Learning is fun…. I swear!

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

It’s funny, when I think back on life I realized that I spent most of my time finding ways around doing educational activities. Of course though at the time my mother hated that, she is now the first to point out that doing just that has given me a creative idea generating edge later in life.

However now I take a totally different philosophy. I spend most of my bandwidth downloading educational material. Most of which actually comes off BBC channels that I can not get in America. They have fasinating documentaries on the workings of the human mind / body, educational tv programs about martial arts, even television shows on mind reading, which for me who has always been interested in everything related to the brain / psychology is absolutly fasinating!!!

I do wonder how much of this information is actually absorbed into my personality…. I mean yes, from a factual point, in a life or death situation due to the strange things I have learned I am confident that I could land a plane, perform a tracheotomy, or hotwire a car; but is spending my days learning these things actually benificial, or is it mearly just trivial nonsense?

Luck Happens…. Or Does It?

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

So on Sunday morning I set an alarm to wake me up really early so that I could go to Covance for a week to be a Lab Rat…. Hey don’t laugh, the money is great and if you actually look into it these short studies are completly harmless.

Anyway they think they are an airline or something so they overbooked. so then they go back through your screening labs and your current vitals etc to determine who to eliminate. Well they decided everybody was within normal range on everything, so what do they do then… They throw our names into a hat and made four of us into alternates. Now funny thing about this process, they set everybody up in rooms with a couple other people but all either male or female in 1 room. There are always more guys then girls at these studies so basically they don’t throw the girls names into the hat, now when all was said and done they only kept 8 people, four girls and four guys.

Yes I was eliminated, it’s kind of shady being stuck down to a 50% chance that they will pull my name from a hat. Oh well, shit happens… they are still paying me 200 dollars just for staying over night to be an alternate in case somebody had second thoughts etc.. Not bad for 1 day of hanging around, watching movies on sattelite, playing yahtzee (while some hippie played / sang some accoustic music that was actually very good), a few games of pool, some ping pong, lots of good conversation with the other people on my study (as well as a hot nurse with a beautiful english accent who came from the covance in Leeds) etc… So all in all it was a good time that I got paid for.

I also ended up giving one of the other alternates a ride home, he lived like an hour past where I live, but I think he will end up referring me web design business etc… Hell just for the ride home he gave me 20 bucks… Nice guy, we will have to go out for a beer sometime.

Then I get home to see that US Cellular is appealing my unemployment ruling. I am fairly confident that even if we both show up to the hearing that I will win, but not 100% so it’s kind of annoying. I am however not concerned about money to much these days, it has been a long time since I have been poor and I don’t think I will let myself get back to that state.