Well, well, well! Who woulda thunk it? I just came back from a lab. meeting and I left feeling like part of something good. Man, I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I’m so looking forward to it! I can’t believe the feeling that’s rushing through me. 🙂 I think my job may not be so bad as long as I follow the directions. As my boss put it, we’re in “production” phase and we haven’t reached the analytical phase yet. We are saddled with lots of production problems so a lot of my work will be centered around disproving or proving that some problem was caused by something and then, tweaking experiments accordingly. Wish me luck and I hope to hold on to this spurt of good will! 🙂
Category: Commentary
One working woman!
Man!! One week on the job has gone by with a tiny incident. The old tech (NO) and I were sort reminded about certain protocols on the job. well, NO and the undergrads seemed to take this in stride. I was a bit thrown off balance and so I busted my butt all day Friday. I am looking forward to the challenge that next week will bring. In non-work related news, I got a call from a long time friend. It was very refreshing and I wasn’t able to be as talkative as I wanted to be because I was on the clock. I’m sure I’ll be initiating the next call. On the family front, job stressors are taking its toll on people. Here’s uttering a little prayer for all of us who could do with a bit of a break. I’m currently in love with 3 songs on Faze’s album “Independent.” He is surprisingly good and I will be keeping an eye out for his stuff courtesy of Donald who hooks me up. lol. Thanks bro! That’s all for now. Ciao!
Mea culpa, friends and family
It’s day 4 of my spanking new job. I love the environment. It’s a fast paced place to be in, but it’ll be perfect for honing my skills. I’m sad that I can’t blog as frequently as I used to, but I’ll try to make each post count as much as I can. Life is going on as well as can be in our household. I’m dreading this month’s utility bills but all told, it’s not as bad as some of the horror stories I’ve heard. I can’t wait to get paid although the money has already been budgeted out. 🙂 First things first, people. I’m getting rid of my Bank of America credit card. I’ve been a customer of theirs for over a year. I was approved for one of those secured credit cards where a down payment had to be made (along with a $29 annual fee). Naturally, my credit limit was low, but perfect at the time for my needs. I tried to get removed from the “secured” status to a regular card, but a snotty CSR informed me that I had to be upgraded from their end and that it wasn’t something that I could initiate proceedings on. Well, I kept my mouth shut and kept making my monthly payments. Come the end of September, my intent is to close my eyes and pony up however much I’ve got left to pay off the card. Then, get my $99 deposit back and tell them that it sucked being a customer of theirs. I will still hang on to my other credit card and gradually get back up to a level that I feel comfortable with. Here’s saying prayers for a certain aunt who’s been battling a debilitating illness for awhile.
I’m lovin’ it!
I’m on day 2 of my new job. I feel like I’m back in familiar waters. I almost feel pressured like the way it was in grad. school. However, as Matt tells me, relax Jane. And for a brief spell, I do. I want to understand what I’m working on. I panick when I don’t understand what it signifies that a certain protein is a monomer or dimer. Just when I go into ventilation overdrive, I tell myself, relax. Right now, I’ve got a lot of reading material. I need to prepare myself and dive into the work. Matt’s getting used to the idea of me working now. lol. I had been at home for over 4 mths although counting from when I was officially eligible to work, I stayed on the job market for less than 1 mth. 🙂 Huzzah!! Hopefully, after putting into some time at this new gig, I’ll be moving on to other things. What they are, I have no idea. I don’t want too much headache at this point. No kids being planned anytime soon so making enough (from both spouses) to keep happy and well-fed is what I’m aiming for. lol. Actually, add saving for retirement and that cute house to the mix. I’ll be doing some really neat stuff and I pray that I understand things in time to not let my bosses be pissed off at me. In the meantime Jah, please help to stay off Facebook while at work (Amen). 🙂
Labor day, part deux
Okay, I lied. I’ve run out of the steam with which I churned out that last post. The long and short story was this: we spent at least 45 mins looking for Sitton’s cave. After almost giving up (I had given up after walking the first mile), Matt found the cave. The state park attendant was very helpful as far as even giving us pamplets on the cave’s whereabouts. I could’ve sworn that the idea of caves there was something of an urban legend because the park ranger and people that our party had talked too seemed reticent about the caves. Well, Sitton’s cave didn’t look well trafficked. Compared to Petty John’s cave, the entrance to Sitton’s cave was ginormous. Just like the caves I’ve read about and seen on TV! I’m putting a small selection of the pictures online.
Now that I don’t have internet access at home, it’ll be a pain to upload these things, one by one. Apparently, the library has disabled the Java Runtime environment from running on their computers. It’s such a pain in the patootie. In other news, I’m almost a full employee. HR hasn’t put my stuff into the system yet so I can’t get an email address. Not getting an email address means I’m cut off from the electronic side of things i.e. online sign-ins, getting on the waitlist for a prime parking spot, et cetera. This part may slightly get on my nerves, but it’ll happen eventually. In the meantime, I’d better brush up on my protocols.
