Goodbye 2008

The final hours are clicking down here in the Eastern Time Zone on 2008 and like many people before me have said, a good riddance to it. Far too many bad things and not nearly enough good things littered this past year. Between the Pens getting bounced in the Stanley Cup Final, to many of my friends losing their jobs and some very nearly lost their homes, and capping it all off with my dismissal from my job of over 12 years, I am ready to just wrap this year up already.

I had the chance to end the unemployment thing today, the newsstand did call back, but I refuse to call them until the calendar year has ended. It will keep for one more day and I don't want to burden a new job with the curse that is 2008. It all goes to the mojo thing, and what better way to wipe the bad mojo slate clean than with the start of a brand new calendar year. I already have some more radio job prospects and have sent resumes out to a couple more stations with openings or potential openings, and there is a radio jobs career fair coming up the first week of January, so hope bounds eternal.

As if the cuts I mentioned by my previous employer weren't bad enough, apparently they have now blown out the gardening show on Sundays and informed the host of the wildlife show, Scott Shalloway, that they will no longer be paying him, but apparently they gave him the option of continuing on by buying time and making the money back in advertisements. I don't know if he will continue or not, he and I weren't close enough that I would pass radio gossip back and forth with him, but I know when I did his show on Sundays he had a few sponsors so he might be able to make a go of it if he wishes.

Funny thing is, as I am sitting at home today the phone rings and it is the radio station. Greg, who I imagine had most of my work thrown on him, was calling with a question about one of the shows I had to download and put in the system every weekend. The temptation to not return the call was great, but it wasn't Greg's fault things happened they way they did. In truth, there are some real radio professionals working there that I truly admire, and I don't blame them for what has happened. It is just the nature of the business I opted to want to pursue a career in. So I returned the call and hopefully it will help Greg out a little bit. Likewise, while I mentioned that I got the call from the newsstand people today, one of the things I forgot to mention is that they called my former boss, Ron , the program director of the radio station, and he gave me a rave review, so good in fact that when Dee called about me working there she said it was the best reference she ever got off of anybody.

I have a hockey game on Yahoo right now, San Jose is at Minnesota. They had the Pens game on last night, and because they were carrying the Boston feed from NESN, it wasn't blacked out here in Pittsburgh. Either that or they were asleep at the switch again. whatever the case, I would have been better off not watching it, as the Pens lost 5-2.

I banged out the Pogo badges today, they were easy and for my personal I redid a badge that I had already won. I normally don't do that, but since I have been playing Dice City Roller a lot recently, I just redid a challenge form there to get the bonus New Year's badge. Plus by finishing the two badges offered today, I completed the 2008 badge album, meaning I now have three completed years on Pogo, and I am probably withing 12 or so on the remaining ones.

I put in a call to Verizon technical support this evening. Well, not really a call, I did an online chat with them about an issue that has been plaguing my computer for quite some time. Seems that whenever I would play audio or video, the CPU usage would ramp up on my system and the video or audio would speed up. I haven't had the time to deal with it until now, so I webbed them up to see if the problem was something with my system or if it had to do with the signal coming in. While it didn't seem to be a Verizon problem, the techie guy still asked if he could take a look at my system to possibly find the trouble. I turned over the computer to remote assistance, he went dabbling here and there and everywhere and it works much better now. Not perfect mind you, but a lot better than it did. What was also cool about it was that since we did it in chat, there was no accents to try to figure out on either of our parts, and rather than hoping I would open the right file or what not, he was able to just take control of my computer (I still had primary control and could have ended it at any time) and do the necessary things that would have been a pain to explain on a phone call. It's not often I get to say good things about customer service, or pass along a reccomendation, but the Verizon Help Chat is on that very short list of things I would give a thumbs up to.

Okay, tomorrow could be a big day for me on the employment front, so I am off to bed, since last night I was up till about 6am, this morning. Yikes indeed.

But before I go, we need to close out a sucky 2008 in a sucky fashion. Any ideas? Nevermind, I got it. Seacrest out.