Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your eyes.
I come to bury this past week, not to praise it.

This past week was rather bizarre and quite long. It started off on Sunday/Monday with doing math. What an excellent way to start off the week. I should note though that I’m done with my second quarter at ITT here in Green Bay. That leaves 3 quarters to go. Then I restart the quarter count back up to eight in Milwaukee.
Tuesday was work. Wednesday was my only day off this week and it consisted of going to TekSystems in Appleton to fill out several thousand sheets of paper (exaggeration: it was more like 30 and I only had to sign about 10, including that damn W-4 form or whatever that is with the stupid “1″ or “0″). Later that day Jon and I went to ITT because Jon needed to get his schedule fixed. Turned out there was a PS2/Linux thingy going on in one of the rooms where a group of the game design students were trying to get samba (Windows sharing on Linux) to work on the PS2. After some tinkering around I managed to get it working for them, which resulted in a celebration meal at the Rustic Rail–slightly expensive but good. Thursday resumed with work, as well as Friday, Saturday, and now Sunday. Friday and Saturday was particularly interesting as I had some friendly 10-9:15 shifts. I think my feet still hurt from working those two shifts (new shoe time?). I’ll admit the days did go rather fast as they were busy. Saturday was an exception. All morning our District Manager, Steve, was there. We thought he’d be lecturing us on what we were doing wrong, but he was instead in the backroom making calls and causing our backroom server to crash (a not-so-quick reboot fixed it).
Now we begin a new week. This week will be a transitional week as things will definitely be changing. Since I start work at Humana next week Monday, my RadioShack availability will go down to just weekends and occasional closing shifts during the week. I guess no one at work is liking this too much as I’m supposedly a “good employee”–where do they hear such nonsense? My last day of a regular schedule at “the Shack” is Tuesday. Wednesday through Saturday I’ll be out of town–Wednesday in Milwaukee and Thursday-Saturday at Devil’s Lake. RJ, Robert, Buddy, myself, Jon (?), Steve, Sam, and Tom (?) will be on a camping excursion which I’m looking forward to–especially with how last week was and how different the following week will be. I was planning on staying through Sunday but a work “situation” forced me to work on Sunday. Lame.
While getting a new job is all great because the incoming cash flow will be increased (ALWAYS a good thing), this will definitely add a burden to my scheduling scenario. Up till now I’ve been able to take pretty much any time off to go down south to see Amy/family/friends/etc. My new job will restrict my down time to just weekends, which will usually be filled with hours from RadioShack (unless I request off, which I plan on doing anyway). Alas, the days of 3-5 days off are gone, at least for now. This new job is technically only a 3-month agreement. We’ll see if I decide to keep going after the three months–especially when I know that there’s plenty of extra “incoming cash flow” to be made at RadioShack during the upcoming holiday season (yes, I said it. It’s coming, brace yourselves.)
Upcoming short-term plans? Survive the new quarter, the new job, and my new schedule. School will probably be challenging, despite the fact that I’m only taking two classes. Network OS II will likely be a breeze, but WAN Technologies will be more difficult as it’s a “Quarter 7″ course (designed to be taken towards the end of your scholastic career) and is heavily-loaded at the beginning and the end. My instructor has warned me of this class, so I’m expecting the worst. Work will be challenging at first as I’ve never done help desk before and I hear the 6 week training course is brutal. My schedule will also be challenging as I’m leaving myself for not too much downtime (just following the standard college student schedule protocol).
But enough of this extended outlook crap. I just want Wednesday here. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen Amy, and I’m really looking forward to that camping trip. I need some downtime. If you try calling me this weekend you can expect one of three things to happen:
1. My phone will not receive a signal (as demonstrated here)
2. My phone will be left in the car (I’ll only have a phone close to me probably during the night so I have an alarm clock)
3. My phone will be off (for charging)
Just a heads up.

I think that’s all I’ve got for now. For those of you anxiously waiting for my Vista Pre-RC1 review should know that RC1 was released yesterday to Microsoft Connect testers. Folks like myself and MSDN subscribers will likely get it next week. I’ll likely save my big review for the (hopefully)-milestone RC1 release and just do a quickie list for pre-RC1.

~Jaker

—–