Signed a lease for a house today. Drove 9 hours round trip to do so.
I’m glad that’s over with. I was afraid I wouldn’t find a place before I had to move for my job since there appears to be far less supply than demand.
That’s some stress relieved, but not all is gone. It won’t be, fully, until I’ve moved. Then I have to worry about doing a good job at work while studying for the CPA exam.
Let’s not forgot that I’m going to know no one. That’s the most difficult part.
So I cut myself, badly enough that I had to go to the ER. My first time ever, after having worked in kitchens for 10 years. What is funny, though–and not in a haha way–is that this happened about a month out from me quitting. I lasted this long. Why couldn’t I have done so just a few weeks longer?
The good news is it doesn’t hurt anymore unless I bump it, then it stings pretty painfully. It didn’t hurt too badly, considering, when it happened or immediately after. I declined pain medication when the doctor asked if I wanted a prescription. My coworkers say that was stupid, and that I should’ve filled it and sold the pills to them. Yeah, that’s totally not happening, stoners. Sorry!
Note: this image is after about 5 days.
I’ve lost nearly all motivation to do work this semester. Each assignment is a chore. It takes all that I have to just do it. This feeling isn’t new to me, however. It’s all I felt when I first started college in Computer Science in ’03, when I had to deal with all of those programming classes that I quickly grew to despise. I wasn’t a senior then, just a freshman. Supposedly that might be worse than now, but I don’t feel any relief. I’m at the end of my fifth year back at school full-time. That is 5 years after I already had 50 or so credits from my time in school the first go around. I’m seriously ready to be out of school for a while. I’d like to go back eventually for grad school–but certainly not in the foreseeable future.
In other news, I’m finding that it isn’t very easy to find a place to live in a small town. There’s virtually no information about apartments or rental houses online. The one apartment complex that I found advertising in the town’s local newspaper didn’t answer either of my phone calls today. The real estate agent I was put in touch with by a future coworker claimed it’s very difficult to find places to rent in De Queen. As soon as they’re available they’re snatched up again. This isn’t looking so great. He gave me a couple of names of people who might know something, but I’ve yet to actually be able to get in touch with either of them. It’s a bit frustrating. I’m planning make the 5-hour trip down there Friday, but what’s the point if I don’t have anything to look at? I guess I could drive around and look for rental signs, and check the newspaper, but that’s a longshot. I wouldn’t think the paper version of the newspaper would have things the online version doesn’t, but maybe they just never update the classifieds… Who knows?
I have some good news to share. I got a job offer this week. It’s a good paying job, too, with good hours. I almost can’t believe it’s happening. I’m very ecstatic and happy, of course, but at the same time I didn’t see myself able to find employment before graduation. It’s both an exciting and scary time. I start on May 13th, which is 2 days after I graduate. It’s on the opposite side of the state, so it’s going to be a long drive that Sunday. There won’t be any time to delay. I’m going down to that area on Spring Break to look for a place to live. When I’m down there I’m also supposed to meet with my immediate supervisor. I’ve emailed him already, and I’m hoping he can provide assistance in finding a nice place to live in order to begin my post-college career.
I should be very happy that I had chosen Accounting as my major instead of something else in the business college. I keep hearing about how International Business and Business Administration and Management majors are having difficulty finding jobs. I’ve had no problems landing interviews being an Accounting major and with my considerably strong GPA. It’s just the actual job offer part that has eluded me until now. My friend, who graduated with a B.S. in Physics with a higher GPA than mine, is still seeking out employment in his field. He’s living in Chicago right now, where there are tons of opportunities. I guess those opportunities are just relegated to certain niches.
I consider myself lucky. While the area I’ll be working in isn’t the most exciting, I’m sure I’ll be able to make the most of it. I want to get as much experience as possible while passing the CPA exam. That’ll be the next thing on my radar. I only hope it doesn’t take me too many attempts to pass.
A month has come and passed since now and the last time I wrote here. A lot of time that is, but it doesn’t mean a lot. School has started. It is my last semester at my university hopefully forever. But what do I once I graduate?
