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I'm hopelessly hoping that I can land a job managing. I'm hopelessly hoping I can land a job under a decent manager. I've only had a couple. Ken Kearns was one of the best I've seen, but I work in IT where bad managers are the norm (hence Dilbert). Of course, Scott Adams is now the pointy haired boss, so maybe there's hope after all.
I don't think that I can take having to work underneath a boss who doesn't know how to manage me again. It gets really tiring, having to train new bosses in how to do their jobs. I'm amazed at how many bad managers there are, and how little anyone seems to care to help them do their jobs better. Human Resources normally comes down hard on the boss who actually manages, because he or she doesn't fit the touchy-feely type of boss that HR thinks is best. Reality is different. Much like the much-ballyhooed finding that women make better bosses. Only on certain ratings. In the end, a boss has to be able to win, to hold his or her own against the tide, to know which risks are worth taking. I think that if we ran the numbers differently, we'd find that there is less of a glass ceiling as a deck stacked against women in upper management. Sure, the good old boy network still exists, but let's not forget to look at real gender differences. Mostly on aggressiveness and mindless drive to do things just to show up someone else. Mindless competitiveness can be quite effective.
I really need to find a place to work. That or sell my book.
-- manasclerk
Don't Send a Resume says everything that any jobhunter is used to hearing:
You can't be someone that you aren't.
In the end, I need to find my next job (I hate contracting) by doing something that I want to do. I've spent the last 14 years pursuing careers that I hate, to work with people I don't relate well with, and produce product I don't care much about. It's pretty bad when the work I'm most proud of is volunteer work that I didn't know how to do. But I did just be myself, pettiness and all.
One of the things that Jim Collins's Good To Great and Gallup's First Break All the Rules both seem to emphasize in different ways is that you cannot be someone that you're not, that greatness does not stem from over-aggression or self-aggrandizing. Instead, it stems from an unflinching look at your situation, from seeing what you are really capable of and shoring up the areas where you lack by bringing in other people.
In the end, I think Fox makes some interesting points but attempts to get everyone else to look like him. We don't. Still, his first line is excellent advice:
Don't send a resume.
-- manasclerk
The new windows (thank you, Home Pros Indiana) seem pretty OK. They aren't as noise reducing as having full glass storm windows were, but they don't leak air as much. My old windows were in terrible shape and were a pain to pull out, according to the workmen who kept telling each other that these were the worst windows they'd done.
Once again, I'm glad I got a fixed-bid contract. This house is just a nightmare to upgrade.
-- manasclerk
Although I could have sworn I was out of the woods, I got hit up to be a "backup best man" for B's wedding in Kansas City. Argh! Yeah, I'm honored and flattered, and I do a bang-up job as a best man, to the point of getting compliments from the wedding planners. Still, I kind of was hoping to not have to do anything.
It looks like B's best man's wife is expecting the next weekend. Anyone want to take the odds on me not having to stand up at this wedding? At least I'll get to meet the notorious Dagwood after all these years. I'm coming in early to throw a bit of a bachelor party, too, even if I have to drag McJ's sorry ass up to KC -- something that will probably entail finding a nanny to help out with his new kid (a real cutie!).
Ah, well. I should just expect it. Life just doesn't let up with the accolades for me.
-- manasclerk
Wiggum: "If I can tranq out one freak on stilts, I know I'm doing my job."
Lou: "You're living the dream, Chief."
-- "The Great Louse Detective", episode 1406 (F55310 ); Original Airdate: 12/15/02
This design stinks. You'd think the guy who put together the Wacky Waste of Bandwidth in 1994 would be able to do better than this. I need to get down to brass tacks and redo it. I'm sure that I'll get to it at the same time that I get to redoing the Process Write website for my boss. It's on my list of things to do, but I just don't have the interest any longer.
I'm thinking of adding a flash animation of Dert and the Radioactive Gelatin Monster. That would be a really good use of my free time.
And, on another note, I'm looking for a new job. IT OD?
-- manasclerk
Take a peek at it.
Babcock looks like a promising young cartoonist. A bit too Disneyesque, a bit too Adobe Illustrator (it just doesn't have the same look as "analog"), a bit too edgy. But it's pretty good -- a great new effort from a young cartoonist. It's all about a depressing, neo-goth chick who is riddled with exitential angst (or, as her childhood Eeyore toy suspects, has her underwear on backwards) and her perky, chipper, not-so-bright but successful friend. Very art-student in nature but also very funny.
The really funny part is that I suspect she's more Mona and making fun of both herself and her perky friends. But you can't tell who has the better life, the one who's oblivious or the one who's self-absorbed.
manasclerk say it out check.
