The Definition of Cold Front

If you've ever wondered what a "Cold Front" is, maybe this picture can help to explain it. It's going to be 47 degrees here in Wisconsin today, so a lot of our snow will probably melt. But look at tomorrow... Our high will be 9! Oh the joy of living here, you just never know what to expect from Mother Nature.
In other news... I am looking for a new job and had several phone interviews and one face-to-face interview last week, and now have many very good prospects. It looks like the career change to driving a truck may be on hold :-)

The one real interview was very interesting. It was with Solidworks, a company that develops 3D CAD (Computer Aided Design) applications, something that I have always really loved. I would probably be placed in their Labs group, developing new ideas that may or may not make it into the product, testing new technology and developing it. This would be VERY cool, I am quite sure I would really love this type of work. Development would likely be done in C++ and C#, and I have a friend that has worked there for a year and a half and he really loves it. I may even have the opportunity to learn Macintosh development, something I have wanted to learn for years. It would also be a great chance to hone and develop my own complex math and geometry skills, something I have not used at all since college but was always told "you need to know this stuff". Maybe they were right...

I also spoke with Inacom about an in-house development position. This is where Paul Heuring works and he referred me to this position. It too sounds fun, but we have not yet progressed to the actual interview stage, though I am hopeful that will happen this week. This position would be pretty close to ideal too, working on multiple short-term type projects in a wide variety of fields, using various development tools. It does not sound like it would get boring quickly at all.

After initially being contacted by their recruiter in California over a week ago, I finally did get the chance to speak with one of the two local hiring managers at Quest Software. Quest is where a very good friend of mine works, and they create some wonderful tools mostly to fill voids in major application vendor products (Microsoft, Oracle, etc). This would primarily be a C++ development position. The manager that I spoke with late Friday is not the one that I need to speak with. The manager that is looking for developers lost his voice, but the other one wanted to make contact with me to let me know the other definitely wants to talk to me, hopefully early this week. That was very nice of him to let me know that, and we had a very nice hour-long chat about the company and the type of development they do out of the Madison office. One very positive thing to come out of that conversation was learning that they practice and preach "Test Driven Development". In essence, they practice quality, they do not just preach it!

So that is where things stand now. Nothing concrete just yet, but I am very hopeful that I will ultimately have a decision to make between multiple offers, possibly as early as this week.

In other news, my mom turns 60 tomorrow! That is wonderful, but it also means I turn 40 in 2 weeks! Not so wonderful :-) We went to Bill and Bonnie's Christmas party yesterday. This was the first Christmas without Mike Gullickson, (Bonnie's son, Heidi's brother, and Halle's dad), since he was killed last February in a snowmobile accident. Paul and Heidi Heuring were there with their kids, so Paul and I talked "shop" about the job above, but we also played Ping Pong and had a few "interesting" drinks. Everyone had a real good time, but I know Christmas this year without Mike will be hard on everyone in the Gullickson family, especially Halle.

I do wish money grew on tree's! All of the girls want these new sub-notebook computers for Christmas, like the Acer One. They are real notebook computers, but have 9" screens and run Windows XP. They are very cool! They also cost $350 each, which isn't bad, until you multiple by 3! :-) All I want for Christmas is a good job, and an iPod Touch!