After years of debating on whether or not I wanted to be a boring person with a boring domain name, I settled on … boring. I am now the owner of www.kathylin.com for at least the next 9+ months. A one year domain registration actually came free as part of my hosting plan, but I just never took advantage of it now.
I’ve set up the subdomain kathylin.dreamhosters.com to redirect to this one, so update your bookmarks if you were so nice as to actually bookmark my site in the first place.
Another year has gone by, and I just wanted to say, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! What did 2009 bring for me?
- New job. This is at the top of the list because I left a long and pretty good career at Booz Allen Hamilton. I was looking for something new, and do not regret my decision.
- New degree. In May 2009 I graduated from the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce MS in MIT program. I received a Master of Science in the Management of I.T. It was a really awesome experience and I met a lot of really fantastic, smart people. It was definitely the push for me to take the leap and do #1 (new job).
- New commute. Unfortunately, with the new job comes a long long commute to Richmond, VA. At least I know more people in Richmond, now.
- Been engaged for a year. Depending on what time zone you are in, Aaron and I got engaged on July 30th or July 31st. Still planning that wedding!
- First blizzard. After living in SC for a good chunk of my life, I’ve not been part of any major snowstorms. Even living up in DC didn’t produce the kind of snow we had last week in Charlottesville — about 20 inches! It was a lot of fun, but also majorly inconvenient. :) Still pretty neat though.
- Completed my next gen gaming console collection. From my humble beginning as a Wii-only owner, I’ve rounded out my frivolous collection with a PS3. I had been waiting for years for the “thin” version to come out and in August, it finally did. Of course, the amount of time I’ve had for any gaming in recent months has gone down substantially.
Now that I work in the commercial world, I get to hear a lot about how the work I do affects people in their day to day lives. While on my sojourn to work Friday morning, I was thrilled to hear my company’s website mentioned on NPR!
Any publicity is pretty cool, especially when coming straight from the mouth of a job seeker (in NY no less)! Always nice to hear what they have to say, even when we can’t speak to them all personally.
The story focused on how online job listings aren’t always what they seem. Although job boards such SnagAJob.com seem to have many listings, sometimes it is not a true reflection on which employers are actually hiring. It is also important to keep in mind that employers can afford to be rather picky now, especially with the number of workers flooding the market. However, not hearing from an employer often erodes the trust of the seeker in the website that presented the listing, rather than in the employer.
Balancing the needs of the job seeker and the employer is an everyday occurrence at work and will continue to be. There isn’t a magic bullet for everything. :)
WordPress announced recently the ability to post and read via the Twitter API. This is kind of interesting to me because it manages to blur the line between a blog and a micro-blog. If your Twitter feed is supposed to be what you are doing in 140 characters or less, your blog entry should at least have more meat, yes? I think so.
But perhaps in this day and age with short attention spans, maybe not. Just skimming this page shows I don’t blog very often. Of course, my last tweet (over two years ago) is evidence I use Twitter even less frequently. Maybe one of these days I’ll go back — once someone manages to convince me that it’s not 99.9% noise.
This site could really use some more contents or updates, or something. Well, let’s just go with the most “recent” update. I started to work a SnagAJob.com on Sept 14th as a Product Manager. I’m in Bizarro-Land. It’s commercial vs. government, 2-week sprints vs. one month, .Net vs. Java (NAnt? NHibernate? c’mon — these names aren’t very original), and in general, requirements and user story creation vs. build-it-run-it-test-it-deploy-it.
I haven’t decided how I feel about it yet. It is very very different from what I used to do, so let’s just leave it at that.
Aaron, Xandy and Neely are doing great. I’m still living in Charlottesville, VA. The commute isn’t the best, but others at work have a long commute, and they don’t complain so I don’t want to too much either.
My wedding site is up in a skeleton form, the big day is November 6th. I am gladly taking recommendations for photographers, but venue, caterer, and cupcake-maker are pretty much nailed down.
