Regular Ordinary Day

My trip to Michigan was fun! I learned a bunch of new stuff, including a new PCR technique, and I shared our techniques with the lab I visited. Everyone was really nice, and they all talked about how cute my “rollerskate” was (my Smart car), and not one person mentioned a word about my Atomic Pink hair. Haha!

When I got back, my boss and I put our heads together and we think we’ve fixed an issue that’s been plaguing us since mid July! Go science!

In unrelated news, looks like my old, old website mood theme works again since I upgraded WordPress last night. Weird. I don’t like how it’s in the sidebar of my admin for some reason, instead of below the text box, but whatever. I wonder if it appears in the LJ post?

Guess Where I Am!

Here is a small hint:

6 hours of driving (if you count the hour stuck on the 402 about 5km from the border, sitting in construction with the engine turned off) and my butt still hurts. I don’t think my adorable little car is made for cross-country treks.

The tape on my speedometer worked great, though to be honest I could have gotten by just doing what I do anyway: driving the same speed as everyone else. ^_~

Travelling to the USA

I’m being sent to Lansing, Michigan today/tomorrow for work. Pretty cool! I get to see some new techniques that we might implement here, so that’s fun.

This is the first time I’ll have driven myself to the US, though, and the second farthest I’ve ever driven on my own. (The farthest was to Ottawa -8 hrs – for Sabrina’s bridal shower) Eep!

I’m crossing at the Bluewater Bridge (geez, I haven’t even been over that thing since they built the second one!), so at least I kinda know that area. Depending on what time I get there, I may stop for chips under the bridge. I hope they are as good as I remember from my childhood.

Why can’t I find speed limits for the I-69 online? Is it some secret?
My car’s speedometer only has markings for kph, and I’m not good at doing the mi -> km conversion in my head while driving on a busy highway, so I was hoping to have a rough idea before I left. o_0

Blackberry Pie

So long, Telus, hello Fido!

I finally dumped my old crappy cell phone plan, and got a new one that actually suits the way I communicate!
My old plan was supposedly $25/mo, but with a system access fee, 911 access charges, misc charges, and $0.15/text (send and receive), it ended up costing about $40-45/mo, generally. I got 200 minutes, but I never went close to that limit.

My new plan only has 50 min talk time, but it has unlimited texting and unlimited email and Blackberry Messenger use, which is really what I do most. Not to mention I can actually use the Blackberry Josh got me for our anniversary last year, instead of the crummy $0-three-years-ago phone I was using.

The downside is that due to the Blackberry I had, my only options were Rogers or Fido (owned by Rogers). Rogers was way too expensive, but I can afford Fido. Plus no stupid contract! My contract with Telus wasn’t supposed to be up until November, so I’ll have to pay like a $100 fee, but that would be about the same as 2 months service. I haven’t gotten that bill yet from Telus, so hopefully it’s not too crazy.

I’m not saving any great amount of money, since in order to get a Blackberry plan I had to get a phone plan to add it on to, but the total should come out to be about $37/mo. The savings will more come from the fact that I can actually text people, and not worry about the cost when I get text messages that say “ok” or “:)”. Not to mention, I like typing on the QWERTY keyboard way more than stupid phone typing.

Bye-bye Cable Bill!

It’s official: I no longer have cable.

Woo!

I decided a little while ago that I just don’t watch enough TV to be worth paying for it anymore. I would, I mean, there’s loads and loads of shows I’d like to watch, but I keep doing things with real people instead. Probably better for me overall, and the shows I really need to see I just watch online. I’ve also been watching some of the specials that Discovery uploads to YouTube. Dinosaurs rule! ^_^

I had to give 30 days notice, and pay a $12 disconnect fee, but my 30 days was up on the 22nd, and I returned my digital box and remote control to a Rogers depot last week.

This will save me about $75/month. Holy crap, eh? I was only on the second “tier” of options, too! No pay-per-view, no HBO, no fancy-pants channels except Discovery, TLC, and HGTV. Those 3 were what I watched the most, though, especially Discovery, which is why I was paying for the second tier (which also included about 9million channels that I did not care for). Blegh.

That $75/mo is going right onto my debt, though. I still have a student loan, a personal loan, a Line of Credit, my car, and my mortgage to pay off. Rather than get used to having an “extra” $75/mo, I’m going to put it to work for me where it’ll do the most good.

My goal is to have all my consumer/education debt and 1/2 of my car paid off by the time I’m 30 (2 years in May). My stretch goal would be to have everything but my mortgage paid off by then.

