Another semi-useless spot on the web…
Over the last few months, I’ve gotten more inquiries via email and phone calls from recruiters than I recall ever getting in the past. Now that I’m gainfully employed by a large employer, I seem to be a target for recruiters. Is it recruiters’ MO to target skilled people working at large companies? I’ve only been in this job about 6 weeks; do people think I’m just going to jump ship? Of course I’m not going to do that.
How do I stop them from calling (at least for now :-))?
A few weeks ago I started listening to audiobooks again and became very engrossed in a James Patterson book. I was running with an iPod Nano and walked the dog with my iPhone as well as had my iPhone with me while driving. In order to keep my position in the book, I had to sync the Nano after my run, then sync my iPhone and then before my run, sync the iPhone and then the Nano. This got old real fast (a few days).
I had been eyeing the Fisica Fitness Sensor Key for my iPhone to hook up my heart rate monitor for use with RunKeeper Pro. I couldn’t resist as eliminating my iPod Nano from the equation would make my life easier. I received the Sensor Key about 10 days ago and did my first run the next day. RunKeeper Pro is a decent app that handles everything my Garmin ForeRunner 405 did and more.
I thought that the weight of the iPhone 4 on my arm would be a problem (I also bought the case that Wahoo Fitness sold), but it isn’t that bad. The Sensor Key does exactly what it is advertised to do; it connects Ant+ devices to the iPhone. RunKeeper Pro integrates the heart rate monitor fairly well, but displays the current heart rate in a very small part of the display (almost unreadable). The iPhone is a bit unreadable in bright sun, but the large display is nice.
After a few runs with the iPhone, I can’t see going back to my iPod Nano and Garmin ForeRunner 405. One of the best features that just came to light today was when I was happily running and the narrator of the book’s voice started fading and the phone rang! I was quite surprised, but saw that it was my boss (technically my boss’s boss) calling, so I slowed to a walk and answered the call. I don’t get many phone calls, so being able to get a call when I take a midday run is a great feature of using the iPhone for running.
If I had been running with my iPhone last month, I would have been able to take a picture of the guy who had put a rope around his Christmas tree and dragged it behind him to take it to the recycling place instead of putting it on the roof of his Ford Explorer!
I’d like for RunKeeper Pro to add the ability to bulk export the files and then this combination would be perfect.
When I setup the DBA for my company, Gruby Solutions, I went ahead and found a free business checking account with Washington Mutual. While I didn’t need a bank account as my company is a sole proprietorship, I figured it would look more professional and could have some benefits down the line. When Chase bought Washington Mutual, the free account transferred over. When my wife was looking for a bank account for her business, she also chose Chase.
Things were fine until last month when Chase sent us letters saying that they’d start charging us $15 per month for our accounts, but with a minimum balance of like $5000 or a large number of debit card transactions, the fee would go down. As my company isn’t bringing in any money right now, I decided to simply close my account. My wife, on the other hand, needs her account for her business. She did some research and found that Comerica bank offered free business accounts; there is a branch pretty close to our house, so it was a no brainer for her to also start the process of closing her account. (They do charge for allowing us to hook Quicken to it which annoys me as I’ve gotten used to downloading transactions from my bank.)
While I understand that Chase probably considered us freeloaders, they lost 2 banking customers that will likely never return.
While discussing what I should do with my spare time, a colleague suggested that I write a book. That sounds interesting, but what makes me qualified to write a book? He said what makes anyone qualified to write a book. Good point, but I still am not writing a book.
Today I spent my time on the (almost) daily dog walk thinking about that and came up with an idea “professional source code review”.
So, I’m now opening up my new service. For a flat fee, I’ll spend up to 5 hours reviewing source code and then I’ll prepare a detailed outline of issues and recommendations on how to proceed. Who am I targeting? In general I’m looking for companies that have outsourced their projects and want to keep an eye on the development to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth and to be advised of where things can go wrong. Many companies that undertake development don’t have internal resources to review source code and rely completely on the outsource vendor. While many applications work, reviewing code can assist in polishing the code and possibly preventing future issues.
What happens if your vendor fixes the issues and you want another review, I’ll spend an additional 5 hours (at half price) re-reviewing the code. Are my services cheap? Well, no, but how much is your vendor going to charge you fixing their own mistakes? Software development is a unique business where we’re paid to write the software and then fix mistakes (most projects I’ve worked on are on a time and materials basis).
Why should you hire me? I’ve been writing handheld software for over 16 years (yes, I actually have as I wrote Newton software while I was still in college). I’m very meticulous and have seen enough code to know what is good and what is bad. Software can work, but some of the hardest problems to track down are caused by poorly written code. I can help resolve these issues.
If interested, contact me. Of course, there are certain projects that I can’t review, so I’ll need a high level overview of your project before I can let you know about proceeding.
Do you spot the differences between the 2 boxes below?
If you don’t, you’re not the only one. My three and a half year old son saw the box on the left (these Trader Joe’s Crushers are a staple in his diet) and said “It has 2 holes”. My wife and I looked at him and didn’t quite understand what he was talking about. He was clearly talking about the box, so I grabbed the old box and low and behold, the old box (on the right above) has one connected hole to display the product. The new box (the one on the left has 2 holes). While there are other differences that you can now see by looking at them side by side, I never would have paid attention to something like that.
