One of those not-yet monumental birthdays is approaching within the next two weeks. It’ll be my last birthday before the big 3-0. Folks tend to focus on that one as the big one, the one to tease you for that it’s all downhill from here, that wrinkles and gray hairs are going to jump out of your mirror the minute you peek on your 30th birthday. So, I’m thinking this year is the perfect year to celebrate the youth that I’ll get to enjoy for a full 365 days before the infirmity of a 30 year old sets in. Each day will be enjoyed and savored. I’ll relish the ice cream cones that’ll go straight to my hips post-30, but which are reasonably safe in my twenties. I’ll revel with all of the energy that a late twentier has, as compared to a thirty-aught. I’ll lustfully live the life of today, rather than pine for the retirement of tomorrow. 29 will purposefully be lived as a year of delights, a season of flavor, and a period of joyous discovery. That way, if 30’s as bad as everyone makes it out to be, at least I’ll have had _some_ fun before decrepitude.
Month: July 2003
Career Musings…
Performance evaluation time has rolled around at my company. Time to take stock of what it is I’ve done well, what it is I’ve done not so well, and how to convince management that the done well was done so well that payroll should hand a little extra money my way. That’s the basic part of the performance evaluation… the harder part is figuring out my goals for next year. They impact both my chances of getting reviewed well next year (and thus keeping my job/getting a chance at another bump up the payscale) and how I actually spend my time in my career. The economy being what it is (lousy for those of us in software development that don’t have some X level of security clearance), the career path weighs more heavily, as it affects marketability both within my company and outside of it. How do my needs/abilities/interests mesh with the market? What can I highlight of my talents that someone will then be willing to hire me for? How do I make myself indispensable to someone, anyone, with signing authority for employment contracts and paychecks? I’m not willing to sell myself out and do something like go back to writing Cobol, but I am interested in at least putting my finger up to the wind to see which way things are blowing.
Dave Thomas (of The Pragmatic Programmer’s and one of the authors of ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, rather than the deceased founder of Wendy’s) has put together a talk called ‘How to Keep Your Job’. The talk addresses some of the excuses (my word for it, not his) developers give for why they can’t find jobs or get laid off – H1B visas, companies hiring “fresh-outs” and laying off more expensive “graying” developers – and basically says, hey, you need to manage the stuff companies pay you for (your knowledge) in the same way as you would an investment portfolio. Balance risk and reward. Invest regularly. Monitor your investment to determine if you’re still balanced in risk and reward, and if your payback is getting you where you want to go.
All seems to make sense by me. So now I’m weighing what “value” I bring to the market, overall, and I can do to increase my knowledge worth. BEA training? .NET certification? Java Certified Programmer? Begin an MBA (probably not until next fall at the earliest, so not applicable to this eval cycle)? How far am I willing to go geographically within my current company to get exposure to other sides of the biz? How hard am I willing to work?
I’ve got about a week to get those thoughts down, or whatever slice I’m willing to reveal to my employer, on that performance evaluation piece of paper.
Just to give a non-career slant on the whole thing, here’s Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life?. I don’t own a copy of it, but I’ve been drooling over it for a while, based on an interview I heard with him on NPR and a Fast Company article. (There’s apparently an audio segment, as well, but I haven’t listened to it yet.)
The male vs. female reaction to pregnancy
Two experiences, unconnected, within a half hour of each other:
Female co-worker: You’re six and a half months along? Wow, I’d have pegged you for four!
Male co-worker: Say, shouldn’t you have had that kid six months ago??
Ego boost, ego flattening… At least it all evens out. God’s got a sense of humor that way, I think…
Job of the future
Blogs are taking over the Internet – they’re what we read now to get the spin, to get someone else’s opinion that we respect, and to get a different flavor of news or ideas than those to which we’d otherwise be exposed. That said, most material on blogs is pure drivel. Blog writers generally write for the chance to express themselves, and as folks on the whole have a generally low ratio of interesting things/thoughts to talk about versus mundane filling space things to talk about, thus the ratio of interesting or useful entries is low. Of course, some writers are better than others, and thus we can choose to bookmark them and avoid the rest so that WE don’t wade through the mire looking for the diamonds, but that doesn’t save the rest of the world from US as writers. Hey, I want to be thought of as insightful, as interesting – I don’t want to be one of those folks on the low end of the blogger totem pole. But I’m obviously not the best critic of my own entries…
So, how to solve it? How to protect my online reputation? Hire a ghost blog writer! Authors do it all the time – what famous person who’s written a book lately do you think really wrote all of their book? If they’re famous because they’re important, then generally their time is too well-filled to have the time to write a book! And so they hire a ghost writer to write the story they would have written, had they the time and the talent. The ghost writer shapes the story the person gives them, and crafts something better than would have otherwise emerged.
Blogs now being the source of our reputation on the web, ghost blog writers would solve the same purpose. A ghost blogger would take my snippets of ideas, ask me some pointed questions, and then mold an entry to be enjoyed by my breathless audience.
