...

now say that really fast... :D

anyway... it's been a long time since i bothered to post a blog, and kudos to you if you are actually reading it! you know how it goes, the longer you wait to post, the cooler you think it needs to be, so you wait and wait and wait for something awesome enough to happen... then you realize you're not that cool and you shouldn't have bothered waiting in the first place, but you did so now all your friends deleted you from their friend list and forgot you ever existed?

tee hee.

anyway, i've been really busy since my last blog. i am still at that job, just about 2 years into it. it's fun, my engineering friends saw me a while ago, and they can never quite remember what exactly i do. well, what's cool is that i do so many things at my job, it really has me on my feet. i work for a global property insurance company, but as an engineer. i provide risk assessment and consult about how to mitigate damages from fire, earthquake and flood. what's so cool about it is that i get to go to so many sites and see how things work, that it's kinda like being on that show "how stuff works" or whatever. below is a list of some of the kinds of places i've been:

• rock crushing facility (they make ballast for railroad tracks)
• casinos
• data centers
• high rise office buildings
• rendering plant (EWWWWW nasty place, but good people there)
• warehouses
• large hospitals
• coffee roasting facilities
  
• large-scale printing operations
• and the coolest one of all...the star wars archives!!!!!

no, i'm not kidding (and my boss said it was OK to tell people i go there, i just can't talk about certain proprietary things). i actually got to see the model of the death star, along with the actual costumes worn in the star wars movies! how awesome is that? kinda takes the edge off having to go to a rendering plant :P

anyway, i've been learning a lot. i visit places that are worth anywhere from $5 million to $1.2 billion dollars. i help these big-leaguers protect their businesses, and help keep property loss events as distractions rather than disasters. it's a fun job (if not frustrating with how much you have to learn, but heck i'm a nerd so that's part of the fun!)...

in OTHER news, well there's not much. times have been economically difficult. i thought it would all be like magic with this new job that pays better than my old job of running the wind tunnel lab at the University of California, Davis, but i've been paying off student loans, and my boyfriend was out of work for a long while (he recently got a job--yay!). so when i got the job, i bought a 360 and a new TV that CAME WITH A PS3 and an additional several hundred off the TV. alas, i had to sell them both.

well, i take that back. we sold the PS3 because we got the YLOD. sony is full of crud. we had it for 1.5 years and barely ever used it, and we kept it well ventilated and everything. design defect, not user error. we tried to repair it once using the heat gun method, but it didn't work. i don't think we were agressive enough, but took the heat gun back. money got tight so we put it up for sale for $75 w/working controller. what was fun was that we got offerred a trade for a working 360 (60GB) with MW2, and 2 wireless controllers. the 360 had a spring missing from the memory card faceplate and they had spilled coke all over the front, but the 360 was working fine and had never RRODed (verified by a local gamestop employee). my bf and i took the trade and spent 2 hours cleaning it, and engineer that i am, i remade the spring and the faceplate worked and looked like new! we ended up turning it over with 2 more controllers we had for $140! what a win for a bit of elbow grease :)

i've also taken it upon myself to start exercising a lot. my job has me climbing some awful ladders to get to the roofs of these buildings, and i didn't like feeling weak and tired especially since i'm somewhat scared of heights (and try going up to a 35 foot ceiling to look at the sprinklers on scissor lifts with your boss walking side to side in it!). so that's been good. haven't lost a lot of weight 'cause i eat too much junk, but my muscles are definitely working better!

that's my long rant. i had hoped to put up my college entrance essay, but i didn't feel like getting the box of old stuff out of my closet just yet. perhaps i'll post it up later.

thanks for stopping by! hope you didn't drool on your keyboard when you nodded off after my rambling :S

later gater ;)

...

Time has passed. Wow, a LOT of time!

I dunno if anyone who used to visit this page is even around anymore, and my bad for not keeping up on it :) This year has been super trying, but I think overall good when it's all said and done.

So I got that new job in September. I'm working as a field engineer for a property/business insurance company. Basically, I go to the businesses my company insures, and I serve as a risk consultant. I look at the various hazards they face that are inherent to their business that may cause physical damage to their building, or equipment, or things that may cause business downtime, and advise them on how to protect themselves.

