Steaming Turd

That exciting news I mentioned in my last post has arrived. I just got off the phone with someone at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and they have offered me a job as a patent examiner, starting July 7.

The good news: I finally won’t be scrounging for cash, and I’ve heard the Alexandria, Virginia, area is really nice (not to mention being not-too-far from all the touristy stuff in DC).

The bad news: One, I won’t be finishing my Ph.D. And two, I’ll be moving out of Cleveland sometime in mid- to late-June.

You can pretty much look the pay scales up on the web, so I might as well go ahead and say that I’ll be GS-9 step 8, so I’ll be making roughly $70k a year (the USPTO pay scale is a significantly increased percentage over the base government scale, where GS-9 step 8 is about $50k), and I can get a signing bonus if I agree to stay for four years (close to $9000 a year for each of those years). Full government benefits and all that, too.

Actually, the USPTO has some really nice policies in place for its workers: training academy, paid overtime, very flexible scheduling (they move you to a nine-day-a-fortnight work week shortly after you start, and you stay on that through the academy), and an accelerated promotion schedule (I’d be eligible for evaluation for an upgrade after six months instead of the normal year).

The issue is that it’s a “production environment”, meaning they want you to push those patent apps through as fast as you can while still doing it right, and some people burn out. They hire about 1200 examiners a year because of the high turnover.

But it’ll be interesting to see what people are inventing, and more importantly, I’ll hopefully be able to prevent bad apps from getting through. Oh, and I’ll get a .gov e-mail address, too

I’m a bit nervous about the whole moving thing, though. I’ve lived in this apartment for almost nine years. I’ve never been to the DC area before, and my online apartment-hunting research has been… frightening, considering the number of places I’ve found where people have commented that this apartment or that apartment has roaches, noisy neighbors, or problems with car break-ins and other crime. And the places that don’t have those problems are a good bit more expensive. One of my planned priorities is to save enough money to make a down-payment a house out in the ‘burbs, but for right now, I’ll have to settle for an apartment. And rent is going to be two to three times as expensive as what I’m paying now for a place substantially smaller

Anyway, I’m glad to finally have the job uncertainty resolved - it’s gonna be quite a ride from here!

The Fox News website has an interesting, if pointless, article about the recent upsurge in rickrolling on teh Intarweb.

Edit: Bah! I suppose it couldn’t have lasted too long. Near the end of the article, where they mention three other Intarweb memes, they included “2girls1cup”, one of the most disgusting things on the net that I haven’t seen (I avoid that kind of stuff like the plague that it is). But since it was so over the top for something like that to be mentioned on Fox News, I clicked on it anyway. Rickroll! That’s how they got me. But now they’ve changed it, maybe because people complained that mentioning 2girls1cup on a professional website was too much.

Still, it was hilarious reading all the comments from people saying things like, “OMG, I just got rick rolled by fox news!”

Anyway, since it looks like I didn’t manage to rickroll anybody by proxy, I’ll just leave you with this rather obvious link.

P.S. Exciting news coming in the next few days!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_hci9vrvfw

A statistical analysis of red-shirt deaths on Star Trek.

Homis pointed me toward this excellent composite artwork of Futurama.

So, I was re-re-…-re-watching Empire Strikes Back (which, in adulthood, I consider to be the best of all six movies) the other day, and realized something about Han Solo that ought to make George Lucas feel like a moron. If the millions of voices suddenly crying out that “Han shot first” haven’t convinced him, how about this: Lando and Han walk with the rest of the crew through the halls of Cloud City, Lando says that he’s just made a deal that should keep the Empire out of there forever, doors open, and Darth Vader’s standing right there in the coolest scene in the whole movie.* And guess what, Han shoots first.

Let’s compare the two situations.

Han versus Greedo in Episode IV: Greedo and Han have a brief conversation about how Jabba just wants Han dead now, and Greedo is just the Rodian to do it. Han shoots Greedo first in defense of his own life, and that’s it for Greedo.

Han versus Darth Vader in Episode V: Doors open, Han starts blasting at the first sight of Darth Vader, who effortlessly blocks the blaster fire with the palm of his hand and then takes Han’s blaster away from him from across the table, longways. Vader, known to use the remote chokehold on his subordinates for the slightest display of ineptitude, instead responds with a pleasant invitation to dinner. Fast forward to the end of Episode VI, where we find out that there really was some good left in Vader, as he kills the Emperor and saves his son’s life by sacrificing himself. I mean, sure, there was that whole torturing Han thing, but it’s not like Vader stuck around to enjoy it.

Soooo… Lucas feels some moral twinge of guilt about Han shooting in immediate self-defense, but is all cool with him opening fire just because Vader looks evil.

* I dunno, something about the all-white room, the window in the background, and the all-black and all-menacing form of Darth Vader standing up in front of it. I would have held that shot for maybe half a second longer. And that was just for starters. You add in the total surprise element, Han and Chewie’s quick reactions, Darth Vader stopping blaster fire with the palm of his hand, and then intoning ominously into the silence, “We would be honored… if you would join us.”

Such a work of art can only come about when George Lucas is as uninvolved with the actual moviemaking process as he was in those days.

Happy April Fools’ Day!