Time to be Happy
Time to be HappyI miss Em. While I had more free time than usual I was trying to squeeze in some time back in Huntsville with Emily but Em’s mom didn’t come up with anything. I think things are extra hectic over there since Emily is going to have a new brother or sister real soon now.
My unofficial vacation is about to come to an end. I start a 4 month contract-to-hire position doing perl development either this Monday or a week later. I have a plone/python project, a php/mysql and a unix admin project to wrap up. The company I’m going to work for is up in North Dallas right near where I lived when I first moved here in ‘99. Apparently insurance companies rarely pay all of their bills to hospitals and doctors. This company uncovers the difference in what the insurance companies owe and what they paid and gets the rest of the money. So it’s nice to stick it to the insurance companies for once. :)
Read more...Nerdbooks
NerdbooksIt looks like Dallas has a good technical bookstore now, and has had for the last 10 months. Nerdbooks made the move from Sacramento, California to Richardson, Texas and brought 20,000 technical books with them. When I asked about the Pragmatic Programmer books they knew right where they were. They even had the more academic books like say Donald Knuth’s Art of Programming series.
What particularly stood out, aside from selection, is that you pay the online store price, without the shipping. Previously I’d been hanging out in the poorly organized, but decent selection at the Micro Center. Nerdbooks is much more competitive on price compared to the other brick and mortar places.
Do you enjoy hostility?
Do you enjoy hostility?I got this in my mailbox this morning:
Let me know if you are interested in a Developer position in Downtown Dallas right in the New Development arena. This position is for someone who enjoys the Developer environment, thinks way outside the Box, and enjoys hostility.
The emphasis is mine. I wonder who finds hostility an enticement to work somewhere. I’m also amused to see the Box has become a proper noun.
links for 2005-06-16
links for 2005-06-16Work Field Trips
Work Field TripsOnce when I worked at BroadbandNow!™© back in 2000 I had to go out and get some office supplies. It was like a school field trip because I was out of the office during office hours. Only it was better since it was unsupervised. When I was out and about I was amazed by how busy everything was. It seemed just as busy as any other time I’d ever been out. I wondered if these people had jobs. They couldn’t all be on a field trip like me. It really surprised me and has stuck with me over the years.
Read more...Taking control of the interview
Taking control of the interviewAfter a couple interviews, and an untold number of conversations with recruiters I’ve come to a new conclusion. I need to take over the skills assessment and I need to be far more prepared about the character/work ethic questions.
I can short-circuit the skills questions from less prepared/skilled interviewers by presenting samples of my work and explaining how it works. Although for the most part I’ve found that skills have not been the stumbling block.
Read more...The Fountainhead
The FountainheadAt 31 I didn’t really expect to be unemployed and wanting to find regular work. I thought at this point I would have it all figured out. I would have transcended the need to take care of mundane bills and be free to focus on more interesting things. Instead I find myself fighting others for jobs just to be mediocre.
I’ve discovered that I spent way too much time educating myself. Nobody cares about a clean Model-View-Controller design with RESTful URIs behind a nice XHTML/CSS interface, with Ajax sprinkled through to improve UI response time. Yes, I also know how to build that for application for you in Perl, PHP, Java or even Tcl. I’d love to take a stab at it in Python or my beloved Ruby if you like. No system administrator, that’s fine because I know apache inside and out and Unix/Linux systems are my bitch. No database administrator, that’s fine because I know a lot about normalization, entity-relationship diagrams, indexing options of various databases, replication and high availability. No network administrator, that’s fine because I can order the line, setup the router, and configure HSRP and BGP to make sure we never lose connectivity to the Internet. Above it all I know there is a business to run so I’ll chart and diagram the hell out of this to prove that it saves/makes money.
Read more...