Well it’s time for another quarter end at Moore, and another quarter beginning at Strayer. I’m not running a shift this time at Moore, instead I’m going to be at my usual job and also entering information about how much quarterly stuff has been completed so that it can be reported to one of the clients. They want daily updates on how much has been sent so they know it has all gone on time. A couple people at Moore developed a database to track it all, rather than doing it on paper as they had been in the past, so that will make things much easier. It’s almost too bad that I’m doing doing the quarterly shift this time, since it is good money, but at the same time I don’t feel like spending the time involved to do it. With another quarter starting for school I have enough to do without working 80 hours/week on top of it, 40 is plenty.

School is going well, I got all A’s again last quarter. I wasn’t sure if I would do well on the final for the programming class, the questions weren’t really like what we had done in class. It wasn’t programming, but planning, and we hadn’t really done much with it. I apparently did fine though, I got 35/35 on the final, and an A in the class. Overall the classes were good. Accounting was harder than I would have thought it would be. There were a couple concepts that I didn’t really completely understand, which hurt my exam grades, but I still did fine, I think I averaged 95 or so in the class. The other class was psychology, which was ok. I didn’t especially like the text, but the information was generally interesting. I did learn a few things, which is always good. There was a lot of biology information in it, focusing on that aspect of why people behave as they do. I thought the book focused too much on the biology, but that’s ok.

This quarter I’m taking the last C++ class, learning about the more advanced aspects of object oriented programming. I’m looking forward to it for the most part, it’s stuff I’ve wanted to know about for a long time. I’m not sure that the book is going to explain it especially clearly, but we’ll see. I’m also taking the first english and humanities classes that I have to take. The english class is going to be pretty boring, learning about sentence structure and stuff like that. There’ s a whole chapter on the comma. Exciting stuff. The humanities class will be a little more interesting, and probably the one I’ll have to focus on the most. There’s a lot of discussion involved, and it will be hard to find the time to do it in a timely manner. I usually do everything on the weekends, but the way we have to do the discussion means I have to post much earlier so that I can get responses to what I have said, so I can’t wait until I have time on the weekened to do it. As long as I do the reading early I’ll be ok I think, but it’s hard to be interested in working on it when I get home late from work. The class covers a long period of time and all over the world, talking mostly about the art of each period.

The english class also requires writing journal entries, so I think I’ll post them on here. It’ll give me something to put up, and I can work on it from anywhere if they are on here. This week we’re supposed to do 3, and I assume that will be true every week. I should have done them much earlier, now I have to do 3 today, which probably isn’t really the point, but that’s ok, I haven’t had time until now to do it. I still don’t know what I’m going to write about, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something. I still have to do a short thing (3 paragraphs) about “why the humanities” for, surprisingly enough, the humanities class, which I’ll also post on here.

I don’t think there’s much else new here. Work is basically the same, with a few additional duties than I had last time I wrote. I can pretty much fill 40 hours/week now, rather than splitting the time between the office and fulfillment, so that’s good. Supposedly they may try to reduce the number of temps and hire some of them in-house, so that would be good, as long as I’m one of the ones kept. 🙂 I’m sure I would be, they can’t eliminate my position unless something else changes, so my job is safe. We went to Maine a couple times since I wrote last, but Sabrina talked about that on her blog.

I guess I’ll try to work on my school stuff.

I’ve been thinking lately about my lack of social skills, and how I behave around different groups of people. It’s not a straightforward topic, so I thought I’d write some thoughts down so I can look at it later.

Read more ›

It’s fascinating to see what searches will bring up your site. I hadn’t realized until today that I could see the statistics for what search terms were used by people to visit this site. I knew you could find the referrers and what domains people come from, but until recently I wasn’t listed in any of the search engines so I never saw what terms came up. Not too surprisingly, several of the searches came from looking for broccoli. I had a couple hits from people searching for Olive Garden‘s garlic-herb chicken con broccoli, which is what I usually get when I go there, and there are several from people looking for information on the Trek 7500, which I bought last summer. I didn’t think anyone that I didn’t know ever came across the site, but it makes sense that once it was indexed by google and other search engines, it would come up. I still don’t have enough traffic to have more than one hit for earch search, but it is still interesting.

I remember back when people were trying to be careful about what personal information they put on line, in fear of net-stalkers, or other people knowing too much about them. Now that’s what blogs are for. People share the details of their life with complete strangers that they wouldn’t tell their close friends. I think it is good in many ways, very cathartic. Of course, there is still the danger of people becoming obsessed with someone they met over the net, but that’s a problem anyway, I never thought it was worse because of the internet or something stilly like that. How is it different than randomly following someone you see in a park? It’s much less dangerous in many ways. True, the internet makes some information that should be private a little easier to get than it used to (like social security numbers or drivers license information), but that was available for the right price anyway if you were really trying to get it.

