It's new year's eve, and I think my first resolution for the year of our lord 5767 will have to be to get my butt to bed at a regular hour more often.

I might as well join in on the 9/11 recount.

When 9/11 happened, I was on the Internet. I didn't know it had happened--strangely enough, the sites I was browsing didn't mention it. It must have been around 4PM when my mom called downstairs to tell me that some crazy people flew planes into the world trade center.

After that, the entire month of September was unbearable, and I largely blame the media for this. The TV was just one long loop of planes crashing into buildings over and over again, set to the soundtrack of mindless commentary of news commentators who honestly though their endless jabber would some how shed more light on what happened.

The worst part of it, though, was seeing the people jumping off the WTC on TV. That's without a doubt the worst thing I've ever seen; I had wondered how horror movies were every supposed to be scary again after seeing something this bad. And of course, I had to see those images of people jumping to their deaths looped over and over again, again set to the soundtrack of more useless commentary. And no matter what I did, I just couldn't escape the awful replay and useless talk.

Ever since then, I've suffered from 9/11 fatigue. I absolutely do not give one wit about the latest 9/11 movies and I outright refuse to go to them with my friends. If my friends watch something about 9/11 on the History Channel, I just go in the other room. And I can't listen to Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" because that song so effectively sums up how I felt that entire month--"I'm being overwhelmed, I think I'll go to my bedroom and take a nap, wake me up when this stupid thing is over and people are ready to accept this tragedy and learn from it instead of replaying it pointlessly."

And that's my recounting of what I experienced on 9/11.

Friday.

Hard day at work. Made me very tired. Took a nap at 8:00PM to get refreshed for the party at 10PM. When I woke up, it was 5AM. Dammit, I suck.

Verdict On Friday:

I seem to have a difficult time with this alcohol in moderation. Last week, I drink too much, and by accident pass out on a couch on a porch, and miss most of the next day in an awful hangover. Friday, I ended up by accident going to bed ultra-early and stone-cold sober. I'm now at the other extreme.

Saturday.

Got up real early. 5AM. Way damn to early for my own good. Did some stuff around the house. Went to the (e:ladycroft) and (e:nejifer) birthday party. It's actually right around the corner from my place, so I didn't have to drive. At 3:30AM, I eventually make my way back to my apartment and crash.

Verdict On Saturday:

High points:

I got up early. My Circadian rhythms might some day align with the rising and setting of the sun.

I got to see lots of (e:peeps), as well as meet some cool new people.

I was reminded of my days spent at Ithaca College with foreign exchange students. I forgot how much they could be.

I helped save the cake at the party by grabbing the third corner of the tray. Were it not for my actions, the cake might have smashed to the floor.

There were half-naked people dancing. Very amusing.

I practiced far more moderation than I did at the last party.

Counterpoints:

By getting up early, I reduce my ability to stay up really late, and will want to go to sleep really early.

I realize that I would have had ever more fun at the party if I hadn't stopped taking french, german, and spanish courses in college.

I helped save the cake from accidently smashing to the floor, only to see it later intentionally smashed into the faces of (e:nejifer) (e:ladycroft) and (e:decoyisryan) . Though I've got to admit, the second outcome was far more fun to watch.

All the half naked people were men. And even if there were any half-naked women, the fact they come from cultures where half-nakedness is not taboo and is socially acceptable would totally spoil the shock value of being flashed.

I practiced enough moderation to get home safe, sound, and coherent. But I still woke up with one bitch of a hangover today, and spent most of today in bed.

Sunday (today):

Spent most of today recovering from yesterday. Missed the Buffalo Wing Festival, which probably is better for my high cholesterol situation. Had an excellent meal at Panos. I went to see Idlewild at the Elmwood Regal.

Verdict on Sunday:

Hangovers suck. It's not only the headache, it's that false feeling of malaise that makes you want to stay in bed all day as if you were sick. I made it through, however. Far enough to have a great pasta dish, which probably won't make me any fatter because for most of the day I was to nauseated to eat anything. And Idlewild was really good, at least in my opinion. It was cool to see stop-motion animation, great dancing, and jazz in a movie with two top-ten hip-hop artists; I had expected the "I-sell-lots-of-records-therefore-that-qualifies-me-to-be-a-great-actor" attitude to prevail--I'm glad I was wrong.

(Trying to work my way to 100+, baby! I want that userpic caption!).

Every week or so, I get one or two e-mails or calls from various IT recruiting agencies, either with HR/recruiter people with specific jobs that matched my Monster profile or who say "your resume looked really interesting, we should talk."

Up to this point, I haven't considered any of their offers. I felt that I should put in at least a year in my current job, so I'll get some more experience that future employers may find acceptable. Yeah, I know I probably know a lot more about developing software than the kid just out of college, but as far as an HR office is concerned, if you haven't gotten paid for it, and especially if you haven't gone to school for it, you obviously don't know it.

Before I took the job up here, I had doors repeatedly slammed in my face for hundreds of tech positions in NC, though it's not so much of a slamming as it is a "we'll call you back" and they never do. To paraphrase Woody Allen, I've found the computer job world "worse than dog eat dog, it's dog doesn't return another dog's phone calls." And that's before considering all the competition I'd have from all the people who make Raleigh-Durham one of the top ten info tech places in the country. In addition to local folks, I'd also get the stray e-mail or call from across the country about some job opening, and I pursued it will no better luck (till I got the one for up here).