Rejection seems to come around every hairpin turn. Out of nowhere. Well, it all has to come from somewhere, but I don’t see it. It isn’t easy, and each time it slaps you in the face you lose more and more motivation and confidence to continue. It is a tricky thing that I don’t think ever delivers a less burdensome anguish which we must struggle to overcome. I couldn’t see myself ever getting used to this, but for the near future I also don’t see myself circumventing it.
I guess we have to learn to deal. If not, then we give up. But that’s not an option either. Not after all of this time, money, effort, and youth spent.
While using Windows 8 over the last month, I’ve encountered several issues, varying in degree of annoyance. The one most frustrating is the lack of ability to edit a contact entry’s profile picture in the People Hub in Windows 8. Not only is that not possible, but we can also not handle this task with the People Hub in Outlook.com. It is utterly baffling that this seemingly basic functionality is missing. Not only that, but I discovered a support thread on Microsoft Answers in which a support personnel appears to confirm that doing this is not possible.
Apparently, Microsoft expects everyone to have some sort of account online, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. How about people’s technologically unsavvy parents and grandparents? Give me a break. I’ve noticed that lack of options/settings/functionality is a giant problem in Windows 8. They have sacrificed too much for simplicity. I still like Windows 8 and my Windows Phone, but they have really got to realize that taking features away is the wrong approach to providing an operating system that does anything but seriously frustrate its users.
Windows 8 1st impressions
As the title of this blog post implies, I recently upgraded my computer to Windows 8. There are many things I like about it, but there are also present many issues that I find incredibly frustrating. It took me some getting used to, but at this point I can say that I feel confident navigating the interface.
Charms Bar
One of the important factors that aided my ability to work my way around the new OS is the hot corners feature. I’m not quite sure whether or not they’re called that in Windows 8, but hot corners is a feature that I first remember on my 2007 Macbook running OS X Tiger. On the Mac, you could move your mouse to one of the corners to initiate certain functions. You could set a corner to show the desktop, another to initiate Dashboard (which was/is a multitasking feature), and another to open the widgets pane.
I think hot corners was a good feature, very useful at the time to get to places much quicker than you could on Windows. I know that on touch devices, the corners aren’t what are used but instead the left and right sides of the touch screen. Now, in Windows 8, we use hot corners for practically the same reason. Still, no matter the method, this functionality is used to do similar things as the Mac in Windows 8: multitasking; switching to the start screen menu; and opening the charms menu, a contextually sensitive menu allowing users to view app settings, search, share, or send the content to devices. Once I figured out how to use these as I should, it became a lot less irksome to test drive Microsoft’s latest Windows installment.
Windows 8 is obviously built for touch. It’s navigable with a mouse, but I really feel like the best experience with Windows 8 will be with a touch-enabled tablet or notebook/hybrid. The reason I don’t include desktops is that it may be physically tiresome to reach 2+ feet to reach a large monitor on a desk. I don’t have any proof since my monitor isn’t touch-enabled, but I cannot really foresee the possibility of my arm not tiring after a few minutes of reaching to the monitor. If anything, I opine that desktop monitors with touch will only be used as a supplement to a mouse or touch pad. It may depend on the desktop set-up in question, but I suspect my expectations to be mostly true. I’ll have to test out a touch pad when I can afford a quality one.
Windows 8 is an attractive OS. It’s very colorful, and ‘metro’ apps all share a standard design sensibility that is nice to see. Right clicking in an app gives contextual menus at the bottom of the screen, while application search and settings are all handled by the charms bar. The live tiles are similar to those on Windows Phone, giving updates, notifications, and live information as necessary, depending on the application in question. Since there’s more room on Windows 8 devices than on smartphones, they actually provide more information than on Windows Phone.
