trdaisuke

So it's been a few months' hiatus since I've posted, let's take stock of what's been going on:

I am another year older and another year closer to no longer being able to call myself 30-something.

Work got really busy with a big event in September and then the sudden departure of the head of our office so work has been a bigger lift than usual. Many days coming home and taking a nap right after work.

FFXIV raid is progressing, we've cleared P5S-P7S and phase 1 of P8S, working on High Concept prog.

Work on my gaming backlog is progressing, although there's new urgency to play anything I want to play from years of Stadia Pro due to the planned January shutdown.

I got a 4K gaming monitor and something seems to be throttling since my already poorly-ventilated case now has more heat to try to get rid of.

I didn't get the job that I wanted but ultimately I don't think it would have been a good fit after my second round interview.

To-Do:

Might try to recase gaming PC over the holidays.

Start posting on Gopher again.

Create a better solution for crossposting Gopher to WWW since Known is still being fussy and refusing to post certain gopher posts for no readily apparent reason.

Upgrade home server to Ubuntu 22.04 or rebuild it on another base (been liking Fedora for desktop lately)

Purge things that are no longer needed from the apartment, it's getting out of control.

Various boring work things.

Consider applying to jobs outside higher ed, since the higher ed landscape seems to be continuing its spiral down the drain.

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts (on a ~1 week delay) here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 13 July 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-07-13.txt

Title: I underestimated how long 500 words actually is...
Date: 2022-07-13

----

Phew, it took way longer than I anticipated, but I completed the written
interview for the position I applied for! Time for a beer or two XD

I think the reason it took way longer than I anticipated was because I
started by being as concise as possible. There was a word limit, so
I decided to try to try to err on the size of nice, limited prose for
each of the five questions.

But then, after answering all five of the questions they asked, I finally
checked my answers against the word limit, and damn, my nice, concise
answers were only about 150 words each and the word limit was 500!!!

In a panic, I had to spend another hour and a half expanding on all my
nice concise answers. I had thought they were great, but like... what
if they look at these small word counts and think I didn't spend enough
time on them??! What if all the other candidates used all 500 words?? :o

I didn't end up using all 500 words for any of them... but at least I
got them up to a more respectable (maybe?) 350-400 words each. I don't
honestly know if all the additional information I provided will actually
help. I personally value brevity and would rather read a concise 150
words than a boring 400 words... so here's hoping whoever is evaluating
me doesn't find them boring!

Bottom line, I guess: 500 words is longer than I thought! This post, for
instance, is only 287 words.

I sincerely apologize for the abuse of punctuation in this post. I have
had a beer and a half since I started :guilty face: