Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was a very busy day for me.  After two days ago deciding that it was really, really necessary that I begin seriously considering what my “other” options are I have been swamped with people contacting me.  Even with the holiday coming up next week things have been super busy.  Dominica and I are feeling much better at this point knowing that there are a lot of options out there for me.  I have not been on an active career hunt for far more than a decade.  I haven’t really been serious about finding something completely new since 2000 when I made the transition from OilNavigator.com to IBM.  That was a couple weeks of hard core job hunting, but that was the last time.  When I left IBM in 2001 (the day before I met Dominica) I had decided that I was not looking for anything new and while I did find many contracts in the years between 2001 and 2006, at no time was I actively job hunting and was just picking up contracts as they came along while working full time with NTG.  So, quite literally, I have not been in full scale job hunting mode since almost exactly a year before meeting Dominica (thirteen years ago!) and only had a small amount of it at that time.  The last extended attempt was in early 2000 when I was interviewing all up and down the east coast all of the time.  I’m not really in that mode now, but am inching towards it.  So thirteen years is a really long time to go without having the solid feedback to know what your options are likely to be.

I reached out this morning to one of my top pick companies ever, anywhere and they got back to me within fifteen minutes and had an interview scheduled within an hour!  That was impressive.  We had a great talk this morning and I feel much better than I had been feeling.

I got some good, but far from conclusive, news about work later this morning.  There was some conversation between the businesses that have been creating the hold up the past two months and, I am told, that there should be some resolution on Monday.  I am not exactly holding my breath but this is the first that there has been anything like this at all in a very long time.  I’ve had no news whatsoever for two weeks as of today so this is a pretty big deal.  Even if the news is negative, it sounds like we will finally have an answer on Monday which is very much needed.  We need something definitive so that we can just move on with life.

Was on the phone much of the day.  It was a very busy day.

Had another great interview this evening with another company that I am really interested in.  It was a great day.  It is looking like I have a lot of choices.  That went until seven this evening.

Then at seven thirty I spoke for half an hour, via Skype, to the SpiceCorps Denver group.  We had bad Internet problems at the house, though, so we only had one way video and the audio was a bit problematic.  Our Internet here just continues to be problematic, although most of it stems from the wireless problems to the second floor and not from the outside access.  That has mostly been fixed.

After that presentation was over I went down to the living room and everyone hung out together as a family for the evening.

Thursday. We had a more or less quiet morning today.  Had time to get up and be rather leisurely before Dominica and the girls drove me down to the Croton train station at a quarter till noon.

I had an interview in the city today with a software firm.  The interview went pretty well and it was pretty encouraging for everyone that I interviewed with to have a very visible reaction that I was way over what they would be able to afford and they were unclear why I was interested in working there.  And to be honest, the job was only of slight interest.  But worth having a conversation about, at least.

After the interview I stopped by at the AetherWorks offices on 5th Avenue and hung out there for an hour or two and then Rob and I went out to a local Irish pub where we drank Guiness for most of the evening.

Dominica and the girls picked me up from the train station.  I managed to nap a bit on the train northbound.  One of the advantages of the Croton train versus the Peekskill one is that the station that I am going to is the terminus of the line so if you fall asleep they will wake you up at your destination.

 

Dominica and I stayed up late last night watching Sleepy Hollow.  We are pretty much completely up to date on that show now.  It is totally not our kind of show yet we like it a lot.  Something about the writing and the performances just has us hooked.  Plus it takes place right here in Westchester County so we like it for that too.

Pretty slow day.  Middle of the week.  Making some contacts and plans for looking into some new job prospects.  Nothing solid but looking into some things.

Tonight I played a lot of Wind Waker for the girls and we managed to make it all of the way through the Temple of the Wind.  One step closer to being done.

 

I was up before eight this morning.  Dominica and Luciana woke up around nine thirty.  Luciana came into our room and asked me to get her her morning chocolate milk and immediately climbed onto our bed to wait for me to get it for her.  I covered her up and she was fast asleep by the time that I returned from the kitchen with it.  So adorable.

It’s another day of waiting to hear some news.  It is feeling like things are going to stretch on for forever.  We are now over three months into this process with no resolution in sight.  We are starting to look into more options.

Got Dominica loaded up with Tropico 4 on her Lenovo laptop today, she is going to try that out.  I played a little more Tropico 3.

Had a lot of phone calls today but nothing, at all, resolved about the work situation.  The stress keeps increasing and the answers are getting fewer and fewer.  It’s not a good situation at all.  In some ways it seems like we are making some progress, but overall, we are not.  We have no idea what the plan is going to be long term.  No idea at all.

I got to play quite a bit of Tropico 3 today, which I had installed last night. It is a really fun game.  Low key and pretty easy.    I played the original in 2001 as Dominica bought it for me when we were first dating.  I had liked it a lot back then.  I made it through both of the tutorials which are relatively long, but fun.  Dominica is considering playing it as well.

Dominica and I played Age of Empires II together today too.  That was fun.

I started playing Jade Empire from BioWare.  It is from the XBOX era but I have it on the PC so am able to turn up the graphical quality and while it certainly shows its age it looks far better than it did on the XBOX original and is pretty decent.  I played it for about an hour today.  Liesl and Luciana all camped out in the bedroom so that they could watch me play the game.  I really only played through the tutorial portion where there was essentially no story at all and just a chance to learn the controls and stuff.  Very basic but the game is looking like it is going to be a lot of fun.

I have high hopes for Jade Empire.  It was made by BioWare who made Balder’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic before it and Mass Effect and Dragon Age afterwards.  So they have quite a track record both before and after the release of Jade Empire.  This game has a significant legacy to live up to.  I can’t wait to play it.  BioWare makes many of my all time favourite games.

I did some work on my XenServer cluster tonight.  I got the basics set up yesterday and today I got it working as a cluster with live VM migration between hosts which was pretty slick.

I also did some NodeBB maintenance on several sites tonight.