Still going after all these years.
I may be able to add a celebrity blogger to my HooBlogs register of blogging University of Virginia alumni, now that it looks as though Katie Couric (along with NBC’s other anchors) might be starting a blog (thanks to MicroPersuasion for the link, original story at Yahoo).
Katie, if you need any support or advice about blogging in general or blogging from inside a corporation in particular, let me be the first to volunteer my assistance.
My new office is in Framingham, and it’s surrounded by big box stores. Coming in, I pass a financial services complex and a big box mall on my left, and a big box strip on my right. Just past my office is a big box grocery store (the “super” version of Stop and Shop). In a two mile radius can be found Office Max, Office Depot, Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, Target, Macy’s, Filene’s Basement, Best Buy, Tweeter, Comp USA, BJ’s wholesale club, and Old Navy, among many others, plus an assortment of supporting stores like Panera and Starbucks that seem to accompany the big boxes like birds picking insects out of a crocodile’s mouth.
Is it odd that I feel a sort of relief in the litany above? These are stores that can be found next to most white collar office parks. They were in Fairfax and in Redmond (or Bellevue), and tend to show up near most of the places I have traveled on business. Their purpose in life seems to be to place everything within reach that you might need to pick up on your lunch hour or on your way home from work. At this job they are very good. Big box stores are a little like APIs for office worker shopping; they make it easy and simple to accomplish known tasks and are present wherever you go.
Of course, that is their downside as well. There are no surprises with big box stores, only the same things you can buy everywhere else. And there is a terrible cost—in wasted space, in environmental impact (you need an SUV to take home all your big big purchases!), in health (have you ever eaten in the restaurants that cluster next to big boxes? They should all have standard defibrillators to go with the hubcap sized plates), in soul.
But oh, the convenience.
The benefit of sitting on postable items is that sometimes they pile up into some neat connections, as is the case with these three friends-with-bands stories. First, here in the Boston environs, Chris Rigopulos’s band Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives has released its second album, Second and Eighteen. (Chris was the lead guitarist with the Jack Tang Orchestra back at Sloan.)
Second, Craig Fennell, who sang at our wedding and who was a dear friend for many years starting in the Glee Club days, takes time off from his landscape architecture job (and, apparently, weight training. My God, it’s full of muscles!) to play keys and sing in Wonderjack, a DC area band that’s starting to get some radio play. The band’s bassist is another former Virginia Gentleman and Glee Club member, Dan Roche—congrats on the nuptials, Dan. (Nice band pics by another Glee Club friend, Guido Peñaranda.)
Finally, Justin Rosolino has added a new credit to his resume: producer. Apparently he sat behind the boards (as well as behind the electric guitars) for Portrait of Another, which (completing the UVA connection) is the band of the housemate of Hooblogger Hunter Chorey.
I thought my iTunes regimen was elaborate, but Glenn MacDonald’s takes the cake. Automatic rating based on playing habits, automatic image handling that marks up the cover art with “fingerprints,” even automatic payment to artists whose tracks are highly rated but unpurchased.
My setup is simple by comparison, and heavily dependent on smart playlists. Never Played is all tracks with a playcount of 0. Just Added is the last 200 most recent tracks. Less Played is any track that hasn’t been played at least twice, and whose last play was more than six months ago. Fell Out of Rotation is a track whose playcount is more than 2 and whose last played date is greater than a year ago. That plus a bunch of manually generated playlists works pretty well for me, but I’d love to take a look at Glenn’s script.
Update: Well, of course it’s a hoax. Or a satire on what you’d have to do to be able to compensate artists fairly. Or whatever.
I’m having trouble not creating a ruckus while reading Twisted Toyfair Theatre’s Seder Masochism, a touching story of the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm—better known as the Thing—discovering his Jewish roots. Amazing costuming job on the various action figures, and hysterical storyline. (Courtesy BoingBoing.)
Astute readers (or folks who click to my site rather than just scanning my RSS feed) may have noticed that my tagline, which formerly read “This blogger is for hire,” has changed. Later today I will start my new job as product manager for iET Solutions, a company that makes software that manages IT services based on the ITIL standard, as well as more traditional customer and IT management offerings including helpdesk and CRM.
I thought it might be helpful for other people in the job market to get some perspective on my search. My full time search started in November, and I received my first offer in early April, almost exactly six months later. During the intervening time, I spoke with almost 40 companies; had first-round interviews with about 15 of them; second round or higher with 8; and secured two offers.
