Well, let's see -- yeah, it's been a little more than a month since I posted here.  Things have been a little busy.

First off, for the very good news: I got the job I wanted with Comcast.  I went to new hire orientation today, and start seven weeks of training tomorrow.  As soon as the training is done, I'll be working second shift (1:30 to 10:30 pm) Thursdays through Mondays, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays off.  I am indeed getting paid about $25 a week more for working this job 40 hours a week than I was being paid as the general manager of a Pizza Hut for working 50 to 60 hours a week.  And this is a much better job for me.

But wait, there's more... :)  I also get my cable TV and high-speed internet for free.  With an automatic upgrade to the super platinum package, which means every movie channel Comcast carries.  I've ordered up a couple of upgrades (8Mbps internet, that kind of thing), so I will still have a cable bill.  It will run about $20 a month.  That's an extra $35 a week or so in savings, which means my actual net monthly increase is something like $250.

All for working less, but smarter... *smile*...

Oh, and Comcast has a lot of nice discount agreements with many and varied other companies and corporations.  I could save 15% on a Ford.  Or pay 20% less for almost any cell phone service out there.  And their benefits package is more than competitive, good rates for medical, dental, etc.  Seven holidays, three more floating holidays, two weeks' vacation, 8 flex days (sick or whatever) per year.  This may sound like no big deal to y'all, but remember, Pizza Hut only closes two days a year.

This is one of those places that not only talks about treating their employees as their number one asset, but really puts some money and clout into turning that talk into reality.

It's a nice location, it's going to be a good and fun job for me... I'm happy.  (Oh, and the fact that I've got a girlfriend these days, an outstanding woman as far as I'm concerned, sure doesn't make me any less happy... *smile*... )

Gotta say, guys, I really enjoy Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel.  Adam and Jamie make *such* a cute couple (whether they intend to come off that way or not -- but it works very well), and I have dreams at night about Kari Byron. 

I'm positive every red-blooded, straight or bi American male who has ever seen the show has dreams at night about Kari.

But, for me, the star of the show is... Buster!  The humaniform dummy who suffers all of the indignities of each crash, fall and explosion engineered by our intrepid myth-busting team.

In the extremely unlikely event some of you have not yet seen this show -- see it!!!  :)

Gee -- I leave this page un-looked-at for a couple of days, and suddenly I find some of the old gang popping on as friends.

Welcome!

Got through the second phase of interviews at Comcast today, looking for a job in their technical support call center.  It's a natural outgrowth of my career as a tech writer, for which my best qualification has always been that I'm good at explaining things...  It went well, and I'm hoping to hear confirmation soon.  If I do get the job, paid training starts Juy 9.  Everyone keep your fingers crossed for me, please...!

BTW -- if I do get this job, it will pay, at entry level, for 40 hours a week, a little bit more than I was making doing a minimum of 50 hours a week (and usually more) as the general manager of my own Pizza Hut.  Methinks I was really getting underpaid there, especially for the amount of work involved.

Paul asked me what I thought of Superman Returns.  Well... actually, I didn't get to see it in the theater, but I bought the DVD and watched it a couple of times.  I thought it was a very interesting attempt to produce a sequel to the first two Superman movies, and pretty much only to those two movies.

The cast worked well for me, especially Spacey as Luthor.  Roush was playing Reeve as much as he was playing anyone or anything else, but it was a valid set of choices, I thought.  His version of the character worked quite well, I thought.  His Clark was a little more earnest and a little less comical than Reeve's Clark, but his Superman has a deliciously confident quality that, even as well as Reeve played the role, was somehow more personally and deeply felt.  It worked well for me.

The story was halfway decent -- especially since I'm aware (from comments made by Kevin Smith, who had been approached several years ago to work on a Superman film) that the script has been through a lot of phases.  The idiot former hairdresser, Jon Peters I think it is, who owned the property wanted to completely ignore every tiny bit of the Superman mythos, wherever it came from, use a few of the character names and such, and try to do some kind of gothic, Batmanesque thing.  Something that featured a huge mechanical spider.

Every writer Peters brought in was told he HAD to incorporate a huge mechanical spider in the climax of the film.  The only other commandment was NO traditional red-blue-yellow outfit.  And it'd be real neat to see part of the costume (which he wanted to be black and metallic) turn into little knives that Supes could throw.

Bleccchhh!