My tentative Start Screen
Having a Windows Store allows us to have a single place to go to find applications. While I never thought that going to a developer’s Web site to download programs was a particularly painful experience, having a standard place that is easily searchable adds a lot that I didn’t know was missing. Right now the application situation is about the same as you might expect it to be for a new OS, but it will get where it needs to be shortly. Plus, only Windows 8, you can still run legacy applications in desktop mode. Those types of programs can’t be downloaded from the Windows Store, but Microsoft does provide links to the developer’s own Web page so that they can be downloaded from there. That still provides an advantage of the single, searchable place to meet our application needs.
Windows Store main page
The primary fault I find with Windows 8 that there seems to be a lack of options. I’ve found that several times I’ve wanted to do something that I simply couldn’t figure out a way to do. Maybe there are methods, but they were neither readily apparent, nor did they present themselves after a modest amount of searching on the issue. In the Xbox video app, I downloaded on the ‘New on Xbox Video’ videos, but couldn’t find a way to check on their download progress, cancel the download, or subscribe to that channel to download videos automatically in the future. Well, I did finally manage figure out a way to cancel the download, but it happened accidentally when I closed the app. You would think there would be a background downloader to handle these sorts of things, no? I remember my Xbox 360 being way more open to giving information than this application.
There are also usability issues I’ve encountered, too. For example, several times I got stuck in the “me” section of the People Hub without a way to get back to the main page of the app. The only option that remained was to close the app and reopen it. After some time, I discovered that I could right click to reach the home link, but that didn’t occur to me the first couple of days. I also downloaded the Skype app and tried to add a friend as a contact that I already had on messenger. After doing that, I had two contacts in my Skype list. I couldn’t find a way to link them like I can do on Windows Phone. After a couple of days and reinstalling the Skype app, it appears to have linked that contact automatically in the People Hub, but in the Skype app itself the Messenger contact appears separate from the Skype contact. Additionally, when I go to the People Hub and choose a contact to message through Messenger, it takes me to the Skype app instead of the Messaging app like it did beforehand. It also doesn’t appear to let me message through Messenger after doing this, but rather it wants me to pay to send a Skype SMS or something. To top it off, it puts these weird characters before the email address of the person I’m wanting to message. Here’s an example:
Screenshot of my Skype Issue
Metro Internet explorer seems to lack a lot of options, although generally the experience is positive. You can’t order tabs or have multiple windows in use. Having many tabs open can very much diminish the amount of real estate dedicated to the Web page while you’ve got the app UI toggled. In order to bring up the app UI, you have to right click. Some Web sites don’t allow right clicking, which can cause issues with managing to toggle the UI. Perhaps there is a hotkey for this, but if so I’ve yet to find it. This same problem occurred as well when I opened a YouTube video in a new window. I couldn’t click anywhere to open the app UI to close that tab because the video filled the entire screen. Internet explorer also seems a little slow, and some Web sites don’t appear to work as properly as they should with it. Not only that, but IE doesn’t seem to always open Web pages on the first attempt. Several times I’ve had to refresh the page at least once to cause the Web site to display. I thought at first that it may have something to do with streaming through Xbox Music—since my internet speed isn’t very fast—but it also happened when I was listening to locally stored music. It’s a huge issue in my opinion since Internet Explorer is the default browser in Windows 8.
Sample Internet Explorer Windows/Tabs
Xbox Music is very complicated to use. It’s not always easy to tell which music is in the “cloud” and which isn’t. Over time it appears as more and more albums were accompanied by a cloud icon next to them, so it seems to take significant time for them to be added to the cloud. But what cloud? These songs aren’t in my SkyDrive. It must be a service similar to iTunes Match, where these are songs that I can listen to on another device sans ads without having to store it locally on that device. I suppose for albums that aren’t on Xbox music, we’ll still have to upload them to SkyDrive if we want to put them into the cloud. Allowing Xbox Music to pull metadata from the Internet also causes a lot of issues with respect to music organization. I just ended up turning it off.
