Archive for December, 2007

stumbleupon and stuff

December 18, 2007

every so often, when i’m “surfing the web”, i peruse my blog stats. wordpress does a pretty damn good job of showing how people are getting to your blog and where they’re going when they leave. they also have a good plot-line graph that shows your traffic per day, week, or month. i’m always curious how things are going in that regard.

anyhoo, about a week ago i noticed a HUGE spike!

Stumbleupon Spike

i poked around in the referrer section and found that i was getting about 99% of that traffic from stumbleupon.com. i looked into it and found out that a friend of mine from nintendo posted a link to my site on that site. apparently the traffic immediately started flooding in and continued to do so for about 24 hours. i continue to get about 1 or 2 hits a day from there, but nothing significant since. it’s weird how stuff like that happens.

on another nerdy/computer related note, meredith was transferring some video files from my external hard drive to her laptop the other day and was bothered by Apple’s time estimations, like, “about 1 minute.” she said that computers aren’t people and they shouldn’t act like they are. i completely disagree. i love it when computers “say” things like that. a few days later i found another good example of that sort of thing from flickr. i was testing out the new “edit” feature and received the following message after i canceled the edit.

flickr is people

nicely done, flickr. nicely done.

in antarctica news, things are still going really well, but it’s pretty obvious that we (the galley crew) are all getting tired. it’s been well over 4 months for win-fly and just about 3 months for mainbody, and that’s a long time to scrub the same dishes and mop the same floors. we’ve got about a week until xmas (which will be just as crazy as thanksgiving), followed by the cargo ship off-load in the middle of january. soon thereafter people start leaving, and we will probably be on some of the later flights out around the middle of february. i have no doubts that we’ll make it out alive, but we’ll never be the same. ha ha!

also, i just uploaded a new batch of photos.

Posted in nerdery | 1 Comment »

two down, three to go

December 7, 2007

it’s been another month, another 4 weeks, another 28 days. they’ve slipped by without hardly a notice, and before i know it, i’ll be waking up one morning with my bags packed, the room cleaned out, and that’ll be that; it’ll all be over before it even began. time sure does fly when you’re having fun.

mid-season evaluations

we had our mid-season evaluations this past week. it wasn’t too much of a big deal, just a 15 minute meeting with one of the leads to go over what we’re doing well and what we can work on. they said that i’m doing very well overall, and that even the things i need to work on aren’t that big of a deal. they have to give me something to work on or else i couldn’t improve.

i wasn’t too suprised with what they had to say about me.

first off, they said they really liked my attention to detail. it has definitely come in handy a few times here and there, but they said that at times it can get the best of me when i get a little too focused on the task at hand. apparently i need to take a step back every once in a while and see if i’m using my time wisely. too focused? me? you don’t say.

secondly, they said that i talk too much. jk. well, not exactly. they said that sometimes when i’m working and talking, my work suffers. it’s not all the time, and they’re definitely not saying that we aren’t allowed to talk while working, just that i need to stay a bit more focused sometimes. again, not too surprised.

so, i’m doing well, but sometimes i get too focused and sometimes i’m not focused enough. hmm…

it never gets old

things are still great. i still love walking home in complete daylight after a long night at work, and i still love going to dance parties like every weekend, and i still love washing dishes to my favorite music, and i still love hiking up Ob Hill, and i still can’t wait to come back.

Posted in general | 7 Comments »

next season

December 4, 2007

Worktalk of “next season” begins the moment you arrive on the ice. the contract cycles are arranged in such a way that you never arrive to an empty base, so new folks are always thrown in with the old (who are already thinking of next season).

next season is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. things will be different next season: you’ll have a better job, you’ll have a better room, you’ll remember to bring that thing you forgot, you’ll hike more, you’ll have more friends, et cetera. everything will be perfect. that’s not to say that the talk is delusional; in fact, if someone does come back, the chances of the above mentioned coming true is actually pretty high.

i know that i personally started thinking of next season after only a few weeks, and not because i was unhappy or disappointed with my experience. it was the exact opposite: i was so happy that i couldn’t wait to come back; i couldn’t wait to go through all of it again. i still feel that way (after almost 2 months), and i’m about 95% sure that i’ll be back again next season.

Posted in work | 6 Comments »