This mostly has to do with fire protection, and I do a lot of analyses on automatic ceiling sprinklers to make sure that the sprinklers will provide enough water to control a fire that may occur with what they have. This may sound simple, but different materials burn with different intensities, and depending on how they're stored, if they're in racks up to 20 feet high, or piled up on the floor, will require different protections. Good stuff :P

Other stuff I look at is flammable liquids storage, equipment hazards, and finally natural hazards that can harm the business, like earthquakes and floods. I look at all these things and try to help my clients figure out where they can better protect themselves from a loss.

It's pretty fun, but it's physically exhausting 'cause I'm on my feet, walking and talking for 5-6 hour every visit (about 2 per week), and I get to climb onto roofs and stuff :lol:

So, on Tuesday it will be my 1-year anniversary with the company. Can't believe it's been that long, and that I'm still a noob with it! I have a lot of trouble writing reports, they take me like 4 days because of all the information I have to input, and the research I have to do since I don't know the information by heart on how to protect plastic storage in single row racks up to 25 feet in a 35 foot tall building!!!

Other stuff, I am not gaming as much, but I still want to. I am still playing City of Heroes, and we did get a PS3 and 360, but I never play those. With as much as I'm working, and as tired as I am when I'm done for the day, it's tough to invest in learning a new game :( I tried out the beta preview for Aion, but all it was were hunts up to lvl 5 or 6, and it got boring really fast. Not to mention the people playing were... um... "special" :P

I looked at Champions Online, since it's made by the makers of CoH, but every week it looks dumber and dumber. We'll see. I'm not sure about any PS3 or 360 games. I never finished Fable, maybe I'll pick that up again. I just got annoyed at how my chick looked like a freaking male after a while :P

So I hope you are all well, I'll try to browse your blogs this weekend and leave some comments.

ttyl!

...

wow. long time no type, and this blog'll explain why! :lol:

i started my new job about 7 weeks ago, and it has worked me to the bone. so far, i've trailed an engineer in san francisco for 3 weeks (which makes my commute ridiculous at about 2-2.5 hours each way if i have to go into the city, which isn't all the time, but still...), and now i'm up in portland, oregon, on my 3rd week of trailing another engineer. i've had a major test which i totally freaked out about, but at least i passed, albeit my boss graded very easy...

so what do i do, you might ask? i am not working in my precious wind tunnel lab anymore, that job was nice but it didn't pay near enough to pay off my loans and live for the last year due to all my extra work getting pulled due to the economy. now i work for an insurance company that insures businesses against property loss, which mostly deals with fire and natural hazards. i'm a field engineer, and my job is to go out to buildings that we insure and evaluate the risk of fire and other stuff, and try to reduce that risk. basically, i get to tour nearly the entire building, looking at fire protection equipment like sprinklers, make sure they're working properly, and recommend better ways to take care of things. i also look at the structure a little, go up onto roofs, test fire pumps, evaluate maintenance and how they perform hazardous procedures that could create fires or other structural hazards.

it sounds like an awesome job. and it WILL be. but first, before i'm out on my own, i have to trail 3 engineers AND study for 3 major tests :( then, after the tests, in december i get to go to the east coast for 3 weeks of bootcamp so i can get approved to start going out on my own. so right now, i'm putting in near full days of work trailing people, then i get to study in my "downtime". but, when i'm out on my own, i'll get to work from home during the days where i'm not actually visiting a facility. full training takes nearly a year and a half, but i think i start going out on my own and not having to go out into the office sooner than that. I HOPE.

i hate the office. it's an hour commute there, then i get to sit in an uncomfortable chair and study. no, i can't study at home, i have to go there. i don't have an office, or even a cubicle. they have undesignated offices that are empty and if free, i can use them. mostly there are a few empty, but a few days when meetings are occurring, i have to scrounge for a place to park myself. then 8 hours of studying, and another hour drive home. and probably more studying. most of the people in the office are ok, my boss seems pretty cool, but i still don't feel comfortable there. i have my reasons, but that's a WHOLE other blog and this one is already lengthy.

