I’ve been missing having all my things accessible (about half of them are crammed into a storage unit in Portland), plus I’m really not all that compatible with my current housemate, plus the neighborhood I’m currently in has gone downhill since I moved here (rowdy partiers moved into the house next door).
I was racking my brain for strategies for addressing at least the final problem (I hate not having peace and quiet at night) while at the same time having to cope with being unemployed in an expensive city. Suddenly, I’m employed again. I don’t have to rack my brain: I just have to sign a lease on an apartment of my own and sign a check. Problem solved.
I’m definitely not looking forward to the whole moving process again, but I am looking forward to settling into my new place for at least a few years. As much as I find things to dislike about Seattle, it’s not all that bad a place when compared to the average big city in the USA, and it is in the ecoregion I’ve bonded with and consider myself part of.
Moreover, while not perfect (is any place?), the apartment I’ve found does have enough of the things on my rather lengthy list of wants and needs (some of which are difficult to satisfy in Seattle) that I feel comfortable signing a lease and bringing an unexpectedly early end to the search for a new home.
First, slide film is not dead. Yet. Fuji still sells it, and fortunately I prefer Fuji’s slide films to Kodak’s anyhow. So I figure there’s at least several more years when I can continue shooting the exact same combination I’ve done for a decade now. As a bonus, the more people who do this, the longer slide film will last.
Next, color negative film is still going strong. I don’t like it as much as slide film, but Kodak has released a new emulsion in recent years (Ektar 100) that I’m actually quite fond of. So after slide film dies it will be decision time: is there a negative film available that is good enough? If so, I can shift to it.
If not, it will be time to begin the unpleasant process of learning how to cope with a new but inferior tool. Or perhaps time to abandon a form of photography which, while presently an enjoyable pursuit, will have become unduly tedious and frustrating thanks to technological processes beyond my control.
And I am loathe to bequeath the name “progress” onto such processes.
I had what I thought was a better-than-average job prospect, but at this stage it’s obvious it is not going to materialize, since the appointed time for a response has passed with no word whatsoever from the employer.
Maybe it’s just as well, because it would have required relocating at short notice to a different part of the metro area. It wasn’t a particularly bad part of it, but still: if I must relocate at short notice, I’d rather it be to someplace in Cascadia that does not have one of the key glaring downsides that each of the major metropolitan areas here have. In other words, I’d rather get something a little extra for the pain and bother of moving.
If it wasn’t for those downsides (Portland: allergen levels and general poor air quality, Seattle: poorly-planned growth that has a significant negative impact on quality of life, Vancouver, BC: onerous immigration hassles), I wouldn’t necessarily have an objection to living in a larger city. It’s just that each of the three “major city” options in the Pacific Northwest happen to have a serious downside to them.
The forecasters really couldn’t make up their minds on this one. First it was supposed to be the storm that ends this current cold spell by dragging the normal mild marine air back. Then, it was supposed to start as snow but turn to mild rain and end the cold spell anyhow. Then the amount of initial snow went up to amounts that would create a slushy mess when the rain came. Then it was supposed to be all snow, huge amounts of it.
Those huge amounts of snow went south (Chehalis, a lowland town that gets no more snow on average than Seattle does, got a whopping 17 inches). We ended up with a little over 4 inches here in West Seattle, still a very significant accumulation for the lowlands.
It all wound up as forecast around 2PM. Or so I thought. I woke from the nap I took after my walk in the woods, and looked out at a puzzling sight: tiny little drops on the outside of the window, a haze in in the distance as if it was still snowing, but no flakes falling and no evidence of the least bit of melting.
I went outside and the mystery was solved: the leaves on the laurel bush out front were becoming glazed with ice. Freezing drizzle. It’s sundown and there’s now a distinct crust on the snow, and the tree branches are making that creaking sound in the wind that they do when encrusted.
Up until this week, I had been worried that this was going to be a dud of a La Niña winter. No longer.
