Marin’s New Bed

Angela found a new bed for Marin last week.  She found it off of craigslist and I was the lucky one that got to pick it up.  Turns out a twin size bed will fit in an MDX with the rear seats down and the front seats moved up a bit.  The lady kept it in great condition and with all of the pieces!  I have put together several furniture items throughout the years and you can definitely tell a quality difference between them.  This is a pretty solid bed, so it should last her for 4 or 5 years…at least that is the plan.  Here are some picks, I gave myself a pat on the back since I had to put it together without any instructions and only a faint memory of a picture from the craigslist listing from a week prior.

	We are still sticking with the Tinkerbell theme.
Just chilin’	She LOVES the slide!
She had a routine of pouring herself a cup of tea, climbing up the ladder to the bed, sliding down the slide, and repeat.	And soon it was bedtime.  She did very well the first night (last night).  We asked her this morning if she liked her new bed and she responded with, “I like it.”

Job Hunt

I am still going strong with the job hunt.  I had 3 interviews this week, so it was a better week than most.  One was a very brief interview with a head hunter/recruiter that was looking for a .NET developer position for a friend.  I don’t think she typically handles technical jobs, so she really didn’t know what to ask me.  She just kept saying, “Oh, I think you are perfect for what he is looking for.”  So we will see what happens with that one.  Another interview was with a small growing company needing mostly a programmer, but also someone that can get their infrastructure in order (as far as IT).  We will see how that goes, but I am a little uneasy with the size of the company.  He had 15 employees at the end of last year.  He is “restructuring” and is now hiring employee number 4.  (I was employee #4 at Marketplace Software and we see where that got me.)  The last interview, which was actually the first of the week, was with a large company that contracts out technical services to other companies.  I applied for a .NET Developer position.  The interview was a technical interview which consisted of 2 guys taking turns asking questions about object oriented programming, .NET and SQL.  Specifically about polymorphism, abstract classes, inheritance, implementation, .NET controls, stored procedures and SQL functions.  And yes, finally someone that doesn’t care if you natively use VB or C# (pronounced “C Sharp”)!  For those of you not familiar with the difference between VB and C#, I will give you an example.  The difference is mostly syntax (meaning how items are written out). The two code snippets below do the exact same thing.

Can you tell what the program writes out?  Doesn’t one of examples seem to make better “sense”?  I think so, and I think it’s VB (Visual Basic).  Yet 3 out of 4 companies will want a C# guy.  Turns out 95% of C# programmers only have about 1 year experience right now (I was told this by a recruiter after they went through 150+ resumes looking for 3-5 years, not my statistics).

Here is another tip I have found while looking for work…craigslist!  Two of the three interviews this week were from a posting on craigslist.  Plus, I have found a couple of contract opportunities as well.  I just finished one small project for a guy I ran across on craigslist.  He was very happy with the work and has already given me another small project.  And guess what language…you got it, C#…gotta do what you gotta do!