Dead Blog

I've taken a leave of absence from blogging from an indeterminant amount of time. I may return one day, but not at this site.
For more up to date Travis stuff go to: http://www.travisulrich.com

Jobs Galore!

So for those of you who haven't heard, I recently got a job. I followed my Mom's advice and checked out Confederation College's Job Connect. There I found a job for a "Assistant Graphic Designer" - "Must be proficient with Adobe Illustrator and Mac OS". Bingo! I saw the job ad at 2:00 pm on May 24rd and was working there, at Sportop Marketing, at 8:30 am on May 26th.

My first day on the job, I get a call from ManPower, a placement agency I had registered with. They had an "assignment" for me. I graciously declined... By graciously declined, I mean I never called them back. They hate it when you go through their 4 hour skill assessment process and then go get a job by yourself.

The job is great. I get to do graphic designing, full time, and it's mostly very interesting. Sportop does work for pretty much any business in town. Of personal interest, they do the jerseys for the Thunder Bay Border Cats and the Lakehead Thunderwolves.

Today I got a call from Northern Ontario School of Medicine wanting to interview me for a job I applied for. Unfortunately this call was during work so I couldn't talk at that time and asked if I could call them back. I had planned to call back during lunch but I forgot the phone # at work so I waited until my afternoon break to call. By then though, it was too late. I was told that all the interview positions had been filled and they could not fit me in anywhere. Grrr!!!!

In the end, yes, the NOSM job would pay $200 more per month but I was really wanting the job offer to so I could convince Sportop to up their pay (I figured I could possibly get them to up it $160 more) because it would be a real heart-breaker to leave such a great job.

So despite the disappointment of not getting a shot at the NOSM job interview, I celebrate my new, great job.

My Dream Dream

No one got the Simpson's reference, hey? I know for a fact that Patrick Larin would know exactly where it's from, but I'm guess that because of the shear size of my last blog (and the fact that is was a lot of me geeking out about Nintendo's new video game offering) that few read it.

I've been having more and more wedding related dreams lately. A couple nights ago I dreamt that BlackMamba had lost my MacBook Pro, err... wedding ring (just kidding, Honey).

Last night I dreamt that I got a phone call from my former boss, Jodi Carlson (now Jodi Kurzhals). For some reason the Action for Neighbourhood Change needed to do a weeks worth of work in Australia and she wanted to know if I could come along from July 7-14, I could bring BlackMamba along with me. I would meet with her later to confirm whether or not I'd take the job.

So all I had to do was convince mt fiancé that going to Australia for our honeymoon would be better than Chicago, even though I'd be working.

Soon after I woke up. Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM, which is NOT against multiple sclerosis) has yet to call me for an interview. BTW, I applied for a job at NOSM.

Wee! Err, Wii!

Geek Alert: Women and children may want to take cover.

This past week the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) took place in Los Angeles in the Staples Centre (where the L.A. Lakers play... Go Suns!). This is an annual trade show where videogame hardware and software developers get together and show off what big projects they've been working on since the last E3 to technology-based journalists and nerds who have enough expendible income to travel to LA and purchase a ticket to the event.

In the past one or two years, I've gone from a hardcore gamer to a more casual gamer. In today's video gaming world it seems like 95% of the games that come out belong in only a hand-full of genres with one clear leader in each followed by a bunch of clone copy-cats. Furthermore, pretty much any game worth my time is worth too much of my time as it would take an extremely long time to completely go through it from beginning to end. So unless it's a "must have, killer app" then I can't bring myself to log much time into it.

Enter the Wii, Nintendo's newest hardcore offering. The Wii has come up with a whole new controller scheme. In one hand you hold what looks like an ordinary TV remote with a few buttons on the top and a finger trigger button on the bottom. Attached to it by a chord is what looks like half an ordinary gaming console controller (called "the nunchuk") with a thumb stick and two trigger buttons. Both peices of the controller or motions sensored so they detect movement from the controller in the hand of the user, and the remote can be pointed at the screen and used to select different areas on the TV screen. So, for instance, in a shooting game, instead of using the analog pad (or joystick for you old school gamers) to move your cross hairs at the enemy, you'll just point at him on the TV screen and fire. One cool feature in an upcoming game called "Red Steel" for the Wii is that if you turn the remote sideways, your character turns their gun sideways. (Two points to the person who quotes the Simpsons reference to: A sideways gun). But being able to point at the TV screen and shoot something is nothing new, Duck Hunt has been out since 1986. But somethings that the new Wii controller can do that is new is: It can be swung like a bat to hit a pitch in a baseball game, or like a golf club. It can be used like a fishing rod in a fishing game (yes, they exist). The Wii controller is a sword, a tennis racket, a fly swatter, the possibilities are endless.

I don't think that the Wii could turn me back into a hardcore gamer, but I think it's the right system for me: Something that is going to be fun and not have a plethora of crappy games to sift through. Hey, maybe I could even get Black Mamba into videogames?

And Wii will also have the "must-have, killer apps" such as Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Metroid Prime.

The broom

I haven't updated in a long while. Here's a picture of the broom. It has since been removed.

Our House... In the Middle of Our Street...

After my exam, which went well by the way, I went to the lawyers office to pick up our key. I waited until Sylvia got off work so we could enter the house together.

I recorded a video of us opening the door for the first time and entering to find a card and bottle of wine left for us by the previous owners then the batteries in my camera died. Which turned out to maybe be a good thing because the former owners also left plenty of other items that we had not requested: some ugly dishes, a few items in the fridge, an old wooden green chair that looked like it had been through a war (which I immediately broke apart and threw in a garbage bag). They left two bags of garbage behind (which, to their credit, they did apologize for in their card), many beer empties in the back porch, and various items in the basement including a broken beer bottle. The topper of the undesired left goods came when I joked that they should have left us a broom, and then right beside me was what looked to be an old curling broom. I went to lift up the broom and it was stuck to the floor! It looks like it was used for staining and then just placed in the back porch.

Besides the disappointment of not arriving to a spotless house, we are very pleased with our little home. That night we had a showing in which our immediate families came to look around and laugh at the broom stuck to the floor. There's a lot we want to do but first we need to clean up and move a bunch of stuff in.

I'll update later, and I'll try to get a picture of the broom.

We get our house today!

It seems like it has taken forever to get to April 7th, but now here we are. Unfortunately, before the house stuff, I have to write my Final Exam for Managment Information Systems at 1:00. Hopefully I won't be too rushed to get out of there. After the exam is finished I'm heading straight to the lawyers office to pick up our keys.

More on this later.