Where Dustbunnies Go To Die

I'm back from a week in sunny Anaheim at the 64th Worldcon, and have finally found time to log onto LJ. I don't think I'll be reading too much of what has been posted in the last week, though I may scan my friendslist. If you posted something you really want me to read, comment with a link.

I didn't record the goings-on in my notebook this time, as I often do, and there were far too few computers in the Internet Lounge, so I didn't take the time to post each day. Alas. However, some of the highlights:

( On panels... )

( On finally getting to see a couple of legends in the field... )

Most of my photos didn't turn out too well, unfortunately - the drawback to using a cellphone camera. I did get some cool pictures, though, and I'll put them ( behind this cut. )

Another highlight of the week was getting to meet several TrekBBS members. We met up for dinner and drinks on Saturday night in the hotel bar, after which several of the group went to Disneyland. (I didn't join them, as I wanted to get back to the con for some particular reason; I think it was the Hugos, but I ended up missing them anyway.)

( Photo here... )

Let's see... what else. I went to a number of room parties, and helped out at the Montreal in 2009 bid party, tending bar from 10pm to 5am one night (Friday, I think it was?). I went out for dinner a couple of times with the Gaylactic Network crowd (there were about 18 of us). I met a hottie from Columbus named Chris who engaged in some light flirting with me (though he may have simply been trying to get my vote ;) ). On Saturday afternoon, he said to me, "If we win the bid, do you know anyone in gay Columbus fandom who would run our LGBT panel track?" Hell, I don't know anyone in Columbus, gay or straight. So I gave him my email address. ;) Alas, they didn't win... Denver won by 12 votes. I think this might have been the closest vote in quite some time. I know the Chicago committee would have thrown a fabulous con (I think they threw the best parties of the three 2008 bids), and yes, I was kind of thinking that it might be fun to work on LGBT programming for Columbus, but at least, with Denver winning, you have no excuse not to attend, mishalak! :P

Overall, I had a fantastic time, though the Wednesday-to-Sunday schedule instead of the usual Thursday-to-Monday left me confused about what day it was for much of the time. That's also probably the reason why I can't remember which days certain things happened.

Now, I get to do it all again in a few days... I'm leaving Thursday for Dragon*Con.

In other news, I popped into Future Shop today to try to find a USB cable for my cell phone so that I could upload my pictures. It turned out they don't carry them (the local Telus store didn't have any either), but I did get Animaniacs Vol. 1, Desperate Housewives S2 and House S2 on DVD.

I also got a few phone calls from recruiters while I was away, and spoke to them today. The TD job sounds promising... the hiring manager had some specific questions for the recruiter to ask me, which I answered. There's a possibility they may have me in for a technical test first, though, given that it's been nearly two years since I last worked. I reminded the recruiter that I was going to be away this weekend. Which reminds me, I should call the other recruiter I'd been dealing with recently about the position at JP Morgan.

Wow, there were a lot of posts to get through today. Over 500 since I last logged on. Of course, it was probably largely due to both lizblackdog and omahastar participating in Blogathon. Entertaining as it was, why did it have to be while I was away? :P

Okay, so here's what happened this weekend...

( Thursday, July 27 )

( Friday, July 28 )

( Sunday, July 30 )

( Monday, July 31 )

So, that was the weekend.

Today, I got up around noon and called a headhunter who had left a message on my machine while I was gone - not the same one I'd been dealing with previously. This is for a position at Honda - they're looking for someone with experience in COBOL, CICS, various mainframe utilities, MQ Series and J2EE. Good luck finding someone with all of those. I told the headhunter that while I don't have J2EE, I do own a textbook that I bought about a year ago just for kicks so that I could learn it. She found that amusing.

Apart from that, today has been filled with reading all of the weekend's emails (365 of them in total) and reading everything you folks had been up to all weekend. That, and staying inside for the most part, though I did have to go to the drug store for toothpaste, soap and anti-perspirant. Somehow I managed to run out of all three at the same time. According to what I've been reading, today's humidex hit 48C (118F) - no wonder I felt like a drowned rat the second I stepped outside. I may pop over to Dominion and pick up some ice cream. Fortunately I have plenty of Lactaid to go with it. Hm, the more I think about it, the better that idea sounds.

Oh, and some memeage, gakked from yellow_freshia:

My Gay Fairy Name is Star Dancer. How Gay.What's Yours?

Apparently my special fairy skills are:

• Drinking dew drops


• Dancing in the mushroom patch.


• Over the rainbow tourguide

Uh-huh. Could have been worse - yellow_freshia's fairy name is "Lance the Gay Fairy".

GIP! *grin*

(Okay, it's not a GIP, it's a regular post. But still...)

