days pay at place #3 to go and meet with place #2? During the drive I was beginning to think it wasn’t so smart.

My meeting at place #2 went well. I informed them that I was double booked and wouldn’t know about my availability until Friday.
I think I could do pretty well at place #2. The project they would have me working on looks kind of cool.

I still haven’t heard about place #1. I don’t know if I’m going to get it. I want to have faith in the temp agency that got me considered for this spot, but I’m not holding my breath. Geeze.

Freelance continues for at least another day at place #3.

I don’t know. It’s like a bizarre poker game. I don’t think I like wheeling and dealing.
I kind of have an idea for my next few plays, but won’t speak about it here until some of this waiting around crap gets resolved. Talking about place numbers here is starting to bore me.

We had a tasty meal at the Olive Garden after I picked K up last night. Yum. I wish I had some leftovers right now. I’m hungry.
That was the first time we had been to the Olive Garden by Mall 205. The layout of that place was kind of lame and noisy. Are they all that way now? We hadn’t been to an Olive Garden in a while. We usually go to the Clackamas one and that definitely has a different floor plan. Ah, who cares.

I need to stir up some creativity and inspiration some time soon. I need to get on the ball and do something cool and fulfilling.

Hey, happy birthday Martin. You’re an old man once again.

Ah yes. Just like that the weekend is over.
Another Monday has come and gone.
My Monday was pretty okay. It went by fast so that is good.

I had another day of freelance again. Gosh, before you know it we may start paying some bills here.

The dilemma of the 3 workplaces continues. I guess it’s more of a blessing, not a dilemma. I haven’t heard back from place #1 yet. I’m starting to get anxious about that. Today’s freelance was at place #3. Tomorrow I go in and meet with place #2. I’m a little nervous about what to say about place #1 to place #2. “I’m committed to another contract position right now and won’t know if I am available to help with your project until maybe Friday?” That sounded okay I guess. I’m doing more freelance at place #3 again on Wednesday so that’s cool. This is confusing. Did I get all the numbers for the places right? Let me go back to that older post and see. I won’t be as cryptic as soon as something is solid. You have to be careful now you know with the government looking over all your internet activities. Whoops, I shouldn’t have typed that.

I guess it was sunny out today. I saw the sun briefly as I passed by a window. I was locked away in a color safe area with minimal lights and no windows today.

I did something rather uncharacteristic yesterday. I watched a whole football game! Yep. I watched the Seattle Seahawks beat the Carolina Panthers. It was pretty exciting. Those Seahawks were machines! Hooray for the Northwest. Our team is going to the Super Bowl. Yes I know I’m a Portlander but we share the Seahawks with Seattle don’t we? Maybe we’ll have a Super Bowl party here this year. K didn’t seem to be very humored by that idea.

Hey, I got all of the old posts archived into this new format. All caught up now. It kills me that I didn’t write anything during 2005! What was I thinking? I read over most of 2004’s posts. That stuff seems like it happened yesterday. Now that the archives are updated I can do some fine tuning on some of the bits of this page. I discovered the other day that the header and footer aren’t lining up properly when this page is viewed in Windows Internet Explorer. Come on browsers, get this CSS stuff figured out already. It’s a pretty easy fix but I haven’t had access to a Windows machine since school ended. I don’t miss my access to Windows until something like this browser compatibility nonsense comes up.

Speaking of compatibility, my cousin’s wedding DVD isn’t playing on their DVD players! Argh! So close and yet so far. I don’t know what everybody’s problem is but everything views fine here at the Noodle Compound. No actually I think I figured out the problem. I used disks that don’t always play on standalone DVD players. Stupid disks! I’ve learned that it is best to burn movie DVDs using -R disks at 4x speed. There you go. I was so excited to hear their reviews of the wedding DVD and now nothing. Disappointing. I’ll get some new disks out to them this week.

Time to see if I can find some food.

Good morning all. Well, I think they are saying that the rain is supposed to stop for a few days after today. It is gray, damp and still out there right now. I have the curtain open here in the laboratory and I am staring outside right now. One more day of rain and that’s it. Would it be too much to actually get some sunshine with that? I’m not complaining it’s just that whole winter gray thing kicking in.

