Enjablog

I went out with a bunch of friends tonight to see Superman II as part of Crystal City’s outdoor film festival. We watched Superman last week and it was a little terrible. Not at all like I remembered it (awesome).

Superman II was a big improvement over the first movie. But some questions did come out of the evening:
1. After Superman gives up his powers and gets it on with Lois, how do they get back from the Fortress of Solitude (in the North Pole)? I’ll grant you that Clark stops to pick up a jacket when he later returns to the North Pole, but they had no jackets when they arrived. Because, you know, that’s all you need for the North Pole.
2. So, having given up his powers in an irreversible process, Superman discovers that he, in fact, needs those powers to do stuff, like beat up bad guys (he never was a smart superhero…). He must then return to the Fortress of Solitude (wearing a jacket this time). There, he finds a green crystal and then he has his powers back. Jigga-what?
3. Also, what kind of world does not believe in the death sentence, but believes in immortalizing criminals so that they will be imprisoned for eternity? Oh wait… I just realized that sounds a little like Hell. But Krypton-created. Hm. I guess I take that one back.
4. What is with the new superpowers Superman discovers after the supervillains start teleporting around him? He doesn’t use these later, but they’re pretty cool: super-cellophane “S”, teleporting, self-projections/holograms, and tractor-beam eyes.

Again, this was waaay better than the first movie (and they even continued the theme of hitting children). And I understand that you’re supposed to suspend belief to a certain extent when watching movies. But I think these are legitimate questions.

Oh, and Fortress of Solitude? Shouldn’t Superman have some kind of security system on that place? There were half a dozen people traipsing through there, not to mention Lois trying to redecorate 30 seconds after arriving. If I had a fortress of solitude, you’d better believe I wouldn’t use it for parties.

I had a girls day out on Sunday with some friends to celebrate a belated birthday. We started out with the most incredible brunch ever at the Ritz. They had a breakfast area, including an omelet bar, waffle bar, and a buffet with eggs benedict, sausage, bacon, crepes… Then there was the sushi/seafood/lunch area. And the 2 dessert stations. It was also the most expensive brunch I’ve ever been to, but I think the bottomless champagne/mimosas balanced that out.

This was followed by a shopping trip. First stop: Sephora. The birthday girl, Mella, had a coupon for a birthday freebie and as we were looking around, I realized Mella would be the perfect person to do my wedding day makeup! She agreed without hesitation — and then asked what the date would be. She then proceeded to ask me about the makeup I use as my eyes glazed over and my complete cluelessness became apparent.

She then took me around the store teaching me the basics and showing me her recommendations. Then we got an employee to help me do a skin match (?) to find the right foundation color for me. Which led to the following:

1. Primer
2. Pore refiner
3. Foundation
4. Concealer
5. Makeup — the other stuff that makes me pretty after I finish looking “natural”
6. Powder
7. She Laq — which apparently I’ll need so my makeup won’t run when I sweat

I’m just going to take an intermission here. After I got home and discussed with Ian, we got to talking about wood finishes:

1. Clean
2. Sand
3. Pre-Stain conditioner
4. Stain
5. Polyurethane/Shellac

If you’ll notice, a woman’s face requires 2 more coats than it does to finish wood.

After I was properly made up [an hour later], we proceeded with our shopping excursion. A stop in to redeem a free panties coupon, some dress shopping, and then the final shoe stop before calling it a day.

It was an all-day immersion training on how to be a girl. Educational and fun!

Ian and I went to a birthday party this weekend for a friend we know from high school. We weren’t very close friends in high school, but our circles overlapped and we had fun catching up at our reunion last year. As it turns out, she and her roommate (also from high school) live only a couple miles from us, so it was a fun excursion for the evening.

