Month: January 2007

I’ve not blogged in a long time, I see. Forgive me, dear reader, for that. In fact, a lot has been happening in the week since my last post. In that time, I’ve been poring over the job boards, looking for something to do. I admit, I’ve felt a little discouraged and slightly dejected owing to the lay-off, but life, as they say, must go on.

So, I’ve been doing all sorts of keywords searches on those sites to find things that interest me, and discover how things I’m passionate about can become things that I can make a living out of. And, of course, I’ve been sending resumes out like mad (I’ve not had any callbacks or emailbacks yet). That is really why I haven’t blogged, and why I haven’t worked on any of the django websites, which really need to just get finished at this point. I’ll tackle those this weekend and try to at least get 3crowns out of the door.

So, my passions. Funny (not in a ha-ha sense) story: Last summer, I googled around for some of my old high school chums. I’m sort of in touch with a few — one (who I’ve known since 6th grade) directly and 3 indirectly. I had found that my friend Gordana is doing some cool and major stuff in the world of Art. I thought she’d be in the UN or in politics or something while we were in school, but I guess I’d just taken for granted how great she did in Art class. Well, we exchanged a couple of emails and we got to talking about being passionate about what you do. I never responded to her, because I hadn’t figured out exactly what that is. So a four-month late reply is about to go out to her. Told you it wasn’t funny.

It turns out that I am, apparently, one of those people-people. I said it, it’s now out there: I’m a “people person.” Once the shivers are gone when I say that, the truth begins to sink in. I joined gentoo and I became its evangelist not by technical achievements (there’s no bit of programming that I can point to and say: “there, see that piece of genius? I did that.”), but rather by softer means: I had some great ideas (cascading profiles and g-cpan come to mind). I didn’t have the technical oompf to actually code those things up. However, when I found the right people who could, I knew I’d found them (that’s an indirect shout out to Mike).

And I realised that that’s what I’d been doing at Gentoo. I did it well enough, though I certainly stumbled quite a bit along the way. I’d been building teams. That’s been my modus operandi: find a weakness, apply a band-aid, find specialist surgeons to fix it and strengthen it and build upon it. I’m not trying to toot my own horn, here, please understand that. I’m just airing my thoughts of the last few months. And then, there’s the fact that my blood runs with devrel. That is to say, even though I’m not formally really a part of DevRel any more, I still do devrel type things (lately it’s been talking developers out of leaving the project). That’s just my nature, I can’t help it. I’m not alone in that, mind you — it takes that kind of person to be in devrel (which is a shout out to Bryan and to Ferris — wasn’t there some pop star named Bryan Ferris back in the day, by the way? Have I stumbled upon a conspiracy?).

And, of course, there were the linux world expos (though not really with the more recent ones) where I took the reins at interacting with booth visitors and attracting people to the booth. Some might remember me dragging some Malaysian television crew to the Gentoo booth to cover us.

So what does this all mean? All that stuff made me deliriously happy. Well, not all of it is happy (the leaving of devs, for example, sucks mostly), but it’s all what I do. That’s just who I am. That’s what I need to be doing. I don’t know if there are any corporate titles that cover that sort of thing (and pay well) or not. I don’t know what those titles are, either.

So with this present job search, after the initial round of keyword searching, I decided to try and hone in on some of the industries I’d like to be working in. I don’t think I want to work in the linux industry (such as it is), because Gentoo fulfills that need more than amply. But when I think about the kinds of products and services that excite me, then we start to see a picture forming.

Airlines, for example, I feel very strongly about. I love to fly. I love being on airplanes. I love everything about the flying experience, and on non-American carriers, I love the food. Airline food is probably my most favourite type of food. Too bad you can’t really go out for that sort of thing. Or, heaven help you, order it in. Anyway, yeah, I love the boarding, the pushback, the taxiing, the sitting on the ground during delays, the line up, the take-off (I LOVE the take-off), the cruising, the drinks, the food (did I mention the food?), the movies and music, talking with fellow passengers and the cabin crew when they have some down time, the slowing down, the landing and touchdown (I LOVE the landing and touchdown, and pulling to the gate. I’m not so thrilled about the steps following that. This, after 32 and a half years of flying continually (my first airplane ride was at 6 months old). A relaxing time for me is watching the airplanes taking-off and landing. I love watching the approaches. A couple of years ago, there was an internet feed of KSFO airport and I used to have that as my background, er, music while doing Gentoo things. I didn’t understand most of it, but it relaxed me to listen to the air traffic controllers interact with departing and approaching flights. I hate seeing people off (I love seeing them come in), but I think that’s a tinge of jealousy that I’m not the one boarding the aircraft.

Needless to say, one of my categories for search is now Airlines/Aviation. Whether or not I can score a position there that is mutually suitable remains to be seen. And yes, I’m picky. I’d rather work for the cool airlines like Jet Blue and Southwest (if we’re talking American carriers). Those have a people focus to the way go about things. They have a courtesy and general respect for their clientele, which is lacking in most of the other domestic carriers.

I’m not sure yet, which other products/services I feel strongly about, but I’ll start noting them down as they occur to me. I know they are there, I just need to tap into my brain to get at them.

