chuggnutt.com

Pretty much it can be summed up thusly: I got a job. (Background.)

No, I won't keep you in suspense about it, and get straight to the reveal-disclaimer of who it is: Smart Solutions. They're a web and software development company and, well, I'm doing web development work (again).

The job started the 3rd, right after the first day of school, so in a way it's like I was on the school schedule: I got the summer off and then went right back to work, in tandem with the kids. Since then, there really hasn't been much to report: most of my time has been taken up with full time work again.

So... yeah. It's taken some adjustment, going from full time to half time to unemployed to full time again (learning a new job, no less) over the course of six months. But, I realize I'm lucky too; I know people who were (are) out of work for longer than that. And I like the new job, so—fingers crossed.

I had actually hoped to start writing a lot more here since my last post, but August slipped away and September is here with all its changes. But before I get to those, here's how the rest of August went.

The week following the 8th, we had to travel to Florida for unavoidable family business. It was fairly last-minute, and traveling cross-country is no picnic. We were essentially gone from Monday through Sunday.

The week after that was a continuation of the job search and interview process. I actually did a fair amount of running around and, of course, it was the "recovery week" from the previous week's trip to Florida.

The final full week of the month was spent essentially getting ready for school and the Labor Day weekend—my brother and sister-in-law were coming up from San Diego and they were staying with us at least part of the time (that we knew of—it actually was the whole time) so there was a fair amount of shopping and cleaning to do in preparation.

Labor Day weekend rocked, and I can safely say I exercised my liver quite a bit without any ill effects. (It's all in how you pace yourself.)

There you are, the capsule version. My next post will encompass what's happened since the beginning of this month.

That secret being: I've been "officially" unemployed since mid-June.

I use "officially" in quotes because the Dire Employment Situation began earlier than that, but it wasn't until June that I was entirely laid off.

What happened was, well, I was working for a builder, and we all know how the local economy has been treating home builders and real estate, right? Anyway, I guess it was in March when I found out that my hours were going to be cut back to half-time at some point in the near future, and then that happened in April. (I think; my timeline on this is a bit fuzzy.)

Thus, I became a part time employee for a couple of months. I started searching the local job scene but avoided blogging about any of it at the time, because

1. the status of my current job was still unclear, and I didn't want to rock the boat unduly one way or another; and
2. I didn't want to tip off potential future employers with something that could potentially be interpreted the wrong way—i.e., it was something I'd rather discuss in person, if needed.

Then June came, and the official layoff came to pass. (It was myself and two other employees from a small-ish sized staff, to give you an idea of the scope.) In some ways it made everything easier—with the kids out of school, I could be home with them, I could devote my time fully to the job search, etc.—but of course this kind of thing is never easy.

Several people have asked why I didn't blog about getting laid off sooner, and use the blog as a networking tool. Good question.

Here's one reason: I screwed up my application for unemployment compensation and didn't manage to get that resolved until just last week, so I didn't want to somehow compound the problems I was having by blogging something inadvertent until it was fixed.

That's a true answer; I really did screw up the unemployment and I really was a bit paranoid about blogging it—but it's not "the" answer. Not that I can give you an alternate reason, other than I just wasn't ready to write anything about it.

Anyway. For the past month and a half we've been watching our budget closely, I've been seeking employment (I've had a few interviews, too—two as far away as Portland and Lincoln City), and ideally I'm doing some freelance web development work to make ends meet while job searching.

I'd like to say that I took the extra time to really focus on my writing and blogging and trying to turn them into viable revenue generators, but, well...

So. I'm currently unemployed, and if anyone should have any leads on a computer- or internet-related job (I specialize in PHP and MySQL web development, don't ya know), I'm available.

(I don't do Bar Mitzvahs.)

Simone noted the humor/frustration level I was having with Dell this week at work. Of course, anytime I mention "Dell" around her she shakes her head in disgust, so perhaps she's not exactly the most objective observer. :)

What happened was, at work this week one of the newish Dell PCs started making a high-pitched spinning/whining noise. At first I thought it was a fan, so I opened up the box, eliminated the fans as a source of noise, and quickly concluded it was the hard drive. Sounds emanating from the hard drive are, generally, a Bad Thing. And sure enough, when I tried to boot the machine up again in order to copy the data to the network (most of the user data is already on the network, except for a few things like email and some accounting data), I got the Windows blue screen and problems booting.

