Serious Business

Yikes. It’s been almost 4 months since my last update; shit has changed. A lot.

Job

Soon after my last post, I took a job with an ISP as a developer in a fault monitoring / tools group. It wasn’t really what I was looking for was looking for when I left my last job, but as I had mentioned back in July, I needed a job. The job really breaks down like this: we are a small “go-to” team for all issues / tasks that come up. Tool development and maintenance / solutions provider / network monitoring / netcool administration / system rollouts and maintenance / firewall administration / network issues (BIG network) / and on top of all that throw in some security issues as well. You name it, we do it, for the most part. It’s pretty brutal day in / day out. This team doubled in size the week I joined if that gives any indication of the workload we’re facing. Thankfully I’m working with guys who I can really respect on a technical level and generally enjoy the team dynamic we have going.

Projects

With the job came the loss of the one thing I really didn’t want to give up: free time. My outside of work activities / energy has been cut to a sliver of what it was 4 months ago and I find myself constantly fighting to squeeze an extra hour out of every day wherever possible. The job has been real rough on all aspects of my life. There’s not a whole lot I can do about it right now, so I’m hoping things get better in this regard, or at the very least I’m trying to learn to unplug from work before I end up in the same state of mind I got into at my last job. At this point I’m not really sure how I feel about all of that though.

Work has somewhat stalled on a lot of the projects I was working on before I started the job. This is really something I’m trying to figure out how to work around. I put a lot of time and effort into a lot of things this past year and I’d really like to have the opportunity to finish / see through to completion at least a few of them. This is currently one of my main driving points and long term goal.

Summer

This whole past summer came and went in flash. It was one disappointment after another it seems. I finally got my teeth fixed by the most incompetent dentist I’ve ever met (I swear he did more harm than good). Only now has it almost come to an end after 3 root canals (they fucked one up), two crowns, and 1 filling. Along with that headache, the only things I hold truly near and dear, my cattes (Pudge and Pipper), both got very sick this summer. My birthday came and went as I worked through it. I finally had to say goodbye to one of my cats, Pudge, in what has to have been the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. It put me in a real bad state of mind for a few weeks. However, life continues on…

The Good

On the plus, I’ve recently become the new owner of two kittens who are adorable. I’ve named them the most metal names I could come up with without offending everyone; Blitzkrieg (Blitz) and Skwisgaar (Skwis). I just signed a lease on a place to live for the next year out in Herndon. It’s a pretty big place to give the cats some room to roam and I’ll have it all to myself which will be nice for a change. I’ve also been doing some really great work on some projects at the office which have made me feel a little better. It’s something right?

Here’s hoping things get better.

Went through all the effort to get this up, then realized it was hard to keep my focus on a blog when I was working on so many other cool things. That said, I figure its time for an update and hopefully more frequent ones from now on.

My life has been slowly spiraling out of control this past month or so; both of my cattes got very ill, one of my teeth cracked pretty hardcore on a carrot and I have no dental insurance, and MD decided to totally fuck me on my car registrations and suspended it. My one skinny catte, Pipper, has kidney disease which requires this awful process of giving her fluids twice a week + other meds. The other catte (Pudge) got a clot in his front foot which led to xrays (which showed possible lung cancer) and an ultrasound of his heart (which is healthy). $1000 and 6 hours later we were told ‘good luck’ and he is now on blood thinner meds and still needs to get checked out about his lungs. I love them to death and have had them since they where a few days old. I cannot imagine what it will be like to not have them around. This next year (if that) is going to be emotionally brutal.

All of this shit was all followed by a giant chunk of my tooth just cracking off on a Friday night eating  a carrot. Needless to say this pretty much puts me in a super shitty position of having to take a job simply to get dental insurance. I cannot afford to get it fixed any other way, and after two weeks of living with it, I’m starting to really freak out about it… wish things didn’t always cost so much money.

I’m still “funemployed” after being turned down for the only job I really wanted because of computer stuff I did a long time ago. Got back in touch with the jobs I turned down earlier this year and I’m now slowly working my way through the process of figuring out which one I’ll be happiest at. I just need to take one and get back on my feet. Hopefully it wont be so bad and I’ll enjoy the work I’m doing. It’s truly amazing to me that I cannot find a job doing security (it would appear that without a clearance this is impossible) or some awesome development position. At this point I figure i’ve got something good comming my way in the near future. Life cant possibly continue to shit on me after this, can it?  Wish me luck.

I’ve got a couple projects in the pipe that I’m going to talk about this week and maybe a presentation or two to give in the near future. Time will tell.