If you are interested in sharing the little details of your life with the rest of the world, then why not? Some of the little things shared can be helpful to other people, like reviews of a bike, or descriptions of restaurants and their dinner offerings. I think it is useful to be able to see what real people think about things, rather than just professional reviews. Both are useful, but if you find someone that seems to have similar interests, you may value their opinion more than what you find in Consumer Reports or some other publication.

It’s cold out there today, and going to be colder tonight. The wind chill is something like -15 here, which is cold enough, but I saw it was -30 or colder in Bangor, ME, so I’m glad I’m not still there. Of course, if you stay inside it isn’t nearly as bad, but even just going out to the car is hard to work up to.

The quarter is pretty much finished at work, I spent 7 or 8 days working second shift as a shift-lead so that was interesting. It went pretty well, and we got alot done. Second shift did much more than first shift, and third shift was as useless as always. We keep trying to convince them not to have one and the upper management keeps insisting on it. It’d be better to do 2 10 hour shifts instead of 3 of 8 hours. Maybe next quarter they’ll notice that nothing got done overnight this time, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s only true for fulfillment, post-production and printing should have a 3rd shift, but that’s just machine operation.

Since I was gone for a week I got behind on my other work doing postage reconciliation, but today I got caught up, so it didn’t take nearly as long as last time. Cindy had taken some home with her to do last weekend and that made a huge difference. I finished around noon and came home early so I could bring Sabrina to work. I stopped at the library on the way home too, but didn’t find anything good to read.

This is week 2 of my second semester at Strayer. I’m taking accounting, C++, and psychology. So far I think accounting is going to give the most trouble,. Some of the things that are done don’t make much sense to me at all, as far as what is considered a “debit” and what is a “credit.” I’ll figure it out I guess. The other classes should be ok. I almost messed up the first week of C++ because I wasn’t paying attention. The other classes have all had “week 1” “week 2” etc, and this one had “chapter 1” “chapter 2” etc, and so I had done “chapter 1” instead of both 1 and 2. I noticed at about 10:30pm sunday and had to do everything in an hour and a half. Luckily the assigment was easy so it didn’t take long. In the accounting class for some reason they couldn’t open my homework, I think i have a newer version of Office than they do and they couldn’t open the spreadsheet. I resubmitted it as an older version, but I don’t know if that worked better or not. I still got credit for the homework since it is just graded as either submitted or not, rather than a real grade, so good enough for now.

Which reminds me, I got all A’s last semester, yeehaw. I got a letter saying that I’m on the “president’s list” because of it. Oooh. Hopefully I can keep up the grades. It was a bad time for starting the class, since the first day of class was also the first day of the new quarter at Moore, so I was working 10-12 hour days for the whole week. I never got around to reading anything in advance either, so I had to do it all on Sunday. I’ve already started this week’s stuff a little bit, so I won’t be rushing at the end again, but I’ll still have alot to do on sunday.

I think that’s all that is new here. Maybe I’ll update again in less than a month this time 🙂

I always mean to post more often, but just don’t take the time to do it. It’s hard when working full time and going to school full time. I’m on break from school right now, waiting for the next semester to start in January. I got all As for last quarter, so that was nice. The beginning of next quarter is going to be hard because the quarter-end at Moore is starting at the same time and I’m going to be working every day for 2 or 3 weeks probably, with no days off, along with the beginning of my new classes. I’m hoping to get some reading done before the semester starts so I just have to do assignments, but I’m not sure how far i’ll get.

I’ve got a new job at work, which I guess I haven’t mentioned. I’m doing “postage reconciliation” for the Verizon bills we send out. It’s essentially matching up what the post office says we paid, with what bills were sent out, so that Verizon knows how much everything cost. It’s mostly paper shuffling and entering data into a spreadsheet, but its not bad. I get a raise (which i haven’t actually gotten yet) and get to sit all day instead of standing, so that’s nice. It’s supposed to be a half-time position, with the other half of the day spent doing what I always did, but so far I’ve had to spend all day doing it. When I started it took a few days to train, and the person that had been doing it had been out for a week, so I started out behind and have been slowly catching up ever since. Once it is caught up it’ll only take a few hours each day to do. But of course now that I’m almost there, the quarter is coming up and we’lll probably fall behind again, since I won’t be doing it at all. Hopefully the person I am doing it for will at least partially keep up while I’m gone.

I opened an account with UPromise to start saving a little money for school. Companies donate money when you shop with them once you’ve signed up and you can use it for school. Anyone can do it, but usually it is meant as a long-term plan when you have a kid for saving for their entire life. Any money helps though.

Last weekend we went to NH to see my sister and my father again, we did a quick trip for one night and left in the morning because it was going to snow. We almost got all the way back before it started, but not quite. It wasn’t bad though. We got to do another early Christmas gift exchange and see everyone again, so that was fun.

