Only in that it’s already 62 degrees at 7:30 AM.

Merry Christmas!

I start January 7th.

http://www.actsolution.net/

I’m a geek again.

• Still getting lots of nibbles and no bites.
• I’m brushing up some certs right now. I’m concentrating on the ones that I can knock out with a single test, to get the most resume bang for the buck. I’ll be taking Comptia Server+ tomorrow, to be followed by Security+, Network+, and renewing my CCNA. The metalworking door is closed here in JAX, I’m retooling back to IT.
• I’ve been running again. I can lug my carcass 2 miles around the neighborhood without stopping. I’m on the road to becoming a svelte sexy beast, if I can just keep Kathryn from baking brownies again. I wiped out the pan in 2 days. I am weak.
• Driving to Atlanta for a funeral tomorrow. My boss from Rubbernetwork died from cancer complications. Great guy, left a wife and 2 young sons. Total suck.
• December 2008. Still not king.

We got our drivers’ licenses yesterday in the best DMV experience I’ve ever had. We were in and out in thirty minutes.

Today we used them to get shiny new library cards. And the local library has the whole series of Buffy and Angel on DVD. So we don’t need to join netflix as soon as we thought!

More employment nibbles, but no bites to report. At least I’m getting some small but regular action now. Lots of places are closing early today for turkey day, so I don’t expect any calls until next week.

Not sure if today’s nibble will become a bite.

I had a phone screen this afternoon with a hiring manager. Application company, very cool stuff. The talking part went fine; we discussed organizational fit and my history. Then she went through a list of technical interview questions and that part didn’t go as well.

It was frustrating for a couple of reasons. Most of the questions were fill-in-the-blank kind of nomenclature and factoid questions. Name the specific app you use for this. What service pack is this software currently on. What four types of objects can you address in this way. That kind of stuff. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of knowledge that rusts a little in two years. I was hoping she’d give a scenario and we could talk about troubleshooting thoughts, or that I could give examples of problems I’d solved. That may be the case in the sit-down interview, but for the phone screen I guess there’s no time for that degree of interaction.

So I’m not sure what kind of impression I made. I still think I’d be great for the job - it’s like they wrote the description to suit me exactly. And the knowledge I was scraping for is the kind of stuff that’ll be picked up through osmosis in super short order when I hit the job. I have all the principles. I just hope I get to the next phase.

I got two job nibbles this morning. One short-term contract, one perm.

Hoping…

Kathryn and I were driving to the bank this morning to make a deposit. Typical boring errand. To get to the bank, we cross the Hart Bridge, named for Jacksonville’s founder, Isaiah Hart. Here is a picture of the bridge, which is 141 feet in the air at the center. Literature majors have by this point realized that I am using a technique called foreshadowing, and have begun to hear the scary music in the background…

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Kathryn has mentioned before that George the mailman stops in each day for a chat and a slice of cake. He’s got to come up the driveway anyway, since Joe has lived here for so long that the mailbox by the house is still grandfathered in, and we don’t have a box out by the street. Since they bribe him with cake and friendliness, he drops Joe’s mail in the kitchen and Bud’s mail in Bud’s office.

Anyway, the mailman has figured out that Kathryn and I live here now, and separates our mail from Joe’s and leaves it on the stairs.

This is pretty cool.

So I live in Florida now. And I was cynical about that, because I never really wanted to move back to the Sunshine State. But I’ve been working on being a good sport about it, and I’m mostly succeeding.

And then I look down while driving in the left lane of Atlantic Boulevard, and realize that my left blinker is on. And I haven’t made a turn in five minutes.

I’m a Florida Driver. At 34.