so, to sum it up, right now the job is torture. oregon is nice, but it's tough being away from home for so long. and when i go back, i get to commute all over again. but, hopefully, after i'm all trained, things will get better. gotta keep my eye on the prize, right?

oh and in other news, since i'm doing lots of travelling and our work laptop won't allow me to even look at gamespot or my regular email (let alone install games which i didn't expect to be able to do), i bought myself a gaming laptop :D it's the same one Valek has, a Gateway P-7811 FX. it's AWESOME... when it works :P this is my 4th one in 2 weeks: the first one had a W key that didn't register about half the time (W=forward... um, kind of an important gaming key, huh?), the 2nd had horrible ghosting on half the screen, the 3rd had ghosting AND pixel that would light up if a window was above it, then dim again if you moved the window (i even called gateway tech support and they hadn't heard of that one, and Geeksquad had never seen it, either), and now my 4th one has light ghosting which the manufacturer will fix when i have 2 weeks i don't need my lappy, but otherwise works great.

i can play crysis on high settings if i lower the resolution, and i can play CoD4 at 1920x1200 on high settings with 4x antialiasing. it is GREAT. this thing chews up games and spits them out.

the screen, minus the ghosting, is incredible. i didn't think i'd like the glossy coating, but it really makes things more vibrant. the glare isn't so bad as long as you don't have a light right behind you. battery life is just ok, at about 3 hours without intensive gaming, but i usually plug it in.

the nvidia 9800m gts is good, not sure why they didn't go with gt or gtx, i'm guessing power supply and pricepoint (at $1350 it's not bad at all). the PC-6400 DDR3 ram at 4gb (with a 64-bit vista) is amazing, and the core2 duo at 2.26 GHz just rocks your mom's socks.

the sad thing is that this laptop is hard to find in the stores. i only see it in bestbuy, and i went through all they had at one store and ended up having to drive an hour to the next one that had it in stock. i had to do that twice :P luckily my company is paying for the rental car... AND the gas :twisted:

so, that's the happenings. i gotta study for my next test today, since it's a rare day of no appointments, and my mentor has other work to do, so i get to run my own schedule and study my 8 hours whenever i want. so of course i went shopping (hey oregon has no sales tax! why do you think i bought my lappy here? besides the fact that they don't seem to have them in california... hehe).

hope you're all well, and now that i have my laptop all settled, i should be around more. ttys!

-z

...

well whadda y'know. I GOT THE JOB!

remember that company that sent me a rejection letter? well, at the end of it they said they would be hiring again in another few months (this was back in june or something), so i sucked up my pride and called and left a message saying i'm still interested in being considered. then i waited. weeks rolled by... finally, they called me back for an interview that happened on Friday.

then yesterday, i got a voicemail saying they wanted to discuss a job offer! yay! the starting salary is more than i had estimated, so i just took it. the manager said that's the highest he could offer, and it was good to me, and usually these places have more of a pay-scale that's not hugely negotiable. and i know it's considerably higher than what they hire BS graduates for since they posted their job listing online with the starting salary. so yay!

it's gonna be tight, though. i JUST started moving into my new place, i'm about 60 miles away from the office i'll be training at for a year or so. if i hate the commute, i'll have to find someone to sublease this apartment and then find a new one... i hate apt hunting. also, the job starts around sept 8, which is GREAT 'cause that means i'll be on the payroll sooner than later, but i also have to finish up things at my current job, move, and i haven't had a vacation in years. not a real rest anyway, so i'll probably want to take at least a week before starting to breathe. i haven't done a normal 9-5 type job in... ever...

not that i mean to complain, i'm super excited. just saying that i guess i asked for change and i got it smack in the face :P

one interesting tidbit is that in friday's interview, they asked me to tell them about a project i've taken on outside of work and school. well... the first thing that popped into my mind was my metroid costume :lol: i mean seriously, that's a huge project and i used it to demonstrate how i apply my engineering know-how to various situations, even one such as this. and they STILL hired me :D :D :D i had a picture on my phone and showed it to them, they all seemed amused and impressed at least hehe.

so that's that. just sitting at my current job, waiting to start the wind tunnel. i hope you all are well, thanks for your support (especially conner and valek, you guys have gotten me through some awful work-days on steam and AIM!).

ttfn, peace out.

