SELECT * FROM vacation LEFT OUTER JOIN life ON vacation.disgust = life.disgust UNION SELECT * FROM jobsearch UNION ALL
Given that Missy has posted about a billion blog posts in a timeframe where I’ve posted zero, and I’ve had internet access the entire time, I feel like it’s time to stop slacking off so much (granted, Dan hasn’t posted one either, but meh). Also, given that I’m still training somebody at work (though almost done with that), I don’t have nearly as much time to randomly bullshit on the phone as I normally have, and I feel like I’m falling out of contact. In particular, nobody other than me really knows the specifics of my job hunting (Heather knows some, but doesn’t read this blog, almost certainly doesn’t communicate them to people, and doesn’t grasp some of it). It’s not particularly important to anybody other than me, but it’s worth putting it down on paper (so to speak), if only because the telephone isn’t necessary the ideal medium for communicating random crap. Besides that, I don’t think I’ve written a blog in a month or so, and there was a nauseating vacation in the middle there.
That’s not to say that the vacation was nauseating, just, ahh… Americans? Well, maybe people in general. Other than the 20 hour drive (made less palatable by the fact that I worked 13 hours prior to embarking, and Heather being too ‘freaked out’ by Montana state highways [admittedly, a 70MPH speed limit on a curvy, hilly 2-lane road with no shoulders could be disconcerting unless you're really comfortable driving]) to Glacier, I don’t relish pointless searches at the border. As an FYI to anybody who may be traveling to Canada, bear in mind that they consider having both fingernail clippers and a lighter in your pocket as some kind of drug paraphernalia, which will most likely leave you sitting there for an hour and a half while they sift through your entire vehicle looking for THC residue/whatever (that they won’t find).
While there’s a certain satisfaction in driving 1,300 miles nonstop, and I’d certainly rather do that than drive for a few hours and stop (which is, seemingly, Heather’s ideal of a vacation in which the primary mode of transportation is by automobile, even if there isn’t anywhere to stop in eastern Montana or the Dakotas, other than the Badlands, but there’s not really enough time to hike, and once you’ve seen ‘em, they’re not that impressive [particularly compared to the Rockies]), it makes for a shitty way to spend 1/3rd of a vacation. There aren’t any decent restaurants in Fargo, Jamestown, Beach, Great Falls, Bismark, or anywhere else on the way, but nor should there be any reasonable expectation of such (though you’d not know that from talking to Heather). There are, however, trash cans clearly manufactured for giants (where, seriously, I wouldn’t have been able to fit my arms around it, the lid came to shoulder height, yet it looked pretty much like your black trashcan in Phoenix).
So, after driving from Saint Paul to East Glacier on the 10 minutes of sleep I managed to get inbetween gasps and jolts of the brakes which made me think my car was going off the road somewhere in Montana (Heather driving on the aforementioned 2-lane highway), and a long search at the border, on top of another 4 hours up to Banff, we were greeted by… hordes of Japanese and Chinese. Maybe my memory of Banff was skewed, maybe it’s the influx of money from China’s economic boom, I’m not really sure. For the three days we were in Canada, however, buses of Asians arrived not long after. I’m assuming they were staying in the hotels in town rather than camping (not only because I didn’t see any of them driving, but I’d also wager that the people shopping for Coach bags in town probably weren’t camping), but anywhere with a parking lot was beset by them. It doesn’t seem that any of them ever hiked, which allowed some respite (nothing against the tourists, simply that it didn’t really fit with the notion of being in the wilderness).
On the other side of the spectrum, the people in Canada were actually respectful of the wilderness. Nobody was getting hammered in the campsites, there weren’t any RVs, there were a lot of people biking through and actually walking on the trails, etc. Not so once we got back to the US, which was a little too reminiscent of the Canyonero commercials from the Simpsons once we got back. Seriously, with the price of gasoline being what it is, why would you drive from Florida to Montana in an Excursion or a 3500 Turbodiesel with two people? A little bit asinine, especially since they weren’t hauling anything (either inside the vehicle or externally).
I’m probably as wired as anybody else, but the appeal of a disconnect is not lost upon me. I wouldn’t ever bring my Blackberry with me to keep up with work at a national park, nor would I sit around a campsite on my laptop (presumably with an EVDO card or something) watching fucking YOUTUBE. Do that shit at home. At the very least, do that shit at night (drinking beers and cruising the internet at 4PM at a national park seems sad). Other people at the campground? Well, there was the family with four people (two of whom were teenagers, the adults were presumably married), with a separate 4 man tent for each of them. Next to them, people who rented an additional campsite to park their SUVs in (since their two enormous campers took up the other site). Across the way from them? The people who brought their 10×10, 6′ tall chain-link dog kennel, set up next to their tent. Also present? People from Oregon with Green Party bumper stickers on their Hummer. The whole spectacle was a little too awful for words.
