Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Thanksgiving week.  So we are not too hopeful that anything much is going to happen with the job situation.  Any aspect of it.  On Friday we were informed that today there was going to be a major conversation and that things were expected to be resolved.  We got pretty suspicious of that when I was then told that the recruiters did not “expect to hear the results today but would expect to hear something in the morning.”  That made no sense at all.  If there was anything close to a resolution today the new job would be seriously anxious to let me know.  Right now they have to be pretty nervous that I am looking at other options and would want to lock me in with a start date as soon as they possibly can.  Especially as they have stated repeatedly just how important me starting before this Friday is.  If they want me to start before Friday, and considering that Thursday is a holiday and that I will be traveling most of the week, the window to arrange that really closes, more or less, today.  So the story that I have does not add up in any way.

Today was mostly a planning day.  Dominica has been watching the weather and it looks like we have a big snow storm coming into our area on Wednesday so we are talking about leaving tomorrow instead to get ahead of the storm rather than getting stuck in it.  So our week at home is going to be very short.  I am sure that dad will be happy to find out that he will get the grandkids for several days, now, though.  Although we have to be ready to run back down in case something changes with the job situation.  But at this point we are assuming that getting started there this week, no matter how important that claimed that that was, isn’t in the cards.  They have not been communicating with me for about two weeks now, so the chances that they are actually thinking that I am going to be starting this week has to be pretty low.  That I am starting there ever is rapidly seeming to be less and less of a possibility.  I really wrote them off a while ago, but I keep getting what appear to be fake updates stringing me along on this.  I’m giving up even on that news after this.  It’s just getting to be worthless.

We played some video games today.  Dominica has her new collection of Rollercoaster Tycoon games to play and she is loving those.  I played Tropico 3 today and did the initial level (Hippie Island) again and managed to beat it this time.  That was fun.  I tried it before and failed at it so had to do it again.  This time I understood what was going on and had to problem crushing it.  I like that game, it is a lot of fun.  It is the perfect thing for a relaxing afternoon and keeping me occupied but is always very easy to pause when emails or calls come in so that I can shift gears quickly.  I like that it is such a fun, while still casual, game.  Dominica is enjoying playing Tropico 4 a little too.

This evening the girls were begging for me to play a game and Dominica has been wanting to watch me play Bioware’s Jade Empire.  So tonight we set up in the bedroom, Dominica camped out on the bed and the girls gathered around me and we played an hour or two of Jade Empire which already I am liking a lot.  The autumn in China graphics are just amazing to look at.  Yes the technology is old and there is no denying that the game shows its age, but the artistry is excellent and you want to just wander around looking at the luscious locale.

So far, in the first two hours, the story of Jade Empire is looking like it is going to be good.  Lots of back story, intrigue and character development happening already.  Bioware never disappoints in story.  This is the game that Bioware made after Knights of the Old Republic and before Mass Effect.  So if that doesn’t give it some serious street cred, I don’t know what does.  Sitting directly between two of the best story telling titles in video game history (or in all of literature for that matter) puts it in some good company.  It has a lot to live up to.  And being set in a Chinese-inspired medieval setting makes it unique and exciting too.  This is the first original intellectual property for BioWare ever, as far as I know.  Prior to this their RPGs were always D&D or Star Wars based.  This is the game that really put them on the road to being their own company.  So we are all very excited to get to play it.  It is action-oriented so Dominica tends to not want to play those herself but she doesn’t want to miss the game so is planning on watching me play the entire thing.  So this is a family event for us.

We played for a while then got the girls off to bed.  Then Dominica and I watched a few episodes of Brooklyn Nine Nine before we were heading off to bed ourselves.  This is, as far as we know, our last night at home for a week.  We will not likely be coming home until next Monday (a week from today.)  This is the longest that I will have been away from home in quite a while, probably all year.  Dominica has been traveling a lot so it is nothing new for her and the girls.

The word from everyone upstate is that the huge snow that accumulated over the weekend has already melted and there is almost no sign of it left at this point.  So our drive up should be just fine.  We will be managing to avoid all of the bad snow from November, if we are lucky.

Slept in till after nine this morning.  Dominica got up at ten and got straight to playing Tropico 4 even before she got out of bed.  Luciana was up around the same time. Luciana is a creature of habit.  She is the first child awake, she comes slowly into our room and asks for chocolate milk.  She makes me take her downstairs and set her up on the couch with a show on the big screen (normally My Big Big Friend or Creative Galaxy) and she spends about an hour alone watching her show all wrapped up in a blanket.

Liesl got up closer to eleven, she had been up late last night.  Once she was awake the girls brought their chairs back into our bedroom and spent the morning doing their sliding game.  It is very rare that all four of us hang out in the bedroom for an extended period of time like this.

This morning Liesl came to me and asked if we could read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” again because she and Luciana missed reading that.  So we are scheduled to start reading that again tonight.  But they decided to do other things tonight when the time finally rolled around so we are planning on starting on that in the near future.

We mostly relaxed today.  Very little done.  It was a nice day to just spend together.

I was up at eight thirty.  Dominica got up pretty early and cleaned for a few hours.  The house looks much better.  I did some work this morning then cleaned and put in an hour or so playing Space Quest V with the girls.  They were very excited to get to do that.  I would estimate that we are now very close to halfway through that game.  The girls still love it.

Today is a huge day in the Miller house, today we decided that Liesl could try programming for the first time.  I spent some time researching Logo options for Linux and decided to just start with our old, trusty KTurtle option from the KDE project.  So in the mid-afternoon I sat Liesl down and explained what programming was to her, showed her how Logo worked and taught her a few basics so that she could get started making her own first program.  She loved it.  We probably spent two hours working on that today.  Five years old and already programming.  She has me beat by four years.

Dominica is completely addicted to Tropico 4 and played most of the day.  She camped out in the living room and is playing it on her new laptop which is way more powerful than my desktop upstairs so she is able to play a lot of games that we have that my current computer just cannot handle playing.

Overall it was a pretty quiet day.  I did a ton of work on the new XenServer instances that I have now and have FreeBSD, Dragonfly BSD, Linux Mint, CoreOS, SmartOS and more running.  I did a lot of work last night and this morning getting my remote Linux Mint desktop working which is great.  I’m testing on the new NX replacement called X2Go which is really cool and does a great job over low bandwidth.  Now I have regular access to a Linux desktop without needing to run a VM on my desktop at home.

We watched a little bit of How I Met Your Mother and caught up on the latest episodes of The Mindy Project and The New Girl but only just enough while we were eating dinner.  I spent pretty much the entire day working on the lab and Dominica spent most of it video gaming and cleaning.  The girls spent most of the day camped out in the bedroom with me.  They set up some chairs (soft ones) on the bed and floor and used them to make a makeshift slide so that they could slide from high in the room down to the floor.  They are pretty crazy.

We are trying to figure out our travel plans for this week.  We have no idea what we are going to be doing.  There is some possibility that I will be working early in the week, but not much.  There is a much higher possibility that I will be working on Friday.  At this point we really have no idea. We are going up to dad’s for Thanksgiving and Liesl’s birthday party which are both on Thursday.  We think that we are going up on Wednesday but my possible work schedule will determine if we are traveling together or if the girls are going up separately or what days we can travel and who, if anyone, is coming back on Friday.  The girls are planning on going to Frankfort for the weekend after Thanksgiving.  I might be working all weekend or I might be free.  We just don’t know.

Two months of living life in a “we just have no idea how to plan because we have no idea what is going on” is really wearing us down.  It has been so long since we were able to do any type of life planning at all.  It is just horrible.

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.