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I am fine when it comes to speaking and talking with groups of friends. I am even ok when it comes to strangers, as long as I know what the heck I am talking about. If I don’t, then I use the old adage of “It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” I learn a lot by listening to others, and will eventually catch up.

The issue that I have been ruminating on lately though, is that of keeping up communication. I’ve always said I am bad at selling myself, when I was freelancing especially. A good part of that is keeping up communication.

So in an effort to be better at communicating, I will be restoring my previous efforts of posting to the blog. They will most likely be in audio format, since I have more time to record my thoughts than I do to type them.

The content of the podcast postings will be fairly random, but mostly be on the topics of: flash/flex and mobile development, writing, and perhaps some other bits and pieces from my life.

This is an effort to increase my communication skills, so if you like it, great. If you don’t then let me know.

A few other things that I will be doing to increase my communication with family, friends, and colleagues is to email or phone more regularly, to respond to their communications more frequently and in a more timely manner, and… well, I need some help on the rest. That’s why I’m posting, and doing this navel gazing introspection, right?

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I’m still working at Digital Primates and loving what I do there. I haven’t had much time while on the job to study up for the Flex Developer’s Certification, so I do that as much as I can from home. I need to take a practice test or two to see where I would score if I took the actual test, and where I need to focus my studies to make sure I pass.

Over the last several months I have worked more with the Flex Framework than I have ever before. I am so used to doing things in pure AS2 an AS3, that I had to retrain myself to look for things in the framework that were already waiting for me to just use them. Some of the people at DP also have been a great help in this. I’d thank them all here, but I’d really be thanking everyone at the company, so thanks guys.

Moving on into the late summer, I am still working on my augmented reality project. My friend and now co-worker (he’s an intern at Digital Primates), Joe, is helping me work through the FLARToolkit. Making things make sense, and finding out where we can speed things up. Optimization was the main topic last week. This week it was me solo, but I was able to get DAZ3D models into our app. Definitely need more optimizing there (15 Meg for a model! jeesh!).

Oh, and I am also now a contributor to the FLARToolkit’s repo. Haven’t submitted anything yet, but I should before the next post. So with Podiobooks.com, this is the second open source project that I am currently active in.

I may get out another post before Gen Con, so stay tuned.

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Right now I am doing work with LifeSnapz, and have several roleplaying game writing contracts on deck. I am still looking at one full time employment opportunity, but I have at least one other possible large job that is definitely interesting. Note: Make that three others. Overall, I am really hoping to make this business work.

I am really enjoying being on my own with this. I still have some schedules set by other people, and I still need to meet those deadlines. The place that I work, and when I work though, are pretty much up to me. It is amazing how much I realized the commute and working in an office was taking out of me, now that I am not doing the 2-3 hours of commute a day, plus the hours in the office. I also get to see my kids a lot more, big huge plus there.

If any of you out there are needing Rich Internet Application (RIA), Flex/Flash, or web development work done, contact me through the comments if you don’t know my normal contact info. I’ll get some contact information or a form up soon. Just realized that I don’t have that up.

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Note the nugget of wisdom above for other contract and freelance workers. December, especially the last two weeks of December, is the worst time to find work over the entire year. I suppose that this year for many people that it is doubly so. So if you have the chance to grab a contract or three that will last you into January, do so early.

Here’s an almost disaster turned into a great customer service story. My machine is an HP Pavilion notebook, a dv7 series for those that are interested. I have had it for several months now, and earlier last week, the AC adapter started making strange noises. Today, I thought it would be a good time to call HP service to see what they would do about it. While on the call, the adapter stopped charging my notebook, and I couldn’t get it to work again. (I have since the call, but then, no power.) Let me just say that the HP support person was very helpful, almost too self deprecating, and she was quite efficient, even if her computer systems were slow. I was on the phone just about 20 minutes from the start of the call, to the end where they took my address and were shipping me the new AC adapter. A fairly short, and definitely productive, call and I will have the new AC adapter on December 26th via FedEx. The computer is under warranty, and I was thinking that they would need me to cross ship the old adapter, and so did the support person, but as we both found out, I don’t need to. I keep the one that is acting up, and get the new one later this week. Not that I am going to want to use the old one, but in case the new one shorts out, I can go to the old one for backup. Overall, I would continue buying HP products. A few years ago, I would not have said that. Good job HP.

Happy holidays!

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So yesterday I posted a question of do I keep up the hunt or not. Sleeping on it, I realized that I was not as comfortable with my current status to stop the hunt. Today, I am going to follow up with my recruiters and see where things stand. The interview was postponed, or so I assume, since I have not heard from the recruiter who was setting it up (bad form there, always keep your clients up to date).

I am going to take a step back though, since I have my freelance project that I need to get cracking on. Today will be mostly a work day, to get that project really started. I have a decent proof of concept working, I now need to get it past the prototype stage.

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Today I had yet another interview, and it went quite well. I have already been informed that they wanted me back for a second interview as soon as tomorrow. Though given the weather, and the fact that the recruiter called me earlier and said Monday was also possible, I am thinking it will be Monday.

The opportunity sounds like something I have been looking to do. It is about 50% coding/development, and with the other 50% being management of the teams, external resources, and client interactions. Definitely something I have done before, and also enjoyed doing. Lots of new development, since it is an advertising agency, and the projects are more short term. They use Subversion, which is cool, since I find Subversion to be a very very good thing for version control and asset management.

What else? Most of the Christmas shopping is done, and I have started on the freelance project, though mostly the planning, since coding it was a bit difficult with all the running around I had to do today. Oh, and for anyone wanting to find 10 South Lasalle in Chicago, Google Maps puts it about 10 blocks north of where it actually is. So I got very very cold walking around for a half hour trying to find the place I was needing to be. Good thing I had planned on getting lost. Though I hadn’t planned on getting that lost, or on being outside that long. Brrr.

Tomorrow, coding, and probably either staying inside, or heading to Panera. Depends on the weather where I do the coding.

I apologize for the lateness of the posting, the start of the interviewing was at 9:30am, so I had to be out of the house by 7:30am to make the right train.

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I still have my interview tomorrow, and I have another possible coming up soon. Things look really good right now. Thank you all for your support.

I will continue blogging for the forseeable future, but perhaps I can do it about things other than my job hunting. Here’s to hoping!

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I was able to get a few more things cleared off of my plate relating to the household that had needed doing for a while. Even cleaned up in the basement a bit.

As far as the coding front is going, I am still working on the id3 tagging AIR application, and have hit a snag with it. I can get the file loaded, I can *almost* read them, but not quite. So I need to dig into that a little deeper. I may just need to write the bit parsing myself. Right now I am working with Metaphile’s open source parsing classes, but I just can’t get them to pull in the data. It’s not helping that there isn’t any documentation and very little commenting in the code. I am reading the code, but there are a few spots that seem unfinished. I am probably missing something simple, rather than them actually being unfinished. So if anyone out there would like to help me out, I would appreciate the insight you could give me.

Lots of snow here today, driving was not fun. I hope tomorrow is clear. Oh, and that is one thing I need to mention. When your prospective employer emails you and asks if you want to reschedule because of the heavy snow, that is a really good sign that you want to work for them.

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As far as the job hunt goes, some of the leads that I had last Friday are panning out. I have an interview on Wednesday, and I am fairly sure it has a decent chance of turning into work. I am also working on another writing contract, we’ll see if that pans out as well.

As far as all the coding projects, other than the Game Cryer one, I restarted my id3 tagging AIR project, and I hope to have an iteration of it done by the end of the week. Unless of course I have some more paying work that gets in the way.

Here’s to hard work and hoping.

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