being serious for once - a tribute of sorts

ive never been good at expressing emotion, deep emotion that is. I express outward displeasurement all the time and occassionally something joyful will grace past my lips. Generally sadness, disapointment, other of the darker emotions typically get burried deep down and only bear themselves when they absolutely must.

grandpa died on saturday. after a long bout with emphasema. Not necessarily a painful way to go, but oxygen is esentially the most basic thing you need in life, to keep living, to keep breathing. He couldnt get any so he stopped trying. At least he was at home, with grandma, and others perhaps. I was not there, I am not going either. Mom and Dad will go and represent for us, show, emotion, for us. I will stay here and keep on what I am doing, keep on with my life, while remembering his.

After I heard I didnt know what to think, what I should be thinking. I knew it was coming, that it would come eventually, soon perhaps, and then it did come. So what was I suppose to think, when i knew it was to be at any time? I remembered. I will try to always remember, though we were not close, in spirit or distance, we did have some kind of bond, through blood, through family.

We walked out by the lake, in the city by the lake, and sat and looked east. We were not looking at anything, but everything. We sat and looked to the east and remembered...

Update to ball lickers

In the last year or so, since the last time I checked at least, there have been an additional 200 references to the phrase "They are the ones who are the ball lickers" listed at google.

teh intarweb r0x0r

(p.s. there are currently no google results for "teh intarweb r0x0r", maybe there will be one now. check back in 1 year for results)

I got blog spammed.

I dont think this makes me famous or anything but I was spammed in the comments section of several of my posts. Matthew Arata lives here got 3 comments for different sites that looked like either attempts to drive traffic to an adwords campaign or some other weird thing. I think probably more for adwords in an effort to increase page rank or something. I hope that it doesnt continue as I would really like to keep the coments section alive to see if anyone actually comes and reads this.

Job interview

No I did not go to a job interview, I was to be the interviewer. We at my work are looking for a general office assistant / billing representative / etc... So I posted on craigslist. Easy enough right? We get back a bunch of resumes and I weed them down to a few. At the top of my list are 2 women who look fairly qualified to do the job. After emailing both of them with a few "can you write a decent email back to me quickly" questions and discovering that at lease one of them did similar work at her last job I proceed to give them both a call.

I get through to one of them and she seems good on the phone, answers my questions easily, dosent sound like a total moron, which basically qualifies her to come to the office. Lets call her Mandy (not real name like it even matters) but that sounds like a good name. I tell Mandy to come to the office the next day, on Friday morning at 9:30 AM. This would give my bosses both the chance to be available to talk with her as one was going out of town for a few days and the other was tied up for the afternoon. She agrees to come for the interview. I clean up the office a little so we have a chance in hell of her actually wanting to work for us.

Next morning rolls around, 930 rolls around and no Mandy. 945, 10, 10:15...no show. No call, no email, nothing. I think that well, maybe something happened, she got lost, car trouble, didnt have the phone number, whatever. So I email her a few hours later to see if anything was wrong, why did she miss the interview etc.... I didnt hear anything for the rest of the day. I thought it was kinda strange, but things do happen.

Over the weekend I get an email back saying yes there was an emergency. She said she did call but I didnt answer and she felt weird leaving a message (I call bullshit here as I was at my desk most of the time and I see on my phone if I miss a call) but whatever. I decide to give her another chance and tell her by email to give me a call on Monday morning if she was still interested in the position.

Monday rolls around and Mandy calls. She said again that she did have an emergency that she had to take care of. I asked her again if she was sill interested in coming to the office for an interview. She said yes she was. I checked with one of the bosses for his availability and the time was set for Tuesday morning again at 930.

Well this morning comes and goes. Again, no Mandy, no call, no email. Nothing. WHO DOES THAT?

Really. Who sets up an interview, twice, and blows it off, twice? Who takes the time to call and fain interest only to flake out the next day. Did it waste my time? No, not really. I worked on other stuff when she would have been there. But still, at least have the courtesy to call and say she was no longer interested, didnt feel like coming downtown from wherever buttfuck she lives, whatever. Just call and lie to me or something. Do people do this a lot? Do people set up interviews and then blow them off all the time? Maybe she found a different job in the time between our call on Monday morning and Tuesday morning and was so excited that she didnt remember to cancel with me. Even if she didnt, that would have been an acceptable lie to tell me, that she had accepted a position elsewhere and thus didnt need to meet with me.

I dont get it. If someone could explain it to me I will give them a dollar.

I guess I get to go back to the pile of resumes to see if I can find some more people to call.

looking for zelda tab

I very much like the version of the Zelda theme song as recorded by the Minibosses. I believer it is 2-part guitar plus some simple bass line underneath. I would like to learn how to play this ont he guitar, except it is very difficult if not impossible to find this tab. If anyone comes accross the tab for this song please let me know.

This guy is not me. Matthew Arata lives in Chicago.

A google search of the term "Matthew Arata" in quotes produces 204 results. On the initial page of results, 9 out of 10 are directly related to my personal presence on the internet, mostly related to PR that my company puts out with my name on it, some theater stuff and my personal pages.

HOWEVER

The first result is NOT ME!! - som guy in Oregon who is building a plan like 10 years ago. So This is my little attempt to stear another related link to myself boosting my ranking.

ebay rulz and sucks

People will buy just about anything on ebay. I have sold several different items on ebay in the past that I never thought anyone would actually buy, but since I was listing other more easily sold items I thought why not put this crap up for sale as well. I already had the camera out etc... Some of these items include:

-a set of 2 plastic wall mountable coat hooks . Retail value $3-4 for the set i think. Someone bought them for $1-2 plue $6 or $7 for shipping. Since I had used these coat hooks for a while I feel that the investment was profitable, and the person whol bought them either lived a million miles away from a wal-mart or forgot that they had to pay for shipping as well, but went through with the transaction anyway due to the nature of ebay.

-a crappy black cowboy-esq hat - which was in terrible shape, but i suppose someone could have taken it to a Milliner (someone who makes or repairs hats) and had it reshapped. Though for that much money I think they could have just purchased a new hat. Similar to the item above.

So why do people find it necessary to purchase things on ebay that cost more than they would if they were to go to a local store and purchase the same item? It's not like these items I sell are rare or otherwise hard to find.

Though I guess I am slightly dumb for selling some of this stuff, like this one:

v-tech 900mhz cordless phone. (the phone kinda works, but the battery sucks.) I sold it as is, what you see is what you get and made no guarantee of workability. It sold for 99 cents. The final transaction broke out like this:
sale price .99. Guy paid $8.13 including estimated shipping (for a 99 cent transaction mind you). Shipping actually cost $7.19 leaving 94 cents. I had to pay ebay 60 cents to list the item leaving 34 cents. Then paypal took their fee of 54 cents leaving me 20 cents in the hole. (i also used about 50 cents worth of bubblewrap from my work). So if I had to buy the bubble wrap, I would have been more than $1 in the hole for SELLING something on ebay. Ebay made money, paypal made money and UPS made money. The guy got an $8 shitty phone and I got nothing... well nothing except I dont have an extra shitty phone sitting around in my apartment, and I didnt have to send it to the landfill.

The internet economy at work I guess. Oh and I am sure blogger is somehow making money off me right now as I type this post...