Category: Personal

I’m just a bit nervous this morning, normal pre-first day jitters nothing more, but the clock seems to be ticking very slowly just the same. I (want to?) blame Evan for not being willing to get up early enough to have a Morning Coffee Walk. I blame all the people in my RSS list for not writing enough last night to take my mind off things. Uggh, another half an hour until I have to leave to go one last time to a ProMatch general meeting and do the perp walkSuccess Story thing, then head over to the new office.

Speaking of ProMatch, I recommend that any of you unemployed folks in the South Bay join. Although this job did not come directly out of the group, I think that the improvements in my resume and interviewing skills surely helped. Also, less tangible benefits such as getting myself out more, meeting people, being more open to what might come along resulted from participating. One of my goals in the near future is to keep my eyes open and see if I can help any of my new friends in their job hunt.

25 minutes…

I know Jeremy says PageRank is Dead and all, but since Anil pointed out this amusing script to get down to the numbers, how do my two main sites compare:

• http://www.billsaysthis.com: 6/10
  

• http://www.billlazar.com: 4/10
  

• http://www.philringnalda.com/: 6/10
  

• http://www.crabapples.net/: 4/10
  

• http://www.dangerousmeta.com/: 6/10
  

• http://q.queso.com/: 6/10
  

• http://www.scripting.com/: 8/10

Not bad for old Bill.

As you may have surmised from the subject, my long and tiresome hunt was not endless, even though I probably complained, cajoled and kvetched enough to make it seem that way.

I have been accepted a contract position as product manager at a company here in the Valley called Intransa. They make a very serious enterprise class storage system (for the non-techies among you, that means a really big hard disk system) and are a spin out from the big networking company 3Com. If all goes well–if I perform, that is–I should become a regular employee in the not too distant future.

Seriously, I want to thank all of you out there in the webworld for the help, advice and encouragement you’ve given over a very difficult two and a half years. This has meant a lot to me! How did I get this job, you ask? Networking! Seems that what everybody’s saying is true, when you want/need a new job get out there and talk to everyone you know and everyone they know.

Somehow I will adjust to the hardships of workday life. Ouch! Good thing I got caught up on all those old TV series while I had the chance. LOL

Where is Tim Minnear’s weblog? Wonderfalls Producer Seeks Viewers

Bert Kassies writes about UEFA European Cup Football, which I want read later. Do you?

I’ve gone for effect in my writings occasionally as well but in today’s Remote Patrol Tom Heald went way O’verb’Oard!

You’d think, those of you who’ve read this site with any frequency, there’s nothing I won’t write about. Mostly, you’d be correct but there are a couple of very different things going on right now that I’m just holding off mentioning but are taking a lot of my time and mental energy so not much posting. Both of these things are very exciting and interesting and I look forward to writing about them. One will be sooner (tomorrow?) than the other though. Cross your t’s and dot your i’s and come back again.

Calacanis says “The Paris Hilton Rule: If someone tapes you having sex assume everyone in the world will see it. End of discussion.“

Scott Atran: A Leaner, Meaner Jihad

No one I know is more surprised than me that today is the third blogday for BillSaysThis. Sadly, the rumored Sopranos cameos by Mick and Keith never did materialize.

Geffen Records won in court today, or rather they defeated a motion by Axl Rose for a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the label from releasing a Guns N’Roses greatest hits package as scheduled next week. But what really caught my eye was this bit on the long-awaited new GNR release: A “source familiar with the situation said the label has been waiting seven years for Rose to deliver Chinese Democracy and has poured $13 million into production of that album after repeated promises that he was about to finish the project.” I know studio time and studio musicians are not cheap but day-um, I’ve never heard of any album costing more than $10M to record!

You know it’s time for the Big Dance when even political reporting blogs start using basketball metaphors…

I’ve been hearing an ad on the radio, mainly on KFOX, for at least the last few weeks encouraging people who want to become independently wealthy to sign up for a program to learn to be an “asset protection consultant.” There are billions of dollars to be had floating around helping other wealthy folks involved in lawsuits. One lawyer, Flyod Tapia, thinks such schemes are fine and dandy as long as “lifetime, incumbent judges and bleeding-heart juries [hand] out ludicrous decisions.”

Not something that really appeals to me but it did make me curious. And so when I googled the phrase this morning, right at the top was this page on a scambuster website. What a shock, eh? One might think that a station owned by the mighty Clear Channel Communications would be a bit more selective in who gets access to its air time but then again, probably not.

The business of globesity is business, after all, and health be damned as usual…

A post-Millenium Catcher in the Rye with Kieran Culkin as a cuter-than-thou Holden Caulfield pretty much sums up 2002’s Igby Goes Down.

not bad

One of the films I remember most fondly from college days (appropriate, eh?), I was surprised that TS1 had never seen Chariots of Fire and when it popped on the TCM schedule there was no doubt we had to watch. This story of a few British runners in post-WWI years won four Oscars in 1982 including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Soundtrack–everyone knows that seminal new age theme on piano and synth by Vangelis.

Chariots of Fire is the true story of Eric Liddle (played by Ian Charleson) and Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross) who ran for gold in the 1924 Olympics despite great personal obstacles. Liddle, a devoutly religious man, would not run his qualifying heat because it fell on a Sunday, while Abrahams, who was Jewish, faced anti-Semitism. The bulk of the film sets up the climactic races in Paris and, aside from a single race well before that, the two protagonists really never meet or interact. The movie tells of the mental and athletic preparations as parallel stories.

I find it very interesting that none of the primary group of younger actors (Charleson, Cross, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell and Daniel Gerroll) really went on to have substantial Hollywood careers. Of course John Gielgud and Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins in the recent LotR movies, for instance) were different but they were older and firmly established by this point. Cross did make a few pictures and big TV miniseries but the rest of them basically went on to British TV, which is sad as the evidence here is that they were capable of more.

This film takes time and trouble to develop the lead characters by way of a series of set pieces, some focused on running while others explore the conflicts which give meaning to their achievements. Abrahams is set off against both his Cambridge chums as well as Holm as his (naughty boy!) professional coach while Liddle mainly has conflict with his equally religious sister.

Hugh Hudson, who did such a fine job directing the movie, also never did much more. I really wonder why that was. The studios are reputedly such strange, dangerous and incestuous places but one would think that Hudson would have earned more than such schlock as Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes and Revolution (the Al Pacino Revolutionary War flick) but there you go.

recommended

I wonder if Jason’s offer includes plane tickets…

Stan Schultes drops a neat article in Visual Studio Magazine: Build an RSS Generator Component

Very interesting artsy graphic featuring the word Bill [via coolstop.com]

My online buddy Rogers linked this morning’s eBay fraud story over on his very cool Drudge Retort site and caused the biggest burst of traffic this site has every seen. (Of course it would have been nice if a few of those visitors clicked the Google ads but whatever.)