A Danae of All Trades

Well, I was right. Setting up email so that I am automatically notified of new mail even at work has helped my focus tremendously. Yay!

I also am on day two of tracking everything I eat, and day three of being a Good Girl diet-wise. Here's hoping I can stick with it and drop many more pounds. Since moving to Canada I've dropped 10-15 pounds and re-gained 5-10 of that, for a total weight loss of about 5 pounds. If it goes the same way this time (lose N, regain N/2), I'll still be making good progress.

However, I am once again struggling with the age old dieting problem : eating enough without eating sweets or fatty foods is hard!

Anyway, lots on my mind these days. Largely happy and feeling like I'm moving in the right direction in most aspects of my life but still stressed out. Nonetheless, below, a silly but half-serious poll, for your amusement. Clicky clicky! Please note that I probably won't do what you tell me to do. I just find things like this amusing.

[Poll #730880]

My head is foggy and I'm tired of reading internet texts that give imprecise, contradictory answers. Tomorrow I should bring a textbook in to consult on this damned thing.

EMF vs. potential difference vs. voltage, as is relevant to a battery (rechargeable or not)

Just when I think I've got it pinned down, I get confused again. If I just had damned equations and a single textbook that I knew was reliable, this would be soooo much easier.

I think I will ask my wolfie tonight too. After all, he's an electrical genius, or so I hear. ;)

Some random updates...
On Effexor, its half life, and my brain
With my stupidly curious mind, I stayed up late last night calculating how much Effexor is in my system based on the half life. I was unable to calculate it accurately to some extent because Effexor is a double whammy, and it is unclear how much of the 37.5 mg is the agent with a half life of 7 hours +/- 2, and how much is the one with a half life of 11 hours +/- 2. But, I nonetheless made some estimates, rounding them to 6 and 12 hours respectively. Even starting from scratch, Effexor hits the "almost steady state" around the 2nd or 3rd day, and is indubitably there by the fourth day. So, by that token, today is my third day back on Effexor after accidentally missing the Monday dose. This may have contributed to the depression and crankiness of the last few days.

On Digital Hub
Blog is definitely dead in the water for the time being, but they've added me to their roster of freelancers, emailed me their guidelines, and forewarned me that pitches for the August issue are due on the 24th. So, creative juices, let's go. Also, they had forgotten to pay me, so I nudged them, and money is on its way. Which is good, since I'd nearly forgotten about this! More money is always good.

On XTRA
You can see my latest article, the match.com one, on Page 20 of the current issue. It hasn't gone up on the website yet, though; dunno why. I'll let y'all know when it does so that you can read it.

On finances
Better than I thought... ~$300 coming my way from Xtra, and just shy of $200 from Digital Hub. Plus about $650 from my tax refund, and the $300 over the course of the year from my GST rebate. All in all, it adds up to: No, I didn't fuck up on all that spending I did, but I came close. I can put this money in the bank to replace the money I spent, be back to ~3 months expenses in savings, and the next time I make some freelance income or have paycheck money left over, it can go to luxuries like a new pair of glasses. w00t!

On volunteering
The Toronto Poly website is getting into gear finally. Admins and publisher level accounts are getting assigned, and soon misslynx will not have to do everything herself! I just wish I had the time to edit and add more content, but I don't expect that to happen anytime soon, with all that's on my plate and the upcoming escape to Ottawa/Midgard. Still, I have been futzing around with it in my spare time.

On my job and career
Today on the phone with rbowspryte, I summed it up. I'm a person of action. I like to decide that something should change, and then put in the work to change it. With a job search, or housing search, however, the effort I put into changing it does not directly translate into results. I can give 100% and get nothing in return, if there are no opportunities out there that match me. This leaves me feeling out of control (and I'm a control freak) and trapped (claustrophobia is bad!). While it never hurts to cast your net wider, applying to jobs I don't want is not the answer. Learning to get over my issues is.

That doesn't mean I shouldn't ultimately entertain other career paths. But I think its important for me to recognize my real motivations. And, really, if I started looking at PIO jobs, I STILL might not find a better situation in short order. In fact, I'm almost sure I wouldn't because I've BEEN checking York, Ryerson, and U of T regularly for a week or more for jobs.

And, yay. My wolfie is here. Off I go!

Apparently, I wasn't taking into consideration
(1) the provincial "basic personal amount"
(2) the EI
(3) That the BPAs are going up in 2006 (I was calculating using the 2005 BPAs)

Having done that, unless I did my algebra wrong, my minimal survival salary ranges come out much more reasonably. I could squeak by on somewhere between:
$16,300 - $22,771

So, switching to only contract would be tight, but even if I got no other writing gigs I would be fine in the range of price I was planning on proposing.

