Got the Jimmy Legs

December 15, 2009 – 4:06 pm

Some sweat when the heat is on

Looking for some hot stuff

I continue to make edits to the site, so if anybody's watching you will see the site odlly from one moment to the next. Some might say it is unprofessional to make changes to a live site, but I'm not too worried about tons of people continually reloading this site every minute of the day.

After spending a lot of time coming up with a script that would take all my blog categories and dump them into a simple drop-down menu (as opposed to the default setting, which just lists them out ad infinitum), I discovered WordPress has some very simple code to do this, which is what you see on the sidebar now. While it is important to know how to do stuff on the web, sometimes it's more important to know when to stop and say "Hey somebody already did the work for me." This is the soul of being a project manager, which is apparently what I'm shooting for on the job scene.

Speaking of which, I finally have a preliminary draft of my resume, so without further ado I guess I'm officially looking for work now. I say I'm looking for project manager work, but that sounds loftier than what I really want to do, which is tinker around with web programming and design elements, while getting some leeway to call the shots. In essence, choosing "Project Manager" is the moral equivalent of calling someone a "Jack of all trades," while pushing aside the qualifier of "Master of none." So I say "Project Manager" if only to avoid saying "I'm not good enough at any one thing to make a living, so please give me the job whose major facet is getting heaped with all the blame when things go wrong."

My old job paid for career services, which have been a big help for the resume, but now I'm thinking I should see if they have courses on improving my attitude.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Job, Uncategorized | Comments (2)

December 11, 2009 – 4:51 pm

This is Bob Dylan to me

Contrary to rumor, she does have legs

This clearly isn't finished yet, but I wanted to launch the WordPress version of this blog after spending all week tinkering with it. Most of the tinkering will be invisible to the reader, but I assure you it's all very high-tech stuff and will no doubt garner me a position as Tilda Swinton's personal webmaster.

After over 3 years using Blogger's interface, I finally switched this sucker to WordPress, which has been a somewhat most, highly time-consuming endeavor. Before Blogger, my site was driven by an ancient CGI (as in Perl, not the thing that brings Avatar to life) script originally meant to be used for site guestbooks (guestbooks?? what were we thinking back then?). That script functioned fairly well, and I would still be using it today but my host changed some setting and suddenly none of the comments would display. Rather than figure this out, I just switched to Blogger. Those comments still don't work, even though they are all still saved on the server. Someday I will liberate them.

For the time being, I will be messing with this layout, I have a couple of simple ideas for the design that are proving especially annoying to bring to fruition. But for now, it's kind of nice to see this old site with a new skin, after 7 years with that eye-straining teal color scheme. But while the Blogger posts have all nicely migrated to WordPress, my CGI archives remain in the old format, so we'll always have those to remember this site's former glory. I'll get around to linking to them at some point.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Web | Tagged Wordpress | Comments (3)

December 1, 2009 – 2:43 pm

What side you on

So the past month has been full of house-fixin' and career-contemplatin'. I just registered with the outplacement company paid for by my old company as part of the severance package, so we'll see if they can offer any useful advice. Meanwhile, I'm tyring to brush up on my programming skills, trying to learn everything I can about MySQL databases using PHP. This is probably stuff I should have learned in, say, 2001, but instead I chose to waste my days sleeping late and pretending to work. In those days I was telecommuting and making a relative ton of dough doing very little. If I had those days now … like gold in my hand …

Oh well, guess I'm stuck with my resume-sharpenin' and book-learnin'. I still need a solid name for my cats website, I just need something short but memorable. Something like "Street Cats," "Gritty Kitties" or "Bushwick Rent-a-Pet." Maybe "Shwickitties?" The house's cats are holding steady, haven't had many responses to adopt lately. Several new cats have showed up outside as well but funds for cat-fixing are currently locked until I figure out what I'm doing with my life.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Cats, Unemployment | Comments (1)

October 29, 2009 – 2:55 pm

Let's do the time warp

I went out with some of my soon-to-be-fired coworkers last night. It was a lot of fun but I exercised poor boozing form and today feel awful. Today is our last 'real' day on the job, since tomorrow will mostly be us dumping our company laptops and Blackberrys and probably having Security escort us out the door. But of course, the real work has been drying up for some time. I get a couple of emails a day with some small matter to address and the rest of the time I can sit here wondering when the crushing enormity will hit, when I realize the money is running out and I still don't have a job …

I've never been out of work more than a month or so, and that was when I graduated with my MA in Poetry and couldn't find work in my lil' college town for 3 months. Since then I've been gainfully employed. I get so antsy when I'm out of work usually, it spurs me onto the job market like Garfield on lasagna. You should see what a Yes-Man I turn into when I get in the interview room. It's quite a skill.

But I haven't yet felt that fear seep in, mostly in part to the generous severance package ($$$) I have been given. One wonders what it costs a company to keep an employee at a desk in their office, what overhead arises, since they're basically giving me 6 months' salary to leave right now. I guess there's a way things are done in Corporate America, though much of its lessons are lost on me. My whole time here has been full of inexplicable decisions by management, with strange, almost insidious behavior from the those in a position to fire vast swaths of the company. I have to assume it all makes sense to someone, cuz I sure don't get it.

I'm all packed up here, it should be pretty simple to walk away from this office. I'm still having no end of trouble getting my new mobile phone to work; I suspect the Radio Shack management might have a thing or two in common with my (ex) company. But, rest assured, I soon will be texting, tweeting, sexting and swtweexting, sending missives rife with bad usage to my similarly-dyseducated cohorts. OMFG. Hey, wasn't that part of the title over CBGB's?

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Job, Phones | Comments (2)

October 28, 2009 – 9:35 am

The Finish Line

I'm a couple of days away from employment freedom and financial slavery. Work has dried up nicely, most of my work has been farmed out to people around the globe, or just forgotten entirely. I have about a day and a half of official workday left, and then on Friday I have to come in to dump all my office gear and then I fly the coop.

I just picked up my own cell phone to replace the Blackberry they let me use for the past year. I'm gonna miss it, especially the whole not-paying for anything on it. I decided to go with a pay-as-you-go plan from Virgin, as my calculations put it at the absolute cheapest for the best service. So far that has been sort of true.

I am on my 2nd phone so far, the first one had a defective camera, so they just gave me another. This one seems to be having trouble running its applications, giving me lovely Java errors when I try to access the Email program. Yes, I'm getting a bunch of non-phone related stuff on this, if only because I would like to continue to appear to be a "with it" with my "finger" on the "pulse" of something. Which is hard when the damn thing won't work.

So it looks like it's back again to Radio Shack for me! It has dawned on me that perhaps the root of the problem is that I shouldn't have gone in that godforsaken store in the first place. Radio Shack has been in decline since kids stopped building crystal radio sets, and in their death rattle they decided to become glorified cell phone stores. And yet, they can't even seem to get that right. Why is it still so hard to get things that just work when you purchase them? Everything has to be riddled with issues and no one knows how to fix them.

They will invariably just give me another phone, which probably has something wrong with it as well. I have 1.5 days to get a working phone (the Radio Shack is right across the street from my office). After that, god help us all.

I'm going out for drinks with the ladies of my office today, though, that should be pretty interesting.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Bad Stuff, Job, Phones | Comments Off