-zyxe

...

*@#!@&^#@*&@!^# it just never ends. gah. i'm having a bunch of bad luck. i've applied to 6-8 jobs and contacted recruiters, and nobody's gotten back to me. i thought i had good skills and was a desirable candidate, but i guess not. looks like i'm gonna be one of those people that has a hard time being placed in a regular job, i'll have to figure out some kind of specialty job that i actually fit into.

in the meantime, at least i found out my boss at my current job wants me to stay as long as i like. i like this job ok, but it's not really paying my bills. every month i go deeper into the hole, and i'm about out of resources :(

the only "good" news is that i found a place to live starting Aug 1st. i would stay in my current apartment, but i had to tell them if i was staying on another year back in february, when the lease ends end of august. how lame is that? i figured i'd have a new job and would be moving at least by the start of summer. oops. so my apartment has a new tenant starting sept 1st, and i had to put everything on hold to find somewhere else to live. i have all aug to move, and luckily they gave me aug rent free, so i have 2 apts in aug :P sadly though this new place is more expensive and smaller, though it's kinda prettier, but it still feels like insult to injury. it was the cheapest place i could find all around, the only cheaper places are in the next town over and would cost more in gas to get to work than i'd be saving in rent. this new place i can still bike to work.

blah blah. also, my personal life is sucking right now. i just need to get out of this darned rut and make some changes. hopefully, the new apartment move will be at least a change of scenery, and i'm totally getting rid of TONS of stuff which feels pretty good. let's see if that kind of spurs me along on the job hunt.

in gaming news, i'm kinda tired of city of heroes, i'm playing a bit of team fortress ****c but i'm also in a gaming rut. i don't care to game too much at the moment except to take my mind off things. geez, i just wanna get a decent job, nothing too fancy, and pay off my student loans and credit cards, and be able to pay my bills and stuff. i don't want a super fancy car (though i'll take one if you're giving :D) or a super nice pad, just enough to spread my arms out and breathe.

anyhow, wish me luck. hopefully change is a'comin.

...

i didn't get the job. they sent a letter instead of calling like they said they would. so i ended up calling and asking what the status was 'cause i rarely check my mail and that's when she said i should have gotten a letter. i said, "so i'm guessing if it's a letter, it's a rejection." "yeah, i think they decided to go with someone else." "i see. thank you for your time." click.

phail.

ima go find a corner to cry in. then i'm gonna resume the job hunt.

later.

...

ok so lemme recap, and thanks for all of your patience :P

one of my best friends recently got an awesome job. after she described her job (risk assessment for a property insurance company), with all the climbing around factories and getting to work from home, i thought it would also be the perfect job for me. yay me! :D unfortunately, her company put a hiring freeze into effect for a year while they redesign their training. so, she pointed me to another company that has similar opportunities.

late january, i went to a career fair where i looked up a company similar to the one my good friend works for. i ended up speaking with the rep for about half and hour, and it turned out i would be out of town for my sister's wedding when they were doing on-campus interviews, and lucky enough my sister lives where the rep works, so he offered to interview me at a local starbucks at the end of februarey when i was down there. rock on! the interview went on for about 90 minutes and i thought it went well.

so the first week of april i got called back for the 2nd and final interview, which was may 1. it was an all-day interview about an hour from where i live. i had 4-45 minute long interviews with different people, and a writing sample and a personality test. it went from 11am-4pm, and was actually pretty fun. all of the people who worked there seemed happy and friendly, and i think i got along with them all pretty quickly.

the first interview was just more informative about what kinds of stuff i'd be doing and any questions i had, and just generally talking about the training i'd go through if i got the job. the second one had some more interesting questions about what i'd do in certain situations, and i mostly forgot it but what i do remember is that i initially felt nervous because the interviewer seemed a bit more curt and less friendly, but by the end it felt totally natural and that was nice.

