"No other object has been misidentified more often than the planet Venus." - Minnesota's Governor Jesse Ventura, appearing in a walk-in part on the X-Files (!) from about two years ago. Oddly enough, his appearance on the X-Files has gotten no press whatsoever, and the first I'd heard of it was seeing his name on the opening credits. For those of you playing at home, he played one of the menacing Men In Black on the "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" episode, the other Man In Black being Alex Trebek.
So what's going on in the Land Of Ice And Snow? Well, I got a new job. Our department at Seagate (the Optical Storage Group) finally got the plug pulled, and we all got canned in mid-August. We've been expecting this for about six months, and it's been a trying six months at that. My new job is still at Seagate, only I've totally ditched my optics background in favor of "Computational Fluid Dynamics." I will be an air-bearing designer for disk drives. (What's an air-bearing? Think of knock-hockey, where the puck and paddles float on a cushon of air. In a disk drive, the tiny head has to fly a certain distance above the disk surface as the disk spins. The bottom surface of the head has a structure built into it that allows it to fly at a constant height.) Cool, eh? So now you know as much as I do about my new job. The paperwork isn't ironed out yet, and my start date won't be for another week or two. So no more optics. Oh well. My e-mail will stay the same, but I'll be getting new phone and fax numbers.
I did look for other optics jobs in the Twin Cities, but I couldn't find any that looked interesting. I decided that I like Minneapolis more than I like optics, so now I don't have to sell my house and move. Actually, the whole experience has been a really positive one - if I were to knock on 3M's door and ask for a job in a totally unrelated field, I'd get laughed at and turned away. Here, I get to stay in the same company, I get free training in a totally new field (so I don't have to go back to school for yet another degree), and I don't have to move. Pretty keen, if you ask me.
That's been the major event of the summer. There was also the Minnesota State Fair, which featured upside-down rides, animals (including llamas!), and food-on-a-stick. The food-on-a-stick concept was alien to me, but it's a true Minnesota tradition. We have a pork-chop-on-a-stick vendor that does quite well, and rumor has it that there's even a deep-fried-candy-bar-on-a-stick-booth. (I think that may have been a hoax, though.) You can also buy deep-fried cheese curds, but I don't like those for two reasons: (1) they don't come on a stick, and (2) they're disgusting.
We saw a whole slew of movies this summer, the best of which is "Bowfinger". It's similar to "Ed Wood", and it makes you giggle start-to-finish. Other worthwhile flicks: "South Park" was rude but hilarious (it's a musical!), "The Sixth Sense" was thoughtful, "Austin Powers 2" was exactly what you'd expect, and "The Blair Witch Project" was nice-n-scary. I won't even mention the bad movies, the worst of which is "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace". Without a doubt, it's the worst movie I've seen since "Krull". "Eyes Wide Shut" wasn't too good, either.
The radio thing has been moving along nicely. "Crap From The Past" just passed the six month mark in its current time slot, and it's developing a small following. I've been toying with setting up a self-indulgent Crap From The Past website at cftp.org, although I'm not sure what good that would do. (There's already a Crap From The Past webpage at kfai.org.) I'm also talking to one of the smaller commercial stations about producing their Friday night show, which would be a retro-type thing, similar to CFTP. The best part - their call letters are "KOWZ". Yes, KOWZ. Moo. Many years ago, when I was moving away from the east coast for the first time, I had joked with some friends about finding a radio station, KOW. Moo. Well, I found not just one KOW, but several. It's not a definite thing yet, and I'm still looking for co-hosts and an appropriate show title. Keep your fingers crossed, and let me know if you can think of a good pun with both a cow and Friday night in it somewhere. Moo.
Happy Jewish New Year, which is either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, depending on which side of the Mississippi River you live on. Moo.
Ron
