So, it has been about two months since I made my post about being laid off. Back then I said:
I’ve got some runway before things become critical, so I’m choosing to take the optimistic view and look at this as an opportunity. First to just take a little time and decompress and give myself my own time for the first time in forever. Just for a bit. Some relaxing. Some work around the house. Some personal projects that probably won’t make any money, but I might as well give them a shot because I won’t have a better opportunity.
And I have been doing that. It has been super nice. I’ll be honest, I’ve felt better than I have in years. More relaxed. Happier. And even though I haven’t gotten everything done that I wanted to, I’ve felt like I’ve been getting more done… of things I actually care about personally… than I have in years.
I’ve been doing some very light networking and looking at job listings, and even hit submit on a few applications over these last two months, but with the new year it is probably time to accelerate those things and slow down the “fun” stuff a bit. I feel a bit sad about that, but I know it is time. Probably past time. It is a tough market out there, I shouldn’t dawdle further.
Neither of the two projects I’ve spent the most time on are “ready” yet, although I’ve made tons of progress on both. But I figure I can at least say what they are. I’ve been mentioning them both occasionally on my podcast already.
Robin Letter: An alternative to social media. All about keeping in touch with small well defined groups of people rather than broadcasting to the world, with the conceit that you provide updates only when it is “your turn” so everybody participates more equally, rather than being dominated by a few folks. – I’ve spent the most time working on this and building out the functionality. I’m hoping to run the first friends and family tests of this by the end of January. If that goes well, then maybe more people in February. The header image on this post is a preview of part of the UX.
Jukepodder: A podcast discovery service aimed at helping discover the long tail of small podcasts rather than the same big podcasts everybody knows about and listens to already. Tries to be more like rummaging around the back shelves of a dusty used bookstore rather than seeing what’s promoted up front at a major chain. – This is actually already up and running, just not quite feature complete, and with a few known bugs I still need to squash.
If either of these interest you at all, please reach out to me, I’d love to get feedback and maybe have you as an early user. Ping me. Really.
Both of these are at easily guessable URLs given the names I gave above if you want to look for them, but I’ll officially post links and such to “launch” once I think they are a bit more ready.
And of course, if you have leads or introductions for actual job type things… please get in touch too. I spent just short of 20 years at Amazon as a Technical Program Manager, with the most time spent in anti-abuse efforts in the content and email realms… but am open to other things too of course, and in non-tech focused positions too… LinkedIn profile is mostly up to date, and I’ll pass along my resume to anybody who wants it. :-)
Oh, and support my older personal projects too, the Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast, the Wiki of the Day podcasts, and ElectionGraphs (currently dormant, but I’ll be getting it up and running for 2028 later this year).
Hey, I rarely post here any more, but Brandy is running to be properly elected to the position she was appointed to last December. Please visit her website and donate to support the cause, and if you actually live in the 44th Legislative District in Washington State, please vote for her in both he primary in August, and the general election in November. Thank you!
Snohomish County Council voted 4-1 tonight to appoint my wife Brandy Donaghy to the vacant Washington State House seat for the 44th legislative district left by John Lovick moving to the State Senate. She was sworn in about an hour later by Judge Okoloko. Congratulations Brandy! I am so proud!
I don’t know (yet!) about the trials of parenting an infant or toddler or other ages younger than 7, but being a parent to a teenager is definitely much more difficult and stressful than parenting a 7 to 12 year old pre-teen! Just sayin’
Oh, and yes, since a bunch of people have asked over the last few weeks… there is of course a baby registry. Of course it is at Amazon. We fully anticipate to get most of the stuff ourselves, and some of the “nice to have” we may not bother with at all, but if anybody out there DOES want to help out at all with stuff for Alex we would of course welcome and appreciate it. The direct link to the registry is:
Based on the range of estimates, best we can really say is he is due “sometime in September”, although we are guessing earlier rather than later. And we were planning on doing almost all of our baby supply purchasing at the beginning of August (to coincide with my next batch of company stock becoming available). So… if anybody wants to help… THANKS! :-)
William because I noticed awhile back that on my father’s side of the family going back through his father, and his father, and his father, etc… every other generation since 1736… 273 years… has been a William Minter. (Details below.) When I showed this to Brandy, her immediate and unhesitating reaction was “Well, we know what we have to name it if it is a boy.” And that was that for the first name.
