Month: July 2006

Anatomy of a Layoff: Day 8

Posted on by Nimgimli

So the long weekend came and went and, as hoped, I didn’t really feel jobless since no one else was working, either. But today, everyone went back to work…except me.

I spent the day rummaging through stacks and stacks of CD’s finding one with a copy of my resume on it. Hopelessly out of date, but tomorrow is an all-day class/seminar/thing about getting a new job, and part of that is about polishing up your resume. Supposed to bring a copy of what you have, no matter what shape its in.

I’ve been thinking about finances a lot, preparing for the worst. I think if I roll my credit cards into one account, pay off my car insurance for the year now while I have cash, and live very carefully…I think I’d be able to get by on unemployment, if it came to that. I won’t know for sure until I find out how much my payments would be, and since technically I’m still on the payroll I can’t apply yet. I am confident I can live on my severance, of course. It’s almost full pay, the only difference being that its taxed like bonus pay, so my ‘take home’ will be smaller.

So my officially sanctioned moping week is over. Now I need to start being productive in some way, shape or form. Obviously part of that will be looking for a job, but I need to look at this break as an opportunity as well. All the things I never had time to do…well, I have nothing but time now. And yet today I found myself napping twice. Depression, perhaps? Well I’ll need to fight that, and fight it intensely.

The thing that has my most frightened right now is quantifying my skill set. I started updating my resume and couldn’t think of a single thing that I did that seemed ‘significant’ enough to list. And yet, I was always busy! Part of this problem was that, in the closing months of my employment, I was learning a lot of new technologies. So yeah, I was tweaking Java but I’m not experienced enough to call myself a Java programmer. I was working on fixing the mangled mess that the contractors made of our new search engine, but I didn’t get far enough into it to claim expertise with that search engine. Ditto the content management system that had just been installed. I could still list being a Tcl coder, sure, but somehow I don’t think that’s a skill that’s in high demand.

Well, hopefully this thing tomorrow will help on just this kind of problem.

V For Vendetta

Posted on by Nimgimli

V For Vendetta I finally got around to finishing V For Vendetta the other day. I’d wanted to read it before seeing the movie…how long ago did that come out?

Anyway, I have to say, and sorry comic book fans, but I didn’t much care for it. The story was just OK. In a nutshell, V is the name of a vigilante in a near-future England. There’s been some kind of limited nuclear war that’s left England pretty much an island unto itself (har har). The government is a melange of Nazi and Orwellian Big Brother regime, and V is trying to topple it. Heavy stuff for a graphic novel, and I bet the movie was pretty good.

But for me, it was the visual presentation that disappointed me. The art style felt muddy and out-of-focus. There were a lot of places where the details were so abstracted that I wasn’t sure which character was being represented. There were lots of expositional narrative ‘balloons’ but it often wasn’t clear who was narrating. If it was one of the characters’ voices or just an unbodied narrator. Sometimes these bubble would connect to dialog bubbles, but it didn’t make sense for the narrative and the dialog to be coming from one character.

Perhaps the problem was in the printing? Maybe the original comics were in a larger format and so things were more clear. Whatever the reason, though, I would steer you away from this print of V For Vendetta.

I’m still going to watch the movie though.