Yesterday I finally watched the Macworld 2006 Keynote Webcast. There has been heavy discussion about the new macs on a few of the groups and email chains I am hooked up to. Now after watching the keynote and reading a few articles, I actually know what everyone is talking about. For those who don’t, Apple’s head honcho Steve Jobs, gave his annual unveiling of new products speech on January 13th and introduced the World to new macs with the Intel Duo Core Chip inside them. That’s a pretty big deal. Intel chips have in the past only been in PC and Windows based boxes. The new macs are supposed to be speed demons and possibly the best computers out there right now. I’m mildly annoyed because I just purchased my new Powerbook in November and now it is January and there is already a laptop 4.5 times faster than mine?

That’s okay Noodle, you love your new computer and it’s fast enough for everything you’re going to use it for.

Jobs also unveiled a new program called iWeb that pretty much allows the average Joe Sixpack off the street design their own web pages with a click of a button. You can have your photos, blogs, music, and videos all available to you on web pages that you create using iWeb. Everything hooks all together through your brand new iMac. As a person who just graduated with a degree in Multimedia and Web design, I don’t like that anyone in the World can sit down and do what I do with the click of a button. Sure it’s not hard to begin with, but we all agreed to keep that a secret. I know, I know, these iWeb pages that spring up are going to be ugly and uninspired. There will still be work for me. I didn’t want to make web pages for Joe Sixpack anyway.

I think I might be a Luddite. Sure all this new fancy stuff is great, but why can’t they slow it down a bit? I think that there should be a moratorium on computer purchasing and everyone must use the computer they already have to 100% of it’s potential. I guess Apple wants to keep making billions of dollars every year and you can’t do that without the newest, fastest and sexiest products. I’m a hypocrite though, I buy into it. If I had more money I would totally buy a new iMac to go with my laptop.

Not much going on here today. I think I am going to try to do some chores and clean up a bit. We’re in the middle of a money fast this weekend so it looks like any entertainment we get will be of the free kind.

I had a strange day yesterday. Strange in a really cool way.

I started my day out planning a leisurely time spent working on that skills test project thing. Turns out that just getting the file to work on took like 6 hours to download over FTP! I found out later I didn’t need half of the files I downloaded. The main photoshop file was 491.9 MB so that’s part of the reason it took so long to download, but I think I am going to have to see about getting a faster internet connection here. I’m on DSL now but I have a feeling that I could probably get a faster hook up some how. I have an older DSL modem so that might be the problem there.

While I’m waiting for the files to download, I get a phone call from one of the places I interviewed with last year! Looks like they want the Noodlester to come in and do some design work for them. Cool. But wait, I’m trying to download this test file so that I can get into this other place. While I’m pondering the dilemma of what to say to who and which job of the 2 I should put first in hopes of getting, I get an email from the place I was doing freelance for this week and they say that they made a mistake in thinking there wasn’t work and they need me to come in Friday and most of next week.

This is good people! Now I am juggling 3 places.
Here’s how I think I’m going to play it. I didn’t go into freelance place #3 today because I was busy finishing up the test file for place #1 this morning. I will go in Monday to work at place #3. I’m meeting with place #2 on Tuesday and see how that goes. I’m hoping to get into place #1 but if that doesn’t come through then I will go to place #2, and if that doesn’t work out then I will continue to do freelance at place #3. Alright, got it?

I hope something good comes out of all of this! It would be oh so nice to not have to think about finding a job anymore.

Okay, It’s Friday. I just finished up the test file. I think it went pretty good. There was no surprises and I didn’t find it too difficult. It was a photo clean up / retouch deal. It actually took me longer to download it then it did to finish. I’m sending back now via FTP. I’m in the front room now sending this post over a found WiFi connection.

Here comes the weekend! We don’t have anything planned yet for it. I think K has to go into work and have a classroom clean up day on Saturday. I’m going to try to find a way out of it, but I’ll probably get roped in.

