Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Old numbers:
p/r/f
.754/.442/.558
.902/.529/.667

Today’s numbers:
p/r/f
.688/.635/.660
.802/.740/.770

An improvement of over .100 in f-score.  Suck it, Science, I’m kicking your ass.

Right now I’ve got a foot in three jobs.  The job I have, natch.  Plus putting the finishing touches on an academic career with a conference coming up on Saturday as well as looking for a new job, which includes attending talks, making phone calls, submitting resumes, taking a day off for interviews (Thursday) and on and on.

Oh, and I have a two-month old kid and we’re trying to move this summer (though so far that last thing is completely owned by My Baby, which is freaking amazing considering she’s carrying the bulk of that kid thing, too).

By now you recognize this as one of those all-too-frequent I’m-going-away-for-a-while posts.  I hate these.  It’s like admitting failure.  But hopefully when you hear from me next I’ll be done with my academic career, have my feet under me on my current job, and have a new job lined up.  Because I still have three J-mez CD’s to get through along with about 12 of my own.  Plus Mike Patton put out an album a few weeks ago and Melvins’ new one is out tomorrow.  So you know I’ll be back.

I signed a contract that will keep me working at least through March and seems likely to be extended until July.

I don’t know if I’m mature enough to make it work, though.  I may end up sucking my thumb curled up in the bouncy, animal-covered chair waiting for somebody else downstairs.

Probably just typical new-job jitters.  Man there has been/is a lot of change going on around here.  Still, I have a blessed life.

Astute readers might have noted that last Sunday, with its traditional Opening Night game, came and went without me posting my predictions of the final standings, something I’ve done since 2006.

I’ve kind of burned out on baseball. I still like it, and I had the game on that night, I’ve already sworn loudly at a Twins game this season, and I’ll watch more than my share this season. But out of necessity I dove into school, work, and finding a job this offseason and didn’t have time to follow it. Not surprisingly, the offseason went by much less painfully than it usually does. In addition, my RSS reader blew up on me some time back and I never added back my baseball feeds…I never really got an inkling to, either.

Ironically, the same thing that drew me in strongly to baseball in the early part of this decade, the analytical writing in the baseball blogosphere, is exactly what tended to suck the excitement out of the game for me. First, there’s just too much content out there. Even if you just narrow it down to my two fave Mariners and two fave Twins bloggers…man, I have other stuff to do. Secondly, it’s all so negative (and I realize I am totally the pot calling the kettle black here), getting way too worked up over this move or that decision…gnashing teeth over such little consequence. Third, it’s too analytical. Whatever, I respect the work they’re doing, but we blew past the 80/20 rule six years ago, and we’re just niggling at the edges now. If you have to do linear regression in order to come up with a number that measures a player’s worth, then by definition that measure is too unintuitive to me for it to add to my enjoyment of the game. I’ll be here with my broad strokes, thank you very much, enjoying the game in my way.

There’s more to this, like the fact that baseball season, in the past, upset me more than the offseason because, despite being able to watch some baseball, I was almost constantly distressed that there was baseball on and my schedule wasn’t allowing me to watch it. I could go on and on, but I don’t really care to analyze it too deeply and I doubt you want to hear about it that much. I’m just saying, me and baseball, we’re still f**king, but we’re seeing other people.

Okay guys, this is your chance.  I need you.  I need you to want something.

Here’s the deal: I need more project coding experience as I apply for internships and full-time jobs.  The competition is fierce and jobs are few and far between, and I need more non-school coding experience, especially on webby technologies.

So, what do you want to see?  What would make MPL better for you?

How about an online database of my CD collection?  That would give me experience in mySQL, and I would probably code it up in Ruby to get experience in that, too.  Or, here’s an API for a Computational Linguistically-focused Seattle company; what could I do with that?

Anything, guys, I just need some ideas of what to work on.  I broke up with my job this morning.  Long story, but it’s all on good terms, or at least as good as it can be given the loss of income.

So let me know in the comments.

I have learned something about myself in the past month or so: I cannot simultaneously care about my classes and getting an internship.

