Once again: Wow in the morning.
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.: posted by Vera 
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I know you all have just been dying to know what Selekta Stjarna looks like. Haven't you? Well, you don't have to wonder any longer because here she is. Isn't that an awesome picture?
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.: posted by Vera
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The last 15 minutes or so of this mix have some really beautiful trancey breaks and this melancholic howling that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Thanks to Shobha for the link.
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.: posted by Vera
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I cried a little bit today because my boss is hands down one of the nicest people I have ever known, and I am sad that I won't be working for him anymore.
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.: posted by Vera
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I noticed this graffiti recently near the corner of Market and Castro. I think it's new but I can't say for sure. I wonder if it is an epitaph for Brandon Vedas?
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.: posted by Vera
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Something beautiful happened this morning, just like it does every morning.
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.: posted by Vera
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So yeah, like, say hello to the brand new German QA Engineer at Macromedia. I signed a piece of paper today that said that I start on March 11 and that I will be making a lot more money. I know I mentioned before that I had some doubts about this position. But in the end I couldn't ignore the signs the universe was holding up for me. Here they are:
- The company is Macromedia Herself. If you know anything about me, you know that I love Flash. And if you know anything about Flash, you know that Macromedia makes Flash. So there. The discussion should really end here. I will be at the epicenter of the Flash world. But there's more!:
- The walls of the Macromedia office are painted lime green.
- When I first met my would-be boss, he walked into the room with a Hello Kitty water bottle.
- I will finally be putting my German to some professional use, and I have been wanting to do that for a long time.
- The first time I was at the Macromedia office, I saw Nigel Pegg twice, and the second time I saw him once. I have a lot of respect for Nigel because he has one of the coolest jobs at Macromedia: He built all of the MX components. Who knows, maybe if I'm nice to Nigel, he will just give me his job after a while.
- According to my theories on numerology, the number that describes my salary is very lucky.
- For reasons that are beyond the scope of this post my start date is also lucky. My ex-boyfriend would know why.
So yeah, I'm bursting at the seams with excitement. I'm going to be a Macromedian!
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.: posted by Vera
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The company from which I got laid off on July 12, 2001 is now about to completely dissolve. The people who are still "employed" there as of now haven't gotten paid in over two months and don't know if they ever will. I really hope all of the content the company developed over the last seven or eight years isn't just going to fall through the cracks of cyberspace.
This announcement, which I assume was written in 1999 or 2000, makes me smile sadly, especially this part: With 30 current employees, the company is poised for growth [...]. By the time they started laying people off, they had gotten up to 90.
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.: posted by Vera
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Remember the fork that I talked about recently? Yeah, well, the fork has come back and poked me in the forehead: The fork company made me an offer last night. More about this on Monday after I call the company and tell them my decision.
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.: posted by Vera
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Comedian Jim David:
I love getting older. You're happier, you're more well-adjusted, you have more money... and there is one very important thing you realize as you get older: People in their 20's don't know a damn thing about ANYTHING. The only thing that people in their 20's are good for is looking better than people in their 30's and 40's. So if you're in your 20's, you can strike a pose, but shut the fuck up!
Heh.
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.: posted by Vera
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How To Be Fashionable sounds interesting. "It's a book about 'the little things we do to seem cool to people exactly like ourselves.'" It's also "about how we form our identities through the objects, ideas and artworks we consume." (via XLR8R magazine 01/03) The latter sounds a lot like what John Cusack's character said in High Fidelity: "You are what you like," which rang very true to me when I first heard it in 2000. I find it fascinating how much we allow art, culture and fashion to define our selves, how many unread bestsellers all of us keep on our bookshelves - whether those bookshelves be real or dreamt up - and how hard us liberals try to conform to nonconformity. This book sounds like it will hold up a mirror to our cultural selves and make us watch and chuckle at the comical dance of self-reinforcement we dance every day.
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.: posted by Vera
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The German word for ambitious is ehrgeizig (pronounced 'air-guy-tsig). Ehre means honor and geizig means stingy, so if you're ambitious, you're greedy for honor to the point of being stingy. I guess that pretty much captures what ambition is, although it's not a nice way of putting it.
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.: posted by Vera
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Reader Poll: During your morning routine, what do you put on first - moisturizer or eye cream? I used to put on eye cream after the moisturizer but then I started getting suspicious about the moisturizer residues on my fingers contaminating the filmy skin around my eyes. So now I put on eye cream first, then moisturizer. What about you?
a) I put on moisturizer first.
b) I put on eye cream first.
c) I don't use eye cream.
d) I don't have a morning routine.
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.: posted by Vera
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I got a cute email today.