Xbox Music allows streaming music supported by ads from nearly the entire Xbox Music collection on Windows 8 and Windows RT. I say nearly since there are some artists—such as Led Zeppelin—whose music you may purchase but not use through streaming or the Xbox Music Pass. An issue, however, is that sometimes those ads don’t load when I’m outside of the app, and I have to go back into the app for the ad to play. Other times it seems to work fine. Just now, actually, when I was writing this in Word in the desktop, the music player stopped because I was streaming music. Apparently, it won’t stream music when I’m in the desktop, but it appears to play locally-hosted files without cause for concern. Not very consistent.
That brings up an issue pervasive throughout the entire metro interface. If I’m viewing a video in a browser window, through Hulu for instance, I can’t go into another app and still hear the video being played so I would know when to return. This is especially applicable to ads that you want to “tab out of” until your show returns. I’m aware there is a snap feature to attach the browser window to a side of the screen while I’m in another app, but that’s annoying to do each and every time there’s an ad break.
The People app looks to have similar problems as other third party Facebook clients, in that some users can choose to not share information, such as photos and status updates, to the app. I believe this used to be an issue with Windows Phone, but it was fixed so that everything was shared to the People Hub app on Windows Phone as though it were a first-party application. I can view certain status updates by friends on my phone and on the Web site, but when go to those same users’ profiles in the People Hub on Windows 8, there are neither status updates nor photos available to peruse.
In general, I like Windows 8, but I would like more functionality restored. While I don’t have a touchpad, I have a suspicion that the OS would be easier to navigate with one. That’ll be a purchase I intend to make whenever I have enough disposable income to pick one up, since they tend to come in a bit pricey. I did more complaining in this post than praising, but you can always find more to complain about than praise, right? I’m overall fairly happy, but Windows 8 still needs some work. There were rumors that say that Windows 8 was rushed out the door, and I would say that they certainly have a case.
My Windows 8 Desktop
Finals have passed. I actually only had to take two. Lucky me. But they were both on the same day, one Immediately after the other. Poor me. I did well on the second one, for which I spent nearly no time studying. I only hope I didn’t do poorly on the other, the one for which I spent hours upon hours studying. That would be ironic. I only hope to maintain a B in that course. I’m not asking for much.
I recently upgraded to Windows 8. I’m writing some first impressions about it to post here. I’m not sure why, but I felt the spark of the writing bug and at least wanted to express how I feel about it. Hopefully I’ll have it up by Wednesday.
I was invited to the ‘New MySpace’ today. I signed up, but apparently the ‘New MySpace’ doesn’t recognize the 12th day of February as being a valid date for which a person could be birthed. That is Lincoln’s birthday. I’d call it utter blasphemy if there were any chance I could attach a religious context to it. On to the Web site, though: um, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem particularly useful. I don’t really see the point aside from it being a place were you can showcase your media creation if you’re one of those so-called artist types. For us ordinary folk without such developed skills, we can “connect” to artists, have a profile song, listen to songs, and create “mixes.” I put both of those in quotation marks because I have no idea what they are really, even after taking each of the countless, short tours.
In other news, it’s now break. Grades haven’t been posted yet, and they won’t be until Friday. But I’ve officially started my media deluge. There is much that I wish to get through while I have the chance, and I hope to document it all here. It may be only a few sentences per item, but I have every intent of doing so at this very moment in time. Whether that moment lingers for more than a fleeting evening is a guess I wouldn’t dare to hazard.
I’m happy that the semester has almost reached its end. It almost seems as though it has went by too fast, though. I remember it was not long ago that I was dreading returning to school for the fall. All I have are finals left, aside from one last conversation table that I have to facilitate for my Spanish internship.
It’s a scary thought to think that I only have 5 months of classes left before graduation. It’s exciting, but I don’t have a job yet. I’m going to have to focus on sending out resumes over Christmas break and hope something fruitful comes of it.
I’m thinking about beginning to write strictly in Spanish. I think it would help to improve my writing since I would have to do it each time I update. Or maybe to provide a Spanish translation to accompany each one? I’m not sure. At the same time, I don’t want to not write in English anymore, but I feel like if I have two blogs, then I’m going to end up neglecting one.
