Creative agency co-op, part II
A while ago I rambled about an idea, and yesterday Jeremy Blake posted a video that tangentially rekindled my need to ramble about it.
Days of our Lives
Being unemployed is pretty great. I’m getting way more stuff done now than when I was being paid to do things.
It’s amazing how not having an 8-hour soul-sucking void every day leaves me with plenty of energy to do stuff that I enjoy doing.
For example, I’m having great time gardening (well, cultivating a meadow, really), doing pottery, and generally enjoying my life. This has had other great effects, like my kitchen is the cleanest it’s been since filming Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, and I’m having the energy to work on music and open source stuff again (including Publ).
Exit stage left
It’s time I sling the baskets off this overburdened horse
Sink my toes into the ground and set a different course
Cause if I were here and you were there
I’d meet you in between
And not until my dying day, confess what I have seen.— Phish, The Horse
I’m finally doing something I should have done at least a decade ago: I am no longer going to try to be a software engineer professionally. I’m not sure what’s coming next, but hopefully it’ll be a much better life for me.
The frustration of continued existence
My week off from work felt great. But I’m still having difficulty actually focusing at work. I have a bunch of paths of exploration to examine but none of them feel, y'know, right right now.
Meanwhile, my house continues to be a bit more work than I expected. On the plus side, I’ve successfully murdered my lawn and vastly improved my garden and started up my nice meadow. On the minus side, my heating bill is through the roof (literally) and I’ve been getting bids for finally improving the house insulation. So far I’ve had three bids which went thusly:
🔏 General states of things
Some collected ramblings about the usual whiny stuff. Trying not to think too much about the state of the world because everyone’s already anxious enough about it.
So, Hired is pretty good, y'all
When I got the job with Hover it was via Hired, which made the actual recruiting and interviewing process way better than any other job search site I’ve ever seen.
LinkedIn used to be pretty okay but the whole process there has gotten overwhelming and awful, and they’ve tried to turn into yet another Social Media Experience™ but don’t have any actual tools for managing the interview process itself. Hired just focuses on everything about the recruiting and interview experience: you put your information on your profile (and can include things like “I never want to hear from these companies” or criteria for the sorts of companies you’d like to work for), and you can manage your availability for interview slots and be in control of all the contact and timing and so on.
I found the experience to be pretty darn great, and way less stressful than any other job search engine I’ve ever used.
Anyway, if you use my referral link and get a job with Hired, I also get a kickback, so obviously I’m biased in espousing the benefits of Hired. But I do sincerely believe that it’s been by far the best candidate experience I’ve ever had, and led me to jobs I’d not have known about otherwise (and, in particular, the two I interviewed for and the one I accepted).
🔏 Goodbye Moz, hello Hover!
Today was my last day at Moz. Moz is a great company full of great people, but the work just never quite clicked for me, and it was time to move on.
Fortunately, moving on involved getting a job at Hover, a company that specializes in augmented reality home renovation tools. I will be doing graphics research and development, and a lot of the work will be directly related to my graduate research, as it turns out. I also have high hopes for Hover as a company; Moz was a high water mark in terms of culture and while Hover will have a hard time living up to it, all of my interactions with people there have been amazing and positive.
In one’s career there’s the idea of the “golden triangle,” where you can have a great environment (coworkers, company culture, etc.), great work (job duties, projects, responsibilities), and great income — pick two. It’s very rare to get all three, and it seems like Hover might actually be that for me.
I definitely hope to keep in touch with my coworkers from Moz, though. They’re all such great people.
🔏 Things are going well
- All the plumbing issues in my house have been resolved
- The actual bathroom renovation is proceeding to plan and should be done by next Friday (I’ll believe it when I see it of course)
- I just accepted a job doing graphics R&D at Hover and I will be starting in January
Current goings-on
Huh, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog entry. So let’s do some catch-up to the present, I guess.
Studio and cat updates
Studio
My basement studio setup is coming along slowly but surely. I ended up buying a used ADAT preamp to expand my existing audio interface (rather than buying a new interface/patchbay/etc.) and it mostly works great, although I’m going to see if I can hack an S/PDIF decoder into a word clock source for it so that the 18i8 can be master (which makes a couple of things easier to deal with).
For now I’m using my old MacBook as the recording computer. It only has a 500GB drive, though, and I couldn’t find the power adapter for my external HDD enclosure, so I decided to try just running Native Instruments off of my NAS over gigabit Ethernet. Nearly every install failed with a nonsensical “malformed XML document” error, which turns out to be a known issue with attempting to install to a NAS. Oh well. Hopefully that PSU turns up soon. I’m sure it’s in the bottom of whichever box I end up unpacking last.
(The PSU isn’t anything particularly exotic in principle, just a 12V 2A center-positive wallwart, but for some reason all the 12V center-positive wallwarts I can find can’t accommodate its extra-thick center pin.)
But anyway, today I finally got to the point where I could hook up my piano, and so I played piano for the first time since April, which felt nice. I can’t believe I let it be this long. I guess I really thought the backyard shed studio would go a lot more quickly!