To: my email address
Subject: Verify PayPal, please
From: PayPal Security Center
Dear PayPal Customer
This e-mail is the notification of recent innovations taken by PayPal to detect inactive customers. The inactive customers are subject to restriction and removal in the next 3 months. Please confirm your email address by logging in to your PayPal account using the form below:
Email Address: _______________
Password: _______________
Bank Account
Enter Bank Account #: _______________
OR Credit Card
Enter Credit Card #: _______________
This notification expires February 13, 2003
Thanks for using PayPal!
Looks like a big fat scam to me.
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.: posted by Vera
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I went to the big peace rally yesterday. It was a lot more fun than I expected. There were lots of drum squads, people were dancing, and I even saw a topless junkie chick cheering on the crowd and a guy taking a dead homeless man's pulse. Oh, and the best anti-war sign I saw? Fight Plaque not Iraq.
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.: posted by Vera
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For a few days now I have been listening to this radio station, recommended by my friend, the Selekta Stjarna. It's All Electro, All day long. Tune in and get ready for the Electrovolution.
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.: posted by Vera
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You know what hasn't happened to me in a while? Someone engaging me in a drawn-out conversation just because that someone wants to find out if that is in fact an accent they are hearing when I speak or not. This happens to me once in a while, and usually I am not aware of it at first. I first tend to think that the reason the person keeps talking to me and asking me questions is that I am such an interesting person. But once I notice the way the person studies my face while I speak, I get a hunch that I'm dealing with an accent sniffer. They think if they just keep me talking, I will eventually slip and pronounce something in a way that gives away my background. The last time this happened was last May when I was talking to someone in HR about my impending move back to California. She started asking all these questions about my life. I thought Wow, she must think I'm really cool. But after a while I realized that she didn't want to let me leave until -, and sure enough, there came the question: Do you have an accent? The answer would be Yes, but most people don't catch it anymore, so you're special.
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.: posted by Vera
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So, I feel much better today. Whew. That was rough. The main issue was that I had known for a while that it was time for me to get back down to business. This business that I needed to get back down to is my repertoire of tricks of the trade. It had stagnated a couple of months ago, and I knew it was time for me to climb the next plateau. There have been all these things floating around aimlessly in the back of my head, things that I don't know as much about as I would like. These things have names like Flash Communication Server MX, XML Socket Server, 3D with matrices, Flash Remoting, ColdFusion, JRun. But sometimes I get lazy. Sometimes I just want to read books about people instead of code. Sometimes I want to read blogs instead of navigating through messageboard threads. And next thing I know people are doing all these super cool things with Flash, and I feel left behind. So earlier this week I had an intervention with myself for not pushing myself hard enough. So today I sat upright with my heartbeat on the roof of my mouth and ground my teeth and pushed myself. I started playing with the Flash Communication Server. Expect to see a live stream of my webcam on here pretty soon. Not because that's something you would really want to see but because it's something I can practice with. And wouldn't it be neat if I have the next teleconference with my boss in Flash instead of NetMeeting? I also read a very helpful tutorial on 3D that helped me code this. So now that the wheels are back in motion, I feel much better. Thanks for asking.
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.: posted by Vera
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I had this really sad dream last night. My dad, my brother, my boyfriend, my friend Julia and I were all supposed to have lunch together or something. I was running a little bit late. When I finally met up with the rest of the gang, I asked "So what are we doing for lunch?" And they told me "We already ate," and I said "What?" Then I found out that my brother, my dad, my boyfriend, and my friend Julia had all COOKED soup together and then EATEN it without me. There wasn't even any soup left. I said "How can you do this to me? This is the WORST you could ever do to me. You all know how much I like not only COOKING soup but EATING it too!" The amount of betrayal I felt in that dream was unreal. I was so hurt that some of my favorite people in the world had gotten together and COOKED soup together and EATEN soup together, all without me.
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.: posted by Vera
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You know how when you're depressed you lose interest in things you otherwise enjoy? That's what's going on with me right now. The February Blues has made me lose interest in blogging. The February Blues are evil evil creatures. I remember at least two times where I had them as severely as this year: 1993 and 2000. In 1993 I hated my voluptuous body and wanted to get a breast reduction. But I couldn't because I was only 16. This depressed me. I felt like I didn't have breasts but utters. In 2000, I was about to graduate from college and thought about the future: a job for the rest of life, maybe a partner for the rest of my life, maybe kids for the rest of my life. It felt suffocating to have to go to work for the rest of your life. It felt suffocating to be with the same person for the rest of your life, and it seemed impossible to be happy and unbored with the same person for the rest of your life. This really depressed me.
