Author: ryan

Having survived four days at the new job I’m on the verge of becoming useful to them. For me, the first day of any new job is generally spent making an ass of myself as I try to learn how to use the copier, get lost going to the bathroom, and greet the senior VP by the wrong name. By day two I’ve found the soda machine but still can’t send e-mail, and I ask enough simple questions to make my co-workers wonder if I’m brain damaged. Day three finds me confidently making my way from my desk around the floor, but invariably ends in disaster as I discover my card key hasn’t yet been activated and I have to wait in the lobby for fifteen minutes until someone can come let me back in. Day four is my first real chance to screw up something important, and by day five I’ve hit rock bottom and have no where to go but up. With that in mind I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow, my fifth day.

In all seriousness, things have been going reasonably well and I like the people I’m working with (honestly, I’m not just putting that here since they might some day read this journal). I finally found a place to live, and the housemates seem to be interesting people (an artist, two architects, and a writer), but the best part about my living arrangement is the two German shepherds, Fundy (three months) and Argus (three years). These dogs might be the coolest canines ever. My daily routine now goes something like this: work – run – play with the dogs for as long as humanly possible – sleep – repeat.

I haven’t even started work yet and already I’m up until midnight frantically trying to finish things up. I miss the retired life before it’s even ended — not a good sign. I must keep repeating: “consulting is a means to an end… it is just a means to an end…”

I’ve gotten the last of the Alaska photos online, as well as photos from Egypt and various other trips I’ve taken in the past year — anything prior to that will have to wait until the next time I rent a slide scanner. All photos are linked to from the photos page. I still need to add descriptions to most of them, and there may be some broken links (please let me know if you encounter any). If you’ve got hundreds of photos of your own and want the code I’m using to build the photo galleries, I’ll make it available for download as soon as I find the time to package it up.

They say that when you’re waiting for a phone call the best way to get the phone to ring is to hop in the shower. I guess when waiting for a job offer the best thing to do is to post on the internet that you didn’t get it. I still don’t have the job, but they want to talk to me further later on this afternoon.

At this point it looks like I didn’t get the job in LA — they haven’t called, and they initially said they’d get back to me by Monday (today is Wednesday). It’s a bit of a surprise since they needed a very specific set of skills, but I guess it’s a tough market — yesterday eBay had a job fair to fill 183 positions, and six thousand people showed up.

Since I wasn’t eager to get back to work I may just bum around for a bit longer. In the technology world that’s sort of like career suicide since after six months your skills get stale, but cubicles and hundred hour weeks were never really the thing for me anyhow.

Joe, Sheila and I stayed up and went out to the Baylands to watch the Leonids meteor shower tonight. Light in the Bay Area made the viewing conditions less-than-perfect, but it was still pretty cool to see several hundred meteors over an hour long period. At the peak we had occasional bursts of eight or ten meteors simultaneously streaking down at us, and from time to time a big meteor would leave a green or red trail across the sky — definitely worth being dead tired tomorrow to get to see something like that.

This journal is considerably less interesting when I’m not roaming mountains north of the Arctic Circle. Anyhow, I drove to Los Angeles last night, interviewed for a six-month long contract job this morning, then drove home and went out with most of my Accenture start group (from September 1998). They are all awesome and it was great to see everybody again. As to the job, I should know on Monday if I got it. I’m torn as to whether it would be better if I do or do not get this job — the Alaska trip reinforced the idea that the most important thing is to each day make the most of the hand we are dealt. Getting this job would give me some resources to do good things, but not getting it would give me an excuse to get out on the road again. Either way, things are still looking good.