In any case, I should be grateful for what I do have. I’ve got a freelance job, which is good. And while it is a finite position, it will be another site on my resume to show potential employers. That, and I’ll feel much more confidant regarding Drupal, so hopefully that will help propel me onward.

In other news, I’ve downloaded some CakePHP action. I’m not really sure what I’m getting into yet, but if it is to php what jquery has been to javascript for me, maybe it will help me more efficiently do some things on writaur.com that I’ve been meaning to get done.

On a final note, I would really like to go swimming with some stingrays. And they would like to go swimming with me as well. No really, they do, just ask them!

Job hunt is still up in the air at this point. I just took a PHP test that I may have passed with flying colors, so hopefully that will get me to the interview step with a company in Denver I’m looking at. We shall see. Drew’s looking around at various banks and various military places to make good use of his newly gotten Poli-sci degree + globs of BofA & Cap1 experience.

Movies! We’ve been watching entirely too many lately, some better then others. If you have a chance (and especially if you enjoy war movies) you need to go see The Hurt Locker, as it is excellent. It was only showing at independent theatres, but recently got picked up by some major theatre chain or another. I need to see if there is a dollar theatre out here someplace, as all of the movies I actually want to see arrived in one glob. At some point, I must see Bruno, District 9, and Ponyo! Albeit, I will generally have movies I want to see that I’ll just eventually see on DVD, or I’ll just forget they existed.

I justed downed an apple strudel. Satisfying and bloaty!

Job hunt is going kinda eh. Heard back from the recruiter about the job I didn’t get, the company decided they were looking for more of a senior role. I’m currently waiting to hear back from a recruiter about a position working on an intranet. It requires strong UI stuff, which hopefully I have enough of. We’ll see, I suppose.

I am learning that there is such a thing as too much beef. Drew’s aunt gets a side of beef on a regular basis, and as a result it is being fed into my system on a regular basis. I try to combat it with fishes, but sometimes resistance is futile when it comes to the Cow Gods.

It finally stopped raining here today. So much for super-dry out here. Hail two days ago! Apparently by this time of year, it’s usually really brown. Lush and green right now!

Hope everyone is having a super August so far!

I actually had an interview last Thursday, a nice long phone interview with two different people in the company. I felt confidant about the interview – I had practically all of the skills they were seeking, and even made a point of dabbling in one thing they were looking for that I didn’t have. Everything seemed peachy with Interviewer #2, but Interviewer #1 flung questions at me about things that weren’t mentioned at all in the job description or by the recruiter. Based on the description, the position was pretty straight up web design stuff (html/css/js), but then I’m getting asked about things like weblogic and struts, neither of which I am familiar with at all. So I’m still fuzzy on what happened, if the job description simply was not as complete as it could be, or if they decided that it would be in their best interest to get someone that had a wider range of skill then what they were initially looking for, or if there was simply some miscommunication. In any case I did not get the job, which is too bad as I had rather enjoyed Interview #2 (it went more like a conversation, and I’d thought I’d gotten a good feeling from the interviewer), and the job (based on the description at least) had sounded interesting and right up my alley. Alas. Someone called me today about another position, don’t know all the details yet so we’ll see.

Drew and I went to Boulder last weekend and there was a random art festival going on, which was interesting and entirely too expensive. The downtown area fell into a similar category. Manitou Springs seems like hippies + tourists, and Boulder is definitely hippies + yuppies. There was a large stream with some decent rapids which we walked along, along with 8237982374 people and their inflated tubes. The rapids looked really fun, and I’d like to go back and go tubing there sometime. We also meandered outside the town on some random path or another into a canyon-type area, and I climbed a giant rock. My thighs were all in a way after that, but in a good way. I like climbing giant rocks. There are random mesas/buttes nearby, and I want to pack a picnic and climb to the top of one and eat it.

Here are more random photos for your eyeballs’ enjoyment.

This is from a nearby construction site, dusk was a good time for pictures there!