What also goes against me is that I also tend to be a very honest person, or at least I try to be. And honesty really doesn't go over to well with HR people. I could lie about or overinflate my skillset, probably get hired, and quickly learn enough about the technology to do the job at hand (one of my superpowers) and the HR folks and boss would never be the wiser. But I'd rather get a job honestly, and that is a massive strike against me.

The final thing about these HR people that really screws me is that they don't understand anything about the technical stuff I've done or the challenges I faced and surpassed. It's very rare that I've ever been asked "what was a really difficult programming problem and how did you solve it?" or "How would you come up with a solution for this hypothetical situation?" These people want buzzword-compliant people, not innovative people who can actually solve problems.

And don't even get me started on the recruiters who look for five years of experience in a technology that has only existed for two years.

If issues directly related to employment weren't difficult enough, I also had to deal with some personal issues with the way that some people I was close to back in NC dealt with my employment situation. These people didn't understand anything about the computer job arena, and they said I was "too picky" despite the fact that I submitted dozens of resumes a day for virtually any programming job out there. These same people then called me "selfish" for going to job interviews instead of driving them to various errands they were not able to drive to for stupid reasons of their very own making. Then these same people busted on me for being a 30-year old man who didn't have a decent job (now they're undoubtedly complaining about me leaving them and coming up here, and asking me when I'm coming back). I still really miss those people, but dammit, they were a pain in the ass.

To summarize the last five paragraph of useless memoirs, my attempts to acquire employement in the computer field tend to suck in general, and they sucked especially in North Carolina. And I found the whole situation when I was down there very upsetting.

So back to the present, I'm trying to consider other options than the place I'm currently working. Some people in the company where I work prevent me from doing the best job I can, yet they don't balance their expectations in light of that fact. While I don't intend to leave anytime soon, I do want to know what my options are.

So for the first time since coming up here seven months ago, I call a technical recruiter who left a voicemail a day or two earlier. And dammit, the whole experience on the phone was just the same as it was 7 months ago in NC. I was honest about what I had done (big mistake), I explained the database technology I was currently working on (PostgreSQL, which he had never heard of), I said a lot of the programming I've been doing recently is for Apple stuff (which he must have interpreted as the only stuff I could do), and I told him that the stuff I'm currently being paid to do is a very small subset of the entire skillset I have (which he basically ignored). He ended with a variation on "we'll call you back"--"you're entered into our database. Go to our site and we'll keep in touch". That went really well--not!

I guess I need to look for the positives here. Firstly, it's been months since I last talked to a recruiter, so this exchange was a good refresher. Second, he also asked about why I wanted to leave my current job, which I was a little unprepared for; I've now formulated better answers for the next time around. Third, as my dad would put it, talking with this fellow is a step towards realizing that I'm not trapped in my current job by a contract, and that I can leave at any time. And finally, this experience has reminded me that my situation could be worse; some people don't have a job at all and they'd probably kill to be earning what I do (which is still not a lot, but it pays the bills okay).

Now to fill in the blank of my second blessing for (e:carolinian,30) that I totally forgot include. For the last year or so, I've really started liking Neil Diamond, who in my younger days I considered to be "music for old people." So several weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought a Neil Diamond box set from Barnes and Noble. I really like it, and it's one of the best things I've bought in quite a while.

Smidgens of random bits of potpourri of this week's happenings:

- I managed to get Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur tickets, so that's one less thing for me to worry about. I'd like to join the shul in question, but I'm not too sure how easily I could afford the dues. If I pay 1000+ for the year and something wrecks my work situation in a month or two, and I have to move and need money to move, that'll be a problem. But for right now, I won't have to worry that up here I'll be missing out on something I enjoyed doing every year back home.


- Still a little embarrassed about whatever went on at the party last weekend. I honestly don't remember anything past the point at which the guy with the nosering and hat came up to the porch and entered the scene. It's like I remember walking around the house around 2AM, and then somehow, I materialized on pmt's couch in the morning (actually more comfy than some futons I've crashed on). There's an entire blank chunk of time missing. I hope I didn't say or do anything too stupid other than stare at inanimate stuff for hours on end. If I did do something stupid or offensive, I hope that I'm forgiven for it.

- In work news, yesterday I got confirmation from a previous programmer who worked for my company that my latest guess at what was wrong with the system is correct: the former programmers made an assumption about the limits of how their stuff would be used, and since my fellow non-programmer employees had unknowingly started breaking that assumption since I started the job, they had starting breaking the software as a result of it. One one hand, I'm really pleased with myself that I was able to figure out that the problem was the damn software was never designed then to do the things it people want it to do now. On the other hand, I feel really frustrated for having spent months chasing down phantom bugs in the software that were not bugs, but in fact limits of how the software was supposed to work, and that I couldn't find this out because no one in the organization knew how the software was supposed to work.

- My latest project at work is something I really haven't mentioned much to the higher-ups, largely because they'd probably write it off as "getting sidetracked"; kinda like I got "sidetracked" with another project that I started that has automated the business workflow and saved me hundrds of hours of work at the cost of a few tens of hours spent programming it. This new project is a little bit different than the others, because I'm making it run in a web browser using PHP instead of as a regular mac application using Obje ctive-C* like I would otherwise do. My web programming skills have gotten a little rusty and I need to sharpen them up for the sake of my career--this project is also a good excuse to do this. It will also save me man-weeks and make my job a lot easier in the long run, and the higher-ups will be able to view it from the comfort of their own web browser.

- I'm very happy that I got my latest hobby project, a Co coa Postg reSQL framework, to run. As I spend nine hours a day working on someone else's stuff that I think is put together badly, it's nice for me to be able to make something that I feel is put together well.