Min and I had a very busy morning today. She had her interview at 10:00 this morning and had to leave the house a bit before me. She actually managed to call me after getting out of her interview before I even managed to leave the house to go to my own. Unfortunately, she felt like the interview was a bust and that there is very little chance that anything will come of it. We are still hopeful but it was very depressing.
My interview was at 11:00 but was only with a recruiter, not an end client, so my stress levels were far lower than Dominica’s were. My interview seemed to go very well but it is very difficult to tell with a recruiter because interviewing is much less an exact match for a particular position type of situation as it is attempting to figure out what is likely to match down the road. This interview was for a particular position but still it is quite different. I don’t have a regular interview for that position yet and we are not expecting to hear anything about it until Monday afternoon.
After my interview I drove up to Vincent Mazda in East Rochester which was right around the corner and I dropped off my car to finally get its inspection taken care of. That has been lingering on for a month now. What a pain that has been. Eric picked me up from the dealer and we went down to Jay’s Diner on West Henrietta to get some lunch. We drank coffee for a little while to make sure that they managed to finish up with the car before going back north to East Rochester to pick up the car. Then it was time to go back home.
Overall, my work day today was pretty short but I was kind of tired after having worked the Wegmans overnight last night and then having to get up for an interview this morning. Plus I had not gotten around to getting all of the paperwork necessary for the interview done so I did that this morning as well before I left.
Min had to go to work at 3:00 today to work the “B” shift so that left me home alone with Oreo. Oreo loves getting to hang out with me! I am his favourite, you know (shh… don’t tell Dominica.)
Nothing exciting happened this evening. It was a quiet night of sitting at the computer doing some miscellaneous chores and listening to podcasts which I haven’t managed to get to in a while. So that made me happy to catch up a little. I did a little work on my syllabus for the “New Media and the Internet Lifestyle” class that I am going to be teaching this semester down in Castile. I think that that class is going to be an awful lot of fun.
My big news of the day is that I recorded the first episode of the SGL Podcast. Technically, it isn’t a podcast yet because I haven’t syndicated it but that is just a technicality. The point of getting to where I did today was to see if I would be able to use Audacity with my new Logitech headphones to do a decent recording and it seems to have worked really well. Audacity is a really great product and did a great job of recording and then editing the show. It is about sixteen minutes long this time which, I think, is a pretty good length for what it is. I am really happy with how the show turned out sounding. I am always concerned that I will sound weird or awkward when I am recording but when I listen back to it I think that I sound a lot like any other professional podcaster that I listen to regularly so that makes me happy. Using Audacity to take care of things like compression and normalization really makes a big difference and recording in high quality with a nice USB microphone and doing all of the editing in high quality before mixing it down to the MP3 version makes it that much better too.
Min got home a little after 11:15 and was very glad to be home after having had that bad interview and then having had a really bad day at work after that.
I have decided, I think, that I am going to make the attempt to use WordPress to run SGL. I would consider using a hosting service instead of running it myself but the reality is that SGL is already so large that most hosting services won’t touch it. And now that I am starting to add audio on a regular basis, or at least I hope to be, it is going to grow at breakneck pace. It takes approximately one megabyte of storage for each minute of audio that I record. So that is pretty significant.
Min was very excited to see on CNN today that the Humane Society has been doing an amazing job of rescuing pets and other animals trapped in New Orleans from hurricane Katrina. Thousands of pets of being rescued and many are managing to be reunited with their owners although many, as you imagine, are now ownerless and will need new, caring homes and long term care. Dominica and I are asking everyone who can to consider donating to the US Humane Society to help save more of these poor pets that have had their lives torn apart by this disaster as well but were abandoned by their owners and had no way of escaping and didn’t get to make any choices themselves. And for families, espeically children, who have lost everything, bringing them back together with their pets can be critical in mitigating long term emotional trauma. Losing a house is devastating, losing a house and knowing the puppy that loved you starved to death in it because you left him behind could be the straw that tears a fragile family relationship apart.