After every self-respecting person in the business turned Peters down, someone finally sold him on trying to do what the original Salkind-produced films attempted.  Peters finally went for that idea, and it turned into a decent sequel to the first two films.  I especially liked how they pulled in some elements from the "Death and Life of Superman" storyline.  I was generally more impressed with the script for this film than I had been for any since the first Salkind production.

Effects technology has now reached a point where each image, the exercise of each super power, the smooth flow and motion of every sweeping shot, looks exactly perfect.  It is true -- we can now put pretty much anything on film.

Speaking of which, the Sci Fi Channel was running a mini-Dr. Who marathon last week, and I got a chance to see the new Dr. Who, complete with its 21st century special effects.  I'm quite pleased.  I always did find the viedotape/film dichotomy of BBC productions of the 60s through the 80s to be a bit jarring.  And it seems that the script quality is pretty much the same as always, perhaps just a little better.  It's no longer just a children's show, even in the minds of the suits at the Beeb, I think.  And I rather like this latest Doctor, he has a delightful Michael Palin-esque quality that works quite well for the character.  I also like the absent-minded-professor look of his clothes, it suits Tennant's interpretation of the character.

Oh, and BTW -- for those who wonder where Jon Peters' huge mechanical spider ended up, you may recall another film that was produced by Peters -- the Will Smith/Kevin Kline version of "The Wild, Wild West."  Which featured, in its climax, an immense mechanical spider...  :)

Just got home from running some errands, and I must say that I highly recommend the new Quiznos premium subs.  Got one of their prime rib subs with peppercorn sauce -- delicious!  And while most of the stores don't do this, I'm sure, the Quiznos near us got themselves and old-fashioned milk shake maker, from which they make real milk shakes.  With milk and ice cream and flavorings.  Not that goop that comes in big waxed-cardboard boxes.

So, I'm mellow and stuffed... waiting for my lady friend to come by later.  Y'all have a good evening, you hear?  I plan to...!

Here is the one thing I will re-type tonight from my original post that LJ's very badly designed text editor deleted.  (Wiping out everything you just wrote because you wanted to see a help screen is a completely unacceptable piece of crap functionality.)

As some of you might know, I am one of the biggest fans of space exploration on the planet.  I used to spend an awful lot of my online time on Usenet newsgroups, specifically the sci.space.* group.  But that set of newsgroups really started to get overwhelmed by netkooks and cranks several years ago, the signal-to-noise ratio got unacceptably low.

And then one day, about a month after Spirit, aka MER-A, aka MER-2, landed on Mars, I got a quick e-mail from one Alex Blackwell, a frequent contributor to various sci.space.* fora.  He told me of a new web forum being started by another old friend from the newsgroups, one Doug Ellison from the London, England area.  I joined his forum, which was then called the rlmerproject (or something like that), on its second day in existence.

This forum has since become www.unmannedspaceflight.com (herein after referred to as UMSF).  I spend most of my web time there.  I post there very frequently, and all of us who are involved there have been called bloggers, though I always thought that THIS was blogging.

That forum is frequented by many of the Principal Investigators, science team members,and engineering team members of the many probes that are now exploring our solar system.  Alan Stern, the PI on the New Horizons probe, posts there, as well as John Spencer, one of the chief scientists on the New Horizon team.  Many people involved with the MER rovers post there, as well as members of the Cassini imaging team.  And that site features the very best of the amateur imaging specialists and amateur planetary geologists not in the business... :)

Just to give you an idea of how well respected UMSF is, there is a segment in the most recently updated version of the Discovery Channel production "Passport to Pluto" (a documentary on the New Horizons Pluto probe) in which PI Alan Stern mentions that, when planning NH's Jupiter encounter, they decided to consult with "the bloggers" in terms of which "Kodak Moment" images they should try to capture.  As Stern is shown making this comment, several pages from UMSF are flashed up on the TV screen.  FYI, several images, including one which shows Europa hanging over the near horizon of massive Jupiter, were suggested by members of UMSF.

If you want to know me, if you want to see my oddball sense of humor and my forays into amateur planetary geology, cosmology and aerospace engineering, that's the place to go.  I'll post here often, I'm sure, but UMSF is my real home on the web.

LiveJournal's post editor sucks,  big time.  I just spent 40 minutes typing up my first post, and then when I looked at the options at the bottom of the text entry screen, I saw the field for tags.  I wasn't sure how tags worked, so I clicked on the ? next to the Tags field.  I saw what they were, and hit the back button on my browser to get back to my post.

Where I found every single word of my first post had disappeared.

I'm NOT re-writing the whole frickin' thing.  I AM upset.

Welcome to my world.