Category: Other

It’s early morning on Sunday the 26th. I thought I’d be posting about the free Hatch Shell concert from earlier tonight. As it turns out, though, I slept through it.

And when I say “slept through it,” I mean I went upstairs for a nap at 4:30 PM and woke up at midnight.

And now, of course, my body doesn’t want to go back to sleep because it’s already had almost eight hours.

What’s the opposite of insomnia?

I have long suspected that my occasional marathon naps have something to do with depression, but this is a new one—I don’t feel depressed, just disoriented. Unless, of course, I’m hiding something from myself.

Boston Globe: 82 years later, R.I. couple still holding hands. Tarnation. If Lisa and I ever make it that far—and I’m concerned about our individual vitality rather than the vitality of our marriage when I say that—I hope I’m saying “She had legs. And I said to myself, ‘I need to meet that broad’.” And I hope I can still move fast enough to keep Lisa from smacking me. 🙂

Oh: and how perfect is it that he was a typesetter? If there is ever a job that prepares one for the long view, it is that.

On that note: congrats to Furious on her nuptials last weekend. Sounds like quite a party—and I hope you’ll post the full vows at some point, as “I vow either to cook or clean up but rarely both” is about as perfect a replacement for “obey” as I’ve heard in this two-career world. Also have to give big ups to the choice of “Handle With Care” for a first dance, even though there’s an interesting contrast with that vow. I too have been uptight and made a mess, but the beautiful thing about marriage is that one never has to clean it up oneself.

Congrats to Rogers Cadenhead, briefly notorious for his successful domain name speculation exercise resulting in his acquisition of www.benedictxvi.com, for doing the right thing and pointing the domain to ModestNeeds.org, a local charity. He could have made a bunch of profit from the domain, but this is clearly the net positive choice for everybody. I hope the television crews don’t stop calling. I think he should at least get a free trip to Vatican City and an audience, if not one of those hats.

Regarding Dave Winer’s suggestion: I think there will be a healthy amount of blogging about the Pope’s actions and that it should have some central location. But I don’t think anyone going to benedictxvi.com for faith reasons is going to be persuaded by a bunch of critical articles. Setting up popeblog.com or ratzinger.org will accomplish the same thing.

Astute readers (or folks who click to my site rather than just scanning my RSS feed) may have noticed that my tagline, which formerly read “This blogger is for hire,” has changed. Later today I will start my new job as product manager for iET Solutions, a company that makes software that manages IT services based on the ITIL standard, as well as more traditional customer and IT management offerings including helpdesk and CRM.

I thought it might be helpful for other people in the job market to get some perspective on my search. My full time search started in November, and I received my first offer in early April, almost exactly six months later. During the intervening time, I spoke with almost 40 companies; had first-round interviews with about 15 of them; second round or higher with 8; and secured two offers.

Position availability for product managers has been bursty. There was a hot period for about six weeks from November through early December, then no real positions available until about late February, when things suddenly got hot again. This may be a specifically Boston issue, or it may speak to factors in the economic cycle that influence the availability of this kind of marketing position.

I used several lead management methods to identify new opportunities. Monster and Craigslist were in the mix, as were conversations with friends and colleagues at networking events and ongoing daily conversation. I listed my resumé on Monster as well as on my own blog, and found that both brought a roughly equal number of hits in any given month, though the nibbles from people who found me on Google tended to be less targeted and less serious. No one who contacted me mentioned having read my blog. I also worked with three recruiting and placement firms and spoke with many more. Some of the experiences with placement firms were very positive, and I will be happy to provide specific recommendations offline. The recruiter who placed me at iET Solutions was a single-time recruiter (not someone with whom I had looked at other firms) who found my resumé on Monster.

What’s next for me and this blog? Well, it’s likely I won’t update as often as I have been doing for the last six to eight months, but I anticipate continuing this project well into the foreseeable future. There may be some new directions in content, responding to some of the challenges of my new job. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride as much as I plan to.

It’s been a hard couple of days, for whatever reason. I have had bursts of morning energy followed by absolute collapse in the afternoons. Not sure what’s going on, but it might be one of the following, presented in increasing order of likeliness:

• my mono (which I somehow caught in college) might be relapsing
• my hereditary thyroid problem might finally be surfacing
• the Black Dog might still have a big paw on my chest (unlikely for a number of reasons that will shortly be disclosed)
• the allergist at MGH who determined that I had no seasonal allergies, only allergies to dust mites, might have been wrong
• Or I might just be catching up on sleep after a week of hard driving (including time spent driving to SAT prep classes and on my big vacation spree, I spent about 44 hours behind the wheel from Sunday the 3rd to Tuesday the 13th)

I hope it’s not the last one. I have about ten more hours of driving this weekend: down to New Jersey to collect my family and return everyone back home, where there will be a newly finished (though probably not painted) doorway in the kitchen.

Blogcritics: It’s April 1st, Fools. Collection of more than 20 foolish posts in honor of the day. Personal fave is “Joni, Ani, Tori Form Supergroupi.”

I should perhaps be clear that my previous review was not meant as an April Fools joke.