The mind of our son amazes me; he notices so many things that I ignore or simply neglect.
I’ve lived in Southern California for about the last 19 years with a short stint in Portland, OR. Before that I lived outside of Boston and a few other places, so I’ve had the opportunity to experience various types of weather including cold, rain and snow. The weather in San Diego has been quite chilly lately with day time highs in the upper 50’s. The other morning, my neighbors had frost on their lawns (since I no longer have a front lawn and my back lawn is synthetic, I didn’t have frost). To me, that is beyond cold.
I can’t remember when in my life that I’ve been so consistently cold! I’ve heard people say that your blood thins (which obviously isn’t the case), but the consistently moderate weather here in San Diego has spoiled me to the point that anything below 65 is getting cold. I’m still trying to run, but if the temperature outside is below about 60, it takes me about half my run to warm up and that just isn’t fun. 65-70 is my ideal temperature for running; any colder and I feel like I’m going to get frost bite!
By now, people are probably laughing at me as they’re digging out from another snowstorm or scraping ice off of the windshield in order to get to work. A few weeks ago I was in Portland, OR for work and I was wearing a long sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, a jacket, and then a light rain coat on top of that. My co-workers were just about laughing at me. I decided to suck it up and stop complaining; when one of my co-workers suggested eating lunch outside, I kept my mouth shut and went with the flow. OK, it was quite cold out, but with the sun shining, it wasn’t that bad. I’m sure I could get used to the cold again, but why should I?
This past year has brought some big changes to my career and I’ve written in the past that I didn’t want to work for a large company again and that I really enjoyed being self employed. A few weeks ago, my main client, Critical Path Software, was acquired by eBay. As part of the acquisition, I was offered a full time, employee position at eBay. After a little bit of weighing some options, I decided to accept the position. So not only will I no longer be self employed, but I’ll be working for a very large company! I still get to work from home, so that’s great news.
My attitude has changed a lot since I worked for a large company, so I think that this will be a good move.
A year ago I would never have imagined quitting my job, being happily self-employed and then being happy about accepting a job with a large company!
My wife scored some free tickets to LEGOLAND that were going to expire yesterday, so since we had nothing else to do, we spent a few hours there. It cost us $12 to park so even spending a few hours there was worth it.
I’ve been a LEGO fanatic for a long time so I had expectations about the park. (We went about 6 months ago when someone else gave us free tickets.) The first thing I noticed when walking up was that the signs made out of LEGO bricks were faded and broken. The models in the park are made out of regular LEGO bricks put together with some type of acetone and then coated with a UV protectant. This kind of fading was seen all over the park. In addition I saw paint chipping in various areas along railings.
We saw some new models at the entrances to the other companion parks and they were bright and clean. While the park wasn’t dirty, it just seemed a bit run down. For a park that opened in 1999, I expected more. Last month we had free tickets to DisneyLand and the experience was completely different. The much older park was in tip top shape and everything operated smoothly.
We had lunch at LEGOLAND and even the concessions were not up to par. While the food was not bad, the chaos ordering is something you’d never see at a Disney park. If the operators of the park had a clue, they would take some hints from others attractions.
After a little research, I found that the majority owner of the park is the Blackstone Group which also owns SeaWorld, a park we visit often because my son loves Shamu (please no comments about whales in captivity or making money off these animals). SeaWorld is not quite on par with DisneyLand, but the park is well kept and for the most part is a great place to visit (they changed the Pets Rule show for Christmas and it was a disaster).
If LEGOLAND ever wants us to pay the $69 per person extortion fee to get in the gate, they’ll need to do some major refurbishing and possibly rebuild a lot of the models to make everything nice and shiny. I was amazed at how many people were there; I wonder how many return visitors they get. Maybe I’m just too picky, but if I’m going to spend my hard earned money I want to get value. Now if the park cost say $30 to get in, maybe it would be a different story. However at that cost I’d have to compare it to the San Diego Zoo and call the zoo a much better value.
I’ve written about rain in San Diego before and every year, we hear the same thing on the news about flooding. Why is this news? It happens EVERY year in the same places. Yes, it rained a lot. Now the sun is out, move along.
I almost felt like I was back living in Portland with the amount of rain we got! I figured that I brought the rain back as I was up there on business last week.
Oh well, I’ll have to run as much as possible before I have to pull the ark out of storage again.
“Money isn’t everything” is typically a line I hear people say when they don’t have money and think that money wouldn’t help them. After many years of working like crazy, I’ve come to some realizations and it really starts with that line. I think that it’s taken me a long time to come to this realization, others would say that I’ve been lucky in coming to this realization quickly!
I’ve been a workaholic and when I’ve been self-employed, I have gotten paid on the number of hours I work. So, there was always an incentive for me to work more as I got paid more. Over the course of the last 7 months, I’ve done a lot of thinking and have come to the conclusion that the extra work is only bringing me extra money and nothing more. I kind of dread doing the extra work now that I have had a very enjoyable contract for the last 7 months.
My wife commented to me today that I’m much more relaxed. I’m really liking my new attitude; this, of course, doesn’t change my work ethic, but gives me a better balance between work and life.