We did also decide though that we would not actually call him that on a regular basis. There is already someone in the immediate family, my father, very much still using that name. So we’ll let him continue to be the William/Bill in the family. So we’ll call him by his middle name.
We tried a bunch of names as we were testing out calling him various things after we found out the gender. “Alex” just sort of stuck. There was no single moment where we decided that would be it, it just sort of happened and then we all realized that was what we were calling him. It is also the name of my sister Cynthia’s pet snake, but we decided we wouldn’t let that stop us. :-)
Anyway, it will be “William Alexander Minter”. We will generally call him Alex. Except Amy, who has decided to call him “WAM”.
Official due date is still September 21st, although the latest ultrasounds showed him a bit ahead of schedule, with an estimated date of September 5th. (Closer to what Brandy has thought all along.) So possibly not very long now at all.
Oh, and for those who are interested, the line of William Minters…
1619-1655: John Minter
1650-????: John Minter Jr
1690-1743: John Minter III
1736-1809: William Minter
1769-1846: John Minter
1797-1871: William Minter
1833-1913: John Russell Minter
1873-1943: William Ramseur Minter
1912-1991: David Ramseur Minter
1942- : William Maynard Minter
1971- : Samuel Antonio Minter
2009- : William Alexander Minter
And yes, for awhile there was something going on with the name “John” as well, but it seemed to have petered out almost 100 years ago. :-)
Edit a few minutes later: Look at my next post for baby registry information if you are interested.
Aside from one exception for last week’s podcast, there have been no posts here because there was a bit of a meltdown with the server that had been used to host Abulsme.com for the last little bit. This was a server owned by my friend Chris which I have been allowed to use as a favor, which I greatly appreciate. When the machine went down, Chris helped get everything set up another place temporarily to let me post last week’s podcast, but because I didn’t yet have my full suite of automated backups and such going there, I didn’t post anything else. And this proved to be the push to move off of Chris’s stuff onto regular old hosting that I’ve been meaning to do for years now but just never got around to.
So as of about 10 hours ago, abulsme.com is now in a new home which I actually pay for. And yes, I went for a cheap ass plan, and yes, because of that it was probably more of a pain in the ass than it would have been if I’d paid more, but whatever, it is all set up now. If it proves to be insufficient in the future I guess I’ll upgrade.
Oh, and the wiki and my graphs are still yet another place. I’ll probably try to consolidate those over the next few weeks too.
Anyway, I’m back. I have a few posts to catch up on, and I need to get this week’s podcast out tonight as well.
Back in March I last posted stats on my “things I want to do at home”. They are here.
Last time around in 14 weeks I managed:
20 hours of catching up on putting things in Quicken and/or paying bills (43%)
10 hours of reading (22%)
7 hours of random things from my projects list (15%)
5 hours of genealogy stuff (11%)
4 hours of catching up on old email (9%)
That averaged to 3.3 hours per week.
This time I only have 13 weeks on my chart, covering 8 Mar 2009 to 6 Jun 2009 because I wrote bigger on my whiteboard or something, but I ended up with:
10 hours of catching up on putting things in Quicken and/or paying bills (59%)
4 hours of catching up on old email (24%)
2 hours of random things from my projects list (12%)
1 hour of genealogy stuff (6%)
That is only 17 hours total in 13 weeks. This is only 1.3 hours per week. Much much worse that the previous 14 weeks. Bad Sam. Bad Sam.
I must do better in the next batch of weeks.
So far I am not. In the 11 days since the next batch started, so far I’ve done 1 hour of this stuff.
Oops.
Of course, I’ve been doing some of the email stuff outside of this system. Maybe I need to stop that.
