working for a living

work is becoming increasingly difficult to stomach.  My boss is a racist, a chauvinist, and a bigot, his pricing practices are borderline fraudulent and quite obviously unethical, he treats his employees like combatants, and is so painfully incapable of running his shop that he blames everyone but himself and is working himself into a hole.  

there is NO good way for me to leave and so I will have to find an adequate way.  Hopefully I will have gainful employment straightened out before leaving so that the transition is as painless as possible.   He thinks everyone (customers, potential customers, employees, family members, etc) is trying to FUCK HIM OVER.  I'm just not sure exactly what level of paranoia that can be defined as.  because I mean he REALLY thinks that people are trying to screw him over.  We have a customer that is actually quite a good customer who he once said (and was quite serious) was trying to "rape him blind and trick fuck" him.  Since I started people have "stolen Christmas presents from little nathan", "stabbed him in the back", and "raped me and my family." and this is all in the normal course of business.  Let me insist here that in NONE of these circumstances did ANYONE want to do anything but order and pay for printing services.

He refers to people of color with all sorts of phrases the last of which was simply that "they're all just little colored animals to me ."  "ruthless beasts lower than animals" was another one referring to muslims last week.

Its all very out of control and convincing myself to continue showing up to work is getting difficult. 

Sign Shop?!

yes yes… things may be rolling in a positive direction.  I can't really reveal all of the details at this point but I am courting a very good relationship with a consortium of businesses and a fine young gentleman that will most likely end up in me working in a new sign shop.  I'm very excited about the proposition because of what it is and WHO is involved.  It would all mean an excellent chunk of responsibility, work that I would LOVE to sink my teeth into, people that I already care about, and a growth industry the likes of which Rochester has just begun to tap.

 The Family of businesses that these guys own do about 10 million in revenue (not including other businesses that family members may own) and a major expenditure is obviously print, advertising, signage, design, etc.  They have keyed in on this and are looking to bring a design shop in house to A.) help curb their spending, and B.) create a new profit center.  At this point I'm not sure if they will acquire an existing shop or if their intention is to build from scratch.  The smart move would be to acquire and re-tool IMHO.  Their TopMan (a fellow who is becoming a good friend of mine) is on the case and will be in charge of making these types of decisions.  He has a background about as varied as mine and oddly enough has worked in a sign shop in the past.  

 All very interesting and all still up in the air for me because I don't really have all of the details.  These are all things that ARE happening they aren't mightbes or maybes.  The future will tell what my role in an organization such as this would be and I'm looking forward to it.

gotta go work. 

Weekends and Walmart

no, you did NOT read that correctly.  I have not recently been to, nor am I considering going to Walmart.  I am currently encoding The Walmart Movie to DVD for screenings and giveaways.  This is really a well put together film that I would encourage ANYONE to watch.  In fact I had lengthy discussions about it even with my Mother.  Its important.  

 There is a small independent film festival here and I am working on getting this thing screened at it.  I've got a pretty good chance (I have a loose affiliation with the organizers) but I have yet to hear back from the film makers on the details.  I hope it all works out.

MNBuzz Issue 3

Well, my man RickD has finally gotten the last tweaks and edits done on the magazine and Issue 3 is ready toprint.  I should receive final draft today and we can hopefully print tonight.  I'm excited to have this one done and out of the way to clear the way for Issue 4 work.  There are a lot of people who are anxious to see this publication hit the streets.  It has suffered some umm… "delays" as a number of RealLife(tm) issues have creeped in for a number of contributors.  Including but not limited to court hearings, emergency room visits, and going MIA while traveling from China to Germany.

Issue 4 will be completely setup with The Gimp (and maybe scribus) so I'm naturally anxious to get things rolling. 

ubuntu dapper with Xgl and compiz

so it came to my mind that a really keen idea would be to build a machine with which to create and edit the magazine that completely uses Free/OSS software. Since Rick does all of this work right now using ONLY Photoshop Elements v2.0 (jeepers) I didnt think it would be too difficult.

I pieced a machine together over the last week and installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake onto it which was an excellent starting point given that it already has The Gimp, O.O., firefox, thunderbird, GAIM, blah blah blah. HOWEVER doing the bare minimum in these things is never enough for me and so I decided to tackle the task of getting XGL and Compiz up and running.

after nearly poking my eyes out and having to walk away for an entire day due to frustation I finally have it all set and working. <whew> Really, with the number of steps it took me to get everything configureg correctly I'd be hard-pressed if I had to do it again. I can't wait until these projects flesh themselves out and are used in major distributions with elegance and effectiveness. My guess is that Vista's Aero glass interface will be quite a bit more polished when it hits the shelves but then again, there's a lot of time between now and an actual release.

the sexiest part of the whole thing (besides the wobbly windows) is the expose-like task switcher. sorry, but that sucker is friggn smoooooth. I'll be handing this machine off to Rick in the next couple of days and he'll start issue #4 completey inside an OSS environment. Its nice to have people willing to try new things around. =)

 

 

Skype is all setup

and so I've bitten the bullet. I was bored today and so I bought a skypeIN telephone number and some outbound credits with which to make calls with. I guess we'll see how it goes. I'll most likely just use it for a short time and then forget about it like I do with almost everything else, but I was bored and what can you do? (507)573-4577