Much thanks to freefloat for pointing this out!

EDIT As much as I might APPEAR to enjoy speculation, I've had enough. I keep on trying to poke my head into the CEO's office to chat about a doctor's appointment this month and to ask him if he's still open to seeing a contract proposal, but he's always on the phone. So I sent him a brief email, reminding him of our conversation and asking if he'd still be open to the idea. We'll see what he says.

Today was a day. It was cut up in part by my first work review.

Good news:

• Membership has ALWAYS been positive about the bulletin, but there has been an increase nonetheless in positive comments, and even comments saying that they feel the bulletin has become more relevant.


• I have a new assignment with that TO paper I was in the other week.
  The editor wrote:
  "700 words? For the middle of next week? With your name spelled correctly by us?"
  
  *giggles* Have I mentioned how much I like this editor?
  
  That'll be another $315 CAD if its the same pay rate.


• Also, I contacted HEM, a small trade pub I've done some writing for. There's a conference on something they cover a lot of in TO mid-November, and so I pitched the conference to her. She said she couldn't guarantee me anything based on the conference website, but that she could probably out of the stuff there find 1 1000 word article. That would be $200 US -- not much, but work.


• And remember, I'm still waiting to hear back on two viable pitches with W, and one with HS

The bad news:

• There were negative comments about my personality that had nothing to do with my supervisor, and quite frankly are true -- I DO need to work on them.


• I told my boss the truth about my supervisor, and he's concerned. Concerned about what I said, and also about my ability to work with her given what I said. He's going to be looking into what I'm saying, unless he was lying to me, but he'll probably also be watching me and the quality of my work more closely. Time to start turning up the charm, high quality copy, etc., and working my butt off!

I don't think I'm getting fired any time soon, thank goodness. He explicitly said that he wasn't going to turn this into a "one of them has to go" situation, since he likes to have employees free to express their concerns in reviews like I did.

So, there you have it.

I'm screening comments because this post addresses a few delicate topics and I have a right to protect myself when I'm vulnerable. So there. *sticks her tongue out at you*

I called the Spectator science editor. She's interested in a story I have.

I wrote a pitch up and sent it to the Toronto Star Ideas editor. About TWO MINUTES later he sent me a thank you for the interesting pitch and said he'd get back to me next week.

And then I got an email from that textbook company I did the mini try-out "contract" for months ago, but never followed up on and never got paid for, asking if I was still interested.

It's raining work!

I also called up Sal. Bros., the fund that's been in backup witholding for more than three years, and confirmed that it had been removed. So, I wrote a letter requesting that they cash my shares in and send me a check. Turns out the fund has been doing better than usual lately (which is still really not very well at all), and I'm getting more money than I expected (which, granted, will be swallowed by my loans right away).

It's raining money and money making opportunities!

The newsletters I write are archived on our website.

Currently, you can select issue date to see all the stories written in that issue.
You can select company name to see all stories tagged with that company.
You can select topic to see all stories tagged with that topic.

You cannot search.

I just had a conversation discussing this with the boss person. He wants to use tagging because it doesn't turn up false positives.

I argued in favour of replacing the tagging system with a search window, because I believe that search is good enough these days that the false positives are rarely a problem, and with tagging, if you forget to tag it or didn't think of tagging it for topic A when it included topics A, B, and C, you simply won't find that article.

But then I thought about how useful tagging has been on livejournal. Then again, has tagging been "so useful" because we don't have a real search function? I must admit that tagging on LJ has been somewhat frustrating for me because I don't have a list of tags I've used before handy, and I keep on making variations of the same ones. With a fresh document at work or on LJ, there are a bazillion different applicable topics with which I could tag. I could sit there brainstorming for several minutes and come up with a huge list of possible tags for any given article or post. I find this frustrating, even stressful, and at work, I find it to be a waste of my time (not that my time is at that much of a premium, but the truth is, I don't want to do it; it's tedious and frustrating).

In many ways, tagging vs. searching is like the difference between folders in a traditional email application, and search on gmail. A lot of folks tell me that they don't miss folders, because gmail's search function works so well.

So, I'm wondering what you guys think. If you were going to choose one as the reader, which would you choose? Tagging, or searching? Obviously, both could be implemented, but does the tagging really add that much value, to be worth the amount of time and effort it would take to add the tags?

Let the debate begin!