Job search over?

After seven and a half months looking, and five and a half months actually out of work, I finally received an offer.  I’m taking a few days to consider it.  But thank God it’s there!

The job search: What NOT to do

Today I was discussing my discouraging job search with a blogging buddy who is in the same sinking boat.  Somehow we got on the subject of blog topics and he suggested I write up a list of job-hunting tips.

Problem is, seven-and-a-half months of hard effort have not yet garnered a job offer so while I am certainly a reluctant and repeated veteran of the unemployment wars I don’t feel qualified to suggest anything positive to other career seekers.

However, I do feel up to providing a bulleted breakdown of things to avoid, so here goes.

An alternate history for Nokia’s internet tablets

Many readers of this blog already know of my involvement with the launch of the Nokia N800 internet tablet.  I took a high personal interest in the product line that went beyond my normal duties, because I saw a great deal of potential for the devices and their technology.  That interest led me to constantly suggest ideas for software applications and use cases.  Unfortunately for me, there was a development agenda in place that allowed little room for additional exploration.  This agenda was deliberately conservative and is just now enabling maturity in the device family, four years after the first true Nokia Internet Tablet (the 770) was introduced.

But what if Nokia had taken a radically different approach?  That thought (along with musing over related possibilities) has been eating at me a lot lately as speculation around the next device grows.  So for sheer sake of a wishful, whimsical writing exercise, I decided to construct an alternate product timeline with the benefit of my own hindsight and opinions combined with a vast accumulation of user input.  Note that this is not intended to be reflective of reality!

So without further ado, let’s rewind a few years and play with the idea a bit (all hyperlinks are actual and not part of this fantasy)…

Getting out of the box

Very recently I poked a little fun at an unnamed job applicant’s attempt to stretch his grocery sacking experience into the area of packaging design.  But lurking near that tongue-in-cheek soliloquy was an old rant I’ve been meaning to put to voice for some time.

Today I bought two different health supplement products, two packages of each.  In both cases, I was able to combine the entire contents into a single container.  Then I summarily discarded the unnecessary packages.

Although my discomfort with this was somewhat mitigated by our habit of recycling in this household, I’m still disturbed that manufacturers cannot seem to move past this very wasteful habit.  I wouldn’t mind quite as much, except now they’re leaving out the cotton stuffing that used to keep pills from rattling.  Hey, I used that thing!