Selling Jesus

I discovered a new blog today, They Will Know Us By Our T-shirts (via Bookslut). I would never have expected a blog on Christian retail to be funny, but, frankly, it’s nice to see a Christian with a sense of humor about the current state of Christianity, even if it is only the state of Christianity’s retail.

From one of last week’s posts about the incoming Christmas items:

Today’s bundle of Christmas joy is the “Christmas Fiber Optic Wand.” This handheld device is dark blue with white snowmen and snowflakes. Amidst this winter wonderland is the phrase “Jesus Loves You Snow Much.” There are a bunch of fiber optics coming out the end that display pretty colors. I guess they’re popular at Christian raves where people are “rollin’ on Jesus.”

Cool!

iDVD

Rarely does Apple really annoy me, but iDVD is one instance. I’ve been putting together a slideshow for my parents to play at our second wedding reception in Minnesota in a couple weeks. Between iPhoto and iDVD, this is a very easy task on a Mac, unless you’re trying to use an external DVD writer.

I’d been playing around in iDVD with several slideshows of the wedding imported from iPhoto, and had the DVD exactly how I wanted it. I inserted a blank DVD into my external Lacie drive (which I’ve been very happy with, by the way), and tried to click on the “burn” icon in iDVD. … Nothing … Hmmm … maybe I needed to click burn before inserting the disk. … Nope … that didn’t work either.

I googled “iDVD Lacie” and found several discussions, the upshot of which was that iDVD doesn’t work with external drives (Apple itself does not produce any external DVD drives), and that it’s Apple’s fault, not the external drive. That’s a pisser.

I whined to Andrew, who found a hack within a few minutes. There were several reports of problems with the hack, but more reports of the hack working well, so I decided to try it. Fortunately it worked, and I haven’t found any ill side-effects just yet. I’m still miffed at Apple. Come on people, some of us don’t realize that we need a DVD writer until after we’ve been using our new systems for a while — it’s just natural to get an external drive at that point. Do you really want to alienate us??

One other irritation with iDVD — each slideshow is limited to 100 photos. I had a great wedding ceremony and reception one put together, and it truncated it just after we arrived at the reception. I had to break it up into three different slideshows, plus, since there is a 6 slideshow limit, I had to eliminate the slideshows from our honeymoon and of the girls and I getting ready on the wedding day. Oh well…at least I have my DVD ready for my parents.

Content?

Yeah, I know.

But it’s just been blah around here lately, and there hasn’t been much worth blogging. I’m not having any brilliant thoughts — I’m just getting stuck in traffic jams (a 2hr 20min ride home last week, and a 1.5 hr drive in this morning), playing with pictures from the photographers for the wedding, going to a craft sale to get Christmas presents (and a few things for myself), stressing about my job, working on my thesis, and just generally lazing about. I’ll try to do or think something interesting soon…

Blah

Sitting here fighting SAD with a hot cup of chai, my morning blogs, and Men at Work on the iPod. I hate driving to work before the sun.

Road kill

Dear Cunt Whore Bitch Woman who tried to kill me:

Just to remind you, I’m the driver of the car you tried to run off the road yesterday evening. Remember? You decided that not missing your exit was more important than the lives of the dozens of cars around you, and I was the life most directly affected. Fortunately for both of us I have very good reflexes (doubtless from all the video games I played as a child) and my car has very good tires.

Can I make a small suggestion? Perhaps you should stop driving for a while. It is obvious from your behavior yesterday that your priorities have been skewed. It would seem prudent for you to take some time to meditate on what is more important: making your exit or my life. Let me remind you that had you taken my life, which is not a far-fetched notion, you may have been charged with vehicular manslaughter, so it would have had far-reaching consequences for your life, not just mine.

You’ll understand if I tell you that I do not look forward to ever seeing you on the road again. And if you see me first, please endeavor to keep your car as far from mine as possible.

Sincerely,
Happy to not be Road Kill no thanks to you

Back to Equilibrium?

