Another change in a hectic year

To be honest, I was thinking of shuttering this site; but then it hit me: A large reason i have this site is the email address that sounds professional in case I needed it. I certainly need it now. I’ve been laid off recently, so I need to refactor the site slightly to let my work experiences through. Since my most recent job involved working on ATMs, I was supposed to not be very open about it.

I’ve originally used this site for a photography hobby, but I was slow to update it. To wit, I never got around to a post from the Scotland trip in May. (There’s over 6000 pictures I need to sift through, and most of my good pictures are of family. The rest are taken opportunistically out of a bus window and didn’t turn out.) Art’s gradual inclusion will likely continue if I can develop good posting habits.

However, I will need to heavily retool the Home page into an expansion beyond my resume. This will take some time to get right, as my drafts often err on the side of being too verbose and redundant for the sake of trying to tap knowledge I’ve mentally buried too deep to readily access. Not helping, my longest and most recent job had a lot of complexities unique to each contract; so what may be one customer’s highest commandment would often be another customer’s gravest sin.

Those who have known me a long time likely know I seem to have split into two different people work- and hobby-wise, slowly but surely. I have likely become one of the “Old Man Yells at Cloud” types with newer tech in my personal life, but I was more than able to roll with its punches as the feet on the ground (or “smart hands” as datacenter companies like to call it) in my most recent job. Photography and visual arts have largely displaced the mechanical, RC, and gaming hobbies; but I can ramp back up if need be. Perhaps I lean on this story too much, but I got my last job by discussing a slipper clutch rebuild on an RC truck during a phone interview. (Before the octagonal disc and cush drive clutches made their way into RC in the ‘10s, miniature shoe clutches had to be rebuilt any time a gear stripped; which was rather often on anything that ran faster than a 20-turn motor on almost anything electric made before 2006.)

Since there’s a lot of knowledge and expertise in those former hobbies and work experiences, the other “me” needs to have a way of breaking through and making a case for itself. That way, there will hopefully be a case for me in a hiring department out there. I want to stay in my current condo, but that may be too much of a dream. Paints and photography aren’t the expected place to learn there’s a small amount of play when Plastite screws are finger-loose and about to fall when unscrewing them over a pit of no return, nor are they the expected place to learn how to differentiate network outages from misapplied certificate files. These aren’t very interesting in hobbies, but these crumbs of experience may just save someone’s work orders in the profession I was laid off from.

For more on the “Old Man Yells at Cloud” angle, the reasons for disillusionment in each hobby vary, but are rooted in either diminishing returns or problems with peer pressure being the main driving force. My current hobbies aren’t immune, either. I wrote and rewrote this paragraph many times, but there’s one dubious moral at the heart of it: Don’t be influenced by an influencer’s praise. Trust your own judgment. If you don’t think you know enough, take influence from something candid you overheard. For RC, I bought a lot of lemons; but the one good purchase I made during my last phase of it came from overhearing profanities in the pits lobbed at someone’s own competing product that broke down. For computing, enough is enough: If what you have makes do, there’s not much reason to upgrade or branch out as long as your backups are robust enough. (A former sysadmin I try to follow in the footsteps of came to this conclusion long before I did, he now only upgrades when planned obsolescence catches up with him.) For gaming, fun should be the outcome instead of influence; and discerning the two is harder than it should be.

I could maybe start social media back up, but I don’t have much constructive to contribute. I did have a decent moderating resume in the ‘10s, but the one time I was handed the master keys to a big chat server all I could do was cause scandal or watch the place sink. Outside those ivory towers, it feels like all that’s left are shrines to celebrity and I don’t get along with that mindset. With everything big hypermonetized and everything little paralyzed, there doesn’t seem to be room for someone like me out there. Another reason I started this site was how hard it was to break through on Instagram to my own circles, and part of the reason I was planning on shuttering this site was due to upcoming laws making any small site seem too risky to dare attempt to run even if all the content is controlled to a level so strict it’s barely moving. There were some small sites and groups I was a part of in the mid-‘00s to mid-‘10s, but they are gone and missed.

The point still stands, I ought to polish up this site and try to sample my work experiences to make myself more appealing as a job candidate.