Blech

I haven't had much to say lately... not enjoying the job hunt. I'm disappointed with the percentage of employers who don't respond to applications to let you know they're not considering you. I hate being left hanging like that. It's like tearing off a bandage - I prefer the quick and merciless route.

I'm kind of hungry and it's way too late for food.

Barely Lucid

Wow, I've been feeling some pretty extreme fatigue lately. I don't know if it's from the heat or what. I keep falling asleep in the middle of the day, sleeping another 8+ hours at night, waking up exhausted and going to work tired... not so good.

Freelance leads appear to be slipping from my grasp as of late. Hoping that improves soon.

Not much else is up. Still on the job hunt.

Staying Optimistic

I found an incredibly awesome job listing on Craigslist the other day. It's also telecommute which makes it even more awesome. I am crossing my fingers.

Bounce Houses and Explosives

I had a pretty awesome 4th of July weekend. Chrissy rented a full-size bounce house for the party and I think we spent more time in it than the kids did. Food was good, fireworks were good, and everyone had a really good time. I don't want to know how much food I ate!

It'll feel good to sleep in my bed again tonight. Speaking of which, I should probably be doing that right now...

ARRGH!

Things that suck: discovering that 2 sites in my portfolio were hacked recently and probably made a real nice impression on any potential employers who checked them out.

On the bright side, I learned a bit more about security this weekend. I also found an incredibly useful tool for testing PHP code. Just feed Pixy your PHP files, and it'll test for XSS, SQLI and some other vulnerabilities and show you where they are.

In other news, I lost 3 and a half pounds at my last weigh-in on Friday. I probably nullified all of that work by going to the Phantom Gourmet's BBQ Beach Party today, where I ate all sorts of ribs, Wicked Whoopies, and slush.

Some Good, Some Bad

Westfield State finally called me back to let me know they offered the position to someone else. I'm kind of bummed out, but sort of relieved. Tech support isn't really where I want to be, but it was still a good opportunity. My top choice for a job is most definitely something in web design & development. My artist roots aren't dead yet!

I'm thinking of rewriting the webcomic engine and releasing it under some sort of open source license. If I do that, I'll be changing it to be object-oriented because it'll be a lot neater and easier to work with in the future.

Found another job near Anthony to apply to and it seems like a perfect fit. Let's hope they agree. :)

Yuck.

Gained almost 4 pounds so I'm not too happy about that. It's really my fault for not tracking food as diligently as I used to so I'm starting that up again. I think I've been eating more due to nerves and/or stress since the job hunt really sucks.

Boring People Say Boring Things

I'm kind of thinking I have one of the most boring blogs on the planet. As of late the only things on my mind are A) job hunting, B) web development and C) gaming. Oh well. Maybe a meteor will land on my car and spice up my life a little.

Spent some time redesigning my site over the past two days. Now I don't have to feel awkward showing potential employers a huge neon pink drippy skull. I decided to link my personal stuff instead of integrating it directly into the site, unlike the Blogger + Twitter + Delicious mess I had on the prior iteration. I know it's more "web 2.0" or whatever to cram as much stuff as possible into each page but I've always been the type to go against the grain at least a *tiny* bit wherever possible. I was also defiant by not rounding any edges in the layout... so there!

New addiction alert - Battle Forge. It's basically an RTS, but with card game elements a la M:TG. I never even really liked RTS, but this one is pretty cool. I think I'm going to play it after I finish writing this.

Validate Your Face

I fixed about 1300 validation errors on Bizarre Uprising. There are a bunch I can't get at because it's due to what the admins post on the site. What annoys me is that sites like YouTube and Twitter hand out invalid code snippets and screw up perfectly valid code. GRRH!

In other news, Amazon has like 1600 errors on their page. How important is it to even have super duper validated code, anyway?

Losing Weight/Mind

I imported my old weight loss blog in case anybody cares (and some even older posts from 4 years ago). I'm not sure this blog is read by anybody except for me, though. That reminds me, I should get weighed in tomorrow since I haven't gone in May yet.

The job hunt has been discouraging and my work schedule has gotten a bit lighter. I was already worried about paying the bills, but losing more hours is helping to enhance my stress level.

I'm trying to learn my way around Ruby on Rails. So far I'm encountering confusing IDEs and having a hard time finding the kind of information I need to get started. I have some books and tutorials I'll be burying myself in so hopefully the bewildered feeling will go away soon.

Programmer Personality

I'm a PHSB.

