Tag Archives: job

Lying In Bed

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Summary: Brain Dump at 5 AM

I don’t normally lie in bed. When I’m in bed, I sleep. Maybe it’s the ridiculous sleep cycle I’ve been on, but I’d like to think it’s because of all the nonsense that’s been happening in my life.

One huge issue? Physical pains are returning. What a great time for my wrists to start acting up again… And my jaw? Well, that’s something I probably should have taken care of earlier before I quit my job about a month ago. Then my rib pain started flaring up again. I could never get a final diagnosis on Fibromyalgia, but it seems like that’s what I have… completely useless diagnosis since there really isn’t something I can do to fix it. Oh, exercise? I do that, thanks.

But specifically, the wrists are so painful now that I probably could get away with blaming that on the recent drought of content on this blog. (And yet, here I am, typing away… Of course, I was thinking about recording this, but… I still prefer the writing…) But no, I blame it on the incredible lack of focus in my life.

And maybe this kinda leads into the slight depression I’ve been going through. It’s been little over a month since I left my full-time position, and yet I haven’t done much of anything. I realized that I’m no longer working at a 9-to-5 much too late. It’s not like before when all I had to do was perform at my job and get paid a certain salary at a certain time interval. I mean, I could get away with coasting (and yes, there were times when I did coast). But now? The game has changed.

Another interesting realization is that I have somehow hacked myself to live on very little. My runway might be longer than calculated. Funny how this is probably a very small win in the big picture, but I should count the small wins so that midst all these fails, I can feel just a tiny bit better about myself.

Realist JK, meet optimist JK.

"Quitting" In August

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Something magical happened today.

I finalized my leave from my full-time position at NCSA. And how it happened was very offhand. I thought that I told my boss this late last year, but I guess at that time, I wasn’t very sure either. As a sidenote, it’s going to be weird writing a letter of resignation so far in advance.

It’s been on my mind for months, as to where I should go next after my lease runs out. Do I stay, or do I find somewhere else to be awesome in? I’ve also been toying with half-time, but found out even more how bad of an idea that is. (The vacation day payout at the end gets silly, and I won’t have any of that.)

So yeah, that’s it. I’ve been telling friends that this might happen, but now you all know: It is happening.

Why “Quitting” Is In Quotes

I’m quitting my full-time job, but I’m far from quitting anything else.

What the heck am I doing after August? Well, I hope to scrimp and save like a madman up until that point, making sure to at least leave with +$10K in the bizzank. I hope that the next step will be a bit clearer to me as I continue the good work.

How It Began

Just so everyone’s on the same page: I went to college here. After graduating, I did some freelancing while staying in town for a couple more months. Eventually, went home to Cincinnati, because there was very little reason to stay in town. Thankfully, I was hired by a web development firm up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After only about six weeks of being in that job, I got an offer from NCSA (I applied well in advance of the job in Minneapolis) and rolled back down here.

The perk that helped me make that decision was simple: the chance for an all-paid for MBA. I was fairly certain I wanted to go back to school. Of course, I wised up and asked myself why I would endure the same pain and suffering from not being able to do, even though it was free? (And no, I’m not knocking on anyone else who got an MBA. I just don’t feel like it would be of use to me. Who knows, maybe it’ll come bite me in the butt later.)

So with that, I decided that I needed to continue my efforts in making HanMeta a reality. Of course, that was started in Decmeber 2007 on paper, but it started back around when I graduated. I don’t think I really understood even the ramifications of the possibility of running a company. I think I just liked to go around telling people that I had a company.

And Now…

Well, it’s go time now. This year started off with quite the bang, learning more linux admin than I could handle (I mean this because I’m probably going to be outsourcing the infrastructure of whatever I write to Heroku), refocusing on what I want to do with the blog, and relearning Rails from the ground up.

With the acceptance to the Apple iPhone Developer Program (and with my $105.19, blah), I’m ready to do some coding for that platform also. I know that the iPhone platform fits into what I want to do, it’s just a question of what I want to do on it. Do I want to make a quick helpful app to fund the rest of HanMeta? I don’t know.

And as I continue my work at NCSA, I hope to hone the skillset I have now. I’m currently working with two other awesome developers (one of which who was a little too happy for me to quit ;-) NCSA’s getting hit with budget constraints, too, it seems, and I was more than happy that my move to quit was going to help someone else out in the process.) with our insane code update process, with a specific focus on the UI (the HTML/CSS/JavaScript). Finally, I can leave the realm of Sybase and DBArtisan. (If anywhere in the job description you see those two words, run. For me, ColdFusion is on that list, with a few others.)