Today was better.

It's funny, how small things can make or break your day. Like the inclusion of laughter. This morning, I missed the first train, however it turned out to be ok. Who's riding along on the 8:14 as well as me? Why, it's SkaCore. I haven't spoken to him since last Friday, so it was good to just shoot shit at 8 am, while everyone is grumbling, reading the paper, or asleep on the train (which is what I'm usually doing). At the transfer in Secau-sucks, we got stuck on the open-end of the train, which gave us a nice view of the caboose, along with a healthy dose of that clean, meadowlands air. mmm, exhaust.

No boss-man at work today, so I was on my own trying to get paper maps of the SEPTA system into a digital format. I didn't get done as I wanted to today due to the crap-tacular laptop that decides to crash about every 20 minutes. I feel like Sisyphus, everytime I get close to completion of a section of the importation, the computer comes crashing down around me, and I have to start from scratch again. I can't wait till 1) they order new computers or 2) I get sick and tired of this and bring in my own laptop. Interesting news from work: Our shipment of GPS receivers came in, so for the next week or so I should be testing receiver strength from inside a bus in the urban canyons of NYC.

I was talking to the front-desk ladies today, and found out that I'm older than one of them, yet she's married and already has a one year old kid. It freaked me out a little bit, that here this woman (I thought she was older than me from her looks, and her attitude, but not from her maturity) and she's got a kid, and all these other aspects going on. They asked me if I was married. Do I look like I'm married? I don't even think I'm capable of that at this point. I'm constantly amazed at the various viewpoints of people that I continue to meet. This girl's ideal future, is that she gets fired, so she can go on welfare. To me, that doesn't seem right. The point of welfare is to help out those that cannot hold a job or having trouble finding a job but need to support themselves and their families. It is not for those who just don't want to work. That's what the lottery is for.

Everytime I go to mandarin class, I learn a little bit more about Chinese culture, and find out how much I don't know outside of things that I encounter everyday. We were talking about how one pronounces the year. Before the new millennium passed, I know a majority, hell, practically everyone, said the year as two separate numerals, with 1995 being pronounce as "19" "95" or 1864 as "18" "64". Why don't we do that with the current year...saying "20" "05"? I think, we'll start doing it again with 2010. Just a weird inconsistency I was thinking about tonight on the ride home.

Infinity broadcasting can suck it.

I just found out today, that come December 16th, the station that I know a lot of people grew up on, K-ROCK, is going off the air along with Howard Stern. It's switching format....it's going from the last major station to regularly play new rock music and becoming...get this....talk radio. TALK RADIO??!?! C'mon! This is bullshit. If I wanted to listen to talk radio, I would listen to NPR. Screw that, if I wanted to have a conversation I would call up some buddies, we would gather round, drink beer and shoot the shit. Hell, I would even call up @-ron, at 1800-bose-sucks-balls, and listen him prattle on about the benefits of one speaker system over another until 4 am. This means that solid state is now gone. Booker is gone. Hell, Howard is off the air, and he's been an institution in himself for over the past 10 years.

This is going to add a negative to living in NY. The only commercial rock station now is classic Q104.3, which is a good station, but it focuses primarily on rock from the 70s, 80s and now early 90s. Ugh, that and Z100.3. But that's not even an option.

Other music related news...my ipod has now cracked out and shows the disc-error message, and that all the music files are missing. However, when I plug it into iTunes, they are still somewhere on the disc. This in conjunction with the news from above leaves me in very dire straits. I hope that I was able to move most of my music off of it before the great immigration occurs.

Here's to hoping that tomorrow will be a better day than today.

So today I had my first meeting for Hopstop.com, along with my final day of work at the afterschool program.

On the way into the city, who do I run into on the platform in Secaucus but Kayla Wiener. Weird huh? Turns out she is interning in the art department of Stuff Magazine. Pretty cool.

Getting into the city isn't going to be a problem, as well as getting from Penn Station to the Helmsley Building. It's about a 20-25 minute walk, down E 34th Street and then down Park Avenue. A nice little feature of this commute is that I'm going to have to walk past the Empire State building everyday, as well as through Grand Central and the Metlife building. Sucks to be me huh? Well, everyday is a lie. Right now, I'm starting off as a part-timer, 3-days a week. Which is sort of nice, because I'll be able to focus on the lsats that are coming up in december as well as continue to make some moolah and get more involved with the start-up. It looks like I need to be on site for the first month or two as I get a handle on the information development side, but once that's done, the work can be done from anywhere.

Me and the bossman had about an hour-long chat about where the website ultimately wants to end up as well as user goals. This project is going to be very, very exciting. Some of the ideas are pretty revolutionary as well as the way things are to be implemented. I know this is dated, by the word nifty comes to mind. It looks like I'll be working tuesday, thursdays, and fridays in november and then start full time in december with a benefits package. But before anything big happens, there's going to be a trial-by-fire. Philadelphia. It's going to be my responsibility to get the city of Brotherly Love up and running. I'll have a shaman to guide me, who's been down the path before but this is going to be on my shoulders. Sounds like some responsiblity....ut oh.

I was pretty psyched coming out of the meeting, with good reason to be. I was out of by noon, and so I hopped back into NJ on a giddy transist ride. Getting back at 1:40, I realized I could put in one final day at the after-school program. I thought that yesterday would be my last day, but I'm glad that it wasn't. I had a blast playing wallball, two-hand touch football, connect 4, and using scratch paper. Remember that stuff? Amazing. I need to get my hands on it. Funny thing is, the kids are going to miss me. I was only there for a month, but it felt really rewarding just to interact with them and teach them some new things. A lot of them are from families with no male role-models in them, so it was nice to find out that what I was doing was making a difference. $ Bill gave me this really big hug, and said he would miss me. I definitely think I have to go and visit before I move out of here, make sure the rugrats are doing ok.