So I got the person set up with a temporary PC (an older one), pulled the hard drive, and called Dell.

(Let me disclaim in advance that in fact all the people I talked to at Dell were very professional and helpful, and the overall service they performed was very good. It just turned into a minor comedy of errors.)

First of all, the machine's out of warranty; it was purchased one year and one month ago. Of course! Even assuming I'd bought the one-year service plan warranty with it, it still wouldn't matter.

Nearly 45 minutes later, after talking to three different people (a woman from India; some fellow with an unidentifiable accent in Tech Support; and a woman from Roseburg, Oregon in Sales), I was finally able to get the order placed for a new hard drive that matched the specs of the machine and drive in question: 80GB Ultra ATA, IDE interface. Pay attention, that's an important detail.

They tell me that yes, even though I ordered the drive with Next Day delivery, it still may not even ship out until Friday the 14th. That's fine, I say, just get it here ASAP. And guess what? They surprise me by delivering the hard drive the very next day! Woo-hoo!

Open the package, mount the drive into the PC chassis, go to plug everything in... and it's the wrong type of drive. They sent me an 80GB Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, which is incompatible with the IDE interface in this computer.

So there's not much else to do but get on the phone with Dell again, spending exactly 31 minutes on the phone this time (our office telephones have a call timer). I spoke with the Customer Service department (again a woman from India, as near as I can figure), got the return processed (UPS would pick it up in the next three days), then transferred to Sales, where I made sure to order exactly the right type of hard drive. I hope. This was Thursday.

The new drive hasn't arrived yet, so the speedy Next Day delivery that accompanied the first hard drive hasn't recurred. Hopefully Monday? But, the UPS guy did pick up the return Friday morning, so that's something.

Simone did warn me.

I would've blogged this week... but work beat it out of me. (I did manage to keep blogging over on The Brew Site, barely...)

Not just "regular" work, I've also been working on a website in my spare time as well. As part of my other, semi-freelancing gig. That's taking up a lot of my time (and still will this weekend).

So anyway, sucky week. Kind of derailed me.

Okay, that's not exactly true: we got our internet service back at work around 3:30pm or so. But that still means we spent the better part of a day without.

The problem, as it turned out, was a dead SAS unit. (I have no idea what "SAS" actually stands for; it's basically like a cable modem for the wireless broadband nonsense.) Not the cranes at all. What's truly irritating is that it took OneEighty two days to figure this out, and most of today for the tech to "prep" the new unit. What, are they stored in a vault under guard somewhere? Seems to me techs should have spare SAS units in their trucks, ready to swap out at a moment's notice.

So I spent the better part of the day in a bad mood at work, continuously fielding the inevitable "Is it fixed yet?" and "Why aren't we up yet?" questions and basically spinning my wheels. Ridiculous. Now we've lost two days of productivity and I just know I'm gonna be in a bad mood at work for the rest of the week.

Needless to say, I plan on switching us over to a hard line as soon as possible; I've already got some paperwork in motion. What a pain in the ass.

At work, that is. Our internet connection was down the entire day. And there wasn't a thing I could do about it except wait for the tech from OneEighty Networks (née HighSpeed Communications née EmpireNet) to try to fix it. With no luck.

The problem? Well, for starters we have OneEighty's goofy LMDS "wireless broadband" service, which, instead of an actual T1 or DSL or other hard line, employs a line of sight microwave relay system to connect to the internet. "Line of sight" means that anything getting between the roof antenna and the transmitter on Awbrey Butte will block the signal and put you out of commission. Oh, and really foggy/rainy/snowy/etc. days can interfere with the signal too.

(This was all set up well before I started with the company; I just inherited the problems.)

So today it was offline, and the tech can't figure out why, but his favorite theory is that one of the new giant metal construction cranes that went up last week is blocking the signal. Sounds reasonable, except the crane went up last week and we didn't start experiencing any problem until today (or possibly yesterday but no one was in the office to tell for sure).

So work sucks when there's no internet, because it really drives home just how much we rely on having a live connection. Probably 90% of what I do requires internet access. Stupid crappy "wireless broadband." I think I'm calling around tomorrow for quotes for a real connection.