Goodbye, mustachioed creatures. Hello, strange men.

Layout image changes, just for kicks. Getting the urge to clean up digital house (meatspace-clean-up is too tedious), perhaps in time for rehabitation / rehabilitation.

Gotta start the year right, but how? Hum.

No. 1, series of 2010.

Happy new year, everyone.

2009 wasn't really my year. Graduated with a disappointing thesis and a disappointing honorific. Worked for five months at a disappointing job. Was dumped because of being rather aimless and, yeah... disappointing. (Well, at least it's going to be easier to go up than down, from where I stand now, right?)

Of course, 2009 wasn't all bad. (I suppose it's just that the last quarter or so of 2009 has been bad enough to affect my perception of the whole year.) Mixed with the sadness and frustration were times of happiness, expectation, and, yeah, fun with friends. While resigning from my job (i.e., taking an undeserved break) hasn't yet resulted in the sweeping life changes and sharp increase in productivity that I was hoping for, it has been somewhat refreshing, somewhat eye-opening. (It took a while for any progress to manifest, though, but I must say that there were certain mitigating circumstances.)

Well, artificial as the transition from one year to the next may be, I believe it's still psychologically useful! 2010, ready or not, here I come!

For the record. / In a blue funk.

I am in no state to be writing in any substantial way about how I'm currently doing. Suffice it to say, I'm not doing very well. (Read: still jobless, was dumped five days ago, hence more adrift than ever before.)

This isn't the place for this.

One week later

So, one week of unemployment.

I haven't been as productive as I'd hoped, which is no big surprise, but still disappointing. I have made a few tentative steps towards learning various things, but my problem is actually doing something with the references and resources that I've collected.

The underlying issue seems to be one of direction. Up to now, even with the copious amounts of whining I've done (published in this blog or no), I still feel about as aimless as before. My attempts (what attempts? read: intentions) to plan out at least the remaining weeks in the year have so far not borne any fruit.

So, it's all been more or less ad hoc. I'd approach each possible task intending to really get into it, but then find that I possess neither enough motivation nor enough energy and drive to overcome that lack of motivation.

Maybe I need a general tune-up before I even attempt to proceed on this noble but somewhat ambitious project of self-directed learning and improvement. For the rest of the year, my goal will just be to institute some habits to help me get into the right condition. I'll list some of them now, maybe I'll add to this list as time goes on.

1. Sleep early, wake up early.
2. Exercise daily.
3. Give up (the regular consumpion of) coffee, junk food, and eat with more awareness.
4. Do one difficult thing every day.

(Of course, these concrete steps are no substitute for finding my direction/ motivation. But they can't hurt, and will most probably help, right?)

Days Two to Five, In Which Nothing Much Happens

Days two and three were more eventful:

Day Two

Last Friday, I went with Jeanne to the Goethe Institut Open House, celebrating the opening of their newly constructed/ renovated library. Although it was a little boring in the afternoon (we had bad timing and got stuck in one of the less fun parallel activities), we did get to hear Imago, Julianne (who?), and Kalayo perform live. There was excellent German food for dinner (liver soup, bratwurst, sauerkraut, kartoffelsalat), and afterwards there was dancing. (That was more than a little odd, and it didn't help that the director of the Institut as well as the German ambassador joined in at some point!)

Day Three

Then on Saturday we went to The Fort to watch the first night of the Pyro Olympics. Despite the unexpected rainy weather, it was wonderful (fireworks usually are). This year, the competition also involved music, adding an extra dimension to the spectacle. Germany and China performed that night. Personally, I thought that while China's presentation was more consistently in sync and a little cleaner, Germany made up for it by having bursts of creativity amidst the so-so rest of their presentation. (And perhaps Germany's music was a little more familiar to our Westernized ears?)

Day Four

Sunday was a lazy day like every Sunday seems fated to be.

Day Five

And now it's Monday. What have I accomplished? Well, to be fair, I have been applying for various part-time online gigs (transcription, article writing) to help finance my (brief?) break from full-time employment. I have also been downloading and browsing references on Java (but I haven't been practicing much, hum).

I could go easy on myself and say that I'm still adjusting to the unemployed life, that I've never really developed any significant amount of self-discipline, and so on, and so forth... But, in short, I haven't done much, and certainly not enough to justify my resignation (if it needed justification of this sort).

Alright, today will be the day for making more specific and concrete plans, at least for the rest of the year (i.e., the month of December). Must not let self be defeated by the break = vacation mentality - I'm not (just) a student anymore!

Day One: the retrospective.

So, back to being unemployed. As I plan to make the most out of this, ahem, sabbatical, it'd be worthwhile to look back and attempt to articulate just what, exactly, I've managed to pick up in my brief stint as a software tester.

Backstory

Azeus snagged me by chance - I had gone with some friends to the College of Engineering job fair, and submitted my resume along with them to more or less arbitrarily selected employers. I went through the application process without much event until the job offer materialized.

Stuck in the post-graduation mire, I was thankful, perhaps a little overly so, for any path that seemed clear. Research had yielded more reasons to accept Azeus' offer rather than to reject it, and I felt interested enough in the IT industry to take this opportunity to enter it.

So I accepted the job offer, and even got a freebie: a cap with the company logo on it. (It didn't fit me well, though.)

The Employment Experience: The Good

My previous employment experience was at Siemens, as a technical support representative (i.e., call center agent). Between the physically draining schedule and the unrewarding nature of the work, I found it bearable only because I knew it was project-based and would last only a couple of months - from summer vacation to before the start of the next semester. I believe I was barely (if at all) able to hold on to any part of what I earned.

From that first job, I learned the military alphabet, how quickly money can just disappear, and how to have beer for breakfast.

In comparison, of course, working at Azeus was a far better experience, for the following obvious and not-as-obvious reasons:

1. Normal hours

Though this meant contending with all the rest of the urban worker drones during the morning and afternoon commutes, this was also much easier on the body and on social scheduling.

2. An excellent training program

From scratch, we were taught all we needed to know to start doing our jobs. There were times when we were left idling due to our trainers' other tasks and commitments, but then again those were more of a logistical problem than a fault of the program. On the whole I enjoyed the training period: I learned a lot, and was able to put what I learned to satisfactory use during the various exercises.

3. Competent co-workers

As trainees, we could tell that our trainers really knew their stuff. Upon deployment, as we met and worked with more and more people, we found a general culture of competence and workmanship.

4. Quiet, work-and-let-work atmosphere

This is a personal preference, of course, but I really appreciated this. It would seem that IT attracts many introverts, and the office was relatively subdued.

5. Challenging, engaging work (or so I thought at the time).

More on this later.

Suddenly...

...it's October.

The past working months have been, on the whole, fairly tolerable. However, in the light of a recent timely interruption, I realize I may have been prematurely content.

Looking back, I did say to myself that the software testing gig wasn't going to be a permanent one, unless I decided so. But slowly, the routine of working, aided by those small rationalizations one is forced to make to get through the day, made me lose sight of the bigger picture. That is, I conveniently started forgetting that, in fact, I had not yet decided on a bigger picture for myself!

It's time to wake up, recalibrate, to beware of complacency.