As the progenitor of this idea, I offer you the chance to apply for my ghost blogger position. Get in on the ground floor – the pay isn’t much (OK, it’s nothing), but you’ll be the first in on what’s sure to be a tidal wave of a trend. Be my online Ari Fleischer… and save me from inane entries such as this one.
5 years + 2 days
Friday was our 5 year anniversary. Jason’s already commented on the occasion, and his was even on the “big day”, but I needed a few days to catch up and ruminate.
My folks never seemed to do much about their anniversary, so I guess I never grew up expecting the day to be something special. I think Dad might have gotten Mom a card and sometimes some flowers, but for all I saw, that was about it. Since Jason and I have been married, though, we’ve never let it pass without having some special moment to mark the event. This year we went out to breakfast before work (OK, really we delayed work to go eat French toast together), and then made plans for next weekend, since my work deadlines in particular made celebration on “the day” problematic.
I think that we ended up moving the big celebration around seems to suit us and our marriage style even better than a big run-up to the specific date on which we got married. Yes, we got married on July 11 in 1998, and that’s something worth celebrating. But that we’re also married on July 12, 13, 14, 15… is just as worthy of celebration. That we love each other, and work to keep that love strong, on every day of the year seems to be a better statement of our “us-ness” than the plans we make to mark that one day of the year.
It was fun to think about 5 years ago, though – how our wedding day played out, the fun we had at our wedding, the trip to the self-service carwash to try to wash the toothpaste off our car (when we sold the car earlier this year, it still said Jason + Tina on its hood, if you glanced at the paint job just right. Flouride apparently interacts with ClearCoat), the special dinner, our first night in our new apartment… [and we’ll leave the memories right there, folks…]. That day was a wonderful day, and a wonderful way to start our marriage. But as a day in a marriage, it doesn’t measure up to the times when you actually go through things together, when you look past your individual needs or wants to work through something as a couple, when you face something you fear and the experience makes you realize that your partner is even better than you ever realized at being the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. Those probably ought to be added to the calendar to be celebrated, too- and hey, I’d get a lot more beautiful roses and hand-crafted poems that way!
The 100th entry!
My blogging has been sporadic of late- too many other things pulling me in other directions. I’ll note, though, tech-geek that I am, that I’ve started keeping a list of blog entry ideas in a list in my Treo. I think it’s just there to remind me that occasionally I do have interesting thoughts cross my mind, fleeting and non-fleshed-out as they may be.
Looking at Movable Type’s handy admin page for my blog, I see that I’ve posted 99 different entries since the birth of this blog. No doubt some were better than others, and the general quality of the whole thing could be debated. But I’ve enjoyed the chance to take time to think and then write (preferably in that order). I’ve even had folks contact me because of my blog – the Girly-Girl post was quite the favorite for a while – even ended up with an e-mail penpal because of it. (Hi, Christine!)
Of course, I always wish I had more time to spiff up the site, to do something with style sheets ala the CSS Zen Garden, or to make the general functional interface of the site more useful, but hey, I wish I had more time to do lots of other things in life, too. I’d actually think it’d be a horrible thing if this site ended up winning out, priority-wise, over other aspects and interests in my life. On the list of goals in my life, a great blog ranks way down the list: that MBA, the first marathon race, the afternoon spent blowing bubbles with my daugher, the great dinner eaten out or (even better) cooked with my husband – all beat out a beautiful page design or even more frequent posting.
So I amuse myself with little snippets here and there, and I have a vain (probably in both senses of the word) hope that I amuse others, too. Now 100 entries in, I think the feet are wet, the oars are in, and I’m paddling somewhere, though as yet the destination’s unknown.
Expansion
Someone in the coffee area today looked at my belly, even looked for a brief moment like they wanted to touch it, and then said something to the effect of “Hey, starting to show there…”. Uh, starting?
Ideas for Blog Entries
Sometimes there are just too many blog entry ideas running around to fully explain… So, here’s the brief list of things thought potentially worthy of expounding upon.
* the joy we experienced last night at a Dave Wilcox concert
* how lousy it is to be allergic to my own cats
* that expiring Microsoft certification exams ought to convince to me get up off my keester and finally get around to learning something about .NET
* hey, maybe I should figure out if it makes sense to concentrate (finally) on either the Microsoft path or the Java path. Or what am I doing fixating on technology, anyway – when am I headed back for that MBA?!
* hey, PHP is pretty fun! (would love to offer a link here to something cool I’ve done, but unfortunately, it’s work stuff, not fun stuff)
* the social awkwardness of wanting to revoke a turned-down invitation, but feeling as if to do so would be even worse than having turned down the invitation in the first place
* wouldn’t learning to ride a unicycle be cool? Post-pregnancy, that is. (No heart attacks, hubby/parents/in-laws)
* what it’d be like to win the $190 million Lottery – what amount of money is “enough”, and why is it that that number is so big for most folks?