Much needed updates
Hey everyone -
Just wanted to provide a brief bit of a blog post to keep everyone up to date.
In the last few weeks, I have been making more concrete arrangements of sorts in securing a more permanent position. Although I have been searching (intermittantly) and putting resumes out there, a few weeks ago, I went ahead and updated my Monster.com profile and resume. Since then the phonecalls and emails have been nearly non-stop.
What was pretty cool, all in all, is that this chain of events put me in touch with a great opportunity for a higher education tech consulting firm for a position as an Instructional Designer - basically doing about 90% of the things I do now, but in a slightly different context. It seems very promising, I am quite interested, the phone interview went very well (and they seemed very interesting, and I will be interviewing on Monday (e.g. tomorrow). We will see how that pans out... so knock on wood, cross your fingers, do what you need to do.
Beyond that, work has been pretty 'meh.' Nothing bad. Nothing super great. The portal our group is collaborating on is going pretty decent (did some really successful testing with the guys at UIS). The tutorial season has ended, and I wound up teaching a fair share (which I enjoy). But as for work, I have just been working on miscellaneous little things. Sure, I woudn't be altogether keen on going back to the 60 hour/wk School of Law hellishness, but something more engaging that 4 hours at a go (or less) would be nice. Beyond the portal. I personally think the portal project would be nicer with a different framework - and as such, in its current manifestation, rather lame.
I have been working quite a bit though. With Alyssa out from the working world (and not available to take assignments as a temp readily, since she's been having interviews left and right), I am the sole provider for space-station Gibbs here in Beantown. We are definitely making due, but I have been finishing up later most every night to make sure things are done and we have nicely proportioned checks. This weekend, was a nice little rest (during the week) since I went to a conference this weekend. So sure, 7-day work week, but it was a pretty nice conference.
The conference was on Ajax technology - which to save the intricate details, is not a new technology for the web, but a set of fairly realidy usuable ones in place for a while that can be now used in interesting ways - particularlly in building rich and responsive interfaces in web apps and pages (without having the reload the browser). Yahoo's homepage, Google Maps, Flickr, a bunch of things use Ajax principles, and this conference was all about uses, considerations, tools, etc. I was the only one from NIS (since several others who were interested had commitments this weekend).
The whole thing was at the Maxwell-Dworkin building at Harvard University, which incidentally was built with a large donation from Bill Gates and Steve Balmer to honor their mothers (the names, Maxwell & Dworkin were their maiden names). Its new and kind of neat looking and we were in a nice big (but cold) lecture hall with ethernet jack every 12 inches, Wifi, and nice projection setup.
The speakers were several pretty cool people, one guy was from Yahoo! who works with User Interface stuff, another was the lead for the big, really significant JavaScript library, Dojo, and the third works as an applications guy for the Washington Post, and build this framework for rapidly building dynamic web-based apps in Python. [Most people are hearing, blah blah blah].
I learned a lot of things and really want to play around more. Significantly, I would like to (when I get a little spare time) contribute, fix bugs, and help out with Dojo. It seems like cool stuff and open source projects are really nice things for getting some good, solid, real world experience with a broad range of developers. [Most people are hearing, geek geek geek].
So after an evening of relaxing (finally!) and making paper flowers with my wife, just winding down and getting ready for bed.
Ah... one other thing. Besides working on and off on Alembic Labs stuff, I am playing around with [blah blah blah warning for non-geeks] various Content Managment Systems and am planning on rolling out my own web development blog of sorts (not Alembic's news thing... one for just me writing about tech as Keith Gibbs). I'll keep everyone posted - I got much of the design down, and a bit of the backend (using WordPress).
Just wanted to provide a brief bit of a blog post to keep everyone up to date.
In the last few weeks, I have been making more concrete arrangements of sorts in securing a more permanent position. Although I have been searching (intermittantly) and putting resumes out there, a few weeks ago, I went ahead and updated my Monster.com profile and resume. Since then the phonecalls and emails have been nearly non-stop.
What was pretty cool, all in all, is that this chain of events put me in touch with a great opportunity for a higher education tech consulting firm for a position as an Instructional Designer - basically doing about 90% of the things I do now, but in a slightly different context. It seems very promising, I am quite interested, the phone interview went very well (and they seemed very interesting, and I will be interviewing on Monday (e.g. tomorrow). We will see how that pans out... so knock on wood, cross your fingers, do what you need to do.
Beyond that, work has been pretty 'meh.' Nothing bad. Nothing super great. The portal our group is collaborating on is going pretty decent (did some really successful testing with the guys at UIS). The tutorial season has ended, and I wound up teaching a fair share (which I enjoy). But as for work, I have just been working on miscellaneous little things. Sure, I woudn't be altogether keen on going back to the 60 hour/wk School of Law hellishness, but something more engaging that 4 hours at a go (or less) would be nice. Beyond the portal. I personally think the portal project would be nicer with a different framework - and as such, in its current manifestation, rather lame.
I have been working quite a bit though. With Alyssa out from the working world (and not available to take assignments as a temp readily, since she's been having interviews left and right), I am the sole provider for space-station Gibbs here in Beantown. We are definitely making due, but I have been finishing up later most every night to make sure things are done and we have nicely proportioned checks. This weekend, was a nice little rest (during the week) since I went to a conference this weekend. So sure, 7-day work week, but it was a pretty nice conference.
The conference was on Ajax technology - which to save the intricate details, is not a new technology for the web, but a set of fairly realidy usuable ones in place for a while that can be now used in interesting ways - particularlly in building rich and responsive interfaces in web apps and pages (without having the reload the browser). Yahoo's homepage, Google Maps, Flickr, a bunch of things use Ajax principles, and this conference was all about uses, considerations, tools, etc. I was the only one from NIS (since several others who were interested had commitments this weekend).
The whole thing was at the Maxwell-Dworkin building at Harvard University, which incidentally was built with a large donation from Bill Gates and Steve Balmer to honor their mothers (the names, Maxwell & Dworkin were their maiden names). Its new and kind of neat looking and we were in a nice big (but cold) lecture hall with ethernet jack every 12 inches, Wifi, and nice projection setup.
The speakers were several pretty cool people, one guy was from Yahoo! who works with User Interface stuff, another was the lead for the big, really significant JavaScript library, Dojo, and the third works as an applications guy for the Washington Post, and build this framework for rapidly building dynamic web-based apps in Python. [Most people are hearing, blah blah blah].
I learned a lot of things and really want to play around more. Significantly, I would like to (when I get a little spare time) contribute, fix bugs, and help out with Dojo. It seems like cool stuff and open source projects are really nice things for getting some good, solid, real world experience with a broad range of developers. [Most people are hearing, geek geek geek].
So after an evening of relaxing (finally!) and making paper flowers with my wife, just winding down and getting ready for bed.
Ah... one other thing. Besides working on and off on Alembic Labs stuff, I am playing around with [blah blah blah warning for non-geeks] various Content Managment Systems and am planning on rolling out my own web development blog of sorts (not Alembic's news thing... one for just me writing about tech as Keith Gibbs). I'll keep everyone posted - I got much of the design down, and a bit of the backend (using WordPress).
posted by Keith at 11:27 PM
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