I have been looking for employment recently as my last contract came to an end. In the process I have been talking to a number of recruiters. Several of them have commented that they have checked out this site, having seen the domain on my email address.
Of course I write entries here with the knowledge that anyone and everyone may read them, granted very few people actually do. But given the unknown audience and how it may impact me personally and professionally in the future, I try to keep this site fairly uncontroversial.
The problem with that is that it frankly isn’t very interesting and thus doesn’t have many readers. My life today is not all that exciting or scandalous but perhaps I’d have higher readership if I did include more about my personal life; yet given the sometimes high responsibility nature of my career I try to present myself across the board as professionally as possible.
I think the “best” personal blog site is Justin Hall’s old links.net. However even that site has become not much more than a billboard today. For a number of years Justin would write quite interesting accounts of his travels and daily life. It made for a compelling read and ultimately helped bring his name into the public consciousness (or at least the consciousness of the digerati).
Alas I am not willing to be as revealing as he was and from time to time I really do wonder what the point of this site is. Maybe some day I’ll take this site down, but for now I’ll continue with my sporadic and infrequent updates.
This is not my summer for automobiles. My 1993 Crown Victoria had all sorts of problems; there was a coolant leak which had seeped through the spark plugs and gunked up the cylinders with antifreeze. So about $2000 later that was all fixed and while my emissions still failed I spent so much money that I got a waiver to renew my registration. Approximately two weeks after that the transmission overheated and burned up the clutch plates and simultaneously the air suspension gave out in the rear. Being fed up with the car I got rid of it and bought a 1990 Lincoln Town Car.
So far, so good. That was fairly reliable for a month or so, but then the other day I went to start it and the starter wouldn’t turn the engine over. I replaced the battery and was back on the road. But it turns out it wasn’t the battery, it was the alternator. Except, actually it wasn’t the alternator it was a short in the wiring harness. Which caught fire this morning as I was driving to my new job that I started this week.
I’ve never actually driven a car while it’s on fire. It’s not as fun as it might sound. Well it might be more fun if it’s not your car. When it’s your only car it’s less fun.
Luckily someone I knew was passing by when all this happened and she gave me a ride to work. And my other friend has let me borrow his car to get around for this evening. But it remains that I need to fix these electrical issues as I can’t be without a car.
So I called my friend who works at a dealership in the collision repair department to see about getting parts. Well it turns out there are a number of different wiring harnesses all of which are special order items from far away that will not be available before some time next week. So who knows what I’ll do between now and then. It will all work out, but it’s a frustrating way to spend the week and start a new job. Oh well.
I wrote a month ago that I have been evaluating the Blackberry media player QuickPlayer. I think I’m going to cancel my subscription, as I don’t see the point. From what I can tell the content available on QuickPlayer is not really “premium” - it’s just a few selected podcasts that happen to be aggregated in their interface. I’d rather listen to podcasts on my iPod.
The fact that the audio content is available on my Blackberry I like, as I have my Blackberry with me more frequently than I have my iPod with me. Unfortunately the user experience with QuickPlayer is just not worth paying for. It’ s a streaming podcast system (along the lines of TiVo’s podcast functionality), but there is no rewind or fast forward. If I am interrupted in my listening and inadvertently close the application, I have to start listening to the program again from the beginning. Also, since the content seems to be arbitrary podcasts that the QuickPlayer programmers have selected, why can’t I add my own podcast playlists?
I like the concept behind QuickPlayer and I’m willing to pay for media on my Blackberry, but unfortunately this product is not yet mature enough to warrant my continued subscription fee.
With my new job requiring me to spend some time on public transit each day during my commute, I finally have time to listen to podcasts again. Mainly I have been catching up on the last several episodes of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. I was a daily listener to this show for a long time in the early days. I found, and continue to find, the show to be a great way to keep on top of the major developments in the world of podcasting.
I like the show but listening to it is a little hardf for me. I can’t listen without thinking of shownotes.info, my old podcast show notes wiki site. I started it around the time I started working for Amazon and had great ambitions for the project.
Unfortunately just as the site was taking off I transitioned to full time status at Amazon and got sucked into their culture of 24×7 work, leaving me no time to sleep much less work on side projects. As I stopped being involved on a daily basis the site went downhill pretty fast and got overwhelmed with spam and crap.
I had hoped to go back some day and get it all fixed up but then somehow the domain expired last fall and I was too busy with work to even notice until January.
I feel like I let down those folks who were using the wiki to host their show notes and listening to Adam’s podcast is a reminder of yet another failed side project. It’s frustrating. But since the content is good I’ll keep listening and hopefully get over it.
While I have had a fairly successful and varied career, one of the things that I never did was complete my bachelor’s degree. When I dropped out of Virginia Tech back in 1997 the economy was quite good and there were plenty of jobs so my lack of a degree wasn’t a huge issue.
Over the years I’ve developed a strong resume and my lack of formal education doesn’t ever really come up on the job or in interviews. I’ve thought about going back to school a few times over the years, but undergraduate work doesn’t really interest me and it doesn’t impact my career, so I have never found the motivation to make the large time commitment to return to school. I think would enjoy grad school, but it hasn’t been appealing enough for me to make the effort to complete my undergraduate in order to get there.
