Submitted by masinick on October 30, 2009 - 9:49am
I had high hopes this year of being a much more active contributor to the overall MEPIS landscape; helping in the forum, managing at least one project to help in the next release, test all of the builds, and generally become a more active participant in the forums and blogs. Instead, as you can see in earlier blogs, I lost my job at the beginning of the year.
I had hoped that with some time, even with that obstacle, it may provide an opportunity to do more here, but instead the opposite happened. Months went by without work, so I had to shift into high gear to do something about that. I investigated many possibilities. I tried again to get into sales, spent a month in one venture and got nothing except the experience, no income at all. That was a real setback.
I tried to work with a placement and even looked into the possibility, for the first time, of paying to be placed - it was WAY too expensive, could not do it. But finally, finances got so tough that I had to foreclose on my home. That REALLY turned up the fire heat! I HAD to do something. So I've been taking a look at developing a part time business to develop long term residual income, while at the same time looking for full time work.
That has really cut seriously into the amount of time I can devote to testing, coordinating, managing, facilitating, and even to a great extent, blogging and participating in forums. I'd love to get back into it, but if I have to go into temporary housing somewhere I am not even sure how often I will have access to the Internet, except in Wifi kiosks and libraries, so I have to withdraw any commitment to anything until my situation changes. Too bad, I was really looking forward to being a much more active participant in the MEPIS community. Hopefully it will happen - and hopefully sooner rather than later. Right now, survival mode; get a job, get a place to live, move on, then concern myself with other interests. Just like Warren, I need to pay the bills, but I don't get those great consulting gigs; don't have his type of expertise and the many skills I have just have not been easy to sell, or I have not mastered selling them YET.
Submitted by masinick on March 2, 2009 - 11:55pm
The Lenny inspired distros have looked really good in the past month and it has been quite a pleasure using them.
I tried another new one today, Dream Linux 3.5. I am not sure it has all of the attention to detail that we have with SimplyMEPIS, but based on Lenny, it is a pretty solid distro, too, and it has the Mac OS X look and feel, if you happen to like that.
Submitted by masinick on January 30, 2009 - 9:38am
It's tough out there hunting for work. Good luck to any of you who get into a similar situation. As of today, I have come to the end of a nice long contract. I was given advanced notice. Unfortunately, that has not led to an uninterrupted flow - I am still looking for my next assignment.
I have been doing work in project management, specializing in locating failing projects and eliminating the ineffective ones to save company time and money. I also have considerable QA experience, some of which I continued to exercise in many of the ad hoc assignments that I did during my most recent employment.
I hope that I will have little to no gap in employment, but I have to be honest - things are not looking at that great out there. If any of you have leads that could help me connect, I would greatly appreciate them!
Submitted by masinick on January 16, 2009 - 3:55pm
I have had a great 3 1/2 year assignment working at a fine financial services institution. I have performed Software Quality Assurance (SQA) tasks, I have coordinating testing efforts with customers, leading to project management work, and I have been a project manager on three major projects, the first, coordinating user acceptance testing, the second, holding a vendor accountable for failure to deliver product features in the time frame specified in our agreement, and the third, attempting to correct a failing project. I provided senior management with the ammunition needed to end two of those projects, and proved myself capable of working in most any situation in most any role.
Now, however, times are tight and I have been kindly informed that my contract will not be renewed at the end of the month. Usually I get no advance warning, so I am very grateful to the organization that I've been working with and to my senior management for, time and time again, coming up with projects for me when it seemed that there was not much there.
I am, therefore, seeking new work, and I want to network in as many ways as I can, and possibly look for something I have not done before that can leverage all of the experience that I have collected over the years.
If anyone reading this has any ideas or wants to do any networking, I am all eyes and ears!
Submitted by masinick on January 9, 2009 - 5:01pm
I am a big fan of SimplyMEPIS and AntiX. Anticapitalista announced that he has a Release Candidate 2 and if OK, it will become final. The big question is whether or not it will beat SimplyMEPIS 8.0 out the door? I think the answer could well be yes.