The funding situation seems to have been ironed out for my thesis. I’ll be working 75% time as a contractor and 50% time as a grad student. Yup. 125% time…50 hours per week. Well, I suppose I already put that in with the evening and weekend babysitting I do for my data runs. The bad news is that my contractor vacation time accrues at only 50% time (true for anyone working anything less than 40 hours per week). The good news is that all of my other benefits are still in place.

Not sure if I’m happy with this, though. I certainly appreciate all the effort various people have made to make this happen, the upshot of which is that I don’t loose much of my salary. However, now I’m split between two companies, have to document that I work more, lose vacation time, and my tax withholdings will be all messed up (a couple years ago I came very close to owning money due to working for two different companies).

The worst part is that I’m not even sure that a PhD is what I want. I’m at that point where if I quit, I’ve wasted 2 years of my life, but if I continue, I’ll be miserable for the next 2-3 years. I’m not sure which is worse. Oh, and there’s the fact that I won’t actually use this degree when I’m finished that makes it all the more enticing.

I’m going to quietly put my resume up on monster.com and see if there are any good nibbles…

Swift kick in the gut…

I suppose I should have been expecting something bad to happen — it seems that any time something really good happens in my life, I get a swift kick in the gut a week or two later to remind me that life can suck, too.

Kim had warned me a few weeks ago that she might have trouble finding funding for my thesis work, but that the lab should be able to cover it if she couldn’t find money from her own grants. Well, her grants ran out, and the lab will have to start covering my grad salary, but they won’t pay me at the contractor salary that I’ve been making. The upshot? I’ll have to take a pay cut of 25% if I want to continue my thesis work.

So that’s now the big question. Do I want to continue my thesis work?

My intial gut reaction was, no, of course not. I quit my grad work in 2001 because I no longer wanted to life on a grad student’s salary — it was too much to have to constantly worry about how I was going to pay all my bills each month (answer: they didn’t always get paid…)

But, on the other hand, I’ve come so far, and I am at least in a different situation than I was before when I first quit. First of all, I’ll still have “real pay” for half of my work, so I won’t be dropping into the absolute pit of grad-student life again. Secondly, I have a husband who wants me to finish (if I want to finish), and will help out with expenses and cut our budget where we need to in order to make it work.

Back to the other side, though, I’ve been finding my thesis work unsatisfying and a slog for the last year. I find that I don’t necessarily care about the results, and I’ve been wondering if my choice to return was really wise. I’ve discovered that while my reason for leaving may have been primarily financial, it seems that it was also based on a true dissatisfaction with my choice of career.

I’ll regret it if I leave now.

I’ll be miserable if I stay.

Ugh.

Lost and Found

I’ve lived in four different states in my 32 years — Minnesota for 24 years, New Mexico for 3 years, Maryland for 3 years, and now Virginia for just over 2 years. The first two times I moved across the country, leaving behind everything and everyone that I knew.

Needless to say, over the years and through these moves, I’ve lost touch with a lot of people. I often think about some of those people and wonder what has happened to them. As it turns out, my website is a great way for those people to find me.

For example, a few years ago, my sixth-grade best-friend, Lisa, stumbled upon my webpage and e-mailed me. I had not seen her since 1985 or so, when she moved out to the country to live with her Dad. While she was only 30 miles or so outside the Cities, that’s a long way for kids who can’t drive yet. We inevitably fell out of touch. I was shocked when I got an e-mail asking if I was, perhaps, the Barb that she had known. She mentioned our love for Star Wars and Harrison Ford, and I knew it was her. We chatted via e-mail for a couple months, and then lost touch again. I trust that we’ll cross paths again one day, and I look forward to it.

Of course, there are also several people who I was happy to lose touch with. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to censor my website from them.

We’ll probably see this on FOX next year

From News of the Weird:

Among the reality-TV series being batted around in London, according to recent reports in the Daily Telegraph and The Independent, is “Make Me a Mum,” in which a woman reduces a field of men to the two whom she believes will make her the genetically best offspring. At that point, producers will inseminate the woman with sperm from both men and, using intravaginal micro technology, will attempt to record a “race” to see which sperm gets to the egg first.