I had an interview yesterday for a 6 month contract. I really liked the facility and the work environment seemed very clean and nice. The people I interviewed with were very nice. The only problem I have with it, is the length of the contract. My biggest worry is about not being extended. Both of the people I spoke with spoke long-term so that made me feel a bit better, I just can’t shake the worry though. I thought I’d make a list of pro’s and con’s of my current and prospective contracts.
Current company pros
Current company cons
Contract position pros
Contract position cons
If the client decided not to renew the contract at the end of the 6 month period, they would have to let me know 45 days prior to the end of contract and vice versa if I decided not to stay with them either. If the contract expired in 6 months and was not renewed, we would be able to live on the “extra” money that I made from the hourly increase for about 4 months after the contract was over. That would give me 4 months to either look for another job or find another contract. If I was unable to find another full-time position somewhere else in Orlando. Moving out of Orlando is not an option. If I did have to start working other contracts, then I would potentially have to travel a lot.
So basically, I’m not sure what to do. Any ideas?
We got back from our trip to mass. on Tuesday. The trip was like our normal trips, some fighting, some fun, more uncomfortable than anything really. We had Aaron’s birthday party on sunday, in mass. He had a lot of fun and got quite a few gifts. We had to mail ourselves a box full of presents even after we filled up the extra bag that we brought to fly some presents back with us! When we got home, we gave Aaron the presents that we got for him: a slushy maker and a fish tank! Meri took him to the pet store and got him a couple of small fish. He named them “grapey” and “orange”. He gets really excited when it’s time to feed them.
We got back Tuesday and I went to the 2008 LANSA User Conference here in Orlando. I got to talk to a few people I worked with at Terminix and attended some of the WAM sessions. Those were great! I found the AJAX lab to be a bit lacking and the speaker wasn’t that good in my opinion.
I worked from home yesterday and now it is Friday and I am back at the office. I haven’t been here for a week! I must’ve saved a ton of money on gas (well, like $60). Now I’m on-call for the weekend.
Yesterday, when I was working from home, I took a break for lunch (which is unusual for me), I sat with Eli for a bit and I was playing with him on the couch. I started making some weird noises and poking around his mouth to try and get him to smile at me. Normally, it’s difficult for me to get him to smile but he smiled at me for about 20 minutes! It was awesome! I loved it when Aaron first started smiling at me and I love it now that Eli is doing the same. I can’t wait until Eli is walking and talking as well.
Of course I mean my interest in my current job. It seems I can’t stand to stay at a place for over a year (check my linkedin.com profile). There are a few LANSA contracts in central Florida but with the economy behaving the way it is, I think I’m too nervous to take that step and work for myself. Meri can tell when I’m fed up with my jobs and last night, she told me that she would be OK renting the house and moving again. That’s the last thing I want to do. We’ve moved 4 times since I graduated from college and I’m sick of packing up all my junk and moving it around. I’d rather stay in central Florida as long as possible. I thought about maybe going to school to get a masters degree in something from UCF but I don’t think now is the time for that. Meri and I were talking and she’s very interested in going back to school to be a teacher. Right now, she’s looking at getting a master’s degree for herself. She’s looking to be finished in about two years. That’s not a whole lot of time and we’ll be more than comfortable living on my income alone. We’ve been doing it for the past couple of months and we haven’t HAD to slow down our spending; we have cut back but not out of need, I just want to start putting a lot more away for retirement. I’ve also become very interested in getting back into web development. Basically, I’d like to do what I was doing at my last job, just with a stable company this time!
In other, less pleasant news, we’re flying up to Massachusetts to visit the in-laws and yes, we’re flying with both of our kids! In more pleasant news, we’re going to celebrate Aaron’s 4th birthday birthday while we are up there and and also let the rest of the family meet Eli for the first time. Aaron’s birthday is next Tuesday, May 6th.
I think that’s enough rambling for now. I have another blog that I’ve been posting short posts to, it’s at dfktv.com. Also, if you have any idea what Twitter is, follow me! I can be found here. Twitter is pretty damned addictive, especially if you use it in conjunction with twhirl!
Today, I resigned from my current company. I’ve known this day was coming for about 26 days now. The decision to leave my current position was one of the easiest I’ve had to make in my young career.
I did learn a lot from my time here and have worked with two of the finest consultants from LANSA.
I am looking forward to my wife being able to work or not work, based solely on what she wants to do, not because we need affordable benefits for the family. Meri will now be able to stay home with our new baby for as long as she wants, which is the ultimate benefit. I would like for this baby to have the same advantages Aaron had when Meri was able to stay home with him.
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If that isn’t the cutest picture of a kid in a green baker’s suit, then you know some really cute kids!
I’m also considering a new position! This means major changes for the family I think. After speaking with the recruiter, this sounds like a great opportunity. Meri and I will have to talk about it.
Meri and I were in bed, getting ready to fall asleep and then she started talking about work and how she didn’t want to go back tomorrow. That got me talking (and thinking) about my job. Then I started bitching…and bitching and bitching and bitching. So now, about 2 hours later (yeah, we go to bed early here), I’m online. I feel like I should redo my once-proud website.
