"The internet is a place where absolutely nothing happens. You need to take advantage of that." ~ Strong Bad

It seems like I can't get a break in my job search. I just got rejection notices for not one, but two jobs at Boeing only a couple days apart. Let me fill in some