March is going to be a depressing month for me. First weekend of the month is a con that I have not gone to since 2019 (the 2020 one was back to back with a local con that I chose to do instead, the pandemic hit a week later). End of the month is the final PenguiCon which starts on my birthday. Looks like my monthly bowling meet-up has crashed and burned and won't be held again. And still no job and no hits. Maybe I can early retire, but I doubt that I have enough money for that.
Wild Card
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Software tester by day, internet radio DJ by night (Dementia Radio)
Phantom Kitty (Tech)I have to face the fact that I probably will not have another tech based job. It has been 13 months since I last had a job. I got very few hits last year, with less hits as the year went on. I tried for the last 3 months of the year to do a refresher on Python and could barely get through half of it. I just have no desire to do programming or testing anymore.
I need to find a new job soon before I run out of savings. I have no idea how to find a non-tech job anymore, what I could do, what to ask for for pay rate since all my experience is from tech jobs that paid a lot more than what non-tech pays.
I am trying to pull out of the depression this has re-ignited. I have a local con in two weeks that I am hoping will help, but may be last con for a long time at the rate things are going.
Not a good start to the new year.
Martin SeegerDear OSS community on Mastodon,
Every day I scroll through my feed and I see proud announcements like:
“First Alpha Relase of HyperTurboWidget available"
or
“Version 2.7.1 now with improved glorb handlers!”
or
“Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is out”
… and I sit there wondering if I should be excited, terrified, or calling a licensed electrician.
Don’t get me wrong, I love open source. I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. Are we talking about a web server? A file system? A middleware thingy that keeps the flux from overflowing into the space–time continuum?
So, dear OSS developers of the world: When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context.
- Tell us what your software does.
- Tell us why this release is cool.
- Tell us what it requires to work.
Example:
We are proud to announce Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is now avalaible. While it creates a nice wormhole to 1955, it requires an underlying gigawatt stack 1.21 to work reliably.
Because nobody wants to cheer enthusiastically for “v2.7.1” while secretly Googling “what is a glorb and why does it need handling”.
Yours truly,
Someone who wants to celebrate your achievements
Depression time again. I just interviewed for a job that pays the same as what I made back in 1992 when I first graduated college. About a quarter of what I was making at my layoff in Feb 2024 and less than half of what I made in the low paying contract job.
Have I really fallen that low? The good recruiters for what I do are finding no jobs for SQA in this area unless you have a medical degree so you can test medical devices.
I need to pivot into something, but I wanted better than this.
Ericka Simone
I just put down a deposit on a used car. I will find out tomorrow if I can get financing or need to pay for it in full from savings. Major stress point taken care of.
Forgot to post here. Car died on Monday on the highway coming home from a con 4 hours away. Got it towed to repair place and got a rental car to come home. On Wednesday, I learned the engine control module burned out, which was no longer available anymore for my 17 year old car. Yesterday I drove back down so I could get the car towed home. Now to empty it out and work on replacing it. I probably will get a beater since I still don't have a job.
Surprising movement on my job search. Recruiter call at 4:30 PM yesterday if I was still interested in a position that we talked about a few weeks ago. Interview is tomorrow at 4 PM. Today I learned that the position is still open due to no one interviewed so far has passed the technical part of the interview process. So my hopes are not that high, but it is still movement on the job search.
And so, it ends. I think. I connected to my old desktop PC remotely to run Mint updates. Since it included a kernel update, I had to reboot the system. But the system never came back up. It powers on, then that is it. Nothing come on the screen once power is turned on, monitor does not even detect that there is a PC there sending it anything to display. I did let it run a bit in case it was a display cable issue and it would still boot up headless. I will try a live USB but I am not hopeful.
I have been confused on why Mint on my mini-PC has been showing me a battery icon that is slowly draining. I finally got to a screen that told me what it is monitoring: the battery in my wireless mouse. So not only do I have an indicator on the mouse when the battery needs to be changed, I have one on the Mint desktop as well. I did not set this up, the system did it automatically as part of the Mint installation and device detection.
The weird things you discover when using a new PC