strawberryJAMM's Space

Well, that “almost” job with Burntsand I mentioned just after I finished my college diploma courses hasn’t worked out so far.  The thing is, they still really want to hire me, but the economy has put a damper on their efforts to land a new contract – according to their HR person, a process that used to take one to three weeks is now taking three weeks to over a month. This is as frustrating for them as it is for me – while I’m annoyed that they haven’t hired me yet, they’re just as annoyed that they haven’t been hired either!

At this point, the head of the Burntsand Vancouver office is saying he hopes to have the contract approved by July 15th but, of course, he can’t even guarantee that.  This is, unfortunately, an untenable situation for me – as much as I want to work for them and they want me to work for them, I desperately need a job ASAP. So, I’ve been working on my online portfolio (all the jobs I’d like to apply to indicate they require applicants to provide some kind of design portfolio) and have also started to look at possible freelance jobs through Craigslist and the like.

You know what really sucks?

This is the third time I’ve had an “almost guaranteed” job that has, apparently, failed to work out:

The first time was just after we moved back here, when the manager of the department at the company in question actually had all the paperwork to hire me all filled out and had even handed it in to his manager for approval but then the head office declared a hiring freeze for which, although he tried for three days, he was unable to get an exception. (It turned out that the freeze was because another company was starting the process to acquire them.)

The second time was at the start of my current drought of work, and the manager at this other company who had interviewed me once before (but for a different company) said he fully intended to hire me but that he had to meet with a couple more applicants just for the purpose of due diligence. And then, much to both his and my annoyance, he was told by his manager that there was this project manager whom he really liked and he was to hire this other person, using up the “headcount” that he had set aside to hire a user experience specialist!

{sigh} I’m really getting tired of this – it’s almost been a year and a half since I was let go from CGTV… When is all this bad karma going to switch to being good karma?

:-j(enni)

I just realized I haven’t updated my blog to discuss my weight loss since the first time. Bad Jenni!

So, this morning, I weighed in at 140.5 lb – that’s 4.5 lb down from my starting point. While I dropped almost 3 lbs in the first three days that was undoubtedly water weight as I bounced back up to 144.5 a couple of days later, but it’s averaged a fairly steady 1 lb / week over all (this week was 1.5 lb).  So far so good.

Now if I could just get myself exercising regularly again I could bump that up to 2 to 2.5 lb a week... we’ll see. It’s hard to get motivated for exercise when you’re still looking for work (more on that to follow).

:-j(enni)

Nothing to see here - the "update" icon on Messager is from updating my comics list (added Dork Tower, removed BugBash and reorganized the list a bit)

This morning I:

• Handed in my final school project
• Got my marks and signed off on my projects for Flash & Dreamweaver (100% on all four of them!)
• Submitted my practicum documentation
• Filled in the CDI College graduation request form

And THAT means that I’m DONE!!!!  Yay! 

This also means that I’m almost[*] officially a fully qualified Programmer Analyst/Multimedia Web Developer. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... woohoo (Maybe I can get a job now...) :-/

Actually, it looks like I may have a job lined up … got a call from one of my recruiters about three weeks ago for a “User Experience Developer” position requiring ASP.NET and UI design for Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server 2007 “Master Pages”[**]. The position is with the 10-person Vancouver office of a consulting company called Burntsand and, after four interviews (two phone, two face2face), the Director 100% wants to hire me but the deal is, as a consulting group that’s part of a larger entity, they have to have a new contract signed before they will be allowed to actually hire someone new. And they expect to have a new contract signed off “any day now.” {shrug}

For the moment, I’m waiting. If nothing comes of it by early next week I’ll be back on the full-time job hunting bandwagon.

:-j(enni)

[*] I say almost because my instructor does have to mark and submit my final project to the school before it’s officially official.
[**] My old pal “Content Management Server” back from when NCompass was acquired by Microsoft was merged into Sharepoint shortly after I left that division within Microsoft. Master Pages are to Sharepoint, essentially, what Templates were to CMS.

Well, It’s been about 18 months since I reached my goal weight of 135 lb while with Jenny Craig. And in that time I’ve allowed my weight to creep back up by about 10 lbs, only half-heartedly trying to get it back down and blaming my lack of progress or even maintenance on being at school and a lack of opportunity for good exercise.

Well, no more.  My good friend Penny Parris has given me the incentive to get back those ten pounds, and possibly a few more (I secretly would really like to be down at 130 lb) by announcing her “Pounds off Penny for Pennies (or Twonies)” project (that links to her blog. There’s also a Facebook Event page).

Her plan is to use the incentive of getting pledges from friends and family per pound she looses over a three month period to be donated to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of BC. Many of her friends are supporting her and several of us have also “jumped on her bandwagon”, adding an additional pledge per pound that we are also able to lose over the same period of time.

To give me some more accountability, I’m also going to post details of my progress on my blog here, starting today. So, I started a week ago, weighing in on Sat. May 23 at 145 lb. After a week of concerted effort I’m already down to 142 lbs. today.  What a great start!

And as a “public service announcement” for anyone else who is interested in living a more healthy lifestyle, I highly recommend the Windows application Diet Power 4.4.

My mum discovered this application about five or six years ago (it was on V3 at the time) and my parents and I have all used it with great success several times since then (it was a particularly useful addition to the basic Jenny Craig program). The application allows you to enter your weight, your daily food intake and your daily exercise and from that information it tracks the your nutrition levels, total calories and progress against a goal weight (which can be lower, higher or even the same for maintenance). It calculates how many calories you should be eating each day, initially based on standard averages for a person of your gender, age, height and weight but recalculates the amount based on your actual metabolism as determined by the exercise, food and weight details you’ve entered. 

It’s an awesome program, and totally worth the US$39.99.

:-j(enni)