This morning, we decided, would be a lazy morning. I have been working long hours all week and I have not had a chance to get caught up on sleep so I ended up sleeping until around eleven this morning. I really needed the sleep. A little while after getting up Dominica and I ran down to the deli downstairs to grab a late breakfast or early lunch.
We spent a few hours watching some of the third season of Frasier after we finished eating.
The deli had the new Mt. Dew Revolution flavour that they are trying out “infused with Wild Berry and Ginseng”. So I picked it up to try it out and, lo and behold, it tastes exactly like Dewberry Juice – the beverage that I concocted from Mt. Dew and 99 Blackberries like a decade ago! This new flavour is just a virgin Dewberry Juice. (99 Blackberries is made by Constellation Brands based in Rochester, NY.)
Today was, for the most part, a totally relaxing day for us. I did do some amount of work but not very much. I completed the build script for the base build of the Castile Christian Academy desktops that Jeremy will be following this coming week to build their new Linux workstations. He is going to be pretty busy down at the school for the next two weeks or so. There is a lot to be done before the new school year starts and that is not that far away. Just about four weeks.
We had a bit of a surprise rain here this evening. It was around seven o’clock this evening when, regardless of clear skies and dry air, the sky suddenly opened and we had a good quarter of an hour of pretty decent rain. It caught everyone by surprise.
The rain did make for some very clean air tonight which, combined with some low cloud cover later in the evening, made for perfect viewing conditions of the Manhattan skyline. That is what I will definitely miss the most when we leave Eleven80 and Newark. Sitting at my desk in the living room with the twinkling lights of the city glistening outside of the windows and the Empire State Bulding all lit up. It is just breathtaking. I will certainly miss this view.
I did some serious updating of my resume tonight. I haven’t done a real update to it since the last time that I went out for a real interview which was for my current position and that was in February, 2006. That was not a major update either. The last update before that would likely have been in late 2004 just before I started consulting for a year at Wegmans. The bulk of my resume is easily four years out of date.
I would have been appalled to find my resume in this state five years ago. I used to use my resume as a benchmark of my career. I would record my achievements on it. I kept lists of everything on it. Now it is outdated and it needs to be severely changed.
My first realization is that I am no longer the “skills based” worker that I was in the past. For the first many years of my career my resume was designed to catch keyword searches and to cover every possible technology or technology acronym that may be a job requirement. I didn’t want to be overlooked because a position was searching for a specific product name and version. Everything was designed around search engine hits and hiring panels looking at the “bulk of technical experience.”
Now, though, I am older and my “skills” include my breadth of knowledge, length of time in the field and major acheivements. I only need skill highlights to give a brief overview of the technologies with which I am most immediately versed. To someone who has spent so much time nursing and massaging his resume for maximum impact it feels like a loss to finally realize that it needs to be trimed and hedged and massaged in such a different manner.
I should be happy at this change, and I am, but it is a tough thing for someone who has relied upon his resume, possibly as a crutch, for so long. My “classic” resume has been used as a reference document by consulting firms in the past. Like an outdated, but treasured, web site design this old resume too, must pass. At its pinnacle my resume was eight pages in length. About four years ago I made the drastic decision to cut something like twenty short term positions from the document as it had become simple “clutter”. That was difficult enough.
I am excited about having Twitter added to the main SGL page. It is an XHTML/JavaScript badge from Twitter that goes out and grabs the last five items that I have posted on Twitter. Unfortunately the badge is not Ajaxian yet so it does not update itself automatically but will only update when the page is refreshed. Getting an Ajax based version at some point would be really cool. Then people could just leave SGL up and the Twitter feed could update on its own. Of course, that would reduce my page hits 😉
By being able to add my Twitter microblog feed onto the main blog it takes it from being an interesting “also mention” technology and makes it vibrant and useful to me. I’ve been having fun with it this weekend and have found that having it on my BlackBerry to be quite interesting but overall it was mostly a dead end technology for me if it could be integrated into the SGL framework. Now I will really want to keep it up to date as I do not need to take the time to tell each and every person that I know about my Twitter feed in addition to all of the other information about me. Just being able to point people to SGL is far, far easier and more useful. I also have Twitter on my FaceBook page which adds to its usefulness slightly as well.
Dominica did laundry today and I cleaned the kitchen. We aren’t very good at doing household chores during the week. We have to hustle on the weekends or the whole apartment falls apart. It is amazing how quickly our nice, clean apartment (don’t laugh) turns into a complete disaster. I swear that on Friday morning the kitchen is pretty clean (it definitely was because on Thursday I made sure it was spotless because of the glass issue last week) and by Sunday afternoon, just two days later, the entire counter is mounded up with trash and recycling that we haven’t taken out yet and the sink is completely full of dishes that don’t fit into the dishwasher that has already run twice since Thursday afternoon! It’s crazy.
I was up until midnight working on my CV. It hasn’t been updated in forever and it needed to be done tonight. That took a couple of hours but I got it completed. I worked on it in Office 2003, though, and I need to get it converted to PDF for normal use.