Entries from July 2007 ↓

My old (pre-consulting) job had a vending room that was kind of a closet with a window. It might not have been attached to the ventilation system. Anyway, candy in there was kept at a toasty 90-100 degrees, which meant chocolate was halfway into melting. One time, I got a Snickers where the chocolate had held up, but the caramel had all retreated to the bottom of the bag.

And I always resolved not to patronize the over-warm vending machine, but that’s sort of a cruelty in itself - if I could maintain my resolve around vending machines to begin with, I wouldn’t even know that the chocolate is melted in the first place. It’s negative reinforcement, but it’s not negative enough.

My new gig has an over-warm machine in the break room, but at least the break room is nice and cool. I found out because I picked a new Reese’s Crispy Crunchy (NEW! vending machines could actually stun me with electric shocks and I would still go back for NEW candy) and it wasn’t really holding together. I will do my best to not patronize this machine again (although they do turn the coin counter off on certain days - free candy - and ask you to restrain yourself to two snacks), if I can remember.

It’s almost August, which is great for a bunch of reasons:

* back to school shopping has oddly become more attractive to me now that I’m not in school
* there’s vacation (if we’re taking one, which we are this year)
* there’s the fair (go ahead and google “State Fair” - there’s only one that matters and it’s justly the first result)
* it’s possible to watch the Vikings without lamenting the fact that they’re 0-17

July’s not bad, either, but I’m a big August fan.

I spent my first seven weeks as a consultant with a very cool “interactive agency” (they make websites), working on a single site and getting it to the point where they could hand it off to the people they were making it for. It was ASP.NET, C#, a little bit of XML, etc.

My next assignment took me without an interview - the sales people said “Dan’s your guy”, and so I was. And am - the second assignment’s been fun so far (but the drive is a little further out).

The change in responsibility and work has been profound - my first job didn’t give me an email address for the first week, and I never got a phone, so I really had nothing to do but get in and go to work. They were also located in northeast Minneapolis, so there were 800 great places to eat. They want me back for more work, but I’m hoping that every place I go I’ll make a bunch of new friends who would have work for me in the future. (No matter how nice my old desk job was, the only new people I was meeting were the people we brought in to replace the people who had quit.)

So I’m really enjoying it as much as I thought I would - in as little as a year or two, I’ll have a nice portfolio, a bunch of great contacts, and a good picture of the way the world works, which is all I really wanted in the first place.

I’ve been telling everyone I know that I’m playing Guitar Hero II until I unlock that Helmet song. It turns out that the Helmet song, Unsung, is in Guitar Hero - the first game. Looks like I’ll be getting that game before the 80’s version, which came out last week.

I can actually play Unsung on the guitar (anybody can, if they can drop their bottom E string to D), so I don’t know what my rush is.

I went to Macalester, and stayed for a year in the dorm under the bleachers of the stadium. For a year, I went to bed with the St. Clair Broiler’s neon lights coming through the window.

We went there today with Thad and Katie, who just moved up to Minnesota, and who both went to Macalester (but maybe not the Broiler as much as we did). They are renovating, but a sign on the table tells you that they’re part of the so-and-so family of restaurants, with new corporate step-brother Rudolph’s. Nothing’s changed, just you can now enjoy Rudolph’s delicious ribs at the Broiler, etc. etc. (It remains to be seen if this new ownership group has been behind Rudolph’s the whole time, or if they popped up, bought Rudolph’s, and are buying the Broiler just now.)

The Broiler was a diner-esque burger place with Greek emphasis, which meant you could get gyros and gyro salads alongside the featured burgers. (I was a math major with music and philosophy emphasis - that meant that I never accomplished anything meaningful in the music department, and I got a D- in the last class that would have secured my philosophy minor. Unrelated.) But that’s all changed now - food comes on fancy square plates, they’re renovating the whole thing. Everything is kind of upscale-ish, and looks much more serious.

The menu is totally different - it’s got a fantastic painting of the side of the building as I used to see it from my dorm window. Beyond that, it’s exactly like it was, with the addition of ribs. Kind of unfair, when you think about it.

And I’d love to report that they totally ruined the whole experience, but the food was precisely how I remember it. They’re trying unify the whole thing behind a new logo and everybody has a “St. Clair Broiler” shirt, but it was really just the same thing, only better.

This probably won’t work. Checking for the tags “admin” and “tags”.