Today Kenny voiced a similar opinion.

Sorry Kenny, I beat you to the punch on this hard hitting opinion piece, but hey there’s enough hipster faux western wear shirts to keep us both in mother of pearl snaps for years to come, so no hard feelings.

Thank you for this opportunity Catchfire Media. I think we’ve got great things in front of us and I look forward to the challenge of growing together.

Since I still have a few months on my contract before I can get a decent upgrade price on a new Nexus 1 or similar smartphone and I needed something to at least receive and make calls I went to my local store and asked what the cheapest phone they had available for me was. It turns out that the Nokia 1661 was their answer. While certainly not a pretty phone it’s at least small and quite thin. I barely notice it in my jeans pocket, however after using it for a few days I’ve discovered that I don’t really have much of a reason to notice it in my pocket anyway. Gone are the days of instant gratification via web searches, location based applications, and any of the benefits of social networking. What will happen to my mayorships? How will I get those new stamps on my passport? How will I see people’s responses to my snarky comments? At least I still have Google via SMS. Sadly my T9 skills have withered since being spoiled by a full qwerty keyboard, so even the simple queries of gooSMS take forever.
I thought that losing my smartphone might be a bit freeing; no longer tethered to the internet. However in the first few days, at least, that is not the case. I have at least a week before a friend sends me a replacement G1 (thank you Aero), so maybe by then I’ll have discovered the joy that is the retro mobile phone, but right now I’m just not feeling it.
Pros:

• Small
• Thin
• Built in Flashlight (I’m serious)
• FM Tuner/Radio

Cons:

• Everything else…

buy your own (different strokes I guess)

I’m now 33, soon to be unemployed and I realize that I can’t just keep going to an office everyday at a company that I have no respect for simply because they send me a check every couple weeks. What’s the opposite of selling out? Luckily in the last few days I’ve been exposed to a couple of job opportunities that I could be proud of and that I also think I could do really well. Hopefully one of them will work out, but if not I know that my work experience, and my ability to learn new things quickly will help me find something great.

If you happen to know of an opportunity for a nerd with experience as varied as end user tech support to network/system management to database design and managment to application and web development. Feel free to pass on my resume or point them to this site. I’m also on linkedin and emurse.

My last day will actually be April 30th. I’m not really that broken up about this since I was already looking for a new job, but I do feel awful for the staff in our small town office. I especially feel bad because since I started at this small company 7 years ago everything I’ve done has laid the ground work for this. First I built a system to allow us to take on a huge new client and then other clients. Having those clients led to our first being purchased by a big insurance company and then resold to an even bigger insurance company. Now working on this last migration I’ve directly enabled them to bring our work into their main office.

So what does working for a company for over 7 years, and giving up a year of your life to try to meet unrealistic deadlines with empty promises of being “taken care of” get you these days? A tiny reference letter that someone’s secretary printed out and mailed to me. In fact it probably took more time for me to sign for the letter (really USPS I need to print my name twice and sign it another two times for this?) than it did for the letter to be written.

I’m not really sure what the future holds for me yet, but I have high hopes that I’ll actually find a job that I’ll enjoy or at least respect myself for doing, or even just something that’ll give me enough downtime to work on my own things.