State of My Life
My last paid day here will be Aug 31. (Gotta love working for a place where people treat each other right, and I have two months notice...)(Why yes, I'm a bit tired of people suggesting I screw my boss on the way out.) I finished doing up all the documentation on how to do my job, and now I'm just fiddling with details. Meanwhile, since I still have a month, I'm trying to decide how best to use the time; it'd be good if I could make my second database minimally functional before I leave, but, well, I thought I'd have two more years to do that, not one month.
The job hunt: so far, no luck. And the more I browse job ads, the less I think I'm qualified to do anything. Science jobs in general are highly specific for what skills they want - and my masters in fish ecology isn't going to do well when the job wants experience with cyanobacteria (for example). I also disqualify on a lot of the fun field ones on being a physical wimp. Meanwhile, most of the tech jobs ask for computer science degrees, and even the entry level ones ask for more skills than I currently have.
Since it's basically a foregone conclusion that if/when I do find a job, I'll have to move to it, I've started preparing for that. I've got 8 years of accumulated crap to sort through, plus the 10 years before that that I'd started sorting back in February, before I'm even to the point of packing. But I got my box collection started at work and have visited the recyclers/Goodwill a number of times now, there's some forward progress going... (And if it turns out I find a local job after all, well, I'll still have less crap. Win win. )
And finally: I decided it might be good to make a techie demo. I have a friend with art images that make for a good stand-in for the satellite images that I've already made a functional database for, and I signed up at nearlyfreespeech.net to host it. At first I figured it would be fairly quick to set up, since I'd already done it. But it turns out that MySQL and PostgreSQL are not that similar. o.O So, side effect: now I'm learning MySQL. Still a win-win.
Other: Have some tomatoes growing (not sure who I'm going to give them to when I leave), at least one of my compost bins has a worm in it (hooray!), and I'm trying to cut way back on Internet time so I have time to do all the other stuff (so, much less Farm Town...).
I think that covers the state of my life at the moment.
The job hunt: so far, no luck. And the more I browse job ads, the less I think I'm qualified to do anything. Science jobs in general are highly specific for what skills they want - and my masters in fish ecology isn't going to do well when the job wants experience with cyanobacteria (for example). I also disqualify on a lot of the fun field ones on being a physical wimp. Meanwhile, most of the tech jobs ask for computer science degrees, and even the entry level ones ask for more skills than I currently have.
Since it's basically a foregone conclusion that if/when I do find a job, I'll have to move to it, I've started preparing for that. I've got 8 years of accumulated crap to sort through, plus the 10 years before that that I'd started sorting back in February, before I'm even to the point of packing. But I got my box collection started at work and have visited the recyclers/Goodwill a number of times now, there's some forward progress going... (And if it turns out I find a local job after all, well, I'll still have less crap. Win win. )
And finally: I decided it might be good to make a techie demo. I have a friend with art images that make for a good stand-in for the satellite images that I've already made a functional database for, and I signed up at nearlyfreespeech.net to host it. At first I figured it would be fairly quick to set up, since I'd already done it. But it turns out that MySQL and PostgreSQL are not that similar. o.O So, side effect: now I'm learning MySQL. Still a win-win.
Other: Have some tomatoes growing (not sure who I'm going to give them to when I leave), at least one of my compost bins has a worm in it (hooray!), and I'm trying to cut way back on Internet time so I have time to do all the other stuff (so, much less Farm Town...).
I think that covers the state of my life at the moment.