Tonight was a bit of a struggle at the bowling alley. The lanes seemed to be oiled strangely, so Mario's and my shots weren't behaving the way they should, whereas people who throw a relatively straight ball seemed to be doing well. After making an adjustment and adapting to throw a relatively straight ball instead of my usual slight hook (fortunately, my hook is very slight), I was able to pick things up a little and finished the night with scores of 203, 147 and 153. Strangely, that gave me the exact same total as last week, 503. How's that for consistency?

cuteteenboy was still a little behind where he wanted to be on his schoolwork, so he didn't come out to fill in tonight. We still managed to win two out of three games and take total points (oddly, the game we lost was the one in which I scored 203).

Earlier today, I was quite busy with phone calls; I called Mario's colleague who is hiring some contract programmers (left a voicemail), called the headhunter I met a couple of weeks ago (didn't leave a voicemail, as I had left one on Monday, but she called back later anyway to tell me that she had no news yet), and called my RRSP agent to arrange to meet and deposit the Canadian Tire stocks from my grandmother's account (which should have been done a couple of weeks ago, when I got them, but the last few weeks have been filled with activity and drama which prevented it). My mother wants to be there, which means the meeting has to be in the early morning because everyone else has to change their schedules to accommodate her life, of course. *headdesk* 8:30 Tuesday morning. (And yes, I know that for most people, 8:30 in the morning is nothing. Hush. :P )

The other headhunter who had called while I was in L.A. emailed me to let me know that my resume (modified to more prominently indicate my volunteer activities) has been submitted, too.

Hopefully I'll get to bed at a decent hour tonight so that I can get up, do what I need to do (including more phone calls) and get up to Yorkdale by 3 for my hair appointment. Having my hair in my eyes is driving me crazy (or crazier, depending on your POV).

I also have a few things on my Gaylaxicon to-do list that need to be done or followed up on before Saturday's meeting. I think that we may finally have a head of Security who won't flake out or pull a diva act. Whew!

I still haven't been able to track down a Future Shop that has Doctor Who S1 in stock, but I picked up the Queer As Folk S5 soundtrack yesterday. Not bad so far - the first track is by the Scissor Sisters, whom I know troystar likes but I'd never heard anything by them before. Geri Halliwell's track is surprisingly not vomit-inducing. I'm not sure what I think of Marilyn Manson's cover of "Personal Jesus" - the guitar work is fine, but I don't care for his voice. And the song that Cyndi Lauper was performing when Babylon blew up is on the soundtrack too - I seem to recall liking the bits that I heard on the show. We'll see about the rest of the tracks - I have no preconceived notions about whether I'll like them or not.

I had that meeting this afternoon with the headhunter about a position downtown. She still couldn't tell me what the company is, but she thinks I'm a really good fit - mind you, that's what they all say. However, in this case, it sounds like it would be pretty much the same kind of stuff I was doing at CDS, albeit for about 30% less than I was making there. It's not as senior a position as I had - it turns out that the reason for the sudden need to hire is that they recently promoted everyone. That being said, she thinks that given my experience, there's a possibility that they might hire me at a level more commensurate with my experience and past salary. And in any case, it seems there's no 24/7 support required, which is a good thing - most of the discrepancy between what this job pays and what I used to make was extra pay for carrying the pager, anyway. Take that out, and the assorted overtime I used to do, and the difference is about 13%. Still not great - and still 30% less than I made at Manulife, where I had the title of "team lead" despite never getting a team to lead - but it's better than nothing. (Of course, that's what my mother says about working at McDonald's...)

I'd still like to go back to school, but if something comes up before I figure out what I want to do and where I want to do it, I'm not going to turn my nose up. I want to be working - I'm the sort of person who keeps looking at my bank balance decreasing with every bill I pay and rent cheque I write. Even with the inheritance having finally been cleared up, so there's no imminent threat of homelessness, I would still like to have an income. (Am I nuts, or what?)

Anyway, I told the headhunter that I'm going to be away from next Thursday to the following Monday evening, so she's going to try to get me an interview for early next week. It seems this company is in a hurry to hire someone.

Oh, and apparently, while they're looking for a mainframe person, there might be an opportunity to learn Websphere, which I'm seeing in job ads all the time these days. I have no idea what it is, but if they want to teach it to me, I'm all for it.

I even managed to get through the interview without having a coughing fit or having my nose spontaneously start to run. This cold is particularly nasty - I'm dehydrated constantly, and my lips are chapped. I think I'll be making myself a Neo Citran tonight.