When I went back to school, I was totally into my courses and went out of my way, even if work was bearing down on me, to go to talks and symposia, read journals, and just basically try to absorb everything going on in the field.  It was great and I was pretty good at it, and of course those two aren’t unrelated.

And now that work is drying up, clients are demanding rate cuts, and it’s time to get an internship anyway, I’m completely consumed by creating a resume, making contacts at companies, and all that other miserable job search stuff that requires facing uncertainty with the utmost confidence.  And I don’t give a rip about my classes.

I still put in my time in lecture, the readings, and the assignments, but I turn stuff in and don’t care what the grade is because, as the voice in my head keeps pointing out, “getting a job is the goal.”  I guess, Mr. Voice, but it is certainly less interesting, provides less flexibility (you can’t jump around from one thing to another depending on what interests you), and is less intellectually rewarding to look for a job, and when it takes away from something you were really enjoying, that’s kind of sad.

I thought that when I went through this at the end of undergrad that that’s just who I was at that time.  Turns out that, no, I just have limited space for high priority items in my life, and school and job search do not seem to be able to coexist at the top of my priorities list.

My relationship with Bruce Springsteen has been a bit strained for the past seven years or so. But I’ve been going back through all the old stuff, reliving the old days, and, yeah, he made some good points.

Amidst the invented identity crises brought on by presenting myself in a job search and the very real struggles brought on by my contracting work drying up in this recession, Springsteen, with his happy marriage, satisfying career, and jillions of dollars, still has a reminder for me, from Tunnel Of Love’s “All That Heaven Will Allow”:

Rain and storm and dark skies [and never-snow, presumably –Ed.]
Well now they don’t mean a thing
If you got a girl that loves you
And who wants to wear your ring

Then, a kick in the balls of the type I wish I could get more often. From Lucky Town’s “Better Days”:

Well my soul checked out missing as I sat listening
To the hours and minutes tickin’ away
Yeah just sittin’ around waiting’ for my life to begin
…
I got a new suit of clothes, a pretty red rose
And a woman I can call my friend
…
But it’s a sad man my friend who’s livin’ in his own skin
And can’t stand the company
Every fool’s got a reason for feelin’ sorry for himself
…
Tonight this fool’s halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell
And I feel like I’m comin’ home
These are better days

Finally, the ultimate in how good I have it, from “Red Headed Woman” off of In Concert: MTV Unplugged:

Well listen up stud
Your life’s been wasted
Till you got down on your knees and tasted
A red headed woman

It’s the point in my program where it’s time to start looking for an internship for the summer.  The first deadline in the steeplechase the professors set up to make sure we’re not all frantically trying to score a job at the last minute is on Thursday.

I don’t quite understand why I don’t have one lined up yet…after all, I’ve been sitting around waiting for one, and isn’t that what my GPA is for?

This is so not my comfort zone.

Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan Bell quotes a bit of his own paper.

[E]xtroverts generally showed a positive relationship between internet [sic] use and social well-being measures, whereas introverts showed the reverse – reporting an increase in isolation and loneliness. It is still not clear why this might be the case, although it has been suggested that the internet [sic] might provide tools to ‘amplify’ predispositions (Joinson, 2003), so that extraverts [sic] can meet more people and socialise, while introverts can keep them at a distance.

This is relevant to my career search–the ostensible subject of this blog–because I did a lot of work some years ago assessing myself and identifying working conditions in which I would be likely to be successful and happy. I’m introverted. But I identified camaraderie and collegiality as being high on my list of workplace criteria. And now I work from home with a bunch of people who live in Minneapolis and Boston. Which I love. But which I also think is maybe worse for me. Like, in college, I had a surface desire to live on my own, but I think I was happier overall when I had a roommate.

That’s all you’re gonna get on that.

If you’ve never checked out Daily Dinosaur Comics, you’re really missing out. Just head on over there and take a look. Click on the ‘previous’ link a few times and you’ll see what I mean.

Somehow it always seems to relate to what’s going on with me, too. Like, say, this entry, which came up when I was really having difficulties with some people in my role as project manager, where the job description is something like “Get 12 people who report to 10 different bosses to do things for you on time and in a high quality manner.”

Just replace ‘relationships’ with ‘work’ and the first three panels illustrate my state of being in June perfectly.