Go Team Pandy!

When you’re jumping, it’s kind of important to have a landing pad. Right now Yaeka and I are in transition and living at her mom’s place. Last Friday was our last day at the Quahndo and it’ll be almost a month (24 days now) until we get moved into our new house. Before I share a picture of the new place (which I’m guessing you’ve already looked at) let’s discuss what I like and dislike about it and just some of the process Yaeka and I went through.

Because we were trying to be flexible with the location allowing ourselves the maximum opportunity to find the ideal home, we spent a full weekend just driving around Lake Washington for 2-3 full days looking at all sorts of places. None of them were really nice since we were being reasonable and looking within our price range, but there were definitely some ghetto places including one located across the street from a trailer park - it’s amazing how little 300K will buy you in Seattle sometimes.

In the end we selected a place in Sammamish, which wasn’t even one of the places we were considering due to it’s less desirable location (closer to 520 which is always the bridge with worse traffic and not even close to any real freeways to begin with). When it comes down to it, the location is really the only thing that I could complain about the place; everything else about it is great. It has a 2-car garage, no shared walls (say hello to rocking out!), 3 bedrooms (now Yaeka and I each get our own space), 2.5 baths, CAT5 wired, stainless steel appliances, gas range, porch, and did I mention no shared walls? I’m seriously considering setting my drumset up. Another cool thing is that it is actually part of a condominium complex, so even though we have the house setup with no shared walls, we still don’t have to worry about taking care of a yard and all that.

I’m sure this is all more interesting to me than it is to you, but if you’re in the Seattle area, let me know and I’ll take you on the grand tour. Maybe I’ll even let you sleep on the couch. Speaking of couches, we spent everyday of Memorial Day weekend driving around looking at furniture stores. I believe we’ve decided on the South Beach model from Ethan Allen. It doesn’t really look that great in the picture on the website, but trust me, it’s a gorgeous and comfortable piece of furniture.

So without further delay, here’s the picture of my new landing pad:

As I mentioned before, my copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? is currently packed up. Since I wasn’t planning to do any job hunting until I completed the book it may be a surprise that I have just landed a new job. It’s actually a bit of suprise to me as well.

I found the job on Craigslist and the title, Business Manager In-Training, and industry, tech, appealed to me so I figured why not send in my resume. I didn’t expect to get a response since I hadn’t come across the posting until a full week after it was posted, but it obviously turned out a lot better than I had thought it would.

I’m going to stick with my not naming or linking where I work so I’ll just describe what they do. The company has two main sides to their business, the first is mainly a tech support with field technicians setting up/helping small businesses while the second, and main part of the business, provides web event registration services primarily for Microsoft.

I’m still going to finish up the book once I move and free it from its box, but until then, we’ll see if this job is what I’m meant to do at the moment. First day is on May 15th so job updates will begin then.

This post was actually started a long time ago (maybe a month or more) and I just realized that I had never posted it as I wanted to complete some more exercises first.

My copy of  What Color Is Your Parachute? is currently being stored in a box somewhere in a garage so it’ll be a while before I get to any more of those. Here’s what I have for now.
As I mentioned in part two chapter eight sees me drawing my ideal life as well as several other exercises. Here are the results of the exercises in this chapter.

Draw Your Ideal Life
Since I can’t draw, I’m just going to make some lists related to the areas the book suggested.

Home Related
• 1.5-2 story house with basement, 2-car garage and enclosed backyard with deck as well as a view of Seattle
• a large sleigh bed
• room dedicated to music listening with shelves installed on one wall for CDs/vinyl, Bose 901 series speakers, and a recliner
• a comfy couch facing a nice flat panel tv
• office/work area with my typical computer setup — website stats are going through the top of the monitor

Recreation
• Go to concerts
• eat out (Frites and iSushi are pictures)
• road trips

Way back on episodes 4 & 5 of the Security Now Podcast with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte the topic of discussion was “Personal Password Policies”. Most people know that you should change your passwords every six months, but how many that actually do go through the trouble of doing that actually come up with something more than just using their dog’s name or favorite color?

Of the various techniques mentioned in the podcast, there were at least two that I had already partially implemented in my own password creation routine. The first is the idea of a tiered-password system. For example, you may have one password for your banking and other high security logins, another for email and shopping sites, and a less secure password for general sites that require registration for some annoying reason. This way if someone managed to figure out your password for MySpace they wouldn’t also have the password for your bank account. The second idea is blending a word (maybe the name of your dog or something else you may be tempted to use as a password alone) and hashing it with a number. So if your dog’s name is Sparky and your zip code is 12345 you would end up with the password “s1p2a3r4k5y”. It should be fairly obvious why this password is significantly more secure than just “sparky”: it can’t be found in a dictionary, at over 10 characters it’s definitely long-ish, and by mixing two separate components someone trying to figure out your password would not only need to know two significant things about you, but also how to combine those elements.

The new ideas I learned from Security Now were additional methods of coming up with the components of a mixed password and also unique ways of combining those elements. For example, instead of using “sparky”, you could use the domain name and insert digits (phone number, zip code, birth year, etc.) in a predetermined way creating a unique password for every website. For added security you could then swap every other pair of characters or maybe add 1 to every other digit or something along those lines. If you go this route, then instead of just coming up with a different password for each security “tier” you could come up with unique algorithms for password creation at each level instead with maybe just the lowest security priority tier having a identical strong password while the higher security tiers are uniquely created dependent on the domain name or something of that nature.