Unbelievable! It's a Christmas miracle!
I've had The Dell Brick on all day long with the AOC attached and it's still cool to the touch. I wish that I would have bought this thing a year ago. No more scorched thighs when I type on the overstuffed oatmeal.
-- manasclerk
I was using the AOC stovetop this morning and noticed that only two of the fans were running. One of the fans was not secured properly and had bumped up against the top of the device. The fans, which are inside a low-profile plastic enclosure that looks remarkably like a stovetop, are only glued into the bottom. After weighing the pros and cons of sending it back -- I really need it, since my machine overheated yesterday when I had it docked in the basement on a 70 degree F day, and sending it back to get another would cost me almost 100% of the original cost in shipping -- I decided to break into it and fix the lower fan. I'm sure that Xoxide would have been cool about the return, since the device was broken, but for Pete's sake, it's a forty cent fan!
Shawn McDonald has some incredibly good worship music for some kid out of the northwest. Highly recommeded. Pick up his CDs while you're there.
MP3s.com has samples.
Check it out.
I just mentioned the Brenthaven Executive Backpack that I've been using for a couple of years now. You might be interested to know that it is hands-down, without-a-doubt, the best single work-related purchase I've ever made. Incredibly comfortable for carrying laptop, converter, zip drive, external hard drive, printed copies of sensitive documents, and all my receipts for the past two weeks, plus my necessaries, such as my pens, special papers, etc.
This thing has saved my back.
The big test began!
I finally made it home after the big John & Julie wedding (more on that later), and, to my glorious surprise, there stood on the table the grand mailing from the gentle souls at Xoxide. That's some pretty fast mailing for a USPO Priority Mail box. I pulled the two coolers out and went to testing immediately.
Most of you may not have a good feel for what L loves doing. No matter what has happened, hating teaching and leaving academia, she still loves this stuff.
Frontice to a Fleur d'Histoire from the court of Philip le Bon, Duc d'Burghundy. (If I've gotten that right. My French is terrible, but it beats my flemish.)
Pretty interesting stuff, I'd say. She studied the manuscript which is in the Royal Library (the Albertina) in Brussels. Everyday she got to fingerprint the pages. OK, she wore gloves and handled it as little as possible. But can you imagine being able to spend seven hours a day looking at a hand painted book that is five-and-a-half centuries old?
-- manasclerk
I'm really honored and all -- being in someone's wedding is so very cool it's hard to believe -- so I'm not really all that depressed about having to usher at John's wedding tomorrow. The rehearsal is tonight at six. L and I will leave my downtown client's offices at about 5 or so.
After ten weddings and having best-manned since I got out of college, I can tell you that the best man role is underserved at most weddings. The best man should have a lot on his mind, should be the point of contact for all the problems, should already have all the other guys ready to react to any issues that arise. You've got to be prepared for all the usual, too, such as helping the photographer organize the shoots, getting people from there to here, and most importantly, making the bride's mother happy.
I'll give an update after tomorrow.
-- manasclerk
I've lost my contract. Effective tomorrow, I have no work.
I knew that this was coming. The client, a security group at a large insurance company, has been complaining about all these "externals" (anyone who isn't an employee) taking all the credit for this project. Unfortunately, the externals seemed to have done most of the work. They didn't want the risk of the project. One of the other externals I've worked with said that he would often go to meetings about the basic data design and not have a single employee show up: everyone in the meeting was a contractor or consultant. They would wait awhile and then bag the meeting, since the employees are the ones who need to make the decisions.
L and I talked about last night's interesting events. I'm not sure that we came all the way to the other side -- there's still a lot of tenativeness built into relationship from years of, well, stuff -- but we made it mostly out of the trees.
There's a part of me that wants to be one-up on her, that doesn't want her to succeed, that envies her new freedom as I plow through the weeds every day at work.
L and I have just had the best and worst of evenings. She came down to the client's location to spend a couple of weekdays with me, since I spend most of the week on the road. We went out to dinner at BL's only really hip restaurant where she had a great meal, I enjoyed mine, and we had a great time together. We went over to the local ice cream house -- onsite manufacture of some great premium ice cream -- grabbed a couple of cones and walked back to the inn I always stay at. Things were going swimmingly. Then she gave me something to read.
Xoxide sent me an email saying that they shipped my order. It should arrive in about a week or so. Thus far, I've already had my system shutdown on me twice today. It's not the drive -- that checks out fine. I'm still going with the fan, but I'm no longer all that interested in trying to take apart a laptop. I'll replace a drive, but replacing the cooling fan is just too much work. Maybe I should take it in to the local computer guys.
