Airport Dating Service

Ok, it's been a while. Let's recap. My first week of break I was at home, it was good, I got a lot of good Hanukah/Xmas gifts. On my way back this past Monday, USAir lost my luggage. Now let me rant about this for a minute.

I guess USAir is in some pretty serious trouble. They have been screwing people over left and right this holiday season. If I were flying with a connection I might understand but I how do you lose a bag on a short direct flight from Manchester to Pittsburgh? I mean that plane only fits about 60 people, so how do you not notice that half the bags are missing? I really wish they could have at least told me that many bags were misplaced when I got there. Instead I waited an hour and a half at the baggage claim before the flight finally dissappeared from the board. In the middle someone from the airline came over and asked if anyone was from our flight. She said she was checking on it but then she ran off and never came back. Finally I went to the baggage office where they said it would be in on a flight later that night and would be delivered Tuesday morning. Next to the baggage office was a closed down baggage carosel with the whole area filled with bags that must have come in later than their owners. Someone in line suggested it was like a Yankee Swap, we had donated a bag and we could go and take a bag. I had already missed 4 busses.

It did not get delivered Tuesday, or Wednesday. I did finally get it on Thursday. However their customer service sucks.

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Keywords:Rants | Ideas
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Wasting time I don't have

Well, what I said I would do... It didn't happen. We did end up working on Visual Story. We came up with a whole new concept (yikes!). At least it is more managable. We shot 2 of the scenes tonight. We have a lot to shoot tomorrow and then edit before it is due on Wednesday. That is why I have to be at work at 9am.

Tonight I stayed home and avoided more of that and Animateering because I wanted to get my overdue papers done. I ended up just procrastinating them more. Now I'm going to attempt the very risky stunt of waking up early to do it. That works before deadlines but since I don't really have one anymore I'm not sure it will. On the other hand 6 1/2 hours will be more than I got last night (2 1/2) and I don't really have other time this week because of how much I have left to do on Animateering and how little time. I can barely believe it.

I think I will be very proud and happy with whatever we end up with at the end of this, under the circumstances. Although I'm worried about whether we'll be able to make that include all the things we said we'd have done by then, and really should. If I had the semester to do over again I wish I could have done a lot of the work sooner or had more spare time. I'm not sure if that was just poor planning and procrastination or just the unavoidable outcome of a tough semester and project constraints.
Keywords:Procrastination | Busyness | Sleep
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9 Behind

I'm already 9 journal entries behind and they keep piling up. That's 9 days/things I've said I need to write about and haven't. They've gone on a list to be written and predated. If I get around to them, many of them will show up before this one. They certainly aren't the only things I haven't gotten done yet. I've got many whole huge lists of things I have to do, and many more things I just want to do. What would be great would be if I could pause time and get a few days to get things done without deadlines getting closer or having more things to add to the list. Then I'd be able to sleep too. I'm going to sleep now, since I'm only going to get less than 3 hours as it is. A promise: even though I know I have Animateering due at the end of the week and Visual Story due on Wednesday, if my Visual Story group doesn't find a way to need me today (I'm leaving it up to the rest of them to manage since I can only worry about so much) then I'm coming home early and getting some of this list stuff done and getting some sleep so that I can attack Visual Story and Animateering full force again on Tuesday.
Keywords:Website Projects | Busyness
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Doomed to failure

Sometimes I feel like I am worthless and I'll never succeed at building a decent life for myself. Specifically I'll not be able to get a good job, or even any. Today is one of those days. Today a bunch of the visitors we had at the BVW show are here to interview people. They gave some nice presentations this morning. There's someone here from Imagineering who I would have loved to interview with. Unfortunately I spent so much time working on Randy's BVW show, that I didn't get a chance to sign up, so I couldn't. There were a few open spots with game companies. I don't want to work for them, but maybe I should at least practice interviewing, but how could I do a good interview with absolutely no interest in what they do? I still haven't been able to email the few contacts I got at IAAPA. I'm just worried that I'll never be able to find a job and certainly not a good one. I know I have the skills to work for a number of places, but I don't have the skills to get the job and I don't know what to do about it.

What is particularly depressing is that I know the one place I definately want to work, Disney, and according to Randy I'm not allowed to. Although I think that saying no Disney is a bit of a stretch, I agree that it probably would be a bad idea to try and apply to the VR Studio, which is frustrating because I would be happy there and Jesse was complaining that they had received few resumes from ETC students. They want to hire us, few people want to go there, I do, I'd be good at it, I should be a shoe-in. I should already know that is where I'm going this summer but after the fiasco last year (which frankly I think I take more of the blame than I deserve) that is all ruined. It is just moral crushing looking for a job when you are forced to overlook your most desired option, particularly when it otherwise might have been your most likely to get option.
Keywords:Depression | Jobs
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Day 4 and the Show

