Monthly Archive for October, 2002

For the past month or so, I’ve been interviewing for a ‘dream job’ that sort of fell into my lap. It’s no secret that I’ve been disappointed with my current employment situation, and about 6 months ago I started dropping hints with people that I’ve met outside the company that I was definitely interested in looking at any opportunities that they heard of.

Well, one of my friends came through. He called me out of the blue on a Wednesday, about 3 weeks ago, and told me about an opportunity. I was sold after about 3 minutes of talking to him. I sent him my resume that night, and that next Monday morning he hand delivered it to the person that I’ll be reporting to, along with his personal recommendation.

That afternoon, my new boss (he wasn’t my boss at that point) called me to talk about the opportunity, and then invited me to an interview later that week. I drove 3 and a half hours to get to the interview, spent 2 and a half hours there, and drove back that same day (another 3.5 hours).

The next Monday, my new boss called to ask me back for a second interview. I met with a few different people (largely people that I won’t be working with — HR, the big boss, and one true co-worker/peer). My wife came with me on this trip and was able to tour the local area by car while I was in the interview. She looked at a few houses, and got a feel for the land (which I haven’t even really had the opportunity to do yet).

This past Monday, they called to offer me the job. It’s a great opportunity with a great company, and I’ve already decided to accepted it. I’ll start on December 2nd, but there are plenty of things to be done between now and then.

This morning, I’ll have the enviably job of telling my current boss (who’s a great guy) that I’m leaving, but that I’m trying to give him a month’s notice, accepting the offer that I’ve received, and taking care of a lot of other things like selling the house.

If you’re looking for a job selling advertising, that’s a great launch pad, let me know, and I can tell you more about my current job (which will be vacant in a month). They’re gonna need someone badly. The pay is good, but the company generally sucks big time. Only apply if you’re really just looking for a short-term place to increase your pocket book and your resume’s appearance.

Oh, and my house is for sale now… so if you live in North Texas, and want a great house at cost, give me a call. Heh… I’ve gotta move this house somehow.

That’s why Monday was so great. This thing just fell into my lap, and looks like its exactly where I want to be for the next 3-5 years.

[note: there were no posts yesterday or Monday afternoon due to a funeral in the family that I needed to concentrate on. My gramdmother past away last week.]

Googlism for: inluminent

inluminent is a wickedly cool weblog

inluminent is the blog for you

Glad to know that’s what someone thinks of this site

[Later (on 10/30/2002): I added the direct link to the Googlism as it turns out you can hack the URL, but I wasn't smart enough to figure it out.]

This doesn’t need any comment from me:

No this is not some slight of hand or illusion, it works.

Google Scares Me. David Weinberger posts that Google.com can be capable of some very scary (and powerful) things. He suggests trying the following: “1. Go to google.com 2. Type in your phone number, in quotation marks 3. When it finds your name and address, click on “Maps” 4. You are here.” … [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]

It’s scary enough on its own. Don’t tell my wife about this please.

[via My Interests]

I just want to point out that I’m glad they’ve found the snipers and hope they get the worst punishment our courts can dish out. Death by firing squad would suit me just fine. But not just a firing squad with good riles and accurate shooting. A firing squad with really old rickety rifles that don’t aim very well, so that they don’t get killed instantly. Maybe shoot them each once in the knees with iron bullets, so they’ll rust and infect their legs… and they’ll die from some horribly painful death, instead of instantly.

Then again, these two criminals deserve basically the same sort of punishment, in my opinion. Maybe a little faster death, but just as painful… not the white collar, relaxed sitting in a jail community room watching Jerry Springer that they’re likely to get.

And this guy deserves the worst punishment available.

I reported to the main court-house juror’s area this morning promptly at 8:30 am. On the way in I thought I’d be late, because the security guard had no idea what an iPod was and I had to connect the headphones and let him listen to it before he believed me that it was just an MP3 player (while it may be more than that, I didn’t want to strech it with this guy). After he listened to a minute or so of Eminem he let me pass with the iPod. (Sidenote: Apple may have sold a lot of these iPods, but the average American still doesn’t know anything about them.)

After sitting through about an hour and a half of waiting and listening to the local governmental agency information about being a juror, my name was finally called for a jury pool. I had to fill out a questionaire, and then was told that I was to report to the designated court room at 1:30. 1:30? “Shit, there goes the day” I thought (The house is 45 minutes away. The office is 45 minutes away.) Then I thought, well, at least I’m downtown, I’ll hit the Starbucks and get online.

I ended up spending the morning totally un-connected from the internet. It’s amazing to me that downtown Fort Worth doesn’t have a well known public wireless access point. No one had one, nor could they tell me where one was avaialble… I was willing to pay for one even. No luck:

I went to the Flagship Barnes and Nobles on Sundance Square thinking that their Cafe would have wireless access since it’s affiliated with Starbucks, but I was wrong.

I went over to the locally owned and operated CoffeHaus… no internet.

I went to the main Public Library in downtown. They offered public internet access but only on outdated Windows computers with only web (http) access to anything. No public ethernet jacks, or wireless access. Not even a public phone jack I could use to dial-up on my Earthlink account.

I thought about walking around the Square with my laptop in my hands using MacStumbler to hopefully find an access point, then thought better of that idea. While it’d be cool to find an access point, my hopes were already dashed, and I was pressed for time.

So, I found a little chair and table in the downtown Tandy Center Outlet Mall (or whatever it’s called), set up my iPod, and worked on some stuff that I could do offline.

Ugh.

At about 1:00 I headed back over to the courthouse.

[later] It’s 4:30 now and I just got out of the courthouse… wasn’t selected for jury duty. Whew… looked like this one was going to take a few weeks. Sucks to be those jurors.