Category: Work

And now for something complety different.

An old boss/friend of mine contacted me yesterday about a possible job. It’s not web design, but it does sound intreaguing. It looks like it’ll be part time, but I’ll be able to telecommute. I’ll find out more about it next week.

There’s also an EB Games that just opened down the street from here. It probably wouldn’t pay enough by itself, but depending on what the position mentioned above is like, I may decide to apply for a job there too for the hell of it. (Just so I do actually get out of doors on a regular basis.)

I’m starting to feel like I need a change of pace, and being furloughed was a blessing in disguise. (Of course it would be nice if the company I used to work for would actually pay me what I’m owed. Now that I think about it, it’d also be nice if I got a check from EDD soon, too.)

Okay time to stop rambling. I’m off to make a shopping list.

Quick weekend update.

I’m in the process of taking screenshots of websites I’ve worked on for my portfolio. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to just point to URLs and say I did “X” on “Y” site for many of them.

Now the question is, do I build my portfolio online, as a CD-ROM, as a printed piece, or as some combination of the three?

Honestly, I really don’t feel like working on it this weekend, but I need to be able to give examples of my work to prospective future employeers.

In other news, I had a quick initial interview with a company Thursday evening. I’m expecting a phone call from them Monday. I think things went well, as I was asked to keep next Thursday open for a possible follow-up interview. I’ve also sent my resume to a few other places in the area, and I’ve posted it to a couple online job sites.

A couple people have suggested that I take a few days off (a week or two) as a little vacation before I start stressing out over a job search. Good advice, and I have done that in the past – but it’s a little hard to do so when you not only did not get a severance package, but you also did not receive a final paycheck. (Whether I even get that is up to a judge now, I guess.)

In other, other news, someone’s been using my SSN to commit unemployment insurance fraud, which I found out when I filed my claim Thursday afternoon.

I guess I better get back to my screen shots. It’s kind of hard to keep typing with a cat draped across one’s fore-arms.

-Hool ( with an arm full of kitten)

Confessions of a Sentient Conflux

Hello, My name is Hooloovoo – and I was a sentient conflux.

(Hi Hooloovoo)

Back when the sentients first started to appear in Jumpgate you may have seen a C3 investigating a TRI Sensor Beacon out near Hyperial, or paying homage to “Emma – Destroyer of the Unwary”. That sentient was me. I was never a very good PvP pilot, but I did participate in a few of the early sentient-vs-player battles, (mostly as laser-cannon fodder.)

I was also Padan – whom you may or may not remember from the Pirates of GBS fiasco, which took place when Mother was the sole GM left by 3DO to run the game. (Again, I participated mostly in a laser-cannon fodder capacity.) I tried to help Mother out where I could, but Jumpgate was not my primary job responsibility.

I first came to Jumpgate when the company I worked for secured the publishing rights for the game. I was granted a beta account primarily because I was to help desin and implement the product’s marketing, and online billing/support sites. (Which would be loosely tied into JOSSH.) I stayed in the game post beta, because I had found something that I really enjoyed. Not just in the game, but also in the community. (I’m very glad that something of that sense of community lives on here, at g-blog.net, even if I don’t log into my Jumpgate account very often anymore.)

For the last 4 1/2 years, I’ve been involved in the design, creation, publishing, and continued maintenance of The 3DO Company’s online presence. I’ve worked as part of a talented web team, and more recently as “a web team of one.” All that came to an end about 3 hours ago. I am now officialy a “Web designer seeking a position in the San Fancisco Bay Area as part of a creative and energetic web site development team.”

Losing your job sucks, especially when this is the reason.

got hosed, tommy. He got hosed.

Culled from the depths of Company-Bulk

Just found these neat little tidbits nestled down among the posts about looking for a new apartment, virtual yard sales, the latest episode of buffy, and a myriad of other random threads on my company’s internal message board:

Lego-Escher
Relativity
Ascending and Descending
Belvedere
Balcony
Waterfall

oops, looks like I missed one

Edited on May 7th 2003, 22:15 by Hooloovoo

That was a little odd…

I just got a phone call from my first head-hunter. She’s sending me her contact info, and I’ll probably be forwarding my resumé to her this afternoon. We’ll see what happens.

Her agency is Game Industry specific, and she already knew a lot about the situation here. I wonder who she’s already talked to.

Edited on May 5th 2003, 16:59 by Hooloovoo

T -60 Days and counting

I wasn’t going to post about this for a couple of weeks, but…

Is anybody interested in hiring a web developer with 4 years experience in the video game industry? There’s probably going to be a blue-haired-freaky one available to start in early July, (or possibly sooner.)

Sucky way to end the week, but at least I got some warning.

I can’t believe how much crap is on my company’s webserver.

Not having much else to do this afternoon, I figured this would be as good a day as any to make sure there was a recent archive of the contents of my company’s web server.

I fired up an ftp client, logged in and began transferring the contents of the web root to my HD. I’ve been babysiting the process, just in case the connection gets dropped (the server can be cranky sometimes) and I’m amazed at some of the stuff I’ve discovered thus far.

Product sites in multiple locations – backups of backup directories – crap from 1998/1999 that should have been deleted, (infact I was under the impression that it had been) – entire directories with names like europe.deleteme and wwwboard_est_mort which should probably go.

I’m currently downloading product patches that aren’t even supposed to be on the web server – that’s what the ftp servers are for.

I knew there was some cruft on the box, but I had no idea how bad it was. I’m starting to wonder if the 14GB I have on my workstation is going to be enough. Once this stuff is downloaded archived to CD, I think I’ll go in and start cleaning out the crap.

UPDTATE: I started this process at about 4:30 this afternoon it is now 10:40. I had to restart the transfer a few times because of our cranky webserver. (Not from scratch – just from the last file to get transfered before being dropped.) Final tally: 4.31GB used by 73,162 Files in 2,093 directories. I think I could easily cut that amount in 1/2 without thinking about it (by dumping the backups of backups, “working%20files”, “resource.frk” “_vti_cnf” and the like) I could probably reduce that even more by going through and getting rid of some of the other crap that doesn’t really need to be there.

Looks like I have a project for next week: the web-monkey version of spring cleaning. 🙂

Edited on May 2nd 2003, 05:43 by Hooloovoo

I didn’t break it, I swear.

There’s a nifty little program that I use at work (and I home) called ACDSee.

One of the features that comes in handy is the “print contact sheet”option which I use during the selection process for image galleries. When you get 200 some-odd screencaps and you need to pick 10-20 “good” ones, being able to print out proofs can be a life saver.

Anyway, I started a print job at 16:11 of 120 images (but these are much higher rez than normal) I got it about 15 min ago (17:22) I’m still waiting for the second batch I stared at 16:25, and there’s someone in the print queue after me who just wants to print out a 300k word document.

I didn’t break the printer, I swear. You’ll get your word document – but it may not be tonight.