I know I probably didn’t really explain this clearly so if you are interested in coming up with some really secure password methodologies, I really recommend listening to the podcast linked above or just ask questions in the comments and I can elaborate. Now though, it’s time for me to go change some passwords!

I keep forgetting to mention that one of the funny things about this whole “project” of mine is that I can remember more than 10 years ago seeing a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? on the coffee table when my dad was reading it. If I was a good kid that kept in better touch with his parents, I’d probably have a funny story about telling my dad that I’m reading this book now. Maybe I’ll call some time this week.

Anyway, with chapter seven the self-reflection questions begin to crop up. Yaeka offered to make me a special journal with a parachute on it for writing my answers, but I’ve decided to just post them here on the blog. I think it’ll help me get over my “cool complex” as I know I’ll need to be honest in order to get the most out of the exercises and by posting them here I’ll just have to become more comfortable with my own answers and sharing them. I’m not sure what other questions I’ll encounter in the future but for now it has to do with where I would like to live.

Where I’d Most Like to Live

1. Portland, OR
2. Seattle, WA
3. Austin, TX
4. Chicago, IL

This is actually pretty close to a list I would have come up with towards the end of my time at Colgate although a list made around 2002 wouldn’t have included Portland, OR (it’s a pretty new city that I’ve fallen in love with) and would have included Boston, MA; New York, NY; and probably San Francisco as well.

Okay I just did some reading into chapter eight and let me tell you, that is where the real exercises begin. I stopped reading because it’s time to wind down, but it looks like when I pick back up I’ll be drawing a picture of my “ideal life” and doing several other exercisese as well. Sounds like something I can do tomorrow during lunch. I can picture it now: “Hey, Phill, what are you working on?” Me: “It’s a drawing of my ideal life.” Co-worker: “Oh yeah? Does it include working here?” Me (w/ headphones on - that’s the way I show people I’m at lunch): “…” Headphones are great to use when you want to pretend you can’t hear someone. I feel like Yaeka is going to take that the wrong way.

I must admit that I have not been keeping up with my thirty minutes a day of reading What Color Is Your Parachute? as I had planned. I wanted to take a quick moment though to recap a few of the interesting facts and points that I have learned so far.

• The average job search lasts 19 weeks
• The key to a successful job search is having alternatives (over 50% of job seekers quit their search within two months if they only use one method)
• Of people that use the internet as their only job search method, only 4-10% were successful
• Seding resumes yielded a 7% success rate when used as the sole method

So how does this match up with my current efforts? Well I’d say that I’ve been in the market for approximately 10-12 weeks so I am still below average. I am, however, only using one method and if you read my post “So Bad for Team Phill“, you will know that it’s not going well. In fact, I’ve been pretty discourage almost to the point that my efforts had pretty much ceased. With that in mind, it should be a surprise that my one method was using the internet.

I think I’m about to get into the meat of the book now so hopefully this will result in some serious reflection and understanding of what it is I really am seeking and rejuvenate my search.

Last week or so I added a huge amount of feeds to my RSS agregator from the 9 Rules Network. Going through the posts, I came accross a post titled Power of the Comma. It’s not actually that big of a deal or a super in-depth look at the comma, but I found it interesting as I had picked up a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation when I was in Tennessee during the holidays. I just finished reading it and found the book to be a pretty fun, light-hearted overview of current trends in punctuation as well as its history and I have to admit that I learned a good amount. It doesn’t really make a great reference book to keep on your desk, but since I don’t have any other references of this type at the moment, I’ve been reaching for it recently to look up a couple of things while writing music reviews for The PhiLL(er).

Do you have any good writing reference books or websites that you recommend or maybe just some writing tips? Let me know in the comments as I am really working to improve my writing.

Back in Nov/Dec I started “Team Phill”. What exactly is “Team Phill”? Well it was a brief (as in time of existence) wiki that I created to act as a central repository for my team (Yaeka, Amy, & Doug - although Yaeka was the only contributor) to list various job listings that may be of interest to me; this is why I had that whole “I’m doing this secret stuff” moment on my blog back then. Anyway, I still don’t have a new job, but decided that I might as well just post out in the open about things and if my boss finds my blog and learns of my ongoing “mission”, I figure it will just help facilitate some communication since I still act in an ultra-passive-aggressive manner.

So why so bad for Team Phill? Well as mentioned, I don’t have a new job. First, I should admit that I honestly didn’t try that hard; I did in the beginning when I was pretty upset with certain situations, but as I cooled off, so did my effort. I submitted my resume to about 7 or 8 postings (Craigslist acted as my main source) and only managed to get one response and this was from a hiring agency that had pretty much already filled the position and probably just wanted to add some more candidates to their pool or resources. I did eventually get a direct interview with the company, but shrugged off what could have been a job offer after deciding it wasn’t “right” for me.

That’s the background on where I am at now. I recently read a blog article titled How To Suck and Still Be On Top on the Life Coaches Blog and after telling Yaeka about it, she really nailed down my problem. I’ve been full of excuses/reasons why I should remain at my current position mostly out of a fear of change/uncercetainty/risk and even more because I am comfortable where I am at knowing that it would be really hard to fail. Going somewhere else with different rules and challenges leaves an enormous chance of failure. I know that I would be able to adapt and learn in most new situations, but still avoid even applying to places instead choosing to label myself as “underqualified”.

The ante has raised somewhat with Yaeka and I planning to purchase a home in the near future and even though I still carry the same doubts, I am moving into action. Last week Yaeka purchased a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? for me and I promised to try and work through it at least 30 minutes a day. I plan on sharing what I learn from the book in future postings as a way of sharing what I hope will be a significant personal development.