They planned a photo scavenger hunt in Old Town. I think it was the first time doing one of these for everyone in the group and it was loads of fun. There was some joking, though I suspect people were mostly serious, that we weren’t to post these pictures on Facebook. So I’m posting just the one here with my friends cropped out. This fulfilled the “Do the bunnyhop with a stranger” task. Jack Sparrow thought we were nuts. ;)

Other items on the list included:
- Take a photo of one of your group on all fours with a dog.
- Take a photo of one of your group posing with a monument, historic marker, or historic artifact.
- Take a photo of one of your group posing with a street performer or costumed historic interpreter.
- Take a photo of one of your group posing as a sculpture or performance art spelling out a word with their bodies. (This one included a visit to the local Old Town sex shop.)

We ended up finishing much earlier than expected, but that just meant we had time for ice cream before taking the Trolley back to the metro. We went back to the regular part of the party after that and looked through both groups’ pictures. The birthday girl was judge and chose the winning team. I have to commend her for her impartiality. She chose our team for the win, even though she was on the other team. Extra points going to us for our bunnyhop video!

It turns out… at the end of the race, there’s no cure. All they had were cheese samples and coupons.

Ian and I have been having some problems lately. There have been little black bugs flying around our apartment and we tracked it down to our plethora of new plants. They fly around, mate, lay eggs in the dirt, repeat.

Per standard protocol, I used the internets to investigate the problem. From my research, it sounded like we had fungus gnats, so then I started an investigation to find a solution. There are all kinds of ways people have tried to resolve this… taking new dirt and baking it to kill anything that might be growing in it and then repotting all your plants; leaving out bowls of vinegar or wine to attract/drown the gnats; putting cut potatoes on the dirt for the gnats to lay eggs in and then throwing away the potatoes before the eggs can hatch (ew!).

We decided to follow Australia’s plan and introduce a non-native predator: Nematodes. They’re microscopic parasitic worms that attack garden pests… like fungus gnats.

Now, while I was in the midst of researching this, we also noticed a white cotton-y residue building up on Herb. I don’t actually have a picture of it on him because I was too grossed out by it. But I did do some research… And they’re mealybugs. The infestation was significant, but did not spread to other plants.

One of the solutions to mealybugs? Nematodes.

Our nematodes arrived about 2 weeks ago and, I’m happy to report, we noticed a significant improvement within the week! And Herb is looking like he might survive! I went through and cut off all the infected leaves that were beyond survival, leaving the healthiest leaf to continue the fight. He has one green leaf left with some mealy residue and a new, uninfected leaf sprouting. Now Ian’s just worried about what we’ll do with all these millions of nematodes…

In other news, went to Ian’s favorite bar/restaurant in the area with a some of my favorite people last night!
(Disclaimer: If you were not there, you may still be one of my favorite people. I mean, probably not, but I think I’m not supposed to say that. Hm, that wasn’t a very reassuring disclaimer. You may already have won one of my top positions as Friend!) It wasn’t even anything exciting or celebratory. We just hadn’t seen each other in a while and started making plans weeks in advance to find a date when we were all free. And it finally happened!

It’s here! It’s here!

One of my coworkers and I have been discussing buying hardhats back since sea trials last summer. It was mentioned again last week at happy hour and she took the initiative to put the order in. The hats arrived today and now I’m ready for any shipyard related trips to which I might need to attend. *giggles*

I think this is going to be a perfect opportunity to use my gmail unicorn sticker so I can label this hat as my own. I don’t want someone accidentally walking away with my hat. And I need to go find some of those Hello Kitty stickers I’ve been joking about for the past few years.

Oh. My.

I’m going to end on this because I have nothing more to add. I went looking for Hello Kitty stickers… and started clicking around amazon and found this:

Intern01 –
Pros:
+ Does work.
Cons:
- Loud (voice/demeaner, sucking on fingers after eating, belching, hiccups, cracking knuckles, picking at hangnails, listening to music on headphones that I can hear while I have my headphones in, talking to himself incessantly at a conversational volume; people can hear him laughing 5 offices away).
- Hides his ignorance by answering questions with buzz words, repeating what you just said, or just offering useless information (e.g. Where did you get this value from? “It says 8 meters.” Thanks, that totally answered the question…).
- Overly confident. Declared his calculations to be correct (2 years of college, 2 weeks interning), explaining “this calculation is kinda weird,” when our resident expert (30+ years experience) says he estimated something different — offering a quantifiable solution.

