Last night I watched Broken Flowers–appropriately enough, by myself at the theater (Bill Murray stars as a loner/soloist). Excellent flick, as your aging, casual movie-goer might say. There's something deeply invigorating to me about watching a thoughtful or well-executed indie film by myself on a weeknight. In this movie in particular, something about Murray's passive energy really resonated with me. Sometimes I find myself walking a weird line between laziness and motivation. To friends and acquaintances, I tend to present myself as an intensely carefree, laidback person, but privately I consider myself very driven and ambitious. Working alone allows me to keep the two fairly separate, so it's interesting to gauge new people's assumptions about my lifestyle/career. At this point, I'd pretty much classify it as a dramedy, like the movie.
Speaking of friends, I have officially received the most delayed reply to an email EVER today, from one of my friends in (seems to be the theme of the month) NYC. My initial email (part of an ongoing series) was sent 8-19-04. Which makes his reply stale by just over a year–or to dairy farmers, “about the time you can market leftover gallons of milk as cream cheese.” It really puts time in perspective though, the fact that a year can go by and you can just pick up where you left off in a written conversation. Plus, since most of the conversation series before 8-19-04 was included in those neverending “Original Message” attachments, I got a peek at what was going on in my life a year ago. It's funny how a baby can really change things. Especially if you don't know where it is (Broken Flowers joke).
I'm not advocating you abandon AIM, but has anyone been keeping an eye on Google Talk? Is anyone getting tired of the inoperability of so many new and different IM programs with one another? Anyone familiar with Skype? On their “Jobs at Skype” page, they have listed the following positions available in Tallinn, Estonia:
Customer Support Person
Senior QA Engineer
Platform Architect
Technical Writer
IT Support / Network Administrator
I can't tell if they're propositioning potentially qualified robots for every position except customer support, or if customer support is the only position not available to a large population of aliens recently discovered in Estonia (which may be a fictitious land for all I know). I'm going to go with the first theory, since I've recently taken a serious interest in the Singularity.