Chill Pace Strikes Again

2 years and no blog posts? Seems like I’ve been going at chill pace again. Get ready for some posts cause I’ll be moving at 28% of maximum capacity now. I’m BAAAAAAACCCCKKKKKK.

Wasted Time

I went out with my parents to get dinner today. These little meals have occurred every Sunday since I was laid off.  I think we all appreciate seeing each other more and eating some good food, so it all works out. While we were talking, I mentioned that the really promising job interview that I had turned out to be nothing because they had hired another candidate. Upon hearing this, my mother adamantly suggested I go back to school in Fall because six months had passed since I was laid off, and that I was just wasting time.

I thought a bit about what she said, and I have some serious doubts that more education is what I need considering my current degree hasn’t helped me at all in the job search (real world experience and networking is more important than education by a long shot). But the part that really got me was the idea that I was just wasting time.

Don’t get me wrong…unemployment isn’t great . I’m tired of looking for jobs, scraping by on the meager UC pay, spending most of my time alone, and watching the time drift by on the calendar. Unemployment is a humbling experience and one filled with potential for introspection (but I’ll save those thoughts for another day).

But life is about both the good and the bad. I’ve also had a number of good experiences with the free time I’ve been given in between looking and applying for work. During my six month stint on unemployment I’ve:

• Rode my bicycle 30 miles to Valley Forge and 24 miles to Northwestern Ave (northwestern border of Philly) and back on the Wissahickon Trail and Forbidden Drive.
• Played soccer and kickball with a bunch of 20 somethings and neighborhood kids at a park that we’re helping revitalize (clean, paint, etc.).
• Visited my friend Doug in NYC a few times and got to explore a cool new part of the world for me. (By the way, Clue is one of the best board games to play while intoxicated)
• Planned and finally built a new computer so I don’t have to put up with my inferior laptop anymore.
• Started blogging and twittering. Writing is fun again!
• and much, much more…

I’m trying to make the best out of a bad situation and have some fun in meantime. In the end, life isn’t just about work. Stop and smell the roses because all things must pass.

The great job hunt

I’ve realized today that I’m coming up on the six month mark for unemployment. I never would have guessed that it would be this hard to find another position, but I shouldn’t be surprised. There are few jobs that I have experience for and far too many applicants for them.

I’d estimate that I’ve applied to close to 100 places over the span of six months. Out of that 100, I’ve received about 4 phone interviews, 2 internship interviews, and 1 real interview. None of these have gone anywhere.

So far my strategy has followed these stages:

1. Search for jobs outside of the advertising industry
2. Send general applications to various agencies around the area
3. Attend any networking event related to the industry
4. Rework my resume and cover letters
5. Frequent a list of job posting sites and apply for anything relevant that pops up
6. Social network and twitter my way to a job

I’m currently on step 6. I’m still applying to anything that pops up that I might be able to do, but I’ve shifted my efforts to the digital realm in the hopes that it might have a better ROI.

The game continues on, and I will continue to try my best because that’s what I do. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the thoughts of courage wolf:

We have content

As I mentioned in my first post, this site launched without any content thanks to Alex (the goddess of all things internet) and her twitchy fingers. I’m glad to announce that I’ve finally completed all of the static content for my site. It only took about a solid month and a half to write 4 pages. Social media can be hard when everything else in life needs to be attended to first (the job search, birthdays, holidays, twittering,  etc.).

That being said, I hope to start making regular updates in the near future and eventually build an audience. That way this blog will seem a little less insane.

Centipedes…it had to be centipedes…

My battle against the house centipedes continues ever onward. Tonight I managed to defeat two more and wound another. The wounded one escaped into the laundry bin area, and I’m sure it’s waiting for the next time I do my laundry to strike. I need to remember this so I have an actual reason to put off washing my clothes. And for those of you who don’t know, these are the enemy:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/House_centipede.jpg

Some of you may think that I’m a cruel man. Why can’t I let them be? What about the fact that house centipedes hunt other bad bugs like spiders (which I also hate)? Well I figure you can’t start making exceptions about which is a good bug and which is a bad bug or else I’d be some manner of bug bigot. And I’m no bug bigot.

One time I noticed a spider crawling on my door, and I smashed it with the nearest book I could find. After finishing the job, I realized I had crushed it with collected works of Gandhi. I was crushed by the irony.

I love Ubuntu…

Back in January, I erased my Windows XP partition and installed Ubuntu as my primary operating system. I had tried Ubuntu a few times in the past, and I’m pleased to say the transition has been great. As it turns out, all you have to do is get past the concerns and take that one big leap.

I wouldn’t say that Ubuntu is amazingly better than XP.  However, I think that the small differences make it worth using.  A few nice examples:

• Not having to run an anti-virus program
• Easy to find and install programs, all it takes is a few clicks in Add/Remove programs or an apt-get line in terminal(I’ve learned to love it)
• Fast and completely painless system/software updates
• No driver hunting (if you’re lucky haha)
• It’s really, really stable

My two pleasant surprises of the week are:

I needed to scan a document so I plugged a printer into my laptop and used the XSane Image Scanning program included in Ubuntu. It worked flawlessly with no fiddling.

I accidentally opened 14 songs with VLC at the same time. The system slowed down to a crawl with all of the songs playing over each other. I exited out of the individual instances of VLC one by one and everything was fine. The system wasn’t frozen and no restart was required.

I know those are really simple things…but man, the simple things make all of the difference.

We are live…

and there is no content! Alex, in her earnestness, has launched my redesigned website as quickly as she could get it together. This action has put the onus on me to get to work and start putting stuff up. In the mean time, please feel free to enjoy my twitter feed and check back for more to come.