To Apply: Please send portfolio URL and resume to [e-mail address deleted]. Subject line should read “Your Name: Backend Developer.”
Really, now? A portfolio? For a back end developer position? Isn’t that about as relevant as asking an electrician or plumber for a set of pictures showing external views of new buildings he helped work on?
This one cuts particularly close to home for me because my last job involved fixing the horrible mess the back-end code was on a site that looked absolutely beautiful when viewed on a browser. Interestingly, this job has been advertised regularly since last autumn, so it seems this employer is having trouble filling it.
Already have one scheduled for tomorrow. So now I get to go through the whole “this might be the one… oh shit, it’s another mismatch” ride again. Eventually it will end, but the odds of it ending on any one interview are not so great.
Biggest accomplishments were escaping Portland for someplace where I can be outdoors in spring without endangering my health, and unloading the condo I have there (which I guess could be regarded as a subset of the first, but I hadn’t actually lived there for some time).
I’m still unemployed, but that’s not a terribly big surprise. Once I had gone about a month without locating work, I pretty much knew it was going to be a long, hard slog, because I never have any middle ground in this regard; gaps between jobs seem to either be inconveniently long or too short to offer any time to recharge.
… when reading a Craigslist job posting titled “PHP Programmer & Fine-Code Connoisseur // $110,000 (Seattle)”. PHP is a textbook example of the hazards of someone who has insufficiently studied language design designing a language. No genuine “fine-code connoisseur” would want to touch PHP with a 10-foot pole.
The unrealistic salary indicates that it’s a pretty transparent example of a sleazy recruiter trolling for résumés. PHP jobs tend to pay less than those using most other platforms, precisely because anyone with enough smarts to be a good programmer doesn’t want to touch the language.
Some years ago, when faced with the decision to be anonymous or not, I basically said “fuck it” to anonymity. At the time, I was focusing on not being interested in selling my liberty to speak out (on my own spare time, on a web site paid for with my own money) for a salary.
I also thought it was basically impossible to remove any trace of myself. Technically, that is correct. Practically, it will take extra work to locate any such stuff, work that some employer Googling my name probably won’t bother to engage in. So effectively, it is indeed possible to grab back lost anonymity. Plus, I haven’t really lost all that much anonymity, because I have been mostly anonymous already.
Furthermore, I have come to an alternate “fuck it”: The Internet combines the lack of privacy of the village with the lack of humanity of the big, cold city — fuck it.
On the other hand, it does make me pause a little that I might be turning my back on my earlier principles and hiding who I am just for employment’s sake. I’ve pretty much decided that I’m not, if I’m mostly going for privacy and anonymity: leaving only a tiny bit on the Internet that is easily attributable to me, and otherwise being as invisible as possible in cyberspace. Which is why I have no plans to create any Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networking pages.
But still, the whole exercise does stir vaguely unsettling feelings in me.
(And if you are an employer who found this entry by searching my name: Congratulations, you are far more persistent in your explorations than most.)
I did not get the job east of the lake after all. I’m almost certain it was because I expressed my antipathy about doing systems administration work; my interviewers kept revisiting the issue of sysadmin work and my (lack of) willingness to consider doing any more of it.
So be it. There was only one systems administrator at that company. He’s only human, so he’s going to get sick. And if I was to be the one called upon to fill in when that happens, forget it. Worse, suppose he departed for greener pastures — Guess Who would be appointed the new sysadmin (quite possibly permanently!) in such a case?
Really, I never want to do such work again. Ever. I’m completely burned out on it. A job where I am literally a heartbeat away from becoming a sysadmin again is one gigantic turkey of a job.
It pales in comparison to the above issue, but it’s also nice not to be compelled to move again, particularly if the move does not involve leaving the megalopolis. Simply too much hassle for too little improvement in my lifestyle, particularly after I’ve spent so much effort getting settled where I currently live.
