Man! That storm last night was really something. I was too tired to wake up and appreciate it properly, though. Still, giant thunderstorms are one of the things I miss about the weather from elsewhere. Haven’t walked around the house to check for deadfall yet but I bet there are some downed trees and limbs here or there.
ROLLOVER
I have conquered the rollover bedevilment. Huzzah!
Not as planned
Today was a hamster wheel of falling behind.
First, I woke up at 5:30, thanks to the time change. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but around 1 pm I really started feeling it.
Then, my first-off activity in the morning is scouring Craigslist ads and prepping responses. There were so many this morning that I did not wind up until 10; I try to be done by 9. From 9 to noonish I am scheduled to work on this portfolio-dev site showcasing a local filmmaker’s award-winning doc. I have been making good progress on the site and my work objective today was to deploy a a vanilla HTML version of the site with linked nav elements before I slap some chrome and lorem in place tomorrow. Just as I started to crank, the phone rang, and it was my firewood delivery.
The wood was as promised a full cord of mostly cedar, a bit weather-wet but not unseasoned. Cords are an inherently variable measure. It’s whatever volume of wood you can fit into four feet by four feet by eight feet. Ideally the wood is tightly stacked to fit that volume, but in practice dealers can make more money by stacking loosely, so it’s common to receive significantly less than 128 cubic feet of wood. This guy stacked his material super tight for delivery and may have actually bonused me. The upshot of this is that while I had budgeted an hour to stack the wood, it took two hours. So at noon I was two hours behind on my work schedule.
Things progressed along these lines all day. Various disruptions and commitments stole another hour and a half from the afternoon, notably shipping some telescope parts, and at the end of the day I wound up with just over an hour in on one of two projects slated to use six hours. I have to tighten up!
Home office
New home workspace set up, streaming iTunes all over the house. Sweet!
We have a full basement and there are two tiny ‘bedrooms’ on that level of the house. When we moved in, we set up one room to use as an emergency guestroom and the other room is where I dumped all of the stuff from my office in the old apartment. Since the rooms are so small, the place where my gear and files and such ended up in has not seen much organization, although every now and then I have taken a crack at it.
Anyway, since the extra guest room is empty, I just set up in there, got an Airport Express working and I’m off!
I have promised to gut and organize the other room; Viv even asked me about taking down the wall between them, which would produce a very spacious basement office indeed.
Tap tap
Well, it has been a while, hasn’t it?
For a few years this blog has been more of a quick blog, mobile photos and such, than the long-form essay blog it began as.
Some changes have happened that will permit me to spend a bit more time on the blog at the moment, I’m happy to report.
For starters, my ex-employer ran into a cash flow problem and cut 2/3 of their staff, including me. It was somewhat unexpected but I helped develop the business plan that included eliminating my position and I’m satisfied that my leaving the operation was the correct course of action both for me and for the company.
I am actively looking for work and have been overhauling my various online resumé assets. Part of that initiative involved finally upgrading this blog from MT 3.x to MT 4.x, which went well enough. I have also wrangled the majority of my visual assets into one location, at long last.
Here is my online portfolio, as it stands. There are a couple-few things to do:
- build a comprehensive web-dev section; what I have ready to show is pretty damn weak
- cross-link scanned images of published articles to online-searchable text
- adding clips from my tenure at Now Playing magazine
- wrap a ‘best-of’ subset in embeddable presentation tools
I have been carefully reviewing online advertising for available positions over the past month and the average number of listings for which I am nominally qualified has been about ten per day. I like those odds.
As I wrap up the tasks above, I have begun several portfolio-development projects for friends and acquaintances. I can’t blog about them in specifics, but they include:
- design, development, and deployment of a publicity and promotional site for a short film about a well-known musician
- design, development, and deployment of an online credit-education tool for a non-profit organization
- business process review and recommendations for an independent multi-channel merchant with an eye to creating that merchant’s web presence and online customer-service tools
Of course, there are innumerable house projects to address as well. I’m thinking I’ll be posting more often here for the short term at the very least.