For the Anime Geek & career musings.

Just a quick note to mention that I've just now discovered Mozilla Firefox 3.6's "personas", or skins. I'm now using a version of "Firefox Girl", an Anime style "Fox Girl", a cute redhead with fox ears and a school girl uniform and a fox tail, lying on her side across a globe of the earth. Ueber-cute and very 'moe'.

I also was compelled to download Google Chrome on my bedroom desktop, which also has a variety of 'skins'; I chose another Anime themed 'skin' for Chrome; I can't read the Japanese characters, but it's probably based on an Anime series, one I'm not familiar with. It features 4 Anime girls, one blonde and three brunettes from light brown to black hair, and different eye colors and various facial expressions.

The reason why I downloaded Chrome is because my earlier version of Firefox was taking forever to load; Chrome was/is much zippier, it was like having a new computer. Luckily I was able to import my saved passwords, etc. into Chrome from Firefox. I then removed Firefox and reinstalled the latest version, 3.6; Firefox is now "playing nice" again and launching more reliably now. Chrome is still a tad faster but I use both now interchangeably.

I experimented with the free software Xtranormal State. It is a good software, but the problem is, the program is so large that it majorly slows down my bedroom desktop hard drive. I will rely on the Xtranormal website from this point on, as I have been doing. I removed Xtranormal State and my computer is back to its old self.

I had problems with an earlier version of Xtranormal State on my Desktop; it was a buggy, early version. I'm going to uninstall it and reinstall the latest version, I think.

I wish I knew how to link two hard drives together; I have a desktop PC in the closet (my mom's old one) that we don't currently use. I know some people use older PCs as servers for websites, etc. That's beyond my current knowledge of how to do it, but another one of those things it would be probably valuable to learn how to do for the future, especially if I continue my career in libraries.

I've been doing some out-of-box thinking, though, and even considering a transition to working in law enforcement. I need to get into better physical shape anyway, and trying to meet/exceed the police academy minimum standards for my age/height would be a laudable goal. I'm also looking into a local Kung Fu dojo as a way to get more limber and flexible, and also revamp my self-defense skills. Whenever I do Yoga, I find myself longing to get back into full-fledged Martial Arts. I'm not considering law enforcement flippantly; I have been pondering it for a long time now. I know people say police are underpaid, but compared to the salaries librarians make, cops earn good pay. Of course, there's the downside of being more likely to get shot at or stabbed, and dealing with the worst scum of the earth on a daily basis. More than a few old NJROTC comrades from my High School ultimately became cops over the years. Not saying I will, too; I'd rather get another library gig.

But I also think to myself that a good, steady civil service job in law enforcement...something I could do for a solid 20 years then either retire or move on to something else (i.e. maybe take law school classes at night and eventually graduate and become an Assistant District Attorney) might not be a bad thing. I'd have to start out as a patrolman, but I'd have ambition to move up and become some kind of plainclothes investigator. Maybe even Texas Rangers or FBI after that. It's a career path I never would've considered with Bush Jr. still in the White House, but with Obama as president, it's no longer unthinkable for me.

Someday I really despair of really making it as a librarian as a career. Libraries so far for me have been cruel and arbitrary places to work, with no feedback and then one day your boss decides she doesn't like you and you're out on your ass. And actually your boss has been seething all this time but like a passive-aggressive little b*tch she doesn't tell you, the onus is on *you* to figure it out, like in a bad relationship. I hate it. Reminds me of my failed marriage a little too much.

As a good friend and colleague (who is a woman herself) wrote to me: "Women can be jerks; if they don't like you, they can twist and manipulate things to get you fired."; Not saying what happened at Tdub was necessarily reverse sex discrimination, just saying that being male in that environment put me at a disadvantage; I was no doubt "tone deaf" to a lot of the emotional subtleties flying all around me, which no doubt cost me time and again.

I grow more convinced that Cataloging is a dead end for me. I need to make the jump to Reference work, but I also need an employer willing to take a chance on me as well. I've also given some thought to teaching English in China (and eventually, Japan) for a few years. The future remains wide open.