Just killing time before going to bed...

Driving to Albuquerque tomorrow for a variety of reasons. Coming back the second of January or so.

Question of the moment: How many pears could a paring pair pare if the paring pair pared paired pears?

Job prospects

• Local
  • CRL - Not gonna happen
  • ICT - Probably not gonna happen, but I don't want to be a sysadmin anyway
  • PSL - "I might be able to hire you in January."
  • General Dynamics - shit, forgot to actually apply. It was boring web services bullshit anyway though.
  • Lockheed Martin - submitted resume. Apparently they're doing some interesting physics research on creating quantum singularities, since that seems to be where my resume has ended up.
• State
  • Sandia - interviewing with a <contractor|recruiter> on the 31st. Outlook: decent (lots of positions available including one doing graphics, UI, and Tcl/Tk programming)
  • Many other places in Albuquerque - they have my resume; I think Lockheed Martin's singularity research is being shared amongst the technical community actually
  • Some startup company in Los Alamos which contacted me which are doing something vague like use high-end fluid-dynamics simulations to optimize recreational boats or something (and listed "ownership of a recreational boat" as one of the desired candidate traits) - hell no
• Nationwide
  • Evans and Sutherland (Salt Lake City, UT) - A headhunter who works with them is trying to get me in with them. The recruiter thinks I'm an excellent candidate, but there's apparently some communication difficulties with E&S's HR department (probably because of the holidays). The recruiter thinks I have a great set of skills, though, and feels that I should have no problem getting a job (which is normally irritating to hear, but when it's a headhunter saying that, it's actually promising). This is my top pick right now. (E&S was SGI's biggest competitor back when SGI actually did what the G used to stand for. Now they're the biggest only name in high-end visualization hardware.)
  • Apple - Applied yet again to their pro media tools division, and for a couple of HCI things. Not bloody likely.
  • Pixar - Hahaha as if

Stuff I'll be doing in Albuquerque

Hanukkah is still going on. I bought some cheap-but-cute presents for my mom, dad, and brother. (No, I'm not saying what they are, 'coz one of them might actually be reading this now!) Hopefully I dropped enough hints over Thanksgiving about what I want for a present (hint: an electric guitar and amp)

My grandma's health is deteriorating pretty badly. It'll be good for me to be there to help out, especially since my parents are going to Chicago and my brother isn't available to help out much. Stressful times in that regard. I wouldn't be surprised if this was my last chance to see her alive.

I'm bringing a big pile of DVDs (my mom asked me to) and my PS2 and DDR platforms (my mom will probably roll her eyes), and a few other games which are good time-killers as well as ones which I'd play more of if they didn't push the extremes of visual dynamic range (which my projector sucks at). Namely Ico and Sly Cooper.

I'm also bringing all of my art junk (including Wacom tablet and copy of Photoshop) so I might do, like, a journal comic or two. Probably not.

And, of course, I have the interview on the 31st. (The recruiters are getting all of the interviews done while Sandia is shut down, to minimize their ramp-up time and so on.) I'll probably hang out with my brother that night, and be too hung over to drive back to Las Cruces on the 1st. (And, of course, lots of other people will be too hung over to drive but they'll be doing it anyway.)

Right now

Drinking some herbal tea, weblogging, wondering why Shooby's been so hyper lately, mentally rehearsing what I'm going to tell Delphine's pathological-loser friend Alex if he insists on talking to me about our nonexistent relationship when I drop my cats off at her house tomorrow.

(Short version of the story: Delphine told Alex about me, Alex fell in love with an image he built up, he moved back to Las Cruces for various reasons which I don't think he really thought through, he mooched off of Delphine for a while, I was helpful to Alex so he could try to get his feet on the ground, he moved in with his best friend Fred claiming to have found work etc., he violated many of my personal boundaries, and rambled for about an hour about how he hoped he didn't put too much of a strain on our relationship, which I didn't realize we had to begin with. Since then he has been kicked out of Fred's house for reasons which Alex makes sound like Fred's fault but which, knowing Alex, is probably him totally misinterpreting everything in every possible way, and now he's moved back in with Delphine yet again, which I found out quite suddenly when I called Delphine the other day to ask about my cats staying at her house and he answered the phone. The thing I've been wanting to tell him the most since sometime in October: "We don't have a relationship, you have an infatuation.")

And now

for a massage from the Swedish prime minister.