I just got word that my consulting gig will be ending. I have heard talk of being here for several months, taking this role or that role. That never comes through here.
I have another project coming up, a security audit of a local firm, but it will only take about three weeks. I think that it's time to cut back on a more permanent basis.
I have a couple of choices about this. I can respond to it in my normal way, with fear, reacting hard, desperately trying to get things to happen for me.
Or I can trust in the name that God has given me.
I choose to trust. I will resist the desperation and choose to fight.
I know my name. I know who I am. And it's not my job title.
-- manasclerk
I decided against going with the others and went with Xoxide.com instead. I just don't feel safe sending my personal information to a site that doesn't list its physical location. Xoxide was more expensive and didn't have the aluminum laptop cooler, but since I have an old Dell Inspiron 5000 with a front-loading optical drive, the stovetop-style AOC will work best. It also seems to have better noise characteristics.
I've been thinking about my father lately. OK, so I've been considering my father for about twenty years now. I used to think that I'd figured that out, dug that ditch, filled that hole. Lately, though, I've been reconsidering him and me. Must be in light of everything that has been happening to me over these past few years, the changes I've gone through, the changes I've been thrown into.
The older I get, the more I can't figure out why my dad wasn't around. More specifically, why he didn't like me.
Or at least too much heat. My Dell Inspiron 5000 (600 MHz PIII) overheated at my client's on Friday and just switched off. At least I think that it's overheating: I looked at the underside and the MS Windows CoA sticker has actually burned at the edges. Ow! It might be that my fan is broken. But I think that it's a function of maxing out the RAM, adding a 7200 RPM 60 GB hard drive, and running NIC and USB 2.0 PC cards, with a MP3 player on files on the external and internal drives.
It was two years ago. It was terrible. I live in America's Midwest but most of the people that I worked with were in the NYC metro area. I was in Chicago, at the Board of Trade, that September day. I had gotten to the office early because I was training a couple of new developers on how a particular middleware I had installed worked. I got in, turned on my email and internal chat apps, and got down to the nitty-gritty of our system.
We used internal chat a lot, especially since my team was flung across the globe. When London went home, NY came on, etc. There's nothing worse than working with a bunch of Australians or Hong Kongers. You basically have to do it latesecond shift. We had several chat channels, depending on the topic, but normally only had a few messages a day on any one unless we were working on something really hairy. It lets out a chime, which lets you know you should interrupt your productivity to see if they need you.
We had just started on the interface details when I started hearing chimes every few seconds. It got faster. I looked over. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
I wrote a couple of lackluster proposals (or Statements of Work, whichever you prefer) this week. When I first started working for these guys, I couldn't figure out why I never had anything to do. They would give me a task, I'd get it done in about half a day and have nothing to do until they got back to me days later.
It was only months later that it finally dawned on most other folks just don't enjoy writing technical prose as much as I do. I can bang out mediocre material almost as fast as it can be assigned to me. I made a name for myself as a writer not by being any good but by being fast. Normally, I could write passable documents in one draft with very little necessary rewrite. These weren't jewels; I often flinch when I see them again, a regular occurrence for one scanning document I banged out for a European pre-press company.
[ Continue reading "Succeeding at ruining your career without effort" ]I've spent the week at a client's site that's about 150 mi (241 km) from my home. It's not a horrible place to have to be for a week but I miss my wife and home. The work isn't that bad. It makes being away tolerable.
A friend of mine, an artist with appropriately odd habits, called me up yesterday. He's getting married in a couple of weeks to a woman who's just great for him (another photographer). L and I have been looking forward to finally being able to sit together at a wedding. We've been to seven together -- out of town weddings often only see one of us attend -- and one of us has been in it in five. Sitting together at a wedding seems very romantic to us, rarely having done it. So J's wedding was a red-letter day, marked heavily in the calendar.
Then came the fateful news from J: he wants me to usher.
Jill Thompson collaborated with Neil Gaiman on his Sandman run and, rumour has it, she was one of his favourite pencillers. Certainly her "L'il Endless" got some strong reaction in the fan community.
For those who are lost here, Sandman was a montly comic book published by DC Comics in the 80s and 90s. It featured the Endless, the anthropomorphic manifestations of Destiny, Death, Dream, Despair, Desire, Destruction and Delirium/Delight. Gaiman tossed in heavy references not just to Greek mythology but to particular classical writings, moved from era to era with aplomb, created interesting characters with surprising depth, and had a readership that in numbers was beat only by Superman's for DC and was amazingly 50% women in an industry dominated by guys -- most titles have a 95% male readership. Something about Gaiman's complex, convolutied storylines.