The BVW saga continues. Today was the last day, and the show. Unfortunately, today did not go as well as yesterday. Last night, groups were rehersing, fixing, and then cutting videos. It was going smoothly for a while. The problem was that there was no cutoff. The groups that were last thought they could take forever, and they weren't even the only ones who thought they still had more they had to do. What people didn't realize is that they might have wanted their worlds to be better, but if they wanted to have a show at all, I'd need a substantial amount of time to make sure I have all the worlds, sync the bits between all 6 machines, and test everything to make sure it is ready to run smoothly. It's my neck on the line when things break because of that roll I put myself into. I'm tired of Randy telling me I didn't test enough and that I need to be more paranoid because it isn't good when things break in a real demo. I was trying to do that. Trying very hard but I can't do my job if people don't want to let me. If I do this again next year, there are going to be some changes, including hard deadlines.

I ended up decided the deadline would be 4am. I said that at 4am everyone would have to stop and leave everything to me for 3 hours. After that if they wanted to do some more they'd probably be able to but they'd need to talk to me to actually get their changes updated. I went home for a record short 45 mins of sleep. When I got back, what I wanted to do did not happen. People were just always working.

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Keywords:BVW | Busyness | Organization
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BVW Day 3: McConomy

Today was the 3rd day of BVW show stuff. We woke up early in the morning and loaded into McConomy. It went much better than the last two days and I felt a lot better about it. Will Bosley is my angel. I really respect him as stage manager. It's another type of job I think I could do well or at least I'd like to try but that I know Randy would never trust me with, but I can't complain because Will is clearly the best choice for this job. Things really did run so smoothly today. Also people weren't getting on my bad side as much. I don't know if sleep is a factor. I don't think it is for me since I was plenty well rested yesterday that I don't think it was the cause of those problems, and I was still fuming mad when I woke up today. Maybe everyone else got some sleep and we're all getting along better today.

I stayed up late last night being very upset. I didn't want to wake up and come in today but I knew I had to and trying to come in late would only make things worse. When I woke up though, I was still pissed. I came in because it was my job. When we started doing things I just went into work mode where I focused on the job I was doing. I was ready to snap back into my mood if anyone said anything to me about it or said anything snappy to me or if the setup got to chaotic, but none of that happened. The more and more of the setup that went well the better I felt until the day ended up turning out pretty good. Order reigned supreme, the clouds parted, a beam of light shown though, and all was good.

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Keywords:BVW | Anger | Website Projects
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BVW Hell pt. 2

Today was a continuation of the hell that was yesterday. I'm so tire of it that I could cry. The worst part of it is that I have 2 more full days of it and I don't think I can quit, but I can bear to stay. The jury went well, in that we were able to show everything with only minimal failures and delay. But it sucked. For me it was like swimming upstream and I can't take it anymore. At the end of the day I finally snapped, I decided to punch a wall to release stress and when even that wasn't tollerated in the eyes of my hypercritical peers, I totally flipped out and left. I don't know if I'm going to go back tomorrow. I feel like I should, like I'll probably regret it if I don't, but If I do that then they will have won.

It's just that everything everyone has said to me over the past two days just makes me feel like I'm not respected at all. And I know people appreciate the hard work I do, but that's not the same thing. Why do you suppose that if people appreciate what I do, they work so hard at trying to not let me do it? If you really appreciated me, you wouldn't shit on me all day and then appreciate that I stood there and took it, you'd appreciate that I have a way of working that would make everything run even better than it did for both of us and let me do that. I enjoy taking a very tough situation and making it run smoothly, but only when I can do it my way which means using organization to simplify things. I feel that I am worse than a normal person at dealing with with tough situations by brute force because I am used to a better way.

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Keywords:BVW | Rants
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BVW Disorganization

This Wednesday is the BVW show. Tomorrow (Monday) is the jury to decide which worlds get into the show. Today we spent all night trying to set up for tomorrow. The setup is really complicated due to the myriad of different setups worlds have. One world is so complicated that it single-handedly doubles the complexity of our setup.

As much as I should enjoy this kind of work, I am extremely upset right now. This is one of the standard things that piss me off. I like order and organization. I am known as someone who can do amazing things in a tough situation, but that is because by being organized you can break a hard job down to easy pieces. I'm only good in the way I am when I'm allowed to do what I do. Even though I'm willing to tackle a hard job I hate hard work. I can almost always break something hard down. I'm willing to do hard jobs when I can do them on my own terms, but I get absolutely furious when I'm not allowed to do things my way but I have to do the hard things the way others would. I feel like saying, "If you think this way of working is acceptable then you fucking do it," and then walking away, but I usually don't.

Dave is far too nice, I think. Yes, I am about enabling the class and letting them do interesting things, but I do not appreciate groups just deciding what is going to happen for them without consideration of how it affects others, least of all the TAs who are the ones they are expecting to do what they say. I hate that this is acceptable. If I were running the show there would be strict rules.

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Keywords:BVW | Busyness | Rants
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Thought Repository » December 2004