After my relationship ended in May I thought to myself “If a company offered me a job to travel 50% or more of my time, I’ll take.”. It would be the only reason I’d leave Classmates. Such an event happened in August. An usability study in June turned into a job offer by August after various delays on my side. So this Monday I start. First I need to get acclimated with the product (which is called Likewise) and hopefully I’ll be soon traveling all over. This is a big change career wise for me. Going from system administration to deploying software is a pretty big change but it’s a huge challenge for me. My fear is that I’ll get rusty when it comes to system administration but I’m going to do my best to keep my “A” game.

One thing I hate from all of this is way my resume is starting to look. Sure my last two gigs were over a year but not anywhere near 2 years and that makes me fairly unhappy with myself. That will be my next thing to improve…..

So what’s going on with me lately? I’m still working at Classmates. Its a good job. Its different working in a larger team then I’ve had in the past. I can definitely see some good things that this already has taught me. The biggest being that everything needs to be discussed and reviewed before implemented or changed. You also have to appreciate criticism instead of hating it. The job has also taken me to Virginia twice already since I started in August. One ended up being a three week trip, the other only 3 days. I can definitely see myself continue to grow there.

Cam and I are also doing well. Christmas came and then passed leaving us with only a small debt as opposed to larger ones in the past. I gave her a nice digital SLR like camera and she got me a TiVo HD. I was finally able to retire the Comcast cable box and replace it for a $1.79 per month cable card. The relationship Cam and I have is certainly a lot better then it was in the past. I’m glad we overcame our difficulties and problems we had earlier this year.

I hope that this year I can start taking part time classes at BCC or some sort of school. While I am gaining a lot of hands on experience in working with systems and year over year I see a dramatic improvement in my skills. However I really wish to improve my communications skills and managerial skills plus I’d be nice if I could get a degree out of it eventually so I have a backbone to my experience.

Hopefully I’ll be successful in my goal and I’m sure I’ll write about it here eventually. For those that do their yearly checks to see what I’m up to… hope all is going well in your life.

Yvo