Slashdot

Wow. I've only got 3 entries, and I haven't written in my journal for almost 2 years. I guess I'd better not start a blog, eh?

Long story short, I've got 7 weeks to go before I finish my first year of teaching HS science. 2 courses away from my Master's in ed, and $1200 and a pile of work away from getting certified to teach. For someone only lacking student teaching (but having work experience 2x or more that) they make it damn hard to get certified without student teaching.

Anyway, I'm empolyed, and in a field where nobody gets laid off, or outsourced, and people are still getting signing bonuses. And I get summers off. I have to say, as much as I love programming, I'll take a job like this over it any day. And I still have summers to program whatever my heart desires.

What a nice change from the tech sector...

I've been noticing more often lately a problem with the generic Comment Threshold slashdot has. While it's great for main page articles, it doesn't work so well with some of the lesser trafficked areas of the site.

For example, I bask in the magic purple of games.slashdot.org on a regular basis. But I have my comment threshold set at +4 for the main page, which I read most often. On games.slashdot.org, there aren't a lot of comments, and there isn't a ton of moderation. I read it at somewhere between 0 and +2, since that lets me see a decent amount of comments.

Although it would be nice to be able to set thresholds for each section, it would also be more crap in the prefrences to wade through. At the same time, when a games.slashdot.org story makes the main page, I generally view it at +4, since I only want to wade through 50-100 comments on average.

I guess what I'm thinking about would involve a fairly major rewrite of slashcode...sigh.

I guess I'll go play around with my preferences...

Since it's been quite some time since I posted anything at all, I figured I'd make a token journal entry. So here it is:

The recent history of my life, part 12:

I got laid off in January, after 2.5 years of slavery at a shitty company, programming and doing dba work, on 15 minute "holy shit, someone fix this or I'll be fired" deadlines. Our parent company, (rhyme-rhedia, in scooby-speak, and which I'm not allowed to say anything bad about since I signed their damn severance papers) had had us on a salary and equipment freeze for 2 years, and had pruned benefits to just about nothing. As most tech depts are, we were understaffed and underfunded, and desperately needed some major hardware upgrades.

But not only were they too broke to give us what we needed, they couldn't even pay everyone the promised company-wide raise after 2 years of suffering. The solution? Lay off a bunch of the company, myself included, and give the remaining people the long-promised raise. (benefits still non-existent)

It took me a few months after I was laid off to learn this, but as far as I can tell, nobody was willing to have the "sorry pal" talk with me. Apparently my direct supervisors thought I was too valuable to let go in their "we need to get rid of 5% of the company" random victim selection, and they (our parent company) had to call in some people from nyc (the parent company hq) to actually lay me off. My boss didn't work that day in protest.

So I feel good, knowing that nobody at our location was willing to sack me, although it does nothing to fix my unemployment issues. And with the average unemployment length in the US tech sector around 9-10 months, I'm not looking at a rosy future.

Well, I wasn't. After 50-60 applications, all but 4 going into a black hole and disappearing forever, I've decided to call off my job search. I've applied to a few local schools to go back for a Masters in Education, and in the fall, I should start on the road to becoming a teacher.

It's not a real stretch for me - I majored in astrophysics, and while doing that, TAed physics and astronomy labs, and senior year I taught my own freshman physics lab. I've pretty much been teaching most of my life, so it wasn't a hard decision. The fact that I saw mainly teaching and nursing jobs listed during my 6 month job search didn't hurt either.

So Yaaaay! I'm going back to school. Granted I may be a poor grad student moving back with my parents and living off their crappy dialup, (out in the sticks) but I think I can survive for a few years. At least I hope I can....

Mumm... Finally logged in after months of lurking. And with trillian pro feeding me slashdot headlines, I'll be here all the time. Now I must procure some karma. Funny they don't have a pay-pal link to it....