Preparing for 3 days of camping
When the groove strikes me, I go all out: blaring music from my room, tidying up, etc. It feels good. 🙂 Even better is finding over $25 dollars in spare change. Matt’s bad/good about dropping change into our spare-change cup and I finally counted out the coins (excluding the pennies). So, that will be enough to fill up his gas tank halfway. It’s sad, but gas prices have remained at their high price of $3 and even more in quite a few places. We’ll be meeting up with his dad and then, jointly making our way to the camping site. Matt made a little checklist that has proved invaluable to my preparations. 🙂 I am definitely taking my camcorder and camera along with me. Jane, please don’t forget to purchase AA NiMH batteries before you leave! I will be offline for at least 3 days so my phone may be the best way to get in touch with me. In other news, I’m presenting my own rolled-up internet security suite:
- ZoneAlarm Professional (est. $40) from Check Point which serves as a very competent firewall and spyware solution.
- Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition (got this from my ex-school) which serves the much needed antivirus scanning in my email even.
- Ad-Aware Professional 2007 (est. $39.95) from Lavasoft. I use this as an on-demand product although there is an option Ad-Watch that can be used as a realtime component.
Those are the basic 3 that I installed to protect my computer. Another layer of protection will be your browser. I have since switched to Mozilla Firefox and I will not be looking back. For my browser, I’ve got Adblock Plus in operation along with their extra filters that remove the most obnoxious of adverts no the web. I used to have the Netcraft Anti-Phishing toolbar, but I have had a low incidence of those sites due to my diligence in looking carefully at the URLs that I’m sent to. The McAfee SiteAdvisor used to be on computer also, but I got rid of it. I lost interest in it once they started running a “premium” version of their tool. That’s just shitty for them to have done that. They bought out the creators of Site Advisor and then, decided to upgrade the tool, but slap a price tag on it (est. $24.99 single user license). That’s just sticking your tongue out at your users. Well, McAfee’s got competition from lots of angles so there! This was as of last year, but I’ve lost interest in them anyway. Firefox comes built with anti-phishing properties so I didn’t need the extra protection. Naturally, I’ll need Internet Explorer because Microsoft has integrated it almost inextricably into their operating system. Furthermore, buyers of new computers will notice that they may come pre-bundled with other security suites. If you don’t trust those programs, don’t be afraid to uninstall them and install programs you trust.
Wrangling with the beast that is my computer
I am beginning to think that whoever came up with the non-destructive recovery thing needs their head examined. Did they tell you that they would re-install all the programs that came with the factory PC (which is fine), but that they would leave lots of traces of the old programs that were supposedly erased? This goes for things like Microsoft .NET which was another story unto itself. I had to install over 200MB of windows updates, which is fine. However, when it came time to install programs, I was in deep doo-doo. For instance, with .NET 2.0 and 3.0, the installation kept failing with some error code that I couldn’t find a solution to. Well, the long and short was, .NET files were littered on my computer so I had to download a removal tool from a Microsoft guy (Aaron Stebner) who works on .NET which removed all instances of .NET (i.e. .NET 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0). Only then, was I able to install all the .NET flavors. All was fine & dandy and I should have let sleeping dogs lie. I was connected to the internet (!), I had installed the latest microsoft updates (!!), I had my defenses installed (!!!), but my $70 Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 graphics card was lying useless. So, I took it upon myself to do a simple swap out. Do you see where the problem lies? In the Device manager (rightclick “My Computer” and select “Manage:. Then, go to “Device Manager” and click the plus sign by “Display Adapter”), it said that Nvidia Drivers were enabled! However Add & Remove programs had no record of this.
Now, I didn’t know how to go about this so there was a lot of trial and error involved. Hell, I still don’t know if I got it right, but I’m online and typing this, aren’t I? First, I disabled the onboard integrated Intel graphics card I had, swapped my cord connection to the Nvidia card and restarted. I got hit with a blank screen. After a few cold restarts, I got a msg about Windows not starting right due to some hardware/software conflict. I was happy because at least, it let me get into Safe Mode. While there, I then, re-enabled the onboard graphics card, but wasn’t able to re-install the Nvidia drivers. So, another cycle of rebooting began. To make a long story short, the settings on my computer are thus, I’ve uninstalled the Intel Extreme Graphics Driver and now have Nvidia Drivers installed. In Device manager, it shows the integrated graphics card as being enabled although I don’t know what impact it’ll have on the functioning of my Nvidia graphics card.
Right now, I’m tired and done with tinkering with stuff on my computer. It’s time to get to more important things like fiddling with my spanking new camera. Oooh, did I forget to tell you? I’m going camping for Labor Day for 3 days. lol. This should be fun and interesting because the group consists of me & Matt, his dad, Matt’s friend (John), and Julie & Jonathon. This camera couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m sure that with time, I’ll discover more things that have been left over, no thanks to the silly non-destructive recovery thingie. I should have gone with my initial reformat-the-harddrive thought. *sigh* Still, I’m online and that’s almost more than enough for me. 🙂 And my computer’s booting up in less than 2 minutes, a miracle after the sluggishness that was just a week ago. I know I didn’t have any virii or baddies. I just had a shitload of programs on a mere 160GB hard drive that I rarely used! I mean, I had at least 5 graphics editing programs (Photoshop CS, Irfanview, InkScape, GIMP, & SnagIt. Does ConceptDraw count?). I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that I will be severely curtailing my visits to certain sites. 😀