Job Saga IV: A New Hope

So I ended up being a consultant at OldJob. Twice a month on Saturdays. Not ideal, but hey, extra money is extra money. That went on until May, when my old co-workers had a meeting with my OldBoss and convinced her that they knew what they were doing enough to do it without me. Good for them (I remember how awesome it felt to have OldBoss tell us we were not “trained” enough, despite having the old consultant come in for a year) and good for me.

They still owe me a day’s pay, though. 1 month late and counting (9 days since my last reminder and confirmation). Skippy. My next reminder is going to be an invoice in the mail, instead of an email.
I was also promised a letter of reference that never materialized, but I have a funny feeling that OldBoss doesn’t understand the concept of a generic letter of reference, as opposed to one written specifically for a potential employer, and wants me to just call her up if I’m job hunting in the future to ask for one. :/

Same ol’ same ol’, eh?
So glad to be out of there.

My new job, however, is awesome. I’m even allowed (encouraged!) to tell the interwebs where I work: CanWest DHI. We test milk for dairy farmers (as opposed to testing milk for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency). They use our data to help improve the care of their herds, and thus improve milk quality for consumers. You know those ads on TV? “Great cheese comes from happy cows”? Well it’s true. The better the cows are taken care of, the happier they are, and they produce more milk of better quality than unhappy cows.
I use real-time PCR to test the milk samples for bacteria that indicates mastitis.

That’s right, I’m actually doing real science! I have a job doing what I loved doing in school! Even my boss is awesome and nice and fun to talk to.
Sure, some days are a little bit annoying, but that’s the same as any job. For the vast majority, it’s been super great here. I am so happy with my job.
I’m going to repeat that: my job makes me happy.
The cynical side of me says that some of that is a bit of leftover wide-eyed euphoria from being out from under the boot heel of OldJob, but I don’t care. I’ll take it!
Things are better now than they have been in a long, long time.

Money Management?

What do you use to keep track of your finances? Just your online banking? A DIY spreadsheet? A program like Quicken or Microsoft Money? An online app like NetWorthIQ or Wesabe?

I need something easy to set up. Quickbooks was always a huge pain when setting it up for my business, and it was really frustrating to get it all set up, and then have to re-do things because I didn’t do it right the first time, or had to add additional things that hadn’t existed when I first set it up.
I’d like shiny graphs. I’d like a net-worth calculator (do calculators go that far into the negative? Haha). But really, easy/lazy is the most important prerequisite. If it’s too complicated, I won’t bother, and then I’ll simply forget, and that’s not very helpful.

I’ve become really interested in personal finance lately. Or rather, realized that I’d better do something now or else I’ll retire and live in a box. Not even a nice box, like a pizza box.

Anyway, since I don’t want to live in the pizza box, I gotta get my act in gear.
I’m recording everything I spend money on in June (on a handy little PocketMod, because it’s free and tiny). I’ve been to the bank and got set up with a better retirement savings plan and some mutual funds. I don’t have the money to do more than that right now, but I want to find places to reduce my spending, and have more things done automatically.

Nerd Alert! Shields up!

Apparently, I didn’t have enough costuming to get done by/in May, because now I’ve got it into my head to make a costume for the new Star Trek movie, in addition to the three partially completed ones I’m working on for Anime North (one is for Josh). Because I’ll take any excuse to dress up! ^_~

I’ve always planned on doing a Star Trek costume at some point, and I want to be an Andorian. I already have all the supplies to paint myself blue, so why not, eh?

My ST uniform(s) will be Sciences blue, and that works fine with a TNG or DS9 style uniform, but the TOS ones are a lighter (Andorian skin colour matching) blue, and they are all blue, instead of being black with coloured accents. My question is, would it be too much blue, and would it lose the effectiveness that a red or gold costume would have? Kinda like this.

The Lack of Me

I haven’t been around much lately (err, more so than usual). Since October, four of my friends and I have been planning a small anime convention here in Guelph: Con-G.

It was this past weekend, and it was AWESOME! It was bigger and better than we dared to hope! We got about 350 people (about three and a half times what we were hoping for), and have had amazing positive feedback and great suggestions for things to improve upon next year.

I had next to no sleep and very little food and water all weekend (it’s not like it wasn’t provided, I just didn’t have time to go eat or drink, what with running around and making sure things were running smoothly, and averting crises such as when we ran out of walk-in registration forms… twice.) and felt pretty darn hung over yesterday. Ugh. Today is much better, especially after having a debriefing meeting with the rest of the con staff yesterday (remember, there were only 5 of us) and running the numbers and seeing the online feedback. We are already planning next year, though we do hope that it will take a bit less time to get up and running in 2010. We pulled Con-G out of the air with an almost $0 budget in 4 months, but we worked on it practically every after-work moment.
I hope to have a full report up later, plus some more updates on what happened with my job situation, since I never did write up the end of that saga.