Summary: So, he’s mostly loud, but I think I just don’t like him.

Intern02 –
Pros:
+ Seems likeable.
+ Quiet.
Cons:
- Does not seem intelligent; slow — intellectually and when completing tasks. Spends days working on something only to find he has no idea what he’s doing. Now, I’ll grant you, that’s what interns do. But I explained the task on Day 0, came back each following day to ask if he was making progress or had any questions, re-explaining the steps at least once a day.

Day 3, he sends me his first attempt which includes almost every error I cited on Day 0 that would need to be changed or the results would come out wrong. It almost seemed like he was listening. Almost. His email included, “I am getting big discrepancies in between the two, but if I have done something wrong I can’t figure out where.”

After receiving comments, trying again, he returns a few hours later saying he didn’t understand Step 1 (how to read a graph). I guess at least he asked. So, I’ll add that as a pro:
+ Willing to ask questions, regardless of their reflection on him.

- Additional points against him for doing his parts wrong on our team project and submitting his sections of the report 3 days late though. I’m not a forgiving person.

Summary: Not annoying, but I just don’t like working with him.

Winner? “Winner.” I dunno. 01 seems like a bad listener, so even though he works, I don’t trust the results nor do I care to work with him to correct his work. 02 is consistently incorrect, so I can at least trust that I should do the task myself and can then do a better job correcting what he’s done. Ok, I’m surprised by this, but I’m voting for Intern02 because I am actually willing to work with him.

Alright, I’ve been spending a lot of time complaining about interns. Mostly because they frustrate me, but also because they annoy me.

I was thinking back to see if I’ve felt this way about all our interns and whether I’ve changed my minds about them after they came back to work full time for the company.

The first intern brought on full time after I started working (Chad2) took some convincing on my part. I didn’t work with him much, but his emails were often casual, including typos, grammatical mistakes, and just not very professional. Once I was able to get past the spelling, he was a pretty competent worker. So, I was forced to change my mind on him. He did have NewGirl as a pretty strong advocate though, which definitely helped.

The other intern that summer was rather unimpressive, but didn’t annoy me. I didn’t mind working with her and she seemed like she was trying.

The next summer, I did not like the intern. Another coworker and I were giving him tasking on the projects we were working on and he took to telling us he “didn’t feel like it.” Fail.

I didn’t work with last summer’s intern (Intern00) that much, but he was normal enough to socialize with. OtherBoss and I even invited him out to lunch with us — multiple times. It probably helped that the intern in my office spent his days mashing his keyboard playing games or bikini shopping for his [not bikini body type] girlfriend.

Intern00 is back full time for us and I’ve had no problems working with him. The other new person who started a few weeks ago has also been working out really well. He’s definitely odd, but it entertains me that he annoys Intern01.

My department has really grown in the past few months. (We went from 14% women down to 7.6%!) I haven’t gotten around to making up nicknames for everyone, but I feel like I should make the effort.

So there were — Boss, Boss Jr, Skunknut, VTGuy, and BeardFacé.

New people — BreakDancer (who’s been in the dept a while… just hadn’t done anything to warrant a nickname. Though, I could go with CompetentGuy [minus the BoobLooking]), VTGuy2, TimeBurglar (stolen from TLD), ChairThief, and Intern00.

Huh. I just went back through my archives in search of a BoobLooker story. Apparently, I used to be much more professional and only blogged anonymous stories about work. Oh well.

But ok. I feel better now. Everyone has been named. Now I can start telling more work stories.

Also on the to do list — brainstorm ways to get the interns to stop annoying me so much.

So apparently, I need to be getting more Vitamin D so I don’t get osteoporosis either? I thought all I had to do was eat more cheese…

How avoiding the sun to protect against skin cancer has left Georgia Coleridge facing the threat of brittle bones

‘You’re only 43,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit early to worry. You keep fit, don’t you? You get some sunshine?’

