David The Machine

I am still reeling from financial burdens left over last marriage was, and I find myself with a lot of time, but not a lot of money to spend on things that make it “worthwhile”. I know it may seem shallow, but all the really enjoyable solo and social activities that I find also come with a pricetag attached, like watching movies, going out to dinners, picking up a hobby—which means buying materials to pursue that hobby. All that is going to cover paying my part of the mortgage and my rent.

As shallow for me to say this, but money does buy love. What relationships can start off without the courting phase that brings with it the bearing of little gifts, exquisite meals, and time lavished upon the woman would be monopolizing my attentions?

When I’m not working, I’m usually at home playing World of Warcraft, a game I started playing in March of last year. I have an addon that tells me how long I’ve played on all my characters, and it’s already over 100 days, so that means that nearly one third of my time, almost half my waking hours, have been spent in that game.

In all this time, I have 12 characters, or toons, on 3 different servers, 2 of which are at level 80. Of my level 80 toons, my favorite is my first, a female undead rogue, on which I collect as many achievements as I can get. My other level 80 is a female troll priest, specced for discipline—for some reason, I tend to raid and PUG more on the priest. Who wants to run with some stinky ol’ rogue when you can have a healer?

At the moment, I am experiencing the Wrath of the Lich King endgame content, and enjoying it. The guild I’m in is running 10-man Naxxramas weekly, and I get to run it on my priest. When I’m not raiding, I try to PUG heroics on my rogue, and grind out reputation with various factions, partly so I can collect mounts, pets, and titles. At level 80, the various outland factions are dead easy to work on, and the factions in Wrath have plenty of dailies in addition to the tabard system, which means I can have more and more time to devote to my lower-level toons.

So all in all, I am enjoying my timesink, and the guild I’m in is pretty laid back and easy going, so I do get plenty of social contact, if not being the face-to-face kind.

My favorite radio station, Indie 103.1 just announced that they will soon cease broadcasting over the airwaves, and instead broadcast over the internet via SHOUTcast. I have noticed a shift in their playlists to less quirky styles of music, and a cutback on some of their more eclectic programming and changes in personnel. David Lynch was no longer delivering the weather forecasts, and Joe Escalanté had stepped down from being the morning show DJ to focus on an expanded Entertainment Legal Advice Radio Show.

According to Ars Technica, station representatives have not released further word about their intentions for future programming.

I’ve listened to their stream for part of the day, and the quirky and energetic playlist is back, but I have yet to hear anything from a live DJ.

I happened to stumble upon the jQuery 1.3 release announcement the day it was made, and have spent the last couple of days making sure that the code I write works with it—which it does.

If you use jQuery professionally, but don’t get updates about its status, go check it out the goodness that is jQuery!

I’ve worked a wide variety of jobs in my time, throughout college, grad school, and beyond, having had blue- and white-collar jobs. Throughout my time, I’ve been irked by what seems to be a conscious effort to bend the English language in unnecessary ways for the sake of exclusivity.

Having a science education, I know every field of study has its own specialized jargon, but it’s done with entirely new words that have been coined to describe new concepts. Why is there an organizational push to rewrite English for something where there’s a perfectly good vocabulary already in use?

Most of the examples that I have to draw from are in the world of business, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Attack of the Zombie Copy on A List Apart points out the inanity of most advertising copy for technical products. A company neither offers products, nor performs services, but has “Solutions”. Companies do not use, utilize, take advantage of, or plain ol’ exploit practical know-how—they “leverage”. The to-do list and the agenda have gone the way of “task lists” and “action items”.

The shift in mindset and vocabulary to work in a modern white-collar job is something alien to me, as there was no preparation for it in my science-heavy education, nor do I have the inclination or perversity to further seek out its origins. Could this have started as some business-school fad that virally spread out to other business schools, yet contained within their walls?

Even at Domino’s, I could tell there was a recent change of guard in the leadership when “Safe Driver” was dropped in favor of “Delivery Expert”. Along with branding changes, I view this is a trick that new C*Os use to show that they’re making concrete progress in their goals, and laying the foundations of their empire.

Edit 2009.01.16: grammar fix

Thanks to the magic of linkbacks, I see that Gus Van Horn and Martin Lindeskog have noticed me.

Gus says I’ve just started this blog, and to all present appearances, that is true. I still have yet to finish importing my posts from the old blog into here.

I’ve installed and configured a WordPress blog at work, and found enough neat features in it to prompt myself to drop development on my blog software so I can get on with writing content. After all, that’s what a blog is for.

I will reintroduce my old posts, if not in full, and begin to unleash my opinions to the world at large once again.