BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

Well, fun, but mostly really just profit. So yesterday my boss asks me to take a look at the website and see if there is anything that needs to be changed around in the parts descriptions (for their own sake, but also because of what I’m talking about), or if there are any fairly big changes we could make to improve our page rank in Google. Well, if you wonder over to google and type in “total control solutions” or something of that nature, our page is the first link. So I wondered what I can do to improve this. So I go here and start reading. Then I spend most of the rest of the day running searches with our part descriptions, and then slowly take out words one at a time and seeing where we land.

I thought Daniel was full of crap when he said he hurt his finger from picking points in after effects, but I’m proof, you can hurt your finger by over-using the mouse. My pointer finger hurts like hell today. I think it mostly just needs to build up some endurance.

So, I came up with some words that I thought need to be tossed around the site more, but I’m open for some ideas. Which is where you guys come in to play. I would like you all to go to our website and look around a little, and see what we do, and suggest some ways I can help the site improve our page rank. Remember, we sell computers to whoever will buy them, but mostly just industrial style OEM’s buy from us because we do volume and custom stuff. Anyway, besides that, if you threw a random link in your blog to the company that would improve the page rank as well. Maybe not by much, but some. If I like your input I will suggest it to my boss when we go adding more to our “applications” section in the near future.

Also, when posting your comments I want to try something new. So go to this site and create a name, or just ignore me if you already have one. Then when you go to post a comment click the link that says “sign in” above the comment fields, then when it comes back to my site, click on whatever you were going to click to post a comment and hit refresh when the comment posting page loads. This should make typekey work, and typekey is a handy thing.

Well, lunch is over, time to get back to work.

Oh, before I go, my Ipod order is waiting at the company who is going to ship it, and I’ll get it when they get in more stock. And one person signed up for my TV link…please, if you are remotely interested, check it out, I have some new links up on my site now…feel free to use them to sign up.

Starting to get the wedding pictures online…the link is below.

http://bigcat.chaosnet.org/gallery

If anyone wants the huge raw picture files I can send them to you somehow (they are in the 15 to 25 meg range per picture) so you have to let me know if you want to make prints or something, so I can send you the files you want.

Also, I believe Champaign is starting a big 40 days of purpose campaign. So I figured I’d just piggy-back off of that and read along at the same time. So if anyone wants to join with me on this “40 day spiritual adventure” I think I’m just going to read it and maybe if people are interested I’ll start a little small-group like thing to work through the materials for that.

Anyway, if anyone around here is interested leave a comment, cuz otherwise I’m just going to read it with Lauren and not do anything else. I am hesitant to try to start anything to attract new people to our church with this since I have been busy and haven’t tried to advertise, or do anything to invite people. I am going to say that I challenge any of the anti - Warren people to join with me and finally put up and read the book or shut-up about how much it sucks. I get annoyed with that…hence why I have been on both sides of this fence for and against the whole Purpose ™ thinger, and now I am going to finally decide if this book is worth the paper it is printed on (for me anyway).

Champaign people, post a comment, and let me know when I have to start reading to track with the Sunday sermons and small group tapes. Minneapolis people tell me if this sounds interesting at all.

I did in fact walk into a womans restroom by mistake today. I was feeling pretty spacey. I think it might have been because I had just gotten off the phone with a recruiter talking about a position with a company he represented. It is a manufacturing job working with power generators, large scale and small. It could mean designing things and working on a manufacturing floor. I’m hoping that turns into an interview. We were at target, and then we went and bought groceries. It is going to be fun having tacos and watching Smallville tomorrow. Lauren and I invited some of our neighbors over for that, and we’re hoping a few come. Also, all the people I know who can get here are invited, but I figured I emailed most of them already, so posting about it is redundant.

While I was hanging up pictures and towel racks for Lauren today I got a second call. This one was a guy calling me back who I sent a resume to, who works for a company that sells industrial level computers to manufacturing plants. The company is called Total Control Solutions and it looks like it could be right up my alley. He said this was an entry level position that isn’t so much about sales, but more about helping customers with upgrades, and things like that than sales. Anyway, pray for me, because I would love to have either of these jobs as far as they look so far.

Besides that I ordered an HP Ipod, which is an apple Ipod, but sold by, and serviced by HP. Also, it is like a first available kind of thing from the site. If you order the apple you get the apple ipod, if you order the HP, you get whatever is available. And, since they just came out, the HP’s are more available.

