Need Focus, Badly

By mikeismert | Published: April 6, 2009

To provide a bit of structure for my time off, I’ve thought about a few things that I’d like to achieve before I need to seriously think about a new job. Some of my goals for the next month:

  1. Finish cleaning up my resume.  I haven’t had a real resume for years, and since I always assumed that I would be working at Vanu forever I never bothered to keep it up to date.  I’m playing with xmlresume; fiddling with style sheets and autogenerating output formats appeals to me a lot more than mucking with fonts and margins in Word.
  2. Get some sort of regular exercise. I’ve been a sloth for long enough that I’ll be happy if I just get out and walk for an hour a day, but the rain that we’ve been getting recently has put a bit of a crimp in getting that off the ground.
  3. Write a non-trivial Ajax web app.  I’ve been living in a largely C++ sandbox for the last 10+ years, so while I’ve got an academic understanding about how such things work, I haven’t really gotten my hands dirty.  I’ve got some reasonable python clue, so I’ll probably go with Django or Pylons for the back-end just to reduce the initial degree of difficulty, and possibly look at Pyjamas as something to play with for the client-side JavaScript.
  4. Write at least one insightful blog post. I’m busy working my way through the n00b blogger’s cliched hits, just trying to bang out enough posts to start to find my voice a little bit. Despite the fact that I know that the only people likely to read anything here are the few friends that I’ve told and an armada of webcrawlers, the mere possibility of a large audience has made me tighten up. It takes me seemingly forever to crank out even the crappy little posts that I’ve made so far, and everything is very cautious and conservative. It’s hard to write anything thought-provoking if you don’t take any risks.

With the exception of the last one, I think these should be easily achievable in a month. I’m hoping they’ll provide some further inspiration as well. Check back in May to see how I did.

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Unemployment, Day 2

By mikeismert | Published: April 3, 2009

Let’s try one journal-style today…

This morning was a little reminder of how easy it would be to squander my time off.  Start off blog surfing over a few cups of coffee, followed by checking out a bunch of the shiny WordPress toys and options, and then getting embroiled in a discussion with a housemate, and suddenly it’s noon and nothing has been knocked off of the to-do list except for some minor skirmishes in the War On Laundry.

The amount of possible WordPress configuration reminds me a lot of when you first get a new account on a UNIX system.  Choosing a theme is a lot like choosing a window manager.  This theme, Barthelme, has a similar visual appeal as Ion3 (my current window manager of choice) in that there’s not much to look at, so you can install it and get rolling without feeling like you need to spend a entire day picking the perfect background photo and tweaking the color scheme to keep your eyes from bleeding. The plugins are like the old X apps that sometimes did useful things, like xload, but sometimes not (xeyes). Maybe I’ll be motivated to go back and put some additional thought into the design at some point, but right now it smells like a time-sink that I just don’t need.

There was some recovery in the afternoon; I spent a little time looking at Dropbox, creating an account and getting clients installed on my various machines before heading out for a walk. On the recommendation of friends, I’ve started listening to the Adam Carolla Podcast while out wandering around; it’s been amusing thus far and is about the right concentration level for what sadly counts as exercise for me these days.

After the walk, I fiddled a little bit with Dropbox. My real motivation for using it is for synchronized storage for a password management database; I’ve finally crossed the threshold of number of passwords and number of regularly used machines that I either need some help remembering them all or I need to just set them all to ‘abcd’ and wait to get pwn3d. I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far, although the default linux install is a bit not-what-I-want; it is tightly coupled to Nautilus, and you have to jump through a few hoops in order to run the dropboxd daemon without an active Nautilus process running somewhere.

Aside from that, though, the actual service itself is slick. I copied my todo list to the Dropbox directory and started editing it in place, and the time from saving the buffer until the changes appeared on my Windows machine was single-digit seconds. The linux client even seems smart enough to ignore emacs backup files. The automatic revision control is nice, but I’m a compulsive saver of emacs buffers, so if I continue to edit files directly in the Dropbox dir, the file history will soon be littered with versions with minute differences. My only other nitpick so far is that the system tray notifications for the Windows client are noisy by default, but that’s easy to change, so, meh.

I failed to land this before midnight, but I’m counting it as today (yesterday?) anyway. Tomorrow morning, productivity will be mine.

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Officially Unemployed…Now What?

By mikeismert | Published: April 1, 2009

Yesterday was my last day at Vanu. I jumped without a new job or really even much of a career plan beyond “stop doing this NOW,” so it looks like I’m going to have some long, uninterrupted free time for the first time since graduating from high school.  It’s a bit of a scary place to be, particularly in the current economy, but I’m feeling energized by the freedom (and the fear) in a way that I haven’t been since leaving MIT to help found Vanu, Inc. ten years ago.  In the last year or so at the company, I’d stopped growing in a lot of ways, and now I’m looking forward to taking advantage of this adrenaline rush to reverse that trend.

Keeping a blog is one of those things that I’ve been vaguely interested in for a while.  I’ve even gone so far as install WordPress a couple of times, but after struggling through writing an initial “gosh, I’m blogging” post, it was painfully obvious that I wasn’t going to have the energy and the motivation to break through to the point where it became even a semi-regular habit.  Will I succeed this time?  I certainly hope so, but I’m finally at a point where even a few months’ worth of forced writing followed by complete fail seems like a worthwhile experiment rather than a waste of time.

I have no idea what I’m going to write about for three months (possibly a bad sign).  My initial expectation is that it will be some twisted cross between a journal of my unemployment, random ramblings about what to do next career-wise, and hopefully some coherent (and dare we wish for insightful?) commentary based on whatever development projects I’m working on.  When first pondering this project, I had illusions of cranking something out every day, but I’m feeling like two or three posts a week is going to be more realistic, at least until I get my non-documentation writing chops back.  Also, I’d like it to be funny, but I’ll settle for amusing.

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