An Update

Hi!

I thought I'd update the cyberspace with what's been happening in Lee-ville.

Life

This has really been about my work. I was laid off in December from Wasabi Systems, a company in Norfolk, VA. I've only been laid off twice before: once as a dish washer, in high school, and once while working at Data General in RTP, North Carolina, in the early 90s.

In high school, I was a lazy-a$$ screw up, so I think they really fired me, but they didn't want to pay the unemployment insurance! LOL

At DG in North Carolina, I was the only engineer laid off out of 100 engineers in the kernel group, and I think part of the reason was politics (I think I pissed off my 2nd-level manager one day while driving!). That time, I found a job within a week and I never filed for unemployment insurance. And that still was very hard on my ego. I felt like I was not a good person.

But this layoff has really been a challenge. Actually, to be more accurate, it's been kind of crappy. I was really hoping this job worked out at Wasabi. I turned down a couple of other jobs for this one, including a rather lucrative and interesting offer from Google (I would have had to move to the Bay Area). And then when Wasabi had problems, we were told that everything looked good until March. That turned out not to be the case.

I must say that I really liked almost all of the people I worked with there. There was one guy that I believe was single-handedly destroying the code base, but other than that all the folks were super smart and nice. (Names left off the protect me!)

I immediately contacted Google and a company called Isilon, both of which had offered me jobs, as soon as I was laid off. I also talked to VmWare, which had offered me a job in the past. VmWare was not currently hiring, Isilon didn't like me as much as last time, and Google had to think about it. [Update: I may still talk to Google ... we'll see.]

I am hoping to stay in the local area, since my father is getting up there in years, and I'd like to be around him more than once a year. I am talking to a local company now about a possible job. I hope it works out.

Biking

I have not been biking as much as I should, but I rode the Single Speed today for 90 minutes in the cold and sun. It was fun and hard. I still have my summer (i.e. harder) gearing on the bike, and there was mud and snow up on Mountain Top road. I would have been grinning if it weren't for all the mud and the fact that I neglected to bring my front fender along for the ride.

Everything

I haven't been doing much on the "everything" front. The universe tries to teach me, but my dumb laziness seems to keep getting in the way. I have not picked up the Course in Miricles in quite a while. I'd like to change that.