I spent some time this evening watching the Olympic opening ceremonies - not bad at all. I missed the parade of athletes, but I enjoyed Pavarotti, the acrobats, and the fireworks. I also enjoyed the Italian skier who took the oath for the athletes. :)

I still think the hats on the Canadian athletes look a little goofy. Now I know - they reminded me of the hat that Charlie Brown wore in winter, with the ear flaps. All they need are the idiot strings on their mittens.

Oh, and the reason I missed the parade of athletes? I finished watching season one of Desperate Housewives the other night, and had been watching the extras. There's a fantastic bit in the blooper reel from the season finale, where everyone is coming to see Bree at the hospital after Rex's heart attack - the elevator doors open, and they all step out and assume the Charlie's Angels pose. There's also a segment entitled "Oprah Winfrey Is The New Neighbour." I'd sort of assumed that it was footage of an interview segment on the Oprah Winfrey Show or something - but no. They actually wrote a mini-episode which has Oprah moving onto Wisteria Lane and meeting all the neighbours. Great stuff. My only complaint about the extras is that there wasn't enough Steven Culp.

I keep seeing an amusing ad on the subway - amusing in its geeky-inside-jokeness, anyway. There's a decorating show on HGTV called Designer Superstar Challenge. The ad depicts a photograph paperclipped to a file folder. The photo isn't important (though it's pretty garish) - the funny thing is the Post-It note on the photo that reads, "Application #NCC1701-D".

Let's see, what else do I want to share with everyone... oh, right. montrealais helpfully provided this link to a CBC news story about our new Parliamentary Secretary To La Francophonie. It seems Stephen Harper appointed a unilingual anglophone to the post. Real smart, there.

And bovil posted a link to Something Awful's Very Star Wars Valentines. They're all hilarious, but this one in particular made me laugh out loud:

( Cut to save space... )

Anyway, that's it for tonight, I think. Unless I think of something else to prattle on about.

I managed to get hold of the headhunter who sent me to Markham today; it seems that the delay wasn't because she just hadn't gotten around to calling me back, but rather because they had some problems last week at the company and so they hadn't even gotten a chance to consider the applicants.

It seems that I was in the running right up until Friday afternoon, when they apparently interviewed someone who blew them all away. :( Well, I didn't want to have to commute up to Markham every day anyway...

And I have a phone interview tomorrow morning at 11. Here's hoping I'm awake (I guess I should read all the documents they emailed me last week, shouldn't I?).

I also called a few of the other headhunters who have contacted me recently, to see if there were any updates, but had to leave voicemails and haven't heard back from any of them.

Rob Sawyer emailed me the photo he took on Saturday night, with the Pridethulhu given to me by moon_custafer. It's a big picture, so I'm putting it behind a cut. Unfortunately, Rob didn't tell me at the time to hold him up higher...

( Click here to be frightened out of your wits. )

Fortunately, he didn't scare any of the other stuffed animals. *grin*

The Bank of Montreal needs some serious help with the Careers section of their website. I thought I was already registered, but couldn't remember what my user name or password might be, so I clicked on "email me my hint." I kept getting an error message that I needed to enter my user name, and the same page kept coming up. I closed the tab, and tried again from the link on the Workopolis site, and the same page came up again instead of the initial registration page. I had to clear my cookies before I could get back to the initial page and sign up (probably for the second or third time).

And then, there were questions on the application page that didn't seem related to the position, based on the description. (They were asking about PeopleSoft experience, when the job listed COBOL and PL/1 as the requirements.) I tried clicking on "back" to look at the description again, but the same form kept coming up asking about my PeopleSoft experience.

Obviously, BMO's not just in need of mainframe programmers.

(Oh, and like the shiny new icon? elizard100 pointed me towards hellodangerous, who has made bunches of "Brokeback Mountain" icons (my fingers still want to type "Bareback Mountain" instead of "Brokeback"... it seems to be a common problem from what I've seen elsewhere.)

Back to watching "Lost"... I got up to episode 13 before I went to bed, at about 7 this morning.

The past several days have been so jam-packed I haven't had a chance to update... so here goes.

( Pride Preparations )

( Toronto Trek panelist pubnight )

( Pride Day! )

( Sunday night... flirting with the cuties )

( Job Interview )

( Today )

( In political news: )

I managed to catch Doctor Who this evening while flipping back and forth during commercials. David Tennant has been described elsewhere as looking like a Hobbit. I don't know about that, but he does strike me as being a touch effeminate... I predict more flirting between him and Jack. (Maybe it was just the camera angle, but I thought he was much more attractive in the publicity stills I saw from "Casanova."

So who's writing good Doctor/Jack slash these days, anyway? There's got to be some...

Tomorrow, I'll be preparing stuff for this weekend's trip to Gaylaxicon in Boston. Should be fun.