I did my Christmas shopping for Sabrina yesterday, so that was fun. It was pretty busy out, but not really bad. The roads around shopping areas were very slow, and the parking lots were packed, but inside wasn’t really too bad. They have so many people working that I didn’t have to wait in line hardly at all anywhere. One place I was the only person in the line, and another the line just went really quickly. I’m glad I’m done now though, shopping this week would be hard.

That’s about all that’s new here I think. Happy holidays to everyone.

We’re back from Maine. We were gone for about a week, and went to see my father in Bangor, and my mother in Eastport. It took about 6 hours to drive there and 7 back, which isn’t too bad. We stopped a few times each way for food and rest stops. We stayed at the Country Inn again. We like it there, and it’s fairly inexpensive and convenient. We had an early Christmas, so that we wouldn’t have to drive in the snow. We probably won’t go again until spring sometime, although we may go to New Hampshire to see my sister sometime around Christmas.

Before we left we went to a Barenaked Ladies concert, which was fun. We had fairly good seats, except that the people in the row in front of us spent half the show standing and/or dancing in front of us, so we couldn’t see very well. Why is it that tall people are always in front of short people? We engjoyed it anyway, it was fun to see, and the music was good. The new CD is really good, and they played all the songs from it as well as some of the old ones. They’re playing every song they’ve recorded at some point during the tour.

Work is much like it was before we left. Things are starting to rev up for the next quarter, so things are a little disorganized. They have to send out the quarter-end and year-end reports for a bunch of companies, like ING, Phoenix, and American Skandia. The quarter is busy enough, but the year-end is apparently huge, which isn’t too surprising. We spent part of today moving all the supplies and setup for Verizon so that where it had been can be used to process ING stuff. It seemed silly to just move it all over, but it is a slightly bigger area, and instead of having 12 people work on Verizon, there will be 30 people working on ING in the same space. This quarter should be interesting, because I’m sure they’re going to try to make themselves look good since Moore Wallace is being bought by RR Donnelley. They’ve already started trying to keep better track of people’s work, and how long it takes, to become more efficient. It’s about time too, there’s alot that could be changed there for the better. I wish I had more say in what goes on, but surprisingly enough I don’t. 🙂 This coming quarter I’ll be one of the leads, so I’ll be somewhat in charge, but I’m not sure what of, or what I’ll actually have to do. Hopefully I’ll find out soon, so I can plan accordingly. We’ll see though.

That’s about all that’s new here. Maybe I’ll actually update again in less than a month.

I’ve been busy the last couple weeks. The quarter end at Moore made for some long weeks. Last week I worked 50 hours, and the week before I worked 72. This week will be back to normal, relatively speaking. Apparently they’re not doing the A and B team anymore, but having a group of people there all week instead. So I may end up working 5 days/week rather than just 3. I don’t especially want to work 5 days/week, but we’ll see how it goes.

School is going fine, this is the last day of week 3. It’s hard to find time to do class stuff when work takes 10 hours/day, plus another hour travel. By the time we get home and have dinner I’m ready for bed. Last week I did it all on Sunday, and this week I did it all Saturday and Sunday. I had read ahead last week so I wouldn’t have to do as much but this time I had to do it all so it took longer. Hopefully I’ll work a little less this week and can do more during the week rather than having to do 3 classes worth of work all at once. It took most of my free weekend to do it all, so I didn’t get to do anything else. Not that I had any plans, but it would be nice to just relax for a bit.

We cheated on our diet and got pizza on thursday, so that was fun. At Moore they were giving pizza to everyone to celebrate the end of the quarterly stuff, so I was going to have pizza one way or another, so I waited until I got home and Sabrina and I went together. We also went to see Kill Bill. We both liked it, but it was certainly an odd movie. There will be a second one later finishing the story, so we’ll be looking forward to that.

Not much else new here. We’re still planning to go to Maine next month for a combination Thanksgiving and Christmas. We don’t want to go when there is snow, so we’re going early this year. It’ll be too bad to not go for Christmas, but at least it will be another visit. It wasn’t that long since we were there last, rather than waiting 6 months between visits.

Time flies, seems like I just wrote in here, but I guess I didn’t. I’ve been working at Moore each weekend since I wrote last. Mostly I’ve been doing the manifesting, which is slightly more exciting than stuffing envelopes. We’re going back tomorrow (a day earlier for the week) because they called and asked us to come in. The 1st is also the beginning of the big quarter-end project with them, so after this we’ll probably be there every day for the next 2 weeks or so, if it’s anything like last time. Kelly hasn’t actually called to tell us what is going on with it, I think they think they already told us 🙂 Tomorrow won’t be the quarter-end stuff yet though, I think we’re just getting the other stuff done so they can concentrate on the quarter. It should be a long couple weeks between that and school, but that’s ok.

