Pay Day

There's something about getting a wad of cash that threatens one's frugality.

The penny-pinching proclivity begins to waver in the face of potential purchasing possibilities. With all this money, I can actually buy stuff now! I can afford products and services that I couldn't enjoy before because of the lack of purchasing power that I now possess!

It is this same principle that has gotten many a credit holder carried away. Resist the temptation to spend hard-earned cash on nonsense. I suppose its because we spend the bulk of our early life not earning anything that the moment we do, we give ourselves the privilege to spend without consequence, and since we're all piggybacking off of our parents anyways, we are free to rack up debts without compromising our living situation.

Don't buy yourself into an unsavory statistical category and exercise a little restraint.

But everybody loves a payday, so why not celebrate?

How To Get A Job After Graduating

The goal of getting a job always looms over any fresh college graduate. It's an enterprise rife with disappointment and self-deprecating revelations. It makes us wonder:

"Will I ever get out of this hole?"

You have to do things in order to do things. Once you start an action, it makes all subsequent actions a lot easier to stomach. It's like pushing a boulder down a hill. The hardest part is getting it to move in the first place. Unless your name is Chris Redfield, punching boulders don't come natural.

For the rest of us, we need help. It could be through friends, family, a mentor, connections, a network, or just plain luck. As with most things, it's an amalgam of factors, not one, that gets us what we need.

So begins a new job for me that I got through my brother-in-law.

The first time I met my boss, Arthur, was like any other meeting with a slightly deaf seventy-year old. It was too early to be patronized so loudly. He had rough hands, a rigid posture, and one tone of speech: commanding. His interrogatives might as well be imperatives.

My job was simple: look after his 33 year-old handicapped son.

Before you fret, it's not a physical disability, but a mental one. He has a severe case of "I can't remember what I ate for breakfast" syndrome, or short-term retrograde amnesia. It's almost Memento status, but he still has the ability to make new memories -- it just takes awhile.

Arthur went on to explain the job duties, detailing all of his son's quirks and ways to deal with him. From the sound of it, Noah sounded like a micromanagement nightmare.

When I first met my charge, Noah, he greeted me as if we were old friends. I hypothesized that the nature of his condition necessitated a friendly demeanor to any and everyone since he'd never know if they'd actually met before...that, or he was just being friendly. He's a big guy, towering over me by at least a head and a half, with Asiatic features.

For all of Arthur's build up, Noah was surprisingly friendly and easy to look after. Arthur told me of his son's excellent NBA 2K skills since he plays a lot of sports games. His double digit blowout loss, courtesy of me, said otherwise. I played the Lakers against his Rockets and owned him easily.

He forgot it ever happened. If it was me, I wouldn't want to remember either.

I'll give the job a shot.

Rio

You know the influence of games is powerful when everybody associates Rio de Janeiro with Call of Duty. Dudes with guns running in the favela does not a Call of Duty reference make.

It's hard to discard mental associations though. Rio de Janeiro will forever be linked to memories of multiplayer slaughter.

And maybe Fast Five.

Fast Five

Simplicity is underrated.

When things are simple, it's hard to screw up. This is the principle behind Fast Five.

It's not a terribly complex story, but it works in the movie's favor. It's about fast cars and explosions, character depth is unnecessary by design, so try to ignore the forced relationships, shallow characterization, and empty dialogue. You'll enjoy the movie a lot more that way.

I enjoyed the movie, even though it still suffers from frenetic Hollywood shaky cam syndrome. If it weren't for the nonsensical "gritty" screen shaking, one could actually appreciate the complexity and composition of the stunts. Alas, the world of action movies is forever tainted by the Bourne Supremacy.

Curse you Paul Greengrass.

Issuu Issues

It takes headaches to get ahead. The successful completion of a task always involves some kind of head-scratching complication that swallows a whole lot of time, spews out nonsense, and tests your patience.

I wanted to show off my work from the time I was editor of The 'Vine. I heard of a site called Issuu that specializes in Web publishing. It would be a great way of displaying my portfolio without sending large attachments with my emails.

I uploaded my pdfs and saw that everything looked good until I realized that the gutter in the center of the page was messed up. The left page seemed to bleeding into the right. It could safely be ignored by any other less cultured designer, but it offended my aesthetic sensibilities.

Ever encountered a problem that you just couldn't put into words? How do you search "messed up gutter in Issuu?" After some ninja googling, I figured out that I had to re-save my files as single-page pdfs as opposed to double-page.

The solution was simple enough, if only I had the original project files on hand. I backed up all my work but I kept files on both my laptop and the computers at school. Once the year ended, I copied over all the files to my laptop, the caveat being that my files had the same name, which gave me lots of duplicates.

After I found the files I needed among the duplicates, I scoured Adobe Indesign for an option that allowed me to switch the file from double to single-page view. I couldn't find the option, so I looked into modifying the existing pdf to make it compatible instead.

I couldn't find a way.

In the end, I re-saved the files with default settings and uploaded them.

It worked.

The problems that solve themselves are the worst kind, because what are you going to do if they come up again?

Stumble around blindly until you fall into the solution?

Sounds good to me.

Trying New Things

This is the part where I explain what's going on. At the moment, I'm laying in the comfort of my own bed, Swyping away to my heart's content on my smart phone. I don't think I ever imagined being able to pull off this kind of task without a keyboard. It's a lot more intuitive than you would've expect. I, for one, am excited about what the future holds.

Ocean

A wave is coming.

With each second that ticks on by, with each minute that passes, with every day that becomes yesterday, I feel a noose tighten around my neck. It’s getting tighter as the earth spins. It fixes me in place, and I struggle helplessly as I watch a wave as tall as twenty feet approach from the distance. Unless I can cut myself loose and build a makeshift raft out of cash in two months, I will drown. I’ve got to turn this around somehow. I have to ride the wave, not be engulfed by it. I have to ride the crest as far as I can; farther than I have ever gone before, and hopefully, I can reach my destination.

Otherwise, I’ll spend my whole life floating out in the ocean. Time to get organized, sophisticated, and operational.