James Chamberlin

The last couple of days has been miserable. It’s been unseasonably warm for May. It’s been 93 degrees most of the afternoon and I’m absolutely tired of it. It sucks the life right out of you.

The rest of the week is going to be anywhere from 79 degrees to 88 degrees. It’s somewhat of a relief, but it’s not much.

The job market’s rough. There are a lot of people out of work and a lot of competition for every opening out there. I’ve had four job interviews and I’d have to say the last was the worst. Well, it wasn’t really the interview that went poorly, it was something that happened at the end.

I went in for a position with Sears. I’ve always loved Sears and I thought the entry level job was a good way to get into a brand I’ve always liked. The interview went okay, but at the end, the woman interviewing me said I’d be told at the end of the week or the beginning of the following week if I got the job or not. She was going to present my resume and the notes she took during the interview to the other staff members in the end-of-the-week staff meeting.

I said “okay, thank you” and left.

When I got home, I received a rejection email. What?! Not 15 minutes after I left Sears I was rejected! What happened to consulting with her fellow staff members?

My previously high opinion of Sears took a bit hit last week. I don’t know why they would hire someone who would lie straight to a potential employee’s face like that. I wish the people at Sears would do a review of the local Sears human resource office.

Here are the pictures I promised the other day:

The young man is explaining some design ideas for a ride to a man was told is a new employee, when in fact he’s actually the company’s CEO. In this instance, the CEO is Joel Manby, President and CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment. I believe this was at Silver Dollar City, a park I haven’t been to since I was a child.

I watched a little bit of tonight’s new episode of the reality series Undercover Boss on CBS and was shocked by what I saw. One of the employees of an amusement park showed another employee some ideas he had for a ride and he didn’t pull out a sheet of paper and pen. He pulled out his laptop and on it was RollerCoaster Tycoon.

I haven’t played that game in a long time. Even when I was running RCT Station, I only played the game for a few years. I haven’t had it installed or playing in at least three years. I couldn’t help but be shocked and somewhat overjoyed to see that old game show up on television.

I’ll have screenshots up in the morning.

A week has passed since my sale of DVDs and I’m glad to see each and every one of them has sold. I had 17 auctions and I look to bring in a little over $400 from them all. I could use the money right now. Now I just need to get the winners to pay…

Kudos to eBay for lowering listing prices lately. They’ve had 3-4 sales in the last two months and it really helps. I find myself more likely to list something if I can do either for free or for a reduced price. eBay still gets you when something sells, of course, but every penny I can save is a win for me.

I put up over 20 DVDs today in order to get rid of stuff I wasn’t watching and to bring in some much needed money.

I haven’t had any success with my job search. The job with IGN is still there, but with the economy the way it is, my responsibilities and paycheck have been cut back substantially. I envy those of you with full-time jobs.

I don’t usually blog about movies, but I figured I’d share some quick opinions on the latest box office hit, Avatar. I’ve liked James Cameron’s past work, but I just couldn’t get behind Avatar.

The promos never impressed me and after seeing the movie, this movie reminded me of what’s wrong with the video game industry. So much emphasis is put into stunning graphics that the producers don’t put any work on the story. Almost every reasonably successful PC game now is some pointless first person shooter and the success of Cameron’s latest film reminded me of it.

There’s no question that Avatar looked stunning, but it doesn’t make up for a relatively mediocre story. The love story was worse than most made-for-TV garbage. The militaristic approach to dealing with a pesky a native population story was so cliche-ridden I wanted to vomit.

I lost interest in the film a lot earlier than I suppose I should have. There should be more to a movie than pretty graphics.

Thanks to my Tivo, I haven’t had to watch nearly as many commercials as I used to. The Super Bowl is another story however. While there were only a couple of decent ones, there’s one that I can’t get out of my head lately. It’s from Old Spice and I love it.

I haven’t used a piece of Apple hardware since I was a child and the local school had Apple IIe computers. I’ve yet to shell out cash for an iPod, iPhone, or any of their computers. I was holding out some hope that Apple’s tablet would be something that would make me run out to buy.

As news trickled in this afternoon, my heart sank in disappointment. The iPad is merely a supersized iPod Touch with the iPhone OS.

I saw some of the video demos and everything looked sharp. It was very responsive, but one of the glaring issues I saw was the fact that you couldn’t do much with it. There’s no multitasking. It immediately reminded me of Windows netbooks which restrict you on the number of programs you can run at once.

I had hoped the iPad was going to be a full-fledged laptop, shoved into a tablet form, but the functionality just doesn’t appear to be there and I therefore will remain Apple-free on the hardware side of thing. The only Apple on my PC is iTunes.

It was nice to have some time away from writing for IGN. It’s always good to get together with family around Christmas. Now I’m fighting off a little cold which I came down with a few days ago. I don’t get sick very often. I’m usually pretty good about eating a lot of nutritious foods, but I’ve gotten lazy about that lately and it caught up with me.

There’s not much else to report. I’ve stopped updating TV-Reviewed and am trying to find work outside of the house. It’s not easy. I’ve applied to a few jobs and I haven’t heard back. It’s rough finding a job when there are so many others trying to do the same thing. There are a lot of people competing for just a handful of jobs right now.