Personal

101000

Jay Kimble — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:10:05 GMT

Well, this is the geek way to say this... today is the day... at approximately 8:10am est on July 31st, my official age is the equivalent of 1010 or $28 or written in another format : 0x28 (or in VB &h28).

That’s also 50 in octal (which really sucks! I think base 10 looks better than that don’t you think)...

[yep, I’m a geek... you can figure it out... to find that not only am I a geek... but an old one... I wrote all this the night before because tomorrow, I’m afraid that I will be cursed by the early onset of dementia and will have forgotten the whole thing as well as my birthday<grin />]

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PS. I miss you mom.. I wish you were still here on this planet...

How long should it take you to get a new job at your current level?

Jay Kimble — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:39:57 GMT

For me the answer to that question is about 1 month. If I get a contract position maybe less time, but in the last several tries it has been at least a month to find a good company/position.

Last week I wrote about my personal struggles with the job situation. Some bad things happened to my business that put me a month behind in looking for a position (new business came last month that ended up going sour). I had enough money in the bank to cover my personal expenses for exactly 1 month which meant that if my margin for error was really low (and it didn’t take into account the length of time before I received my first check.

Well, fast forward a week. I have been on 2 interviews. The first was followed by a second interview at the same company less than 24 hours later. I always go armed (at least mentally) with a number of Eric’s Questions (I don’t like all his questions, but a number of them I think help you go a long way... and I have had interviewers get upset about a few of them which tells me quickly what kind of place I’m interviewing at). In this case I asked one of the questions, and let him know about all of them... but I didn’t have to ask, he had already answered all of them before I even got to the point in the interview where I got to ask questions. Needless to say, it’s a good place. It also fits me perfectly... so a week after I starting looking for a job, I got an offer at a good company for a good position.

Anyway, I’m going to be starting shortly at the new place (and am shutting down IntraDynamics, LLC for everything except part-time side work). Never fear, I’ll still be blogging here, and am planning on continuing (now that things have settled again I can devote more time to some of my personal pursuits.

Personal: Trying Not to Despair

Jay Kimble — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:15:53 GMT

[This is a personal post that you may want to skip (or may not... there won’t be much technical stuff here, but I need to get this out]

So my business (the one I started last January) is in bad shape. The reality is that if my business is hurting financially (which it is), then I’m hurting financially (which I am). I’m about to quit working for myself and go find a contract and get out of my home office for the first time in 2.5 years. That really hurts, but it is where things are.

So what happened? Well, I have made a couple mistakes that have hurt. Last year I had 2 really good clients at the end of the year that kept me working. One of the 2 was definitely stronger than the other. The problem was that the stronger one had to make some cuts and I was one of them (it’s a longer story than that, but this is good enough), so now I have 1 client. I hadn’t been trying to develop and get new clients in all that time, so when work dried up it was empty.

I did find some work last month that would have greatly helped, except the second bad decisions hit me. I agreed to do work that was brought to me by someone I had a relationship with (and I trusted them), but I knew nothing about the client (no prior experience with them). I am now unable to collect from this client (and am not sure I will be able to). (this means contracts are a good thing... use them otherwise you end up with nothing you can collect on legally)

So I’m looking for work. I’ll continue doing what I’m doing now or I’ll bite the bullet and go work on site somewhere (which means either taking a contract or taking a position). I’ve already been talking to a recruiter friend of mine (and have applied for a couple positions).

Needless to say, it’s time for a change.