after that i had a personality test, and one of the workers took me to lunch. we went to sushi which was all right, but i ended up putting my suit jacket back on and the top button came off :cry: oh well it was something to laugh about with the people there, i hope i didn't look like too much of a baffoon.

after lunch, i had a writing sample. i was to spend 15 minutes describing what i noticed from 2 pictures of a grocery store after a fire. i hope i did OK, i described what i noticed about the extent of the fire damage, what it looked like it damaged and why some things were damaged and others not, and what i think could have been done to prevent it (what went wrong based on what i saw of the damage) and my recommendations for stopping it from happening again. who knows if i was right, i mean i haven't been trained yet, so i hope they just see my logical approach.

the third interview was the most interesting because it was more technical. in the middle of the interview, the guy says, "i'm going to give you something and i want you to tell me what you think it does, and what you think it is. there's no wrong answer, just think it out." so he gives me this 2-inch tall metal contraption that looks like it has a non-moving, serrated wheel on one side, and in the middle, there's a glass tube with red liquid. the other end looks like a hose screws into it, and i pick it up and look at it, not knowing what it is, but feeling it's somehow familiar.

so i go about looking at the parts, thinking one part looks like a valve, and another looks like a thermometer without marks. and then i turn it upside down, wheel-face down... and voila! i look up at the ceiling... OMG IT'S A SPRINKLER HEAD!!! ding ding ding, we have a winner! i felt pretty good about that :) not just 'cause i figured it out, but because i had figured out what each part of it did. he said that some people look at it for a second then say, "i dunno, why?" so i think i looked ok there.

the last interview was with the head guy at the place, and we went over the company values, which actually really match mine. i would love to work for a company who's best interest is their client's well-being. the job i would be doing would be to tour a facility and make recommendations on how to make it safer. it seemed like we hit it off really well and like i should be just what they're looking for.

so basically, i think i did really well, i can't imagine it having gone better. they said i won't hear back until late may, and that the job could start as early as mid-june. not much time to prepare! but we'll see. as long as i didn't screw anything up on my application (which, since i had turned in my resume and gone so far, i'll admit i didn't go toooo far with the generic application, i figured they wanted it for the file and for my regular, legal information), then i really think i have a good shot at getting it.

that's the story, thanks for reading. for your trouble, here's my blonde thought of the day:

why isn't GTA IV about kittens licking baby monkies to show us that we really can all get along?

the end.

:D

-z

...

tomorrow's the big day! i have my all-day interview for the job i really want, it's the 2nd and final interview i get before they decide whether they want a polish blonde rocket scientist at their company :P

i'll start the day by driving over an hour to the office, and interviews will start at 11am. i have a total of four 45 minutes interviews scheduled with specific employees, mixed in with an hour lunch (which is probably another form of interview to see how i act socially since they will probably end up taking me out somewhere), something called AVA which is 15 min, and a 15 min "writing sample" which sounds like a writing test.

i'm a little worried that i haven't written anything that big since my thesis 2 years ago, and most written communication has been in-game, using words like n00b, WTF, OMGWTF, ROFLOMGWTF, pwnz0r u, teh sux0r... you get the idea.

so it ends around 3:45, at which point i get to try to battle traffic on the way home (this is near the bay area in california, not quite san francisco but the traffic isn't much different). i have plans to stop by my best friend's spa (she is the owner!) and chill there for a few, it's kind of my home-away-from-home since i helped her move stuff in and decorate it :D she gives me discounts on everything!!! but... i digress... i'm sure not many of you care to hear about spas.......