The next quarter for Strayer was supposed to start on the 22nd, but was delayed a week because of the hurricane. The school is in the middle of where it hit the hardest, so they waited a week to start classes so people could recover. I did all of the first week’s stuff then anyway, because I knew the quarter end stuff for Moore was coming and I don’t want to have to do all my school work and also work every day any more than I had to. I did all the reading for next week today too, so all I’ll have to do is watch the lectures and do homework. That’s a fair amount as it is, but not too bad. At least I can spread it out over the whole week instead of having to do it at specific times. I would have done more already, but the assignments aren’t posted in advance for any of the classes, so I can’t do it early. Oh well.

So far the classes seem ok. The C++ class I’m taking seems to have a nice professor, so that’s good. The networking class has a good one too. The business class is much more dry, there’s no discussion, just reading and lectures, then quizes to take on each week’s material. Very dull, but easy enough. The other two classes have more discussion involved, and feedback from the professors, which is nice. I’m not big on interaction in general, but it’s nice to have at least some feedback on what you are doing. I just wish the stuff was posted in advance so I could work ahead some. I know what the reading will be for all of them each week, but nothing else.

We went for a walk in Penwood State Park today. It took us almost 2 hours to walk around the main loop, but it was a nice day for it. We stopped here and there to take pictures and were generally strolling. Sabrina had the day off too so it was nice to do something before I was working non-stop for a couple weeks. We won’t see much of eachother until it’s over with both of us working different times. It was a good day for a walk, nice and cool and sunny. You can certainly tell that fall is coming. Some of the trees are changing here, but not many so far. We’ll have to go again when there’s more foliage to look at.

We went to the casino last weekend too, which was fun. We didn’t get back until almost 3am I think, after leaving around 7pm. We stopped for dinner on the way, then spent the rest of the night wandering around and playing slots and video poker. We had a good night again, after 2 big losing nights. We ended up with $3 more than we started with, so we were happy. Sometime we’ll have to stay for the night, but it’s pretty expensive. I’m not excited about spending $200 to stay there when it’s only an hour from home or so. It’ll still be fun sometime though, just for the experience of staying all night in a casino.

The only other thing new is that Sabrina got tickets to go see Barenaked Ladies at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford. That’ll be fun, I like the group alot, and didn’t realize they were even going on tour again. Sabrina had heard about it on the radio. The show is already sold-out, so we were lucky to get tickets. Sabrina bought them online about an hour and a half after they went on sale and within about an hour after that it was already almost impossible to get 2 tickets together. That’ll be November 13th, and we’ll probably head to Maine the next day for an early Thanksgiving. We want to avoid traffic and bad weather as much as possible, so we’re going early. It’ll be a big week for us 🙂

If anyone is interested in being notifed via email when I actually get around to posting on here, let me know. I can set it up to automatically email whenever I add a post. Either email me, or post a comment on here saying you want to know. 🙂

My class finished on sunday, and I ended up with a 98.6 average. Not too bad, but I had hoped to have a perfect score on my final, in which case I would’ve rounded up to a 100 average 🙂 That’s ok though. I don’t know what I missed on the final, he didn’t post any comments, just the grade. I probably won’t ever know, but it doesn’t really matter, I probably just missed something in the directions rather than getting anything wrong. My next round of classes starts on monday, and that’ll take quite a bit more work than the single class I just finished. Hopefully they’ll go ok. I’m looking forward to seeing what the setup is for them, they’re not always the same as far as what is required and what assignments will be.

Today was the first day of the second week at Moore. It was pretty uninteresting, and much like it always is. We stuffed verizon bills for a few hours, then started doing the Manifesting for what was done. We were there until 3 instead of 2:30, then had to wait for a cab to pick us up to bring us home, since all the cars were in use for a change. Usually we can work something out for rides, but we couldn’t today. As it turned out, everyone beat us home so we could’ve gotten a ride afterall. Figures 🙂 We might need to take the cab again tomorrow but I’m not sure.

Last week we sorta got a promotion at Moore. We started helping with the Manifesting for the stuff being sent out, and its considered a higher-skilled job or something, so we should start getting another $.50/hr. Yeehaw. Better than nothing, but not a huge amount of money either. All it is is going through the stuff that is done and bundling it for the mail. It gets grouped according to zip code or some such, wrapped in rubber bands, then put in the post office plastic crates. There’s a list with each job that says which goes in each bin, so it isn’t exactly hard. You just have to make sure everything is there and in the correct sequence, or it’s a pain to follow the list. In theory everyone would be doing that as they go, but clearly some people don’t pay much attention. Frequently the address isn’t showing at all, or there are 2 in an envelope so one is missing, etc, and we have to fix them as we go. Overall it’s a pretty easy job, but we end up standing up to do that rather than sitting for the envelope stuffing 🙂 I don’t mind though, and working 3 days/week works for me.