It’s probably a sign of my impending intellectual bankruptcy that I’m succumbing to memeposting, but I like this one (via Todd at Frolic, who got it from EveTushnet.com, and who also points to these folks). Do I have ten things? Well…

1. Been a state spelling champion. (What, you didn’t know there were state spelling champions? Only in Virginia.)
2. Shaken James Michener’s hand wearing clothes that I had flown in the day before, since my luggage had gotten lost en route.
3. Sung under the baton of Robert Shaw, twice—once at the Kennedy Center.
4. Jammed—and recorded—with Dave Brubeck in the Washington National Cathedral.
5. Fractured my sternum.
6. Sung for President Bill Clinton and NBC anchor (and Wahoo) Katie Couric on the same day.
7. Asked six or seven senior Microsoft executives when they were going to stop pissing off a substantial community of potential customers by calling Open Source Software a “cancer.”
8. Helped build software that’s saving American lives and taxpayer money in places like Afghanistan—and supporting humanitarian missions in Cambodia.
9. With the help of 15 close friends, sampled beer from more than 50 countries in one sitting.
10. Driven cross country in four days.

What’s interesting to me looking back at this list is that many of the items are about my singing—which I haven’t really done since I got back to Boston. Time to change that.

After the umpteenth dropped call on my cell phone, this one from a recruiter, I started finally looking into some options for fixing my lousy cell reception. The first should have been obvious but wasn’t—the form to report a network issue to Cingular/AT&T Wireless.

The second was to investigate new phones. My requirements: Bluetooth, camera, and ability to install third-party software like the Salling Clicker. This pointed me back at Symbian-platform phones, and a couple likely candidates from Nokia: the 6820, which Lisa currently uses, and the 7610, which may be out of my price range.

I wonder if it’s time to look at Sony Erickson again…

Salon: I got derailed somehow!. I’ve been saving this one in my aggregator because the general tone is just about right. Boy, do I understand what “functionally depressed” means. Not to mention “walking, talking avoidance mechanism.” File this one under psychology of the black dog.

MSNBC: Writer Hunter S. Thompson commits suicide. Dr. Gonzo’s insistence on eradicating the illusion of objectivity in his reporting paved the way for the blog world’s embrace of subjectivity. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to overcome his demons.

I feel a little like I did when Elliott Smith killed himself. Not quite the same sense of loss—I wasn’t that emotionally connected to Thompson—but the same anger. There is no bigger opponent for some of us than our own black angels of darkness.

Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Rosette Nebula. Such a cool photo:

Congrats to Fury for qualifying for the US Masters Short Course National Championship swimming meet in breaststroke. And for cracking open a fine Canadian craft beer, La Fin du Monde, to celebrate. I wholeheartedly approve.

Wil Wheaton writes compellingly today about the outcome of his latest audition. There are a couple of things here that spoke to me. First: Wil, like me, is in an industry that is playing the hiring game in a very risk averse way. In Wil’s industry, Hollywood, it makes a lot of sense—people literally make the part. In my industry, the software startups are coming off a multi-year venture funding “nuclear winter,” and now more than ever the old rule applies: A companies hire A players; B companies hire C players. That leaves people who aren’t picture perfect matches for product management jobs (including competitor experience, or industry experience, or multiple successful product launches, looking for the one position that they are the exact right fit for.

These fiscal realities don’t make managing the inevitable downtimes any easier, though. As Wil writes today: “I still haven’t heard anything about the amazing movie, and it’s getting harder by the day to maintain hope.”

This is the hardest part of the search. Last week I had what I think was a turning point: I was talking to Lisa after one particularly frustrating interview and started listening to myself as she offered some responses and helpful thoughts. I was rejecting everything she said out of hand, speaking very negatively, preemptively shutting her options down before she had a chance to elaborate on them.

And I realized. I wanted to shut down the options because I didn’t want to hope. I was afraid to get hurt again.

I decided two things that day:

1. I shouldn’t be afraid to fail. There is at this point nothing to lose.
2. I am going to start writing down when I think negatively about myself, and diving into why.

With any luck, doing both those things will help me catch some of my negative thinking before it paralyzes me again.

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of Allied (Soviet) forces at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

While I can’t find words to express the mix of sorrow, rage, disgust, and shock that still fills me when I contemplate what happened in that camp and others like it across Nazi Germany, I have to try. Because we’re mistaken if we think it will never happen again.

On a more optimistic note, I was encouraged to read Putin’s remarks at the ceremony to the effect that Russia still has anti-semitism and that he is ashamed to have to acknowledge it.

More Holocaust resources:

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and its special exhibit on the liberation of Auschwitz
• A Virtual Tour of Auschwitz
• Nizkor Project FAQ, which addresses and rebuts arguments put forth by Holocaust deniers.
• Responses to the Holocaust at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia

All things considered, 2004, as years go, was no 2001, but I’m still glad to see it go. Here’s to 2005, and its possibilities. Will it be: “Under a blood red sky/A crowd has gathered, black and white/Arms entwined, a chosen few/The newspapers say it’s true”? or “Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear”? Or even “I don’t feel any different/The clanking of crystal/Explosions off in the distance”?