Revisiting development on that site got me thinking about Barry‘s site: FeedBang.com. Dammit man! I was once at peace with not continuing development on PeopleArray.com and someone alright with letting my PHP skills get rusty. Now that I saw that you’ve done work to FeedBang.com, I feel like I need to get off my ass and update that site! Good work on FeedBang.com Barry; it looks pretty cool and I really like that you’ve added the ability to login with openid.
I remember my days at Terminix when I had all kinds of time to develop a site like PeopleArray.com. I once went three weeks doing absolutely nothing, besides asking my manager for something to do. Yeah, that’s right, 3 weeks…in a row!
I loved working for Terminix (both because of the people and the company) but I hated Memphis. I’m glad to be gone but I’m not happy where I ended up. I love being back in Florida but dislike my job. I have learned a lot. I’m proud to say that I know a LOT about LANSA Web! I’m just hoping that I can find a job where I can continue doing either LANSA Web or get back to some Visual LANSA.
….
Ok, so insomnia is not letting go of it’s grip and I just visited Digg.com and Reddit.com. I haven’t been to those sites in a really long time. Normally I just read them through Google Reader.
Is it weird to laugh at something I blogged about a long time ago? I remember writing this and even the details of the circumstances surrounding the issue. Stupid financial month reports. Anyway, I laughed about this blog entry: http://www.acedanger.com/2006/06/08/808008704-megabytes/.
Good night (I hope).
Long time no post!
Well things have been busy here at work! The LANSA projects are wrapping up for me: the version 2 of the Gradebook, written in LANSA with heavy use of AJAX (and JavaScript) and CSS, has been handed off to the consultants we have been using since the project began; I re-wrote the Employee portal and just finished that up this morning. Next on my plate here is Gradebook version 3!
The newest version of the Gradebook will be written in/with WPF. There aren’t many people writing WPF code right now so for me, this is another ground-breaking moment (coupling LANSA with AJAX was the first). Learning WPF will be great for me and my career and ultimately for my family. I’m excited about learning another language and being productive with it.
Other than all that work stuff, there isn’t much to write about. We have been busy painting and turning our house into a home. We’ve put in new laminate bamboo floors in the downstairs portion of the house and also put up about half of the lights that we bought a few weeks ago (5 down, 5 to go!).
Here’s hoping I don’t neglect my blog anymore!
I just registered a new domain, LansaDocs.com. I registered it because the current Lansa documentation is somewhat lacking and needs some tender loving care that only the users (developers) of Lansa can provide. I have installed a Wiki (MediaWiki to be exact) so that the users can modify or add notes as they see fit.
It is my hope that the Lansa developers will begin to use and help maintain the site so that the Lansa documentation can be a bit more user-friendly and contain some very useful information. My target audience can currently be found at the Lansa Yahoo Group, which is currently the most useful Lansa help facility available.
Let me just say start out and say that I have not abandoned the blogging that I grew to like a lot during my significant downtime while I worked at Terminix. I have just been really busy; between work and WoW and house searching and then more work…plus I had a lot of work to do…at work. Lots of work…at work.
After a long search, I have found a place to rent in Winter Park! It’s about 7 miles from work so my commute time should only be about 20 minutes either way. The house we are renting is decent. It is 100% tile…no carpet. That was our largest limiting factor in looking for a place to rent. We were told that Aaron would *probably* be developing asthma in the next year due to his current allergies. It was recommended that we avoid carpet if possible so we did. I signed the lease today. We move in on December 20th. I will be flying to Memphis, for the last time, on December 16th, flying back with Aaron on the 18th and Meri is going to drive down on the 18th and 19th.
In “I STILL have a house to sell” news, couple number 27 came by to look at our lovely home since we put it on the market many moons ago. They are very interested and decided that it was the house for them. They have a house to sell and it is currently on the market but is not showing well because “they have too much stuff and it makes the house look small”. They are currently in the process of trying to get approved for financing for both their mortgage and for the mortgage for our house! That sounds like a lot of work to me. We were told that they stopped looking at houses after they saw ours. If they do not get approved and still want our house, we are going to offer them a lease with an option to buy. That would be awesome to not have to pay a mortgage AND rent!
So anyway, I should probably get back to work. Work is fun, minus being insanely busy all the damn time. I’m doing a lot of AJAX integration (but not with XML, we use JSON because it’s faster) with LANSA. If you have no clue what that all meant, here’s a simpler way of saying it: I’m doing wicked cool stuff on the web! My JavaScript skills have increase dramatically in the past 3 months! I am having a lot of fun doing the actual coding part of my job. Now the operations side I could do without but you have to take the good with the bad.
I just wrote an “auto complete” script in Lansa utilizing the Yahoo UI which passes back data from the DB2 database as a JSON string!
I told you I would go on to be the Lansa programming ninja I’ve always aspired to be!
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