Position availability for product managers has been bursty. There was a hot period for about six weeks from November through early December, then no real positions available until about late February, when things suddenly got hot again. This may be a specifically Boston issue, or it may speak to factors in the economic cycle that influence the availability of this kind of marketing position.
I used several lead management methods to identify new opportunities. Monster and Craigslist were in the mix, as were conversations with friends and colleagues at networking events and ongoing daily conversation. I listed my resumé on Monster as well as on my own blog, and found that both brought a roughly equal number of hits in any given month, though the nibbles from people who found me on Google tended to be less targeted and less serious. No one who contacted me mentioned having read my blog. I also worked with three recruiting and placement firms and spoke with many more. Some of the experiences with placement firms were very positive, and I will be happy to provide specific recommendations offline. The recruiter who placed me at iET Solutions was a single-time recruiter (not someone with whom I had looked at other firms) who found my resumé on Monster.
What’s next for me and this blog? Well, it’s likely I won’t update as often as I have been doing for the last six to eight months, but I anticipate continuing this project well into the foreseeable future. There may be some new directions in content, responding to some of the challenges of my new job. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride as much as I plan to.
The new version of Manila, the software that powers this blog, entered public beta over the weekend. Congrats to Jake, Scott, and the rest of the Userland team.
Some of the changes in the software look really interesting for all levels of users, including nofollow support, enclosures, authenticated member signup, better management for comments and trackback (spam management), and a ton of performance fixes. Others, including version control and site access control, look squarely aimed at a specific set of customers—those inside the firewall. Very interesting.
Things I’d like to see fixed that I don’t see listed—I’m going to try to install the beta bits and check for the fixes, but haven’t gotten there yet:
I look forward to playing with the beta some more over the next few weeks in my shrinking spare time.
Aaron Swartz: SFP: Come see us. Looks like Aaron got some initial round funding to work on his company this summer as part of Y Combinator’s Summer Founders Program and will be setting up an office here in the greater Boston area. Congrats, Aaron! (I like the description of the area he attributes to Paul Graham of Y Combinator:
“Now you want to go about finding an apartment. You want to get a place on the red line [the local subway] because then you can go see people and people can go see you. The best place to go is Davis Square, because it’s cheap, fun, and on the red line. Harvard is fun and on the red line but not cheap, Porter is cheap and on the red line but not fun, so I recommend Davis, Inman, and Central, in that order.”
I’ve come a long way from three years ago, when I wrote about my confusion about Patriots’ Day (is it a day off to watch the Boston Marathon?). Now I live in a town that claims the highest number of first-day casualties within town borders—22 colonists and at least twice as many British regulars, more than either Lexington or Concord—in the American Revolution. The Lexington Minuteman rounds up all the facts and legends.
Update: Good coverage of some of the reenactment fun in downtown Arlington on Ben Hyde’s blog.
Boing Boing: TSA screener: 2-book max on flights. Ross Mayfield has an interesting conversation with a TSA screener in which the screener mentions that the number of books to be allowed in carry-on will be decreased from four to two. Is this simple confusion between matchbooks (which would make sense in the context of the rest of Ross’s conversation) and literature, or does the TSA actually think that books are possible hijacking weapons? My money is on the former, but it’s too good a story not to share.
Google Blog – Live: Mom says so, that’s why. Nice post from Sloan alum and Google product marketing manager Tom Stocky on the official Google Blog.
With the energy deficit I wrote about yesterday, I perhaps should not have walked from Harvard Square to Central Square along the Charles River yesterday afternoon after finishing the repair work on our kitchen doorway, prior to going to choir practice, prior to driving down to New Jersey. But it was too nice a day not to enjoy the sights.
World Wide Wood: Self-Run DNS. Very simple instructions for enabling the built in DNS services in Mac OS X. Important for those days when Comcast’s DNS servers flake out for hours on end. (Though, I confess, it was nice to have an enforced hiatus from being on line.)
Your Scary ’80s 3 and Your Scary ’80s 4 have been posted on the iTMS store (3, 4) and on Art of the Mix. As with the previous ’80s mixes, the odd numbered one is all the tracks you wish you could forget, and the even numbered one is the one with stuff that you wish you heard the first time they came out.
It’s been a hard couple of days, for whatever reason. I have had bursts of morning energy followed by absolute collapse in the afternoons. Not sure what’s going on, but it might be one of the following, presented in increasing order of likeliness:
I hope it’s not the last one. I have about ten more hours of driving this weekend: down to New Jersey to collect my family and return everyone back home, where there will be a newly finished (though probably not painted) doorway in the kitchen.