I wait.

I’m sitting here watching the loading screen on Battlefield 2, so I have some time to write. Another christmas is approaching and I am quite happy, I have a good gift picked out for my wife and I am anxious to see what Becca has gotten for me. Last year at this time I was very nervously thinking about how I was going to propose to her. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. It went very well. OK, so she said yes and that is all that is important, but still I feel like I did a classy job of pulling it off. Now, Rodney, my roomate at college for about a year and a half, is getting married himself, he’s a fool. Not for getting married… just because he is. :D

Now, this map is done loadig so I shall pause while I practice my skill with the grenade launcher in Karkand. Crap, never mind, the freaking server just disconnected on me. Well, I suppose I have a few more minutes. Anyways, the connection at work on the T1 is about 3 times faster than my Adelphia connection at home for playing games.

I found a couple cool tools last night, one is Writely and the other is Jot Spot Tracker. These are the online replacements for Word and Excel. Completely online, completely free. It seems that there are so many great free hosted services available out there right now. A person could really just keep all of their data and interaction online in this set of online applications that some are calling web 2.0. Which I know sounds just plain silly, these are merely new ways of solving old probelms, with emphasis on certain features for covenience that will shape user interaction standards for many years to come. Tagging is a buzz word, sometimes called labels, sometimes called categories, it’s really a simple method of organizing data by keywords. It’s the hype of complex javascript and server side interaction that attempts to make the user experience more seamless within a web browser. I like it, and think it’s important to my role as a web designer.

Of course, some people still think that div’s an css styling are new fangled methods of building web sites, that are unproven and unreliable. Dont even try to mention AJAX, or anything beyone Classic ASP.

Whoa, my mind wandered into geek territory again there. What I really was trying to say though is that there are a lot of cool developments in my career field right now. I wish I had more time to keep up with everything and pick up some of the skills that I’m seeing being utilized.

I’m actually starting to do some real design work at my job now, hopefully I can escape tech support soon. For the past couple of days I’ve been working with some video for a flash banner ad that we were putting together. Specificaly, I had to mask out a moving horse from a snowy wooded mountainside, and yes the camera did pan and pull just to make the task that much more difficult. It brought back many fond memories of long hours in the lab working with video for school. But I’m still confidant that I made the right decision to stick with the web instead of video. For my own sanity at least.

I have not written on this page as much since I have left school. I think my life is simply less busy in many ways, and when I am less busy I less feel the need to blog. Maybe because I am more bored. Actually, that’s not entirely true, the only time I feel bored is when Becca is not around, and that’s pretty much the only time I blog also.Mike’s Blog should prove to be interesting in the next few months if he can overcome the hurdle of keeping it up to date.

I think I severely dislike Wells Fargo, or more precisely I am greatly dissapointed by the service at my local branch. They have just been so frustrating. Becca and I went in after the wedding to get her name put on our account and have my mother’s name taken off. While we were in there we ordered new checks and applied for a new credit card. So we wait a couple weeks and hear nothing from anyone and recieve nothing in the mail. Becca and I call several times, never get to speak with the banker we had been working with, and never get a call back from anyone about any of this. Becca finally goes in one day about a month after the first time and re-orders the checks and has them resubmit the credit card application. Several weeks later the checks show up with my name and my mother’s name on them. The package they were shipped in was addressed to my name and Rebecca. Seriously freaking rediculous. I go back in there to deposit my paycheck and find out what their deal is. Of course, my mom’s name is still on the freaking account, the second credit card application was rejected because Becca was the primary name on it and she was unemployed at the time she applied.

So I tell them that Becca is employed give them all the vital stats and ask them to please remove my mother from the account, they say they will do this and call me with more information later that day. Oh, and we still havent talked the the banker who is never around now, the head teller is the one dealing with us at this point. So now it’s been a couple weeks again and all I have is a letter from Wells Fargo that makes very little sense according to what I was told, and frustration piling up because my wife doesn’t have checks she can use. I will probably go back in there for another round of abuse on Thursday. After that I may start looking for another bank, and some sort of formal complaint form.

I am starting to realize that these huge corporations have very little accountability and control so many aspects of our lives that it’s frightening to know how badly they can screw up our lives. So the list of companies I wont deal with may grow to include more than just Quest DSL and HP.

Too many subject in this post. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.