Also, I’m working on a CD that installs windows XP, all the right drivers, and all the software you actually use, right in the XP install, so once the desktop comes up, you have all the programs you need, and less overall reboots. But it is kind of a steep curve to figure all the stuff out, which is why it is taking me so long to reformat my laptop, which is in need of something (hopefully the format will fix it) because it is just not working right at all.

That is about it for today. Later.

OK, so everyone who has signed up under me, make sure your account is verified. That means if you signed up with a hotmail, gmail, or AOL (i think that won’t work anyway) Make sure you switch it to a university, or private account becase your email has to be verified for me to be approved. This is not a big deal, you just log into the site, and go to the “my account” section. Then change your email address, hit update. Then there will be a link about your account being unverified so far. Click that link, they will send you an email, then check your email account and make sure you follow their verification link.

When your done with that, leave a comment to let me know it is OK to go ahead and try approval. I’ll let you know the approximate time it takes to get approved after that, just so you know about how long these things take.

Now, back to my cover letter.

So Lauren and I wanted to do some errands today. We opened a checking and savings account, we unloaded some of the water bottles for the church thing from the Beamer (which was so loaded it was riding on the axle yesterday) and we went to drop some stuff off at goodwill. The goodwill closest to our house is a goodwill outlet. Just seeing a Goodwill Outlet sign amused me, but what was to follow amused me much much more. The sign said, parking around back. So we pull around to a seedy back parking lot and go in a door that opened up to a bunch of piles of crap, and some loading dock style sorting belts. There were lots of freaking looking people from all across the ethnic board in that place. We had our good ol’ white trash, which I can spot form a million miles away anymore, and we had black, middle eastern Muslims, a few Asians, and some Latino people in there. All rummaging crazily through this pile of crap like it was on blue light special on Christmas eve or something. They are just tossing crap on the ground, there are piles and piles of nasty looking shoes, and some magazines and books. I get amused by the fact that there is a “Playgirl magazine” in one of the piles and point it out to Lauren, who is of course disgusted, but then I see one open to some naked guys, and I’m all “Hey, there is an open one.” Lauren only half heard me so she looked to where I was pointing and exclaims “EWWW, gross, I don’t want to see that, why would you point that out.” and my response was simply, “did you hear the noise you made?”

Good times, I laughed at that for a while, that place was amusing in a scary sort of way….Lauren was just scared.

It turns out that you can’t drop off stuff there, so we followed a check-out ladies barely understandable directions to another place that was much much nicer looking, and they were really cool when we dropped stuff off, and we went inside to look at the stuff they had, and we found a couple of nice coffee tables that we liked and they were about 13 dollars a piece. Which is about 50 to 100 dollars cheaper than anything relatively close to as nice looking as these. So we bought one of them, decided not to get the couch because we have a full sized couch and need a love-seat, not another giant couch. And now I am going to ask Jeff if I can borrow his truck to go get it in a while.

That was my adventure for the day, besides that, I posted my resume to monster dot com, and I am sending a copy to one of Dan’s contacts at IBM soon. Also, tonight I’m going to ask Caleb for a copy of his list of temp engineering places and start calling them.

Besides that check out thisfor a neat deal on some free stuff.

Well, I woke up about 3:30am and haven’t been able to get back to sleep. I prayed for over an hour for the church plant team, all my friends and my immediate family, as well as myself. And I listened quietly, didn’t get much of a response and I didn’t fall asleep, so I’m up. I’m working on my resume, which is interesting. Professional resumes are different than student ones. I hadn’t thought much about that until now. On the upside this makes it a little easier to push my good side, while downplaying my bad. I’m eliminating all my stuff about school except a line that says I graduated recently from U of I w/ a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering. I’m cranking up the last two jobs I have…passing one of them off as a small scale manufacturing job (Dan’s idea, not mine) and moving a bunch of stuff below that. The best looking resume examples I’ve seen online look like that, so that is what I’m going for…emphasizing the work experience….de-emphasizing the GPA. I might put mine online after I finish it, which might be later this morning.