Ignoring, for a moment, the conjunction of those two words with respect to cults and organisations (and some fraternities), I’d like to share some thoughts about branding and loyalty in airlines. As you, my dear readers, might recall, Aimee and I had gone to Los Angeles and Oklahoma for Thanksgiving (late November), and then to Jamaica for Christmas.

Well, as it turned out, we had two starkly contrasting airline experiences. For the first trip, we booked all the flights on Southwest airlines. Southwest is well-known as a budget airline. On the flights you get pretzels and drinks galore, which is fine. You don’t pay much, and you don’t expect much. That, and when you get a boarding card, there are no seat numbers on it. You just board (at the right time, because passengers are placed in different zones) and then pick out a seat you might like. Aimee and I tend to prefer the rear of the aircraft, which is not a popular destination, but very very convenient (except if you’re in a hurry to deboard at the end of the flight). Southwest, however, exceeded our expectations. Without exception, all the cabin crew members were friendly and happy and smiley. They were courteous and not once did I see even a hint of a frown. This, despite some of our flights being completely full. And, on another occasion, populated by a noisy bunch of high-schoolers (noisy being the keyword, because they were a very nice bunch of students — headed to LA for a marching band competition (and by the way, some of them played bagpipes, which is simply the coolest thing I’ve ever heard)).

Anyway, the cabin crew: they were also really funny. The ones making announcements always had a funny quip like “if we expected a water landing, none of us would have shown up to work today.” And one of them called the plane the “Love Chub” which is just hilarious.

While I’m gushing about Southwest, I just want to compliment them on their choice of new livery. That old brown/beige/orange scheme just had to go. It was ugly and made their planes look ancient and rickety. I can’t wait for the rest of the fleet to be redone. We even saw Shamu at LAX, which was very cool.

Oh right, I have a point with all this. For Christmas, we booked our flights on the fairly pathetic USAir. The preflight experience (booking, check-in, boarding) was normal and fine. Friendly staff, quick service. Onboard, however, is a different world entirely. I believe one of the cabin crew members even had a scowl. For heaven’s sake, it’s a public facing job — put on your public face! They just wanted people to sit in their seats and get ready to go, because we were running late. What they forgot was that it wasn’t the passengers who caused the delay — the aircraft arrived late. We, the passengers, were just working with what we had. So, lots of down-talking and PA announcements about “please don’t waste time in the aisles — place your bags away as quickly as possible and sit so that we can leave.”

Once airborne on the 4 hour international flight, they serve the requisite peanuts and soft drinks. Here’s the kicker: for lunch, you get a choice of a salad, or a sandwich or some sort of snack box. Now, Aimee and I had gotten up mega-early for this flight so we basically skipped breakfast, and the flight to Philly was too short to have anything to eat. It was that first flight that was late. So in Philly we had enough time to go into the next plane, and that’s about it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the snack box. All three items could be had at the, um “bargain basement” price gouging cost of 5 dollars. I get it, we’re in the air, you have the monopoly, if not the sense of customer service. Fine, we think, we’ll shell out the five bucks each for the salad, because we’re basically starved. We’re in the rear section (not the very back, but about 10 rows in front of it). By the time they get to us, the only thing left is this mysterious snackbox. We bought one, even though that was simply ridiculous. In it: a bar of candy, a breakfast bar, and nachos and processed cheese or something. Basically, nasty pre-packaged stuff that USAir probably gets for free to promote those products anyway — they just have to provide the “box” part of the snack box.

So, you open your tray table and what do you see? Not a tray table, but a freaking advertisement for Verizon. I paid money to sit in a seat and look at advertisements (this, by the way, is also what disgusts me about movie theaters these days, but that’s a different blog post) for four hours. Five dollars is a magic number on USAir: that’s coincidentally how much the cheap ass earphones cost (we did not, don’t worry).

So top it all off, they ended the flight on a very inappropriate note. The pilot, when announcing our imminent landing procedures, proceeded to inform us about what a great deal the USAir credit card is, and the number of miles that you get for signing up? Excuse me? How about you just fly the fucking plane, ok? Tell me the local time and temperature and other interesting tidbits I can’t see out my window. Don’t pimp.

Needless to say, I’m willing to now pay extra to explicitly not fly USAir. Air Jamaica feeds you well, I hear.

This was a pretty long rant: sorry about that.

Before we left for Christmas vacation, I found out from my boss that the Developer Relations Manager role that I’d been filling for the last few months was going to be dissolved. The reason for this is that the company’s focus is shifting to be more in line with its revenue and other goals for this year.

Well, today (Jan 2) was the day that that happened, so as of this morning, I’ve been laid off. I wish I could say “easy come, easy go” but this one was not so easy to come by, so I’m pretty sad to have it go. I’ll miss working there and I’ll always wonder what would have happened to the DevZone and other outreach stuff that I planned for this quarter (like the 12 articles I’d been working on).

I’ll say this: I enjoyed my experience in marketing, and I certainly hope that my next job opportunity will allow me to continue to grow in that direction.

Wish me luck.