Friday Five #2 – Whazzup?

Okay, this Friday five is a celebration of my return to blog! Why have I been away? I’ve recently changed jobs and now am working for a new company. Here are five things to remember when switching jobs:

1. Make sure you have a copy of any personal documents. Once you leave, that’s it.
2. If you are subscribed to some favourite mailing lists, make sure you switch those lists to an alternative email address. (I missed one of mine.)
3. Take personal stuff home over the last month. I don’t know about you but I love to collect. After I’ve been working at a place for several years, I just pull up my chair to my pile of stuff. When I left, I discovered this thing that had been lost under all my stuff that I hadn’t seen in quite a while which is actually quite surprising when you consider how large it is. I think most people call it a desk.
4. Make sure you clean up your space. Remember, someone else is going to be going through that area that you once considered private. What they find will leave an impression of who you were. This goes for your digital area as well.
5. What ever you do, don’t burn your bridges. As much as you might hate working at your previous job, a little bit of political work can help you out in the future. For instance, I didn’t burn my bridges with a company two jobs ago and the interview process for this company was interested in talking with my former bosses. So I was confidently able to go to my employer from two jobs ago and ask for a reference without concern that I was going to get burned.

Thanks for reading.

Friday Five #1 – Contact lens don’ts

I’ve been doing the Thursday Thirteen and following it for a while now so I’ve been inspired to start a Friday Five. Not too big of a list. Hopefully something interesting to read. This morning I almost lost a contact lens that was irritating me so I’ve decided to create a small list of things not to do as a contact lens wearer.

1. Don’t take one of your contacts out when you are outside in the wind in the early dawn. I needed to readjust one of my contacts this early morning while I was waiting for the bus. As soon as I had removed it I realized my mistake. For those of you out there who are new to contacts, you will probably understand immediately. Those who have been wearing them for a while could make this mistake. Of course, those that don’t wear contacts might not get it. When I first started to wear contacts it took me roughly 45 minutes per contact to get them in. The eye has a wonderful defense mechanism to remove crap from hurting your eye. It tears. Believe it or not, a flood of tears makes it difficult to put a contact in. Another defense the eye has to prevent crap from getting into your eye is a reflexive blink. This too makes it difficult to put a contact in. Typically in putting a contact in, I balance the contact on the end of a finger and gently place an eye drop into the contact to maintain it’s softness (contacts can start to dry out in several seconds) and to assist in the getting it to “stick” to my eye when placing it in instead of it sticking to my finger. The contact needs to be placed carefully and quickly onto the eye and then gentle blinking will allow for excessive moisture to be removed and the contact will slide nicely into place. Okay, now lets return to the issue. Removing a contact is a last resort. Doing it outside is desparate. Doing it without any eye drops is asking for trouble. Doing it in the wind is idiotic both because the wind will excellerate the already short number of seconds it takes to dry out a contact and because it will make balancing a feather-light contact on the end of your finger impossible. Performing any kind of contact manipulation at dusk is foolish since you will never be able to find it if you drop it. Okay enough said.
2. Don’t eat hot & spicy wings when your contacts are bothering you. If your contacts are bothering you, you will need to make adjustments and we all know the badness of jalepeneos and rubbing your eyes.
3. Don’t wear your contacts to bed. Ugg. It’s happened to me when I’ve fallen asleep watching T.V. When you sleep, you don’t blink so much. Blinking is a neccessary way of spreading your eyeball lubricant around. Sleeping with your contacts on will result in your contacts sticking to your eyeball in the morning. It is possible to “detach” the contact from your eye and get the blinking going but I’d recommend avoiding this in the first place.
4. Don’t put your contacts in over an open sink. Typically in the bathroom there is a nice mirror hanging just above the sink. Until you become proficient at putting your contacts in, you will probably want a mirror for assistance. If you lean over the sink to get a closer look in the mirror and your contact falls, say goodbye to your contact.
5. Don’t use spit or saliva to lubricate your contacts. Bleck! Your mouth is loaded with bacteria that you need to keep your mouth healthy but your eyeballs don’t need this type of bacteria. Your eye balls are very sensitive and should never be exposed to this sort of stuff. Use proper eye drops or if available, your own tears.

Okay, so that is my Friday Five. Hope you liked it. Later I might even try to put it in some sort of format.

Things not to do

Okay so I got back yesterday on Monday and found that I had forgotten to get my Thursday Thirteen out.  Bummer.  I came up with what seemed like a brilliant plan.  I decided to write a Thursday Thirteen on Monday about why Monday is sometimes Thursday.  It seemed like a nifty idea.  I got to about the fourth reason when I had to take a break.  Bad sign.  By the end of yesterday I got all the way up to 11 reasons.  After that I had to quit.  In reviewing my reasons I realized that a lot of them weren’t even why Monday was sometimes Thursday but more why Monday and Thursday were similar.  A couple of the reasons I found were so similar I had to edit them to ensure they were separate reasons.  It became an excuse pile to try and bail myself out of having missed the Thursday Thirteen in the first place.  I was becoming very sad.  I finally just kept my post in draft and slept on it.  Waking up today I realize that it was foolish and have deleted the draft so that I can move on and keep up my blogging.

So, having written this blog entry, I feel much better.

Tip: How to not have to moderate each comment

Okay so I finally did some looking around the settings of wordpress and finally found the settings which were requiring me to moderate each comment.  What I found was that although I had removed the checkbox which indicated that the owner had to moderate each comment, what I had missed was a checkbox which required first time commenters who had not commented before on my site to be moderated.  This can be found under Options/Discussion where you can find a checkbox for “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”.

This option, by the way, is a genius idea for blogs that are prone to draw in unwanted comments and have a regular following by a stock number of readers.