My Dad just left too, kinda weird. He called me yesterday and said “hey, I just got back into the states, is it OK if I stay at your house tonight, I’ll take you out to dinner.” I of course replied yes, I would have let him stay without the dinner, so I was thinking bonus (we went to outback just outside of St. Paul, and Lauren invited the waitress to our church…but that is another story and I’ll let her tell it). He showed up with a guy named Ken Couch (sp?). He is another pastor from the Illinois Great Rivers conference, and he had just spent the week with my Dad fishing in Canada. Apparently I know his daughter Grace, who is Kameryn’s best friend, and Kameryn is Scott’s sister. Small world. So that is cool. It was nice having Dad stop in and see the place. He seemed to like it, and he prayed over the house with us last night, which was totally cool.

My cousin Dan called me today and gave me some contact info to hopefully get me in the door at IBM. No promises, but they have stuff all over the place around here. I’m not sure how much manufacturing, but at least I have a guy who is willing to circulate my resume inside IBM. He lives in Rochester (at least an hour…probably an hour and a half in traffic) and works there too, so if I got a job out that way it would be a good commute, but do-able. I still need to call my Grandma and get her sister and brothers numbers. They both live in the area, and they wanted to get in touch with me sometime. My great uncle Paul (grandma’s brother) apparently owns an 8 million dollar house on some lake around here, and my great aunt Jane has a son-in-law that does recruiting for some engineering places. So that might work out in my favor as well.

I’m extremely happy I tried this free Ipod thing. Not just because of the free Ipod, but because we tried out this blockbuster thing where they mail you DVDs in little envelopes that have return postage paid on them. It is sweet. They mail you three from a list you pick, then you just drop them back in the mail, and when they get them back you get the next three on your list. And this costs $20 after the two week trial is up, which is a pretty good deal considering there are no late fees. I guess some companies are figuring out that paying on a consumption basis isn’t what the consumer is asking for (I’m looking at you RIAA and MPAA…not to mention the people hounding the makers of TiVo and ReplayTV). Rhapsody, OnDemand cable, and this blockbuster thing are the wave of the future my friends….wave of the future. You can either get onboard now, or spend a lot of money lobbying and fighting the same progress in technology that got you where you are today and loose. It is inevitable, sooner or later you will realize the hackers will always win this, until you change your buisness model. Stupid record companies. Anyway, I need people for the flatscreen one because I have a tiny 13 inch TV and it sux…I would have signed up for this first since it is more important, but I found out about it later. So if you are even remotely interested in the blockbuster thing, give it a quick shot. (the blockbuster thing even has TV shows on DVD available on the site…thats right all you buffy/24/westwing/alias fans….tv shows on DVD w/ no late fees)

Jeff has been giving some great talks lately. Lauren and I are very impressed. It is great to follow a guy who has vision that I can get ahold of. Sometimes people have vision, and it is good, but I can’t catch on to it. Plus, my view of upper level leadership in the church is a leader who gives the people under him vision. He has been talking about some great stuff, and his prayer life is way up right now, so it sounds totally in tune with where we all need to be, and the vision he is laying out sounds like the vision I want for myself and the people I’ll end up leading. It is way cool. One of the really neat, but simple, ideas he has been giving us is that if we pray a lot, and really seek to be changed by God, then sooner or later our will, will become what Gods will is. Our dreams will become Gods dreams. There is a freedom in doing what you want, and having God say, “yeah, that is what I want.” Of course this could get out of hand and this is the sort of good idea that can lead to bad things, but people are around to keep eachother in check, so I’m not too worried about it. Also, thinking about my expectations for myself and anyone I’m training to lead, I’m starting to think that if I expect more, I’ll get more. Like I will work harder to train those people, which will in turn help me grow, which will help other people I’m leading grow…that kind of cycle. Like expecting myself to pray more and voicing that I expect anyone under me who wants to be a leader to pray more…that kind of thing. Anyway, it is an interesting idea. That sort of attitude worked well with our ministry time in our old small group, and I think Dirk and Chris have carried it on after Lauren, James, and I left, and they seem to be growing and doing well again…so that is cool. The only hitch in this is that if I set my expectations much higher than they are now, I wouldn’t have met those expectations when I took over leading a small group. Eh, just a thought…and a nice way of looking at things for now I guess. I’ll worry about it a little more after I have a group to work with.

Well, I’ve written quite enough now…so back to the resume.

Ok, so I found an article on Wired about how this isn’t fake. You can check it out here.

Also there is some other stuff I’m going to try out like freeflatscreen.com or something like that where you can get a free TV.

I found out about some of this stuff at freeipodguide.com

Anyway, if you are interested in this stuff let me know cuz I have four people and I don’t want to have more than five, so this way we can spread the love to the people who have already signed up under me.

Later