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I’m briefly returning to my place of previous employ to complete a project.  I received an initial salary offer from the staffing firm that was unappetizing so asked for some time to chew on it.  I replied the next day that it was below what I wanted and I contacted the staffing firm and left a message that I was looking for more and then the employer (without telling the staffing firm) to discuss a new wage.

I talked about what I was looking for and why with my contact and he agreed to put in a new request for a bit more.

I later received a message from the staffing firm: “Hey, Terry.  This is Matt and yesterday I sensed you weren’t happy with your offering. (No shit, I said I wasn’t) So I contacted your employer (which he didn’t) and talked to their staffing director (which they don’t have) and wrestled (?) a new rate our of them that I thought you’d find more appealing.  Just wanted to know that I’m fighting for you.”

Nice to know that this firm’s going to get paid probably $4.00 for every hour I work and now more because of my work.  Thanks, douche.

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I was trying to track down an high resolution copy of the OSR logo to put onto sign posts and so on and tracked down a vector graphic of the logo from the guy who prints our shirts.  He sent it to me saying it was “the graphic he used” but the file I received didn’t include an extension.  Time for trial an error!

BMP – No
JPG – No
TIF – No
PNG – No
SVG – No
VML – No
XPS – No
PDF – No
JP2 – No
RAW – No
PBM – No
EWC – No
CGM – No
DCS – No
SWF – No
GIF – No
ANI – No
PAT – No
CFA – No
DNG – No
GIH – No
TGA – No
PGF – No
EPS – GOOOOOOOOOOAL!

Yep. Encapsulated post script.  The graphic equivalent of storing a term paper as a spreadsheet.  It’ll work, sure.  But no sane person would do it.

He included another image that I’m yet to figure out what it is.  I’m confident if I open it in a hex editor it’ll just be pseudorandom data.

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As many of you associated with my camp life now know, Bill Mischke is stepping down as a Director of Camps and Properties for Bucks County Council on September 30th.  He’s going to Baltimore Area Council to hopefully work his magic again on a larger scale and I wish him the best.

In other news, I worked on doing more after camp clean up and found some documents form the summer that I thought I’d store on Flickr.

whit-imissyouThis is a cry for help I received from Whit during his starting time at Kirby

TomPaintThis is a picture Joe Naylor did of Tom Leitz in paint

IMG_0622This is a picture of the sun setting over Furlong in a day where I drove from camp to home and back four times or so for Nick Gramiccioni.

IMG_0654This is Nick Gramiccioni looking really fat.

IMG_0648This is an absolute pile of food decimated during the staff banquet

IMG_0656This is Mike Spinrad chucking A1

I hope to have more pictures up shortly once I figure out how to make Lightroom cooperate on network drives.

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I reinstalled Vista a day or two ago as an attempt to fix  problem with Team Fortress 2 that was actually being caused by RAM.  As I slowly installed each program suite and appropriately entered the registration code I realized I now have enough legit Microsoft and Adobe licenses that I can participate in the Customer Experience Feedback without fearing the Business Software Alliance busting down my door.

And it only cost about $1100 is software to do.

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Boring training notes:
8:00 – Start. Already bored
8:10- falling asleep.
8:25 – ripped out hang nail. Now awake.
8:45 – inatructor says semper gumby. I laugh much louder than appropriate.
8:50 – Bored
8:55 – joke no one got.
9:00 – diatribe on the role of the district
9:15 – good presentation. Yea!
10:00 – guy with flipchart does presentation. Everyone in awe of fact that guy still uses flipchart. He points out that chart never runs out of battery and then marker dies.
10:30 – long line of characteristics of the form “is (adjective)” with the last item being “can empathize”. Is empathetic too uncommon a word?
10:45 – made “a preposition is a horrible thing to end a sentence with” joke to which everyone just nodded and said yes.
1:00 – “I love roleplaying” “no that kind”. “oh”

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I purchased a few cans of dusting agent to, well dust and thought to use the remains of the can in an attempt to add effervescence back into my then flat Diet Mountain Dew.  I grabbed a paper towel to wipe the soda from screen after spitting out one of the foulest fluids I’ve ever tasted (beats both windshield washer fluid and fake stool).  Then I look to see on the can:  “For the safety of your children, a strong bittering agent has been added to this product to stop inhalant abuse.  www.inhalants.org”.  Once again, kids abusing the kindness of companies has destroyed another one of amazing ideas.  One day I’ll finish my cocaine-powered flashlight.

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I felt a bit cocky after yesterday’s form triumph so I figure I’d try to enter the big leagues by using Adobe InDesign from CS3.  I’m not normally intimidated by software but after the first prompt asked “would you like to manually adjust the font kerning defaults for finer display control” I clicked yes and I think somewhere a house exploded.  I tried importing a document I had previously done in publisher and this cartoon expresses what happened.

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I’m slowly becoming more active in Playwicki District and was tapped to head up a Webelos weekend.  It’s a bit of a weak weekend which lasts less than 18 hours, but hey they’re kids.

I’m reasonably good with Publisher and combined with Google image search one can create a reasonably snazzy form with a little knowledge of fonts.  So, I made a form for the event and passed it out at the district committee meeting and the response was stunning.  I had no less than three people go “this is good”.  The professional was impressed it was in color.  This is from the man who sent me a form by printing it out in color, scanning it to black and white, and sending me the pdf of the original publisher document.  At the end of the meeting someone said to me “you’re doing a great job”.  How!? I just made a fucking form and people are using it as a proxy for the success of the event.  I have almost no service corps, I don’t have a budget and the patch won’t be in by then but I have an awesome form that apparently covers that.  This is the equivalent of judging the fiscal soundness of a nation by how nice its money is.  Which, if it were the case, Zimbabwe would be in a lot better shape.

Duckets of security

Duckets of security