This year's installment of the February Blues was brought on by the fork. The fork was a job opportunity that came my way. After the first interview I was convinced I didn't want the job. I went in for the second interview and still wasn't convinced I wanted the job. The facets of the decision sent me into a tailspin of doubts and realizations. I was forced to critically look at my current work and salary situation and reevaluate my career choices and limits. This was not fun. If you lived with me you would know that nothing gets me down more than career crises and job hunts. In the end, it looks like the decision has been taken out of my hands because I haven't heard from the company since Thursday. I assume a neat little rejection letter is on its way. Thank you for coming in and paying a total of $20 in parking garage fees to meet with us for a total of five hours, but we have chosen a candidate who more closely matches the qualifications. While I am somewhat glad to not have to make the excruciating decision that has eaten me for breakfast for over a week, I am also bummed because, you know, nobody likes rejection. So I have passed the fork in the road and am continuing on my journey, but the doubts and critical inner eyes remain all around me while I'm working. I think I'm almost ready for a change, but what kind of change? Do I even have any options? This really depresses me.
If you're reading this, good for you. I am taking this post down shortly because it sucks. The February Blues don't make for imaginative prose.
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.: posted by Vera
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 I just got back from Los Angeles and only have these things to say:
1) When you are on your way to a warm and exotic city like Los Angeles and only have T-shirts, flip-flops and short shorts on you and with you, you shouldn't have to wake up to find your car covered in frost.
2) My least favorite part of a traditional wedding is the question "Who gives this woman to this man?" Puh-lease. Can we say Middle Ages?
3) The Southern California soil engenders some plants that I had never noticed before and that look really REALLY cool and sort of unearthly.
4) I made up a really REALLY cool word that I am immensely proud of: Urbavore. Please don't use it without asking me first.
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.: posted by Vera
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I have come to a fork in the road this week. I can't really talk about this fork in the road because it's top secret, and since I can't think about anything but the fork right now, I don't have anything to write about. And this weekend I might not be able to write anything either because I'm going down to Los Angeles with the boy. So I'm really sorry for the lack of subastral news, my dear loyal reader, but maybe next week I will be able to talk about that glinting fork that's looking at me.
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.: posted by Vera
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It has come to my attention that I don't know what it's like to be one of those girls with really long hair, and that I probably never will. You know, the kind of hair you can swat flies with. The kind of hair that, when you tie your shoe laces, you can sweep the floor with it. The kind of hair that, when you pull on a sweater, you have to bend both arms backwards and dig for a few minutes just to get it all out and on top of the sweater. I have seen people do this. But my hair has been chronically short most of my life. When I was little, I wanted to have long hair, but my mom would always cut it off while I wasn't looking. The only time my hair has ever been past my shoulders was when I was 16. It had taken me about 12 years to get there because my hair was so curly, it always looked like it was a lot shorter than it really was. The longer it got, the more it curled up and the shorter it actually looked. When it had curled up all the way to my ears, I figured I might as well just cut it off all the way to my ears. So here I am ten years later, and sometimes I still get out a pair of tights and put it on my head and pretend and see what it feels like.
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.: posted by Vera
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 Ms. E was awesome last night and I bounced around the basement of Club Six like a rubber ball, but what else is new. I'll tell you what else is new: Volsoc. Wow. After Ms. E's set, two guys with Apple laptops took over, and they were AMAZING. Volsoc is an emerging electro duo from LA. Not only do they dish out some of the bassiest electro I have ever heard, but they also do so in futuristic masks accompanied by distortion microphones that make them sound like sickly robots cross-bred with a singing vacuum cleaner. Watching their show doesn't make you feel like they are from another planet but like you are on another planet.
According to a recent interview, Volsoc also have a creative sense of humor:
"Our purpose is outer-galactic superiority, plain and simple."
"We take what many call 'electro' and regurgitate it, stomp on it, teleport it back to our spacecraft and retransmit it, leaving only the finest points and making sense out of the sonic mess. The vocals are simply one channel of the transmission, a combination of efforts from all involved."
"We are currently brainwashing many different artists, and recruiting only the most advanced and sophisticated programmers."
So that was my first taste of Volsoc. Then, today, I tasted some wine in Napa with my friend Kitty and her boyfriend. We went to several different wineries. The best things that sprang from that were an afternoon hangover and three wine glasses to take home. Oh yeah, we totally only went to the Coppola winery because, you know, He is famous and all, and you can see and touch some of His Oscars in the winery museum. But they surprised us with something even better: coupons for free pizza at Cafe Niebaum~Coppola.
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.: posted by Vera
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I like how the new month is going so far.
First I went to the Veg Fair where I made a new friend that is not only vegetarian AND German, but who also volunteered to be my personal financial advisor and help me open my first IRA! Oh, and she gave me the solid advice of changing my last name (Fleischer) because Fleisch means meat, and how dare I come to the Veg Fair with a name like that?
Then, on the way back from Veg Fair, I was reunited on the phone with a good friend I inauspiciously hadn't talked to in over two and a half years. We were both beaming and squealing with excitement at finally having relocated each other.
Then Hive was live on Future Breaks FM, and he didn't mean maybe either.
And later tonight I'm going to see Ms. E spin! I have loved Ms. E ever since my friend Starrie first sent me a link to MS. E MIX #1 about a year ago, and tonight I am going to see her live for the first time!
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.: posted by Vera
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