‘Ha!’ I said. ‘Exercise and sunshine aren’t really my thing. I’m usually indoors, tapping away on my computer.’

His reaction was both immediate and surprising. All trace of nonchalance disappeared and I felt my first surge of apprehension. Looking back, I don’t know what I had expected - a blood test, maybe - but I left clutching a referral to a private clinic with a state-of-the-art Hologic Discovery QDR bone scanner.

So, it doesn’t help at all that the new intern (I’m going with Intern02) was one of my classmates the past 2 semesters. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time — he sent me his resume and I was only unimpressed with him at the time, so I forwarded it along. (Though, that’s definitely my fault. I need to stop forwarding resumes from people whose emails I want need to correct before forwarding. The last 2 have been duds. Cover letters just shouldn’t include things like, “Also, I can’t remember for sure, am I doing [this week's assignment]?”)

Little did I know how incorrect and counter-productive his work would turn out to be a few weeks later. I take a little solace (very little) in the fact that I didn’t actually recommend him. I said, “you probably shouldn’t ask me.” Which is to say, I didn’t actively advocate against him, but hell if that kind of recommendation helps.

But. I’m a professional, right? And he’s here to learn. So I had some work that needed to be done and a bunch of people too busy to do it. It was even interesting work (to me) — researching equipment for a ship: cranes, winches, rescue boats, etc.

I thought it would take a couple hours… A day and a half later, I take my first look at his results. The first 3 items I checked were off from what I expected by over 7 tons each — surprisingly low values.

After a little probing to find out what his sources were and what models/designs he was looking at, it turns out he was looking at completely different equipment, but “just scaled up.” Using what scaling factor? Your own engineering judgement? Uh, you know, math.

Continuing down the list of his bad data, I look closer at the cranes he cited. They’re drivable. You know, for land. Plus, it’s the wrong capacity. (It turns out he found a website that had a list of cranes for “33-150 mt,” which he took to mean he should take the first and last cranes from that page and those would be for “33 mt and 150 mt, respectively.”) But wait, let’s go back. It’s got wheels on it. That’s not what we want for a ship.

Alright, so I resolved months ago to train some usefulness into my coworkers, as their incompetence was a reflection on me. So, Intern02 will learn something this summer. And if it ends up just being, “Duck when Enjanerd starts punching knowledge into me,” I’ll settle for that. But I hope it’s something work-related. For his sake.

JoCo didn’t turn left, but it was still pretty awesome. Ian and I went to the Birchmere last week to support JoCo’s benefit for the Lung Transplant Foundation. His booking agent recently had both lungs replaced. Did you even pause when you read that? He had both lungs replaced.

The agent was there and he made some jokes about surgery… and robots, monsters, etc. It was pretty cool all around.

The opening act was Chelsea Lee. She was an interesting character. Her voice was amazing, but her lyrics needed a little maturing — whoa, I just looked her up and she’s 17. Her songs were very similar and would all do fairly well as the first quarter of a JoCo song. A little melancholy, relationship-y… But then no robots. Or monsters. Or villains. In between songs, she and her guitarist (Todd Wright, according to the internets) bantered and were pretty funny. So if they could work that into the songs, they would have suited the crowd well.

On my way home from work today, I tried to think back Before Google and remember the lengths to which I had to go in order to keep my life organized.

