Friday, April 29, 2005

Exciting Referral News

Apparently, if you do a search on Yahoo! for "is gallagher a jewish name", this site is the #3 result... thanks to this old list.

No, I didn't figure this out on my own; someone actually did that search, found my blog as a result, and clicked on it. So don't tell me I'm crazy; I'm way back in line behind that dude.

If you're a geek, too...

...then you'll probably also find this pretty funny.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Propaganda and other stuff

I'm trying to get Eti to start a podcast with me. We've gotten to the blog stage, which is a start. However, there are a few roadblocks.

1. There isn't really any good podcasting software that I know of, yet. I tried Propaganda and, frankly, it sucks like a Hoover. It's just mixing software with a few added features. And it's crippled mixing software to boot; there's not even a good way to edit clips in it. Adam Curry's people are working on this program called CastBlaster, which sounds very promising and, presumably, will not cost anything. I know that all you really need to record a podcast is a sound recording program, but I sort of used to be a DJ lo these many years ago and I need my intros and transitions and background stuff.

2. Eti needs to be convinced to do the podcast. I'm working on this.

3. I only have one microphone. It's a $25 clip-on from Radio Shack and it doesn't sound that bad. I just need one more so, you know, we can both talk. This is probably the smallest roadblock of the three.

Anyway, that's about as much as there is to say at the moment.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

The Industry vs. Not

Before a few months ago, the only "real" jobs I ever had (i.e., not summer jobs or short-term temp jobs) were in the entertainment industry. Now I'm out of there. I'm here. And usually I don't miss the old stuff, since the hours are so much better here and I get more vacation and holidays and there's a lot less screaming.

But there is stuff I miss, apart from just the intriguing possibility of randomly running into a washed-up actor trying to pitch a new reality show about people eating pineapples whole. The thing I was thinking about yesterday, as I was leaving, is that almost every aspect of a job in entertainment operates on two levels. There's one level where what you're doing is incredibly important, crucial to the survival of mankind, potentially fatal if swallowed (contact a physician or induce vomiting), etc. There's that level. But then there's another level where it's all sort of a joke. Because unless you're WAY the hell up the food chain, everything you're doing is in service of someone else's creative ideas -- and, let's be honest, those ideas generally suck. Hell, even if they're good, they tend to seem kind of silly when you look at them against whatever bit of minuatie you're working on that relates to them.

On the other hand, in the environment I'm in now, the hyperbolic "NOW, GODDAMNIT!" approach to every single task is pretty foreign. It just doesn't really exist here. A lot of times there isn't even a deadline. You hear things like, "We should probably get this done relatively soon" and "I guess by Friday, if you're not too busy." Things are taken seriously -- not overly so, just about the right amount. But there's no flipside. There's nothing you work intensely on for hours and then giggle about afterwards. You don't get to say to yourself, "Some dude came up with an idea for a talking bear, and somehow that requires me to run an Excel sheet and sixty copies of these graphs." There's still some amount of servicing silly ideas, but they're not laugh-out-loud silly; more like, "well, that's probably more bureaucracy than necessary"-type silly. Also, you can forget about liberally dropping f-bombs in the workplace. And you can really forget about dropping them in front of your boss.

Anyway, that's enough philosophizing for a blog. I mean, fuck... I wrote, like paragraphs and shit.

Monday, April 04, 2005

Referrals

I don't know how long I was able to do this and didn't realize it, but here, thanks to SiteMeter, are some of the searches that have referred people to my site. I apologize to all of these people, because I'm sure they didn't find what they were looking for.

"This document contains no data"
"Old Navy" and "unemployment"
"head songs"
"unemployment blog" (okay, that one was on the money, for the old blog)
"morbid.com"
"arcade fire desktop wallpaper"
"barsyalc"
"bad at directions" (on the New Zealand version of Google)

and the best one ever...

"boba choking"