Upon arrival back in the Twin Cities (prior to the dropping of the police state curtain), my time has been occupied by working, sleeping, and interviewing for jobs. Thankfully, I’m still gainfully employed, and I have little need or desire to just shotgun my resume out there, and I’m able to seek a jobs which sound technically interesting (for the moment anyway, but it’s not as if I’m expecting to lost my job at any point).
- Linux Server Admin at MoneyGram, which is a lot more specialized than the position I’m in now, and would probably be a good career move, plus the team is a lot of fun, but lots of meetings and it doesn’t sound like I’d have the opportunity to do much coding. Already been through two rounds of interviews, and they’re doing callbacks for a third round later this week. I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call, though the commute would involve going through Minneapolis (as a general rule, the west side of the cities have much more atrocious traffic than the east side). Still, benefits are good, I’d be able to comp time if I got called in, it’s an on-call rotation, which is leagues better than what I’m doing now, and I’d get to put Oracle, Websphere, z/OS, and AIX (including LPARs!) on my resume.
- Application Server Support at US Bank. Another financial, which always looks good on a resume. Again, opportunities to work with Oracle. Possibly more coding than MoneyGram. The biggest plus to working there would be the fact that it’s less than three miles from my house, though the boss is friendly enough (the interview, like the one at MoneyGram, ended up getting ended due to them having something else to do, since we were comfortably chatting for an hour or so). Probably wouldn’t be very interesting, technically (mortgage processing applications, some OCR, etc). Like MoneyGram, a salaried position with a pager rotation. It does offer flex spending and a health savings account, though.
- Hardware Test Engineer at Secure Computing. A fascinating position, from a technical standpoint. Load testing, exploit testing, bug testing, compatibility testing, regression testing, and any other kind of testing you can imaging on proxies (HTTP, FTP, database [MSSQL, Postgre, DB2, Oracle], etc), and the majority of the test suites are written/extended in Perl/Python, which fits neatly with my skillset, plus they use Solaris (the appliances themselves run modified BSD). A position I wasn’t entirely sure about from initial (technical) phone interview, but I did get called in for an in-person interview, and it went remarkably well. Being able to actually speak to the people doing the job and establish precisely what it would be (the job description was kind of vague, and I didn’t know if I’d be expected to work with raw sockets in C++ or something) vastly improved my confidence, and the interview went really well. The HR person (who used to be in the 206th MI Battalion as a 98G-AR, go figure) winked at my on my way out, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take that (she thinks I’m cute, or the interviews went well?). No timeline for callbacks, but, again, I wouldn’t be surprised to get one.
What strikes me as really odd about this is that of the (five) positions I’ve applied for, I’ve passed through the initial round of screening and the initial technical interview on all five, to get a callback (seemingly, the three I’m still looking at, since the pay ranges on the other two were flatly insulting) is unusual, especially with the job descriptions being so disparate. I know my current position is very much generalist, which has given me exposure to a lot of different technologies, but I hardly expect all of them to go so well.
As a total aside, the more arguments I have with Heather, the more I’m utterly convinced that I have Asperger’s (or alexithymia, at the very least).
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By Missy, September 3, 2008 @ 2:18 pm
As I’ve told Dan before, I am 100% certain that the two of you are neither autistic or suffering from Asperger’s. My personal opinion is that when you first started hearing people mention it when you were young, it was because they were trying to come up with reasons for why you were so much more intelligent (ie reading and your ability to focus on learning) and they decided that Asperger’s / autism *could* explain it, and it made them feel better personally. Neither of you is in the least clumsy and I wouldn’t describe either of you as lacking in empathy. You’re both odd :p but odd doesn’t = Asperger’s. I also wouldn’t say that either of you have poor communication skills. You can both have a tendency to be a bit brash, but I’d say it’s because you’re both smart enough not to take shit.
In any case, I must say: I want to see a trashcan meant for a giant. I can’t believe that you didn’t take pictures.
I am also not in the least surprised that all of your interviews have gone well. You speak very well and are obviously intelligent, why wouldn’t they call back? So, which job do you think is most catching your eye..?
By Missy, September 8, 2008 @ 6:39 pm
More blogs required.