Games and Brains

I spent a decent part of the weekend playing Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. I really love the newer CV games because they play very similar to Metroid these days. I'm not sure which one I'll play next - I have Symphony of the Night and Rondo of Blood waiting for me. I can't really get into the ancient NES versions because the control is pretty terrible.

Tomorrow's quest will be to continue on the path to JavaScript dominance. If I can't swing the dominance thing, I'll at least try to learn some new stuff. I'm kind of thinking that setting up a separate part of my site for random experimentation might be a good idea. It would be sort of like Dr. Frankenstein's lab, except I'd be the one with brains in jars and strange code snippets running amok.

Chocolate Bunnies

Easter was pretty good. I colored eggs with Anthony's family on Saturday and had a bunch of food before driving home to eat another bunch of food. There's a ridiculous amount of candy in the house right now which is kind of rough. We'll see how good of a job I've done dealing with temptation at my next weigh-in. :)

Editors Are Exciting

I'm trying a new code editor called Komodo Edit. It's pretty nice - seems lightweight and has the ability to collapse code fragments. It's missing a few features which are apparently reserved for Komodo IDE, their non-free thing. Despite that, it's worth a try (and it's free)!

I normally use PSPad for simple stuff but certain things irk me about it - I still can't get line numbers to show up consistently and it seems to crash a lot. I also like Eclipse but sometimes it feels slow, and the lack of word wrap can make webpage editing truly painful.

In other news, I scrubbed the code on Bonnie's site and made it CSS/XHTML compliant. Yes, I'm just full of excitement today!

Not Much

I managed to fix the code on the blogs page. The XHTML is now valid, and that makes me happy.

Rat Races

One job listing annoyed me today - it asked for examples of website design work, but specified "no freelance". Why do they care? Doesn't the fact that I've designed and written websites on an unpaid basis mean that I'm willing to work hard, even without the carrot of a paycheck hanging in front of my face? Do they only want people motivated by money, and not a love of the field?

I could understand if I were a self-taught physicist or mathematician trying to get a job... but any artist, designer or coder worth their salt knows that in fields like this, having a formal education and career doesn't mean an awful lot.

Random As Usual

I finished my site redesign and I'm kind of proud of it. It's pink and green and weird. The stupid Twitter and Delicious widgets made it so one of my pages won't validate properly at w3c. Gonna have to debug that later.

I'm still not having much luck on the job hunt thing. There's just about nothing in western MA, and not an awful lot of stuff around here either. The one response I've gotten back so far was to let me know the position was filled... then the same job popped up on Dice.com yesterday. Now I'm starting to wonder if my resume is crap!

I lost about a half a pound at my last weigh in. I'm hoping I can keep that up. I've been a little more diligent with the food tracking over the past 2 weeks... I was letting it slip for awhile.

I finished my site redesign and I'm kind of proud of it. It's pink and green and weird. Stupid Twitter and Delicious made it so one of my pages won't validate properly at w3c. Gonna have to debug that later.

Faltering

Ugh. I haven't been eating very well, and my stomach knows it. I ate many Tums this weekend... alternated between heartburn and nausea for most of it. I'm still 2 pounds under goal, despite the poor choices I've been making lately. My lowest point has been about 6 pounds under goal (131.2 pounds, dressed obviously).

On the bright side, I played through all of Super Metroid this weekend while at Anthony's house. We also went to see Watchmen again with Jay. I can't wait for the director's cut in the summer... I just can't get enough of that movie for some reason.

Time to sleep. Hopefully I'll have better stuff to talk about next time!

Here We Go Again

I'm not even sure why I'm trying the blog thing again. I'm starting to think that blogging tends to thrive only when one has more baggage than the lost and found at Logan Airport. I guess it's also a valid pastime if you are full of anger and enjoy oozing your seething rage all over the Internet.

I have blogged quite a bit over the years. That's part of why my inability to blog now is so confounding - I used to have no problem yammering on about nothing and leaving it out in plain view. I think it can be attributed to a combination of factors: 1) I'm getting older, 2) I don't have an awful lot to complain about and 3) I'm not awfully worried about what people think of me anymore.

It seems like whenever I have a thought that seems blog-worthy, I either forget it before I get the chance to write it or just plain don't know how I want to say it. I stare at the empty text box and give up after awhile. Even this short post has taken several days to compose, although I feel pressured to have some sort of really cool opening post.

I guess I could try to make the next post a little cooler...