Real Estate...
The upgrade of the house is done and it's on the market. The house is located in a great neighborhood (also desirable), looks good, and staged right but no one is offering.
My mother died two years ago and I've started the upgrade of her condo to put on the market. It's a long story of why it's been empty but that does not really matter. Demo is underway with a goal of having it on the market by the end of August which means some time in September.
Outplacement Frustration...
My executive coach is no longer with the outplacement firm. They have a policy, or did, of letting a client take a leave of absence from the service. We did that informally rather than formally and my online resources are no longer available. Now not only do I feel a bit thrown under the bus by employers but also by the provided safety net, the outplacement firm. This week I'll get on the phone and do my best (I am at my best on the phone) to get three months of online access. My perspective on time has changed greatly since not working at a real job full time. Everything takes more time than you think.
This noon I started a casual conversation with the CFO of a large corporation about a mile from my home. Working there would be great for a couple of years. My intent is to get in as some sort of project manager in the IT space. The outplacement online resources would be helpful to refresh my knowledge in a few areas.
Technology...
I run into people 50+ all the time who seem locked into a technology time warp. Once they figured out email, sort of, that was it. They don't use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or read or write any blogs. I'm not really sure how they communicate. The younger crowd considers email as archaic as a home phone line.
For whatever reason I've dug a big of a 'too much technology' hole. My password file has over a hundred entries (I avoid all those 'log in as Facebook' options) and while I have one or two primary email accounts there are many others for selective successful and unsuccessful projects and there are at least a dozen blogs of which two or three are active. Yesterday I spent an hour configuring my iPhone to do an IMAP connection to an email account that I use to communicate with people that I really don't want to communicate with. Recently I've been motivated by a tenant in the same commercial building who is less than thirty and netting about $30k a month from very astute blog monetization. It's easy to avoid technology and avoid those kind of income streams and it's easy to get caught up in technology busywork like too many devices, to many software applications, too many geewhiz things and technology innovation dark holes. Focus. Really I should be using Wordpress since that's what all the really successful bloggers use and I have several implementations and profiles but it all takes time and when I feel like writing I gravitate to blogger and lament my lack of better branding, personal, theme, etc. It's on the list.
We have DSL service at home. I'd like to upgrade and get rid of our landline but my better half seems to like older phone technology like phones that don't need to be charged (I know, it sits in a charger). The DSL service has flakey moments. Our house has bad 1969 phone wiring. It if rains DSL is flakey. Other times it's flakey for whatever reason. It's possible that it's the switch that feeds all of the access points and non-wired devices. The other night I was having a technology meltdown and wanted to replace the switch. It was 11:15 PM. Everything was closed except WalMart which of course had what I needed because WalMart has what middle Americans need to live. I decided to sleep on it but dreamt about computer crap. It all worked in the AM. If I replaced the switch with a new router I could eliminate three devices with one, free up space in the adjacent power strips and simplify my life when "reboot this1, this2, this3, etc." is the logical step. Of course my life would also be simpler if it did not include IOS, Chrome, XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu and at least two other Linux distributions. It's an interesting contrast that all the hardware and tools that cause me distress are Chinese. Perhaps I need to start looking for old IBM and Compaq (USA made) PC's when prowling the garage sales for USA made tools, but perhaps not; China is our future.
About a decade ago I noticed that where ever I went people were talking about computer things, what they bought, what software working, gaming craps, etc. For whatever reason I felt above that, that I knew more, and I probably did, already leveraging those sorts of things on an enterprise level, actually effectively. Now, unemployed more or less, I'm bound up in devices, hardware, web abs, RSS feeds, archaic email, app development and content aggregation and publishing tools, cloud tools, archival and restoration issues, etc.
There are days that I just want to sit with my carving tools, a few brushes and a box of paints. Actually that's what I'd like to do every day.
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