No work today for this guy. Yeah, I guess I’ll only make my trip into the office twice this week. That’s okay though, working 2 days in a row is hard stuff. I need to rest. Hopefully things will pick up there and I’ll get more work when they get more work. It’s quite a comfortable place for me to be at.

No rest for the wicked though. As soon as a window closes here at the Noodle Compound, a door opens. One of the two really cool places that the temp agency has promoted me to wants me to take one of their skills tests to see if I have the chops needed to come and hang with them. I guess it’s supposed to be a killer test. I’m not too scared because the job description tells me it is something I can totally nail. Bring it on suckers.

Alright that’s it! An ant just crawled out of my keyboard! We have got to do something about these pests soon.

Seth left his U2 DVD behind when they headed for California and I watched it finally last night. It was way good. “Vertigo 2005: U2 Live From Chicago”. I didn’t get as teary eyed as I did during that Coldplay show I watched the other day, I think I was feeling more stable last night. I did get quite a few shivers though. I felt inspired to make some cool art and go for it a couple of times there. The DVD really kicked ass when they did some of the real oldies like Electric Co. and An Cat Dubh. The whole war protest / give peace a chance section was great. It was cool seeing them preform the new songs also. I found myself cringing and grabbing my throat when Bono and the Edge were trying to hit the high notes during “Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own”. It looked like they were both in pain.

Yes, I do love U2 and I am old enough now to not care if you think that is cool or not. The current album “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” has been the absolute soundtrack of my life over the last year. Something about it just speaks to where I am at right now in the Universe. That’s alright though if you are like K and think it sucks.

I have to call TriMet today and try to get them to give me my money back. I went to buy some MAX tickets the day before yesterday on my way home and the machine said “Can’t contact Bank” or something like that when I put my card in to pay for the tickets. I tried one more time and it said the same thing. I snuck onto the train without a ticket and rode downtown where I bought tickets at a machine that worked. The next morning I checked my card balance and find that they had charged my card for all three times I tried to buy tickets! That’s 33 bucks (10 tickets per try) TriMet owes me!

Yep, I’ve got my work cut out for me today.

Oh yeah, this is something new: The Jack Noodle Journal is now listed on OrBlogs, a Oregon weblog community. It’s a pretty cool site and they only take Oregonians so you have a place to go to read about all things Oregon. I was playing around one day and thought it might be fun to send them my link. Having a few more readers to add to my loyal 4 would be nice. I do this journal more as an exercise for myself than a concern for readership. I’ll still be writing even if you’re not reading. It is a bit addictive though reading through the blogs on OrBlogs and wondering if anyone is reading about my love for U2.

Hey there. Look at that. My first evening post of the new year. I am definitely more of a fan of morning writing, but I guess we’ll see how it goes. I actually went to work today believe it or not. I waited until I rested up a bit before coming to talk to you this evening. Pierre is sitting on my lap. He says hi. Boy, I have a tight rolled up ball of headache right behind the bridge of my nose. God, I know. I am such a little baby. I finally work a day in 2006 and all I can do is whine. No, actually today was a pretty good day at the office.

Today was the day after the 2006 Golden Globe Awards. I was wondering what Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe were doing the morning after the Golden Globes while I stood out in the cold and waited for a train. I kind of assumed they were still sleeping as it was 8:04 in the morning. What a weird existence. I can’t believe K and I watched so much of that crap last night. Brokeback Mountain won for best picture which is pretty cool. We enjoyed that movie quite a bit.

I didn’t see much of the outside World today, but from what I hear it rained pretty good again. It is wet out there people. I should probably go down and check the basement out when I get a spare moment. I hope it’s not too wet down there.

K made me a deal that if I washed the dishes tonight then she would bake some cookies. Well folks, the dishes are clean and the smell of baking cookies is filling the house. It’s getting kind of late in the evening for cookies isn’t it?

I think I am going to try to hit the hay pretty soon here. The more sleep I get the better. I’m going in for more work tomorrow. They may make a honest man of me yet!