:|

so then i'll probably start home around 6pm when traffic is better, and stop by some mall to blow off a little steam ;) but the whole point of me getting this job is 'cause i am having financial difficulties at the moment, so i can't blow off too much steam :cry: i think i'll just make my shopping list for when i do get the job :D

which brings me to last week... i bought guitar hero III! and then i returned it. i got a bill in the mail for my car registration and i forgot that i had to get it smogged this year, so there went all the money for that :( BUT if i get this job (i should find out around the end of may), then i can get a Wii instead :D also, if i get that government tax rebate, things will lighten up and i might be able to get one anyway. goooooo Wii! i mean.... me....

so that's it. if i have enough energy, i'll try to write a blog after the interview letting you all know how it went.

wish me luck! laters :)

-z

...

ok so i'm late getting these up, but i FINALLY got the pics of my phone. the camera on this phone sucks, it's an htc wizard aka cingular or at&t 8125. the phone is cool, slideout keyboard and internet, huge touchscreen... but the camera? it is teh sux0r2. my samsung sync takes way awesomer pics, but it don't go online so well :P

so here's where we went to get out nails done. the place was super cute and fun :) then we got hair and makeup done and that rocked (never had it all done professionaly like that). but we had to get up before 7am... and i guess i need the professionals to help when i gotta get up that early and there's no coffee to be smelled anywhere :shock:

but before we did the whole wedding thing, i had that interview. i never heard back :( so i'm going to email them today and see where i stand. *sniff sniff* i really want that job, too.

anyhow that's what's been up. not much but just enough :P hope you're all well and maybe i'll have something cooler to say sometime soon ;)

ttfn.

-zyxe out.

...

man, what a month! things have been insane in the zyxe realm of life, and i'm happy i have a little time in my day to give you all (yes, all 3 of you who still know i exist :P) an update! i have a ton of pics but i haven't uploaded them yet, i'll try to do some linkage later when i can :)

my sister got married on March 1st, and the whole month of Feb was dedicated to doing stuff for that. the first weekend, i flew down to my hometown to throw her a bridal shower. i got to make little party favors which was super cool, and everyone had a great time. we had it in a high-style tea house (so yeah the price was very ouchy), very classy and she still receives compliments on what a good time people had :D

the next weekend, i drove 3.5 hours to her place to throw her bachelorette party. sadly, though, she was super sick and so we ended up having a really low-key "party" in a hotel room and she had to leave early. there was one very memorable part, though... we had decorated the room with some "naughty" posters, streamers and all sorts of fun decorations, and when the pizza guy came, he asked if we were having a party, and sure we told him a bachelorette party... he immediately turned bright red and said "it's not me!" somehow he thought we thought he was a stripper... :lol: i've never seen a guy take money and run so fast. but if you think about it... kind of stupid, considering there was a hotel room full of hot chicks... and me... :P nah we didn't even order a stripper, not my sister's thing. even though she was sick, it was a fun time to get us bridesmaids together and just chill out before the big event.

then, the week of the wedding, i drove to her place again, and we all got our nails done and had some fun, the morning of the wedding was a 6am wakeup for hair and makeup. it was really fun to get all dolled up! it was really pampering and cool, and my sister ended up looking sooooo beautiful :) she wasn't nervous at all about getting married, and i'm glad because she found herself a wonderful guy who will take care of her forever. the reception was a lot of fun (but also lots of work for us in the bridal party), and i'm so happy that pretty much nothing went wrong the whole day, and both families had fun and danced and got along perfectly. it really was a day from heaven :)

sadly, though, i was going through the first of 2 flus during the wedding, but i was well enough to enjoy all the festivities at the time. too bad i caught the next strain, stomach flu, from someone at the wedding. i couldn't eat much for about 2 weeks and probably lost 10 lbs :( that's ok, i got my appetite back up this weekend and made up for it :D

good news, though, is that i had an interview in my sister's hometown, and i think it went really well. it was held at a starbucks (my 3rd home!) and lasted for an hour and a half. he said i had a much better understanding of his company and job than most people he's interviewed :) i don't think the interview would have lasted so long if he weren't at all interested in hiring me. he said he'd contact me by april (since they're still interviewing candidates) to let me know if i get a second interview or not. cross your fingers, i could really use the luck! i want this job really badly...

so that's about it for now. just recovering, trying to get my strength back up. i hope you are all well, and i miss hearing from you guys! look for an update with some pics in a few days :)

take care

-zyxe

[mini update]

i figure everyone could use a happy wish! YOU WILL MAKE A WISH AND YOU WILL LIKE IT. period. .

i'll add pictures later, they're on my phone and i keep forgetting my sync cable :cry:

maek ur wishez kthxbai.