Now that I have started working for a school I think my attitude is changing. It’s starting to bother me that I’m the only one in the room without a graduate degree. I’m not sure if this is just a transitional pain associated with being in a new job environment or if this is going to actually motivate me to go back and continue my education.
My computer is getting old, and it struggles with running things like Second Life and Joost. And if I want to have iTunes and Second Life and Joost open at the same time..yeah…it performs really badly.
I’m running an old AMD Athlon system that I built myself a few years ago. Whenever I decide to get a new PC it’s always a battle of whether to buy a prebuilt off the shelf system or build a new one myself.
The problem with building one myself is that I end up setting “spec inflation”. By that I mean that while an off the shelf single processor Dell with a gig or two of ram would be fine, if I start looking at parts on pricewatch I end up telling myself I need some $5,000 quad-core ridiculous computer. When in fact I don’t.
What I do need, however, is a lot of storage and I’m not sure how easy that is to get with the off the shelf Dells (or competitors). Perhaps it’s time to setup NAS at my house. The other question is whether to get a replacement desktop or to get a laptop. I haven’t had a functioning laptop since the death of my much lamented iBook. I need to get both, but it’s a question of what to do first.
I think first I will focus on making money to fund all of this.
I haven’t really updated much here lately as I’ve been super busy. I did end up taking a new position, and it’s in down town DC so getting used to my horrible commute is taking some time. It’s an exciting job, however, and I’m hoping it will work out for the long run (it’s a contract to perm situation so we’ll see what happens).
I wrote before about using Salesforce.com to track job leads. That worked…um..somewhat well. I ended up with a lot of job leads in progress at once and it became somewhat of a difficult task to keep on top of updating the entires in Salesforce to log every call, meeting, email, etc. This isn’t really a criticism of Salesforce, though, as it was too many job leads to have in play at once. I got overwhelmed myself, was spending way too much time running from interview to phone screen to interview. I should have done a better job of filtering what I wanted; the problem is that because my other job that I was planning to hop to fell through I was in “unexpectedly unemployed” mode which I don’t deal well with and end up chasing after lots of things at once to “get a job quick” and that’s not really very productive.
In this case it worked out alright, though, as I am happy in my new position. Except I need to get used my 13+ hour days of work/commute. Oh well. I’ll live.
It’s not well advertised on their web site, but Salesforce.com offers a free Personal Edition of their salesforce automation software. I signed up for an account a while back because I was curious what the package was like. Salesforce.com gets a lot of ink in the trade press for their innovative software as a service hosted model for enterprise applications, but I’m not a sales person so I had never happened to have reason to use it myself.
I’ve had my account for a while, but I never really did anything with it. See the part above about my not being in sales. I don’t like signing up for test accounts and not actually testing anything, and I kept trying to think of something I could use the Salesforce account for.
It turns out, I have found an application for Salesforce in my life: job hunting. I have recently become unemployed and have been on the job hunt. My typical method is to save copies of all resumes emails I send out to a special folder, along with reply correspondence. I make notes of the phone calls I have with recruiters and hiring managers on various slips of paper and backs of envelopes, which I then promptly misplace.
Salesforce is software to help sales professionals keep track of leads, document conversations, and drive sales productivity. Well, I am selling myself in this case, so why wouldn’t it work for me? So for the past few days I have been using my Salesforce.com personal edition account to keep track of all the various companies I’m in contact with. It’s probably overkill for my purposes, but it’s a fun test of the software.
Overall I’m impressed. I haven’t spent much time looking at their online help (which is excellent), but I’ve been able to get the system to do what I want it to do. I’m sure I’m using only a small fraction of the features, but it’s already helping me keep track of who I’ve talked to on a given day, when I said I’d follow up, etc.
I plan to keep using it until I find a job, and if I come up with any other great revelations about how the software works toward this goal I’ll let you know.
I’ve been playing with Joost a bit over the past week, and I stand by my initial impressions. I like their technology, and the interface is not bad once you get used to it. The problem is they lack compelling content at the moment. It seems to me that Joost either needs to get more deals with television content providers, or else open up the platform for Internet video (Rocketboom, etc.).
I suggest they talk to Mark Cuban, as I think he still owns the Lifestyles of the Rich and famous catalog and since he can’t repurpose that for HDnet, since it was shot on video and can’t really be upconverted, it may make sense for him to syndicate it through Joost.
Wired has a piece covering some apparently prototype software that allows a single 2D image of a face to be extrapolated into an accurate 3D model. There’s a video showing the software in action and I highly suggest taking a look.
I agree with those who commented that this technology cries out for application in simple end-user tools. And no, I don’t consider something like 3D Studio Max or Maya “end-user tools”.
I’d love to use technology like this to more accurately model my avatar in Second Life, for example. And the world of MMORPGs has exploded in the past few years. Now Sony has announced their virtual world “Home” will be launching in the fall on PS3.
