Life is Full of Difficult Choices

So, it will be a while before my posts are as fun as the last five, In the meantime you can entertain yourself with the full set of 300+ pictures here. I'm finally starting to lose my patience for Kodak Easy Share software. It's convenient, and is intuitive, but has a bad tendency to slow our computers down something fierce, and Picasa has a few more fun editing toys to play with until I actually take the time to teach myself how to use Photoshop. I jumped right back in to a job interview this week, taking the drive down to Sunnyvale to do 4 rounds of 30 minute interviews. I thought it went pretty well until the recruiter left me a message today asking if I'd still be interested if the role was materially different than what I thought I was applying for. I'm not sure how to read it, but am worried now since this will be the second time someone had interviewed me and then changed their mind about what it was they wanted in a candidate. I've been skipping out of my current gig to go to a lot of interviews, so I may have to slow down just a bit to minimize the suspicion level. Even with invisialign, I can't possibly need as many dentist appointments as I've had to take off for lately. Essentially I'll have to decide if commuting for a bigger paycheck is worth it, or if losing some of the extra responsibility they'd originally told me about sours the deal. Last night i was up super late because I had to drop W's car off at SFO. She was due in at 4 a.m., so my choices were either the 45 minute drive and the hour plus ride on BART plus a taxi home or getting up and going to get her in the middle of the night. Let's just say it's real quiet on Bart after 10. When I got back I needed to do a little late night grocery shopping so I dropped by our local Foodmax. I was really really really tempted to buy some Cod or Salmon, until I looked at the label to see it was a product of Canada. All I could see was my sad little lolseal (which did not win the contest unfortunately) and I ended up with the rotisserie chicken.

Standing up for a worthy cause

Jason, San Leandro, CA
Originally uploaded by jrherron.

Attached is my entry into the HSUS Anti seal hunt campaign lolseal contest. I don't really think I'll win, but W is such a seal person it was only fitting that I at least enter and show my support. I've been running around a lot lately trying to find a new gig. My fate was "sealed" on that one when I had a meeting with my boss a couple of weeks ago. I said, I think this job is substantially different from what I thought it was going to be and is much more difficult based on some new structural changes. The response I got was I don't really see what the problem is, the other guy used to do it. So at that point I actively started looking. The results have been slow, and not all that great. I had an inteview with a startup software company that would have been perfect. I had to drive to Palo Alto twice, spent a total of 12 hours including travel time, just to have them decide they wanted some one LESS experienced so it would be cheaper. I almost threw up. For perspective you can find my countless other posts about not getting a job because I didn't have any experience. Another potential job sent me to Brisbane for 3 hours worth of 30 minute interviews. I impressed my potential manager, but did not impress the next level up guy because I couldn't quote the job description very well. I had another phone interview with someone today and you can be sure I'd committed the job description to memory. This week we are packing our bags again, and I'm not working for a whole week, so you can assume lots of pictures and excitement are coming your way very soon.