I have now wondered about myself for several months now. I still do not have a good sense of me. I am o tired, exhausted by my -- my what? I am so tired from stress from not taking care of myself, from keeping the powerful desires inside of me. Last night at group I told a woman that she was beautiful. She had talked about how she had been shaming herself for pursuing what she wants, for having these desires, for not controlling her real feelings all the time. I told her that from where I sit, who she is, is beautiful. This is true, and somehow it really affected her.
This is a true statement then, that who I am is beautiful. I do not have to cover over who I am, do not have to hide my true face. As she let her real self out, as she came out from the facade, her beauty became contagious, powerful, strong.
My friends from Europe came through our town here in the States, bringing their two teenage daughters in tow. I should have been driven nuts by it all, but I miss the kids I've never had. The Lord giveth, and then sometimes He doesn't and all. I got to chauffeur the girls to the local beach here and spend the twenty minute drive locked in a car with them. They quizzed me about several subjects, like "Are boys as nervous asking us out as we are asking them to the Sadie Hawkins dance?" and "Is it OK to like my friends more than other people?". It was fun -- they are great kids with some big things on their minds. Some of these questions that they asked would, frankly, probably be embarrassing to someone who had more dignity than I do. But my ease with being asked embarrassing questions (OK, let's be honest: the worst one was "Boxers or whitey tighties?", which I took to be a general inquisitiveness about guys in general) isn't the point of this. It wasn't that rare of an occasion for me; somehow I have kids asking deep questions of me pretty often.
How often I seem to do things that I don't want to! Perhaps the Apostle Paul was on to something when he talked about "the very things I don't want to do, I do, and the things I want to do, I don't". Christians have often talked about the problems of sin, of doing hurtful acts, but perhaps it is broader. Certainly in my life the problem of vocation looms large. I continue in a career that is death for me. I continued in my marriage even though I was dead in it. I continued in friendships that tore me down, continued to seek things that always hurt me.
In vocation, leaving is often a good idea. But leaving to what? Running out on a marriage sounds like relief -- and surely it often is -- but what next? Most of my friends have run from a bad relationship, only to perpetuate their problems in the next.
Maybe the problem is not the job, not the spouse, not the parents. Maybe the problem is me.
My old boss called me yesterday. As we chatted, he let out something pretty big: his wife of seven years has left him. It seemed to be pretty out of the blue. The Saturday after her birthday, he came home to her sitting on the couch where she announced that she wanted a divorce. He didn't really want one, even though they had been having problems for about two years. But she wanted to move on from her old life. She was a college-dropout who was pretty irresponsible and he the high-paid consultant when they met. They married and he put her through school, encouraging her, scolding her, nagging her. I'm sure that in many ways it was a pretty unequal relationship. The difference in education and earning potential put her in the role of student to his teacher. Sooner or later, the student will want to be free of the master to make her own mistakes, her own answers. After completing the BA and Masters, and taking a job at which she is very successful, she wanted freedom from a relationship that was always marked for her as more like a father-daughter than equal partners.
It still gets me right here. Or is that indigestion?
I blame J for all of the world's problems. Look at his hair. This is what caused it. Or was it this Prodigal song he liked so much?
-- manasclerk
This isn't a diatribe (if that's exactly the word I want) against power or its accumulation and use. Power is, simply, the ability to get things done. So this is simply my musings on power and how he feels about the power he has.
Almost instinctively, from deep within my heart, I desire to see power spread out, democratised. Democracy is a core value for me, power held by the many, belonging to all. This may have more to do with my being a latter-born: both the New Birth Order Book and Born To Rebel say that we latter-borns are more likely to take risks. Rebel is more specific: we latters have to overthrow the existing power-base of the older siblings in order to get power for ourselves and attention from our parents. An evolutionary argument that's worth reading, even if some very notable reviewers have called it just so much tripe. We latters are usurpers, overturners, liberals, revolutionaries. We certainly should tend towards shared power and inclusion, since that is the easiest way for us to survive.
"I'm not a techno geek, but I play one on TV"
A new blog for a really, really -- no, really -- fed-up me. It's not that the IT industry is killing me; I make a pretty decent living as an IT security consultant, even in this downturned economy. I shouldn't complain, but it's bite the hand that feeds you week here in America.
Maybe the fact that other people are asking me to do more interesting things -- I keep on getting requests to come take on youth work for internationals living in Europe. Maybe the fact that most of the developers that I work with are little fascists who think that their ideas for how people should live are the way. "And if the worker-bees don't like it, fire 'em." (Really. A quote from one of the other guys I work with on occasion when I said that we had to have a change program for implementing this new piece of software that will radically alter everyone's work.)
