Here is an interesting story from Seth Godin’s site.
Who are your customers talking to? Where do they sit?
Category: Uncategorized Page 24 of 31
I haven’t said much over the last week, but not for lack of things to say! It’s just that there were some things that I shouldn’t have really talked about much until now.
Well, if you know me personally, you may know that lots of people are going through some type of change in their professional life. My friend Jeff (who has no web site) has recently resigned his position as my boss in order to pursue more interesting things. Brian is starting a new job at Microsoft on Monday. Gerry now has a new “partner in crime” (another programmer reporting to him). I know that there are a few other members of the WI .NET Users Group Executive Committee that are either looking, or have recently found new contracts.
Well, on Thursday (7/28), I officially became part of the group in transition. After ~15 months on the job, I was laid off. My company had been downsizing since I started. Over the last year, the development team had shrunk from 9 people to 3, and now 2. I knew I wouldn’t always have a job there, and for that matter I didn’t want to always work there, but I didn’t expect to be let go last week, though.
I was disappointed, but not devastated. In fact, I was actually pretty happy. If I had waited it out and quit on my own, I wouldn’t have got any severence.
Fortunately, I had been thinking about change recently (Chad, I was wrong — the Life 2.0 post was after the lay off), so I had been seriously looking for another position since the week before. In fact, I already had an interview scheduled for this week, and it had been scheduled for about a week. I had already talked to a couple different recruiters, and all were promising that they had leads that matched my skills.
Well, all of the recruiters I talked to were good people, but one in particular was very helpful. She was referred by a friend. I had started talking to her the week before I was laid off, but then she was out of town the entire week. She didn’t even know I was unemployed until this past Tuesday (8/2).
In that time (2 days), she has already found me a few really good leads. In fact, she found me a 4 week contract (and possible hire) yesterday. Normally I wouldn’t have wanted to quit a job for a 4 week contract, but given that I don’t already have a job, I figured that a 4 week contract is the perfect length. Either the company and I will agree to extend my contract, or they will hire me, or, if we aren’t a good match, I can keep looking for a few more weeks.
Personally, I’m amazed at the turnaround time. I was planning to have a couple weeks off
So, anyway, I have a new job starting Monday.
And I’ll have even more news to report sometime next week (probably Tuesday or Wednesday).
The other day I started using SlickRun. It was in Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Tools List. I’d seen it a while back, but finally downloaded and installed it the other day. Here’s a screenshot:
In short, I like it a lot when I remember to use it (which is spotty, but getting more frequent). I have it set to show on Win-Q (the default) at the location of my mouse cursor (not default). You can run commands there as if it was the command window or Start->Run, but you can also create “MagicWords” to be shortcuts to other programs (with or without parameters). For example, if I type Win-Q then “mor” (for morning), my e-mail, my RSS reader, and iTunes all open.
The best thing about it: it’s free! 🙂 Long live the keyboard!
Be on the lookout for a new version. It’s just around the corner!
42.
I made 42 cents yesterday by adding Google AdSense to my site.
If you’re viewing this page in your browser (as opposed to an aggregator) you will now see Google AdSense link units in the navigation. I thought I’d try these out for a while. As you can see, they’re smaller than the regular Google ads that you might have seen on other sites. I imagine that they will pay out less than the other ads as well, but I’m not really expecting to make tons of money on this anyway.
That said, please feel free to click on any of them. I’d rather get something than nothing. 😉
Update: At the moment, I’m also trying out the regular AdSense format as well, so you will see both for now.
I bought Head First Design Patterns (“Part I” here) today. There are lots of exercises in the book, and they apparently (according to the Introduction) are a very important part of the learning process. My dilemma, though, is that I don’t know if I should write in the book, or keep notes separately. I normally don’t like writing in books, but I don’t know why.
BTW, I decided to post about “Head First” as much as possible because it makes casey “giggle“.
Update: I just saw this. It’s a C# implementation of the various source files from the Head First book provided by Mark McFadden. (Via Sean, via Darrel.)
I just noticed that three pieces of software that I often use are in version 1.1:
- Visual Studio (OK, so it’s really version 7.1 of VS, but the Framework is in v1.1)
- Community Server
- My web mail client
I thought that was kind of interesting and it got me thinking about other “v1.1” things. The first thing that came to mind was my actual web sites — this blog site and my “other” site, ScottIsaacs.com. This blog was intended to be a minor upgrade to the functionality provided by my original site — just until version 2.0 comes out.
Another, more important one-point-one is my career. I’ve been through the 0.x pre-alpha stage, the major 1.0 release and then a minor upgrade.
Maybe I should try to upgrade my web sites and career and launch a new version in coordination with the next release of the Visual Studio…
Because so many people have asked, “Scott, what wonderful items can I buy for you?”, I am including this list of various wishlists. (I’m also going to add it to the site navigation so you can find it easier.)
OK, so the list of lists is pretty short right now, but I might add more someday. For good measure, here is the link to my CafePress store. Go buy something. 😉
Well, after being down for about a week, comments are now re-enabled on my blog.
I posted to the CS Forums about this issue to try to get some help, but no one ever responded. So I decided to ask someone I know that works for Telligent — Dan Bartels. I sent Dan a short e-mail, pointing to my forum question, and he responded right away (within ~30 minutes).
He made a simple suggestion to temporarily switch to the default blog skin and see if comments would work. The comments did work! My problem stemmed from the fact that I was using a customized version of a skin that came in the 1.0x CS distribution. Based on his suggestion, when I got home I poked around for about 10 minutes and got it working. In case anyone else has a similar problem, here is my simple solution.
In the /Themes/Blogs/_Your_Theme_/Skin-EntryPostCommentContainer.ascx, add this line:
<Blog:EntryComments runat = “Server” ID =”comments” />
For example, my file now looks like this:
<%@ Control Language=”C#” %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix=”Blog” Namespace=”CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls” Assembly=”CommunityServer.Blogs” %>
<%@ Import Namespace=”CommunityServer.Components” %><Blog:EntryView runat = “Server” ID = “Entry” />
<Blog:EntryComments runat = “Server” ID =”comments” />
<Blog:CommentForm runat = “Server” ID =”form” />
You could also just copy this file from /Themes/Blogs/default/, but you would lose any other changes you may have done to the file.
Thanks for the tip, Dan!!