I should have included this in my previous post, but, honestly, I never get to use the word dichotomy anywhere that doesn’t seemed forced (like plethra), so I felt this needed it’s own article.

I’m a North American boy… grew up near Canada, visited Mexico a few times, but mainly hung in the mid-west of the US of A.  I’ve been to both coasts a few times.  Why is that meaningful?  Well, it probably isn’t, but it should give you context to my point of view.  My conclusions may just be based on uninformed perspectives/experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Again, I’m just going with some random perspectives on what I saw and experienced… very much train of thought.  You can see the pictures I took here.

• •The people are incredibly nice. Often, they want to practice their english with native speakers, so you will find yourself being engaged in conversation with everyone.
• •Even though you may be tempted, DO NOT ORDER A STEAK AT ANY RESTAURANT. It’s not that they will be offended. If it’s on the menu, it’s there for a reason. It’s not going to be good, though. I told a friend I was going to India and going to have a steak, so I felt obligated. It’s not that I wanted to offend anyone, I thought it would be ironic. Little did I know the levels the irony would take. It was the most dreadful piece of meat I’ve seen. Not only did that cow die of old age, it must have laid alongside the road while someone performed some ceremony for days on end. Read the rest of this entry »

I took a new job with a different company. You can check here to see the details, but the bottom line is that I realized fairly early on that the work and general approach to software development where I ended up was not inline with my overall career goals. I like…

→ agile development
→ open source/Internet development communities
→ building applications that people I know will use and find value in
→ doing something I can show my kids and they’ll get

Luckily, a local company I’ve had my eye on opened up a management position. Three people who were on my team at AOL all have jobs there and were kind enough to go recommend me to the hiring manager. In my second week, I’m already more relaxed then during my 5th month at the other place. I have no more insight into the “business” of what we do here than I did at the last place, but I’m more comfortable with the people and my abilities to contribute. I need to research and post about “rebound jobs” in the future, but I still need a bit more distance to get that objectivity back.

Back at my rebound job, part of my responsibilities was to review and recommend an outsourcing vendor for the IT work on my project. The financials were fairly significant (IMO) and warranted a visit to each company site in India. There is nothing better than sitting across the table from people to either build or ruin your confidence in them. I’ll post another day about the value I found in the trip itself and process I followed, but I wanted to give a quick summary of the actual logistics of my traveling there.

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I know… the lyrics are different. It’s an attempt to take a comical statement and apply an alternate meaning. See, I didn’t sleep through all of my college literary courses.

So here’s the point. I’m tired of everyone complaining about killing trees when they print hard copies of something. No one whines when they go into a library or book store or pick up their Entertainment Weekly. I was reading a literary agent’s blog recently and she made a passing comment on modern historians’ concern over the lack of physical letters written between people. In the past, these provided great insight into the personal lives and inside stories of historic events. With the advent of email, it’s just too easy for people to simply delete these correspondents. And before you say it, these people aren’t necessarily blogging. Further, don’t forget that jobs in the timber industry, while significantly declining over the past several decades due to increased automation, environmentalist pressures and foreign competition (damn those canucks), are still US jobs that people depend on. They aren’t high paying and regularly labeled some of the worst jobs, but they are still jobs critical some a subset of our society. Read the rest of this entry »