My Work

I haven’t done even a tenth of the gaming I usually do in a given week. Between my sister Hillary getting hitched in Boston; my sister Genjer and niece Jazzmin coming up from NYC to spend Easter weekend here in Connecticut; and the siren’s call of Rock Band demanding the return of the (in)famous Buzzkillaz, well, that was pretty much it. But though I didn’t get much gaming done, I did get a lot of writing done. I am absolutely delighted to announce that I’ve been hired on at Massively to do what I can to make Massively the number one destination for hot news and features about every single game in existence. I’ve patched Test and re-installed EQ1 because I can think immediately of three or four games which could use a lot more coverage, and I aim to see they get it. ...

Kind of a mishmash post today. I start out with some EQ2, then move on to TV and lastly a little bit about work right at the end. Being a recruit in a highly successful raid guild going through Veeshan’s Peak for the first time leaves me plenty of time to play alts and watch TV shows :) The night before last, I worked a couple more levels with Winterwing, my Arasai bruiser who is bringing the fear to Butcherblock and about whom I’ll write later. Last night, I played Dera, whom I hadn’t played much since she reached 80 over the weekend. ...

Today’s XKCD is about my favorite programming language:

I was thinking… ya know, I’d like to do some fan art with Portal’s Weighted Companion Cube, but I couldn’t find a model of one that worked with a modeler I could afford – i.e., a free one. So I did my own from scratch with the Persistence of Vision ray tracer. I haven’t put in any textures yet… but I think it came out rather well for an hour’s work. ...

I’m getting a little tired of job spammers. It’s time to fight back. Letter to someone who has spammed me three times with the same spam… Well, to be honest, I didn’t fill it out because you didn’t mention a specific job you thought I might fit. Instead, it looks like you want me to do all the work here to put myself into your resume database so that you can potentially place it where I might be applying through another avenue, since I don’t know specifically where it would go. ...

And Lord knows, I love pudding. But this is getting a little funny. A fair number of the places to which I apply for a job don’t believe that I can actually program. My resume shows kernel coding at DRI, application writing at Symantec, systems software at Apple, client/server web work at Thomson and Surya, mobile applications at Sony, but there still seems to be a question of whether or not I can actually program. ...

I’ve cut down on my blog writing (and reading), cut down on my game playing, cut down on nearly everything. I’m extremely uncomfortable, it seems, with doing anything but looking for work. My days are spent working on job skills (I have tried out some new development environments and today am looking at the Lua scripting language), posting my resume places, following up on anyone who shows interest. It’s really hard to send a resume to a specific company. Or to even know when you are sending your resume to a real company. Jobs these days are like… real estate listings, passed along from one headhunter to another, from a website to another… Are these real jobs? Or are they fake jobs, nothing more than profiles of a potential job-seeker who might fit a potential contract? ...

In my job search, there is a question I dread hearing from an interviewer. And that would be, “Do you play World of Warcraft?” It’s great so many people play. When I lived in Escondido, this guy came over to borrow a Windows XP install disk (does this really happen? apparently…). He’d seen me carry computer gear into the apartment… a LOT of computer gear… and I guess he had a hunch I might be a person who might have one. Which I was. ...

Surya laid me off this morning. And after all the nice things I said about them! I wasn’t totally surprised – they don’t need two IT people when they are downsizing across the board. With my boss back from Bali, they no longer need me to cover his tasks while he is away. And the way my direct boss has been acting since even before he returned from Bali, I could tell something was up. I figured if they were going to lay me off, they would do it after his next Bali trip, but… I guess not. ...

I read nearly all the spam Surya gets so I can tune our spam blocker to keep it out of the mailboxes of the bright and beautiful Elois upstairs. Here are some gems. Do not in any case enter our store! Do not look at our prices and wide choice of cheap legal downloadable 0Em software! Do you really need this software? You will definitely need manuals and different promo-discs that are included in the packs from the manufacturers that cost hundreds of bucks! We do not offer you this – only 100% full-working oem software without any manuals. ...