And now for something completely different

This is a rambly, what’s-going-on-in-Dave’s-life sort of post with very little content of interest who don’t know me and/or are stalking me.  You have been forewarned.

I have a habit of jumping around between jobs.  I find that I’m rarely satisfied for long in a position as the thrill of learning a bunch of new stuff wears off, the grind sets in and the drudgery of doing real work is all that’s left.  To many, this penchant for flittery is a big fat check mark in the negatives column while evaluating me as an employee candidate.  Then again I probably don’t want to work for people who care about such things.  This is not to say I never stay put.  I spent 2 years running my own company and there was plenty of drudgery amongst the fun (and terrifying) learning activities such a job afforded.  So, when it seemed the end was drawing near for my time as a failed entrepreneur I made a pledge to myself.  I didn’t want to get stuck right back into those boring jobs I had fled several years back.

Since there wasn’t a lot of excitement for me in the types of jobs I was likely to be offered I started wondering, where can I go?  I had been teaching at the Art Institue of Phoenix for 2.5 years at that point and I knew that I enjoyed my work there.  It was peripherally related to software development (which I still love) but conveniently avoided all those pesky issues like customers and deadlines and software that actually has to work.  It also afforded me much more opportunity to play with and develop game technology, the very thing I had gone to college for all those years ago.  Perfect!

I was all set to move over to the Art Institue when the next surprise came along.  I had written a rather lengthy letter expressing my concerns and dissatisfaction with various elements of the adult hockey league at Oceanside Ice Arena.  I expected to get back something stating “Your concerns have been noted, now buzz off”.  What I got back was “Those are some really great points, this is what I’m going to do to address them, oh and by the way do you want a job as assistant adult hockey director?”.

…?

That’s the first time I’ve ever been offered a job by complaining.  So I met with the rink’s manager and in the next few weeks I’ll begin to take on duties as assistant adult hockey director.  Check mark in the “try something new” category.  Luckily the hockey gig is mostly evenings and the Art Institute is mostly daytime so they’re quite compatible.

So, I leave a full time software engineering job, go to teaching and managing a hockey league.  Sounds like a pretty good career shake-up to me.

Ye olde home towne

Today I got linked an article about Phil Spector’s arrival at Corcoran prison in CA.  It’s mostly about him and playing music, blah, blah, blah.  The interesting bit is at the end of the article.

Spector was previously held in the Los Angeles County jail and then an intake center in Kern County, where corrections officials evaluated him and assigned him to the Corcoran facility.

Spector’s wife, Rachelle, welcomed the transfer and said it would be an improvement from the Kern County prison where, she said, she was unable to visit her husband or speak to him by phone. “Anywhere is better than that place,” she said.

I was born and grew up in Bakersfield which is the seat of Kern County.  Damn I’m still glad to be out of that place, even after all these years.

Let your feet do the talking

Last night I walked out on my hockey team.  It’s pretty rare that I walk out on something.  Bad movies, boring lectures, pitifully performing sports teams, I can make it through a lot.  One thing I refuse to put up with though, is a lack of effort.

It’s one thing to get beat.  It’s another thing entirely to get beat when you’re putting out 150% the defensive effort as the defensemen of your team and contributing positively to your team’s offense (something our defensemen jumping up into the play was not doing).

So, after the 4th or 5th time that I (a forward) was left to be the sole man hoofing it back to defend a 2 on 1, I had reached my limit.  After the goal that made it 7-5 in our opponent’s favor, I headed to the bench, slammed my stick on the boards and let the defense know exactly how I felt about their performance that night.

The response was predictably not anything that would improve my opinion of the defense that night so I quickly made my final decision and headed for the locker room to change out.  About 8 minutes later I was talking to the assistant rink manager about switching teams.

Now I get to look forward to the best kind of revenge, scoring against those same defensemen.

As seen at the office

When we all have camera phones its humorous how quickly something in the office becomes a demotivator.

He’s back baby!

After switching my domain about a year ago my blog has been offline. Sadness. I tried at various points to use some Ruby libraries to upload my old posts over, but to no avail. I have had some initial success with wordpress.com but have overall been stymied by the atom post system (which seems to not accept “normal” RFC3339 dates). At some point all these old posts will magically appear in here once I can figure out how to get the dates posted and categories converted, etc.