update the first, amazon.com

due to my super-slow internet connection from home (what do i want for free?) i haven't been updating in a while. Today I'll try to bring you back to speed.

The Friday before last, Amazon.com called me on the phone to offer me a chance to interview for a QA Testing Position with the "Communities" group. (They control the uber-annoying "Personalized" portions of the Amazon.com website.)

As a quick aside, if you have stock in Amazon.com, I urge you to divest now. Thier call to offer me (an ex-employee) a position the day after i was paid out my severence simply underlines the type of poor management that is going on at Amazon.com. How can they be expected to be successful with such poor management of resources? They should have placed the highly desirable employees in CS (like myself, patty, coffee, and some of our other friends,) in parts of the company that they knew would be understaffed in the future before terminating our employment, instead of soliciting us after they have paid us each a hefty severance. We all knew that these Testing positions, as well as some System Operator positions, would eventually be opened up. This is just the latest in a long string of nearly suicidal business decisions.

Anyhow (my aside got a little out of hand... sorry.) I interviewed for the job last Monday. It was a gruelling two hour telephone interview that went far, far, in-depth into the internal operations of Amazon.com. I really think I did well. At the end of the interview, they unfortunately expressed an unwillingness to work with my school schedule. (I was willing to work 40 hours a week, but I wanted Mondays and Wednesdays off, (Instead of Saturday and Sunday) and they would not capitulate.) Essentially they were forcing me to choose between school and work. After thinking about it for far longer than I should have, I finally decided to turn down the position yesterday.

update the second, coffeecuppaper bidness card

Even though I haven't been paying much attention to livejournal, I have been working on kristin's business card. I made some minor modifications to the arrangements of lights and darks on the image, so that focus could be placed on the coffee cup that the proletariat in the picture is holding. I worked up some text in the Eurostyle font, and transferred and carved out the whole thing onto a Linoleum block. It all came out well enough, but the text is a little rough. The transfer of the text and image had to be done via stencils, rather than the normal method of "Xerox" transferring. (You see, when a Xerox photocopy is made, toner covers tiny foam balls, which the photocopier then melts onto the paper where the "blacks" of the image are to appear. In a "Xerox Transfer," a fresh photocopy is placed face down on the linoleum block, and the back of the photocopy is washed with an orange-oil based solvent. This is then ran through a press. The citric acid in the wash "melts" the tiny foam balls that make up the photocopy, and some of the blacks from the image move from the paper to the block via the action of the press.) Anyhow, since I didn't have a press, I had to go "low-tech" with the handmade paper stencils.
Anyhow, here is the finished block, which I will print soon in order to test for image clarity. (the scan and the crop makes the text look crooked, but it isn't that bad on the block itself.) After I test print it, I will deliver the block and explain it's use, and then we'll be done.