- Email: Yahoo and VT for personal, downloaded to Outlook before I transitioned to Thunderbird. My address book was never the same after that.
- Calendar: Yahoo and Outlook synced with my PDA (Handspring Edge)… until I switched computers and stopped syncing. Then I had a mix between Outlook, a paper calendar that I sometimes remembered to carry around with me, and my rapidly failing memory.
- Pictures: I have piles of actual photographs, CDs of pictures developed at CostCo years ago, and digital pictures dispersed between a few old hard drives that have never been sorted/labeled/transferred. But all my photos from the past 4 years have been labeled and tagged in Picassa. I’ve even made use of the facial recognition option to mass tag my photos.
- IM: I have at least 6 accounts on AIM, an account on ICQ (is that even around anymore?), Yahoo, MSN… and probably others. And about 3 years ago, I started phasing out friends who didn’t use gtalk. Well, not exactly phasing out. But I stopped using my AIM accounts and anyone who didn’t make the transition pretty much fell off my radar of people to keep in touch with.
- Blog: I was a dedicated Blogger user for a long while until I decided it didn’t provide all the options I wanted. I think that was all resolved soon after I switched to WordPress, but I haven’t really been back to do a proper comparison.
- Documents: Shared documents. *Awesome.* The big one for me here is wedding planning. But I also use this for a professional society — on-going action items, minutes, agendas — school, keeping track of plants, sharing my will, etc. Before? I wouldn’t even bother. But if I were forced to, it would just be emailing documents back and forth with no form of config control.
- Maps: Mapquest, yahoo, paper maps that were out of date and you had to look up using an index and page # & coordinates. Once mapquest and yahoo maps came around, things weren’t so bad, but streetview is just so much better.
- Scholar: Sure, the internet made trips to the library for research mostly unnecessary, but where do you find technical papers? And professional reference materials? This saved me weeks of time on one of my projects last semester.
- Health: First, I had to learn that you had to bring a prescription to the pharmacy and then wait for them to fill it. Then, I learned that you could call in advance and pick it up later. And then there is online re-fill with auto-reminders.

And now my phone… I spent years trying to get my contact lists in order. Switching between email programs and syncing between multiple devices created hundreds of duplicates that I never managed to get back under control. I never knew which email address, phone number, or other contact info was the right one for a person. I’m still having moderate difficulties distinguishing between people’s mobile and home/work numbers, but I’m at least able to contact the person I intended to contact.

I spent one evening going through my gmail contact list using the merge contacts feature and I now have a functional list online, on my home computer, and on my phone — all up to date.

I do have some serious concerns for what will happen to my life and my ability to be a functioning member of society if all my google apps suddenly went away. But until that happens, I can look back fondly on my years of piece-mealing my life together and appreciate how spectacular my life is After Google.

Cupcake, the new Android update for the G1, came out yesterday and I’m all kinds of pleased with it! Features I’ve noticed so far:
- on-screen keyboard - convenient, but will take some getting used to if I intend to use it for more than just filling in the occasional form field
- calendar widget - great!
- browser favorites and history tabs
- notification bar includes subject line of emails now
- removal of line separators in call log = less scrolling
- gtalk has different bg color
- a general prettier look to backgrounds and menus

I’ve also been getting a little out of control with downloading apps and comparing apps with friends to decide whether my current apps are good enough to make the cut. I’m not anywhere near running out of space on my phone, but I don’t want to have a phone filled with junk before I start removing things.

So, let me know if you have any suggestions or opinions on superior apps!

A big thank you to all the people who serve or have served in the armed forces!

And in honor of those who will serve to protect our planet and way of life, Ian and I went with his bro, sis-in-law, and TLD to watch Star Trek today. It was enjoyable for the masses, but it was also still a good movie. So, feel free to go watch without betraying the memories of Star Treks past. :)

I have this addiction to social networking sites. I remember thinking it was a cool idea when sixdegrees started… then there were friendster, myspace, orkut, facebook… I never use these sites for anything useful, but I just want to fit in. ;)

So, of course, when my realtor invited me to join linkedin a few years ago, I jumped at the opportunity to join yet another social networking site. Because why not?

Now, at the same time that I’m joining every online whatever possible, I go to great lengths to keep separation between my online and offline personas. My “professional” email address is different from my work address, which is different from my personal address, which is different from my mailing lists address.

This is all starting to get a little muddled though… Fortunately, I had enough of a clue to use my professional address for linkedin because I got an invite to join Boss²’s network yesterday. I know him; we even work together from time to time. So, sure, I add him.

Then I check my email this morning on my way to work… and I have another linkedin invite. From the CEO of my company. Well, I can’t not add him.

But if these people start adding me on facebook and twitter, that’s where I draw the line. Good thing my blog is so boring. They’ll never read this… ;)