spamguy » work

Your Blog Has Been Denied

spamguy — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:35:44 +0000

Mere days after lauding my friend’s craaaaazy new blog idea, I’ve already learned it’s not so crazy new. Behold, Not Hired. It has a catchy title and custom GIFs and everything.

Fear not, wheel-reinventing friend: give it a Rule 34 spin or something and you’ll be back on top of your field.

Objective: To Obtain A Summer Internship

spamguy — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:39:45 +0000

My friend (who shall remain nameless, lest her inferiors gang up on her) is following in the footsteps of blogs that examine human weaknesses. FMyLife logs f-ed lives. So does grouphug.us. There’s even a collection of the ‘mom mails’ that make us roll our eyes, Postcards From Yo Momma.

My friend contributes to the field with Worst Job Applications, which I can only hope is a tentative name that will become less self-descriptive and more artsy in coming revisions. As a job interviewer, she receives self-indulgent résumés and melodramatic cover letters that cry out for public shaming. WJA is her quick and easy vector towards that goal.

She is working off her own received content at the moment, but she welcomes contributions from other interviewers.

The Pen Game

spamguy — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:27:15 +0000

Greetings from Galveston’s TxDLA conference! I have mixed feelings about being here. On one hand, I love the exhibit portion of conferences. Since tagging along to my father’s ALA attendances as a kid I’ve learned to talk the talk, walk the walk, and maximise the awesomeness-to-mass ratio of my schwag bag. Now that I have a job tied to my presence at a conference, the devil-may-care attitude of stealing goods is frowned upon. The background of this conference has little applicability to my organisation and even less to myself.

I still try to salvage a little from my childhood practises by playing the Pen Game. (Not to be confused with Pen 15.) The goal: steal as many pens as possible. Other forms of logoed goodies do not apply. Get co-travellers to compete with you if possible.

My score after Day 1? 5. Laugh at you want for being able to count that high on one hand: I’m working with harsh conditions, like a tiny conference hall barely filled halfway.

Point, Counterpoint

spamguy — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:18:56 +0000

As a UT employee, I’m thrilled to be able to use its resources to continue my composition. Even as a Case Western student, continuing my studies was impossible because I was not in the music major brotherhood. Since taking composition classes was out of the question, learning was limited to me versus a couple aged books from a one-room music library.

A year later, the horizons have broadened. I’m no closer to taking music major classes, and that will probably never change. Instead, I have been given no less than a free pass to a warehouse of music. I park in front of Bass Concert Hall without fear of getting ticketed, wander aimlessly through n-thousand scores, and check out all the texts I want for four to six months. Not days or weeks…months! That’s a semester-long hold.

I had a trial run tonight. I flipped through a reproduction of a 200 year-old score and invested in several volumes about counterpoint: J.J. Fux’s (hold your snickering) The Study of Counterpoint (used by many of the old masters themselves), Walter Piston’s Counterpoint, and Kent Kennan’s Counterpoint. Maybe I’ll toss in a few words here about each volume as I peruse them.