Andrew poses beside a mighty cannon.

I’m a cowboy…on a steel horse I ride…and I’m wanted….dead or alive!

In other news, in a few weeks Drew and I are gonna head off to Florida. He’s got multitudes of grandparents there, as well as a friend or two, and I have a penchant for palm trees. We’ll have couches to crash on, and a tent for nights when we don’t. Aside from obligatory stops at Shake and Steak that Drew requires, I figure we can hit grocery stores and fruit stands for food and be cheap that way. Gas prices are rising a bit, but still under $2 a gallon around here, which still seems incredibly cheap compared to the almost $4 a gallon we were seeing not too long ago.

I’m also wanting to bike to Williamsburg sometime soon. Haven’t done a long ride in awhile, and I really need to stretch the ole legs a bit. Also need to consider other closer adventures, like biking to Regency or something.

So I finished reading New Moon. I liked it better then the first Twilight book. Still full of drama by the bucketloads, but less of the *long stare….dramatic thoughts…..glancing away…..dramatic thoughts…* and more of the *dramatic misery….time to do something really stupid that will entertain the reader!….holy cow, wolves!…*. Mostly, it’s just got more action, along with a main character that actually isn’t all dramatic (well, for the first half of the book, at least). They’re working on a New Moon movie, and I really hope it’s better then the freaking Twilight movie, which was aesthetically pleasing, but that’s about it. It’s like the director(s) took all those godawful long pauses in the book literally and stuck every one of them in the movie. Err, to be honest I only got about halfway through the movie because my brain fell out at some point.

Next up, I’m reading either some sci-fi book about bears, or another fantasy Bujold book (“Paladin of Souls”), which I’m really hoping is more enjoyable then “Curse of Chalion”. If only I didn’t compare everything else she writes to the Miles books.

So yeah, job hunting. I’m reading a Fortune magazine article at Drew’s mom’s place the other day, and it made me irate. Most of it is your standard article, of the “Hey, getting a job is tough, especially right now! Here’s some helpful tips for you!” And then came the last two paragraphs, which said that you really needed to hold out for a job that’s worth it and in your career path, as taking the wrong job could completely throw your career off whack. This really frustrated me. See, in an ideal world every person out there could plot out their career trajectory, what job they’d like to have to get them to the next job. However, this is not an ideal world, and thought like this will depress even the most optimistic of job searchers. The crappy flip-side of the “You can do anything you want to do” ideology of the United States is the possibility that if you end up doing something you didn’t want to do, that you’re not living up to your potential and wasting your life. When jobs are few and applicants are plentiful, it’s rather inevitable that some of those people won’t get the job they want. And why is this such a bad thing, anyhow? There’s opportunity to be found in every job, and, if nothing else, a lesser job gives you a paycheck until a better job can be found. And while you’re not serving your forty hours at that job, there’s plenty of time to be skill-building for your next job.

I sent out a resume last friday for something prospective, a junior developer position that I seemed to fit fairly well, albeit not perfectly. I was good with the required languages, and the rest would be fairly easy to familiarize myself with. The job was posted on Dice by a recruiter, so there were no details about the employer, and only the minimum necessary for the position itself. This is the downside of recruiter-posted positions, there’s no good way to research the company beforehand to see if it’s actually worth your time to apply to the position. In any case, I heard back from the woman this morning, and, after some phone tag, finally got hold of her. Discussed my skills, discussed the employer’s reluctance to hire anyone that’s not already local to the company. She then begins, hesitantly, to tell me of the employer. Based on her tone of voice, as well as experience from a past recruiter (who did hiring for Phillip Morris, among other places), I’m waiting to be warned of the fact that it’s for a cigarette company or something of equivalent potential distaste. But nope. Turns out that job would involve a lot of hardcore pornography. Those people use recruiters to get their hires? And as intriguing as it would be to some people, I really have no desire to stare at porn for 40 hours a week. Alas. Back to the job search.