My life, reduced to bullet points:
- On Tuesday I had an interview with large nameless healthcare company that happens to be in Round Lake, IL. Promising position, and would be very exciting. Contract-to-hire, three or six month contract (to be determined), then hire full time at 15% less pay (but with benefits and vacation). If hired, it’d be a bitch of a commute for the short term, but we’ve been wanting to get a place in the Northwest Burbs, and this would be the catalyst to do so. I might know something by the end of next week. Maybe. The good news is that my recruiter is going to see about submitting me to another position at the same company.
- Not much action on any other fronts. Still putting out lots of resumes, but not a lot of nibbles. It’s a bad time of the year to be unemployed, unfortunately. The good news is that between Dan’s income and unemployment, we’re covered for the short term, at least.
- So this leaves me lots of time to sit around and play video games all day? Not likely. This is the peak time for preparations for Midwest FurFest. In addition to being an engineer, I suddenly get to become a graphic designer, making layouts for all of the items we’re having imprinted, plus designing the staff and attendee badges. We’re trying some new stuff (thus all of the nifty new equipment) that will hopefully make our lives easier and make Registration run even faster. So in addition to being an engineer and a graphic designer, I also get to be a software designer/network engineer, as we tweak the Registration system to accommodate the new equipment. I also get to flex my management skills, since once the programming schedule is posted I need to figure out how to schedule the seventeen (!) people we have on Registration staff to maximize volunteer hours for those that want them and to make sure no one has to miss any event they wanted to see. You understand why I get a bit flustered at the convention approaches.
- It’s been a chilly day here, inside and out. I didn’t notice it earlier when I absorbed in computer work, but now I’m realizing my fingers are getting a bit numb. I’ve set foot outside only to get the paper this morning, but the chill is quite penetrating. I’ll have to brave the cold later to go out and forage for dinner – I’m not really looking forward to that.
- Tomorrow looks a lot more interesting, though. The present plan is that I will drop takaza off at work, stop for some breakfast, stop by the printer to drop off the files for the attendee badges, then strike out westward to take pictures of…something. Things that evoke “County Fair”. Yeah, it would have been nicer to do this earlier in the year, but we didn’t realize just what nice signs we were going to be having. It should be a nice, clear, chilly day, and I expect I’ll be driving around Huntley, Marengo, and Woodstock, which is very pretty country anyway. Later in the day I’ll pick Dan up at work and we’ll do, um, something.
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Duncan, if you need any help with the graphic design work I’ll be more than happy to help you… it’s kind of what my major in school is, heh.
Heh. Now you tell me 🙂 Actually, I’ve gotten everything taken care of for this year, but don’t be surprised if I come to you next year. (Hey, I always wanted to learn how to us MS Publisher. Well, not really, but maybe it’ll come in handy someday…)
Ach, NO! Not Publisher WE HATES IT. You should learn Adobe InDesign. That is an industry standard. That or Quark XPress, but that’s slowly getting phased out.
Heh. Well, Publisher 2003 is at least usable, compared to what I’m told about prior versions. I’m using it ’cause it came with the enterprise version of Office 2003 that I have. I can see that if you are transitioning from something simple like MS Word it’s not too bad, but at the same time I get the feeling that the featureset is much more limited than what it could be. Takaza did the con book in Quark XPress; MFF has a license for that and he upgraded to the newest version a few months back.
There is no bullet number six…
Hang in there! It’ll be a lot of fun. Wish I was going.
Bullet
Points
are
awesome.
Conventions are hard work…thank you for your services.
*HUGZ the final, lonely bullet point*
Go to Antioch and take pictures of my parents’ cows. 😉
Your parents cows are never out by the road though!
Dunc- if you drive up Hunt Club Rd past the turn off for Tempel Lippazan, the trees there all have their autumn finery on, and there’s some more farmy stuff that way. Unfortunately, most of the fields by us have been harvested already, but you can probably swing by the orchard too.
Let us know if you guys are in our neck of the woods on friday evening!
I swear I’m making tee shirts for AC’s con ops staff next year with that saying on it. :xD
Depending on how the timing would work out, you could take the blue line, transfer at … um, montrose I think, take the metra to round lake. Depending on timing, I could even pick you up at the metra in Grayslake, and take you over to work before I go to work.
I appreciate the offer, but unfortunately Metra’s schedule is very much aimed at commuters into the city – from what I’ve seen, it’s just not workable outbound in the mornings. Ideally, I’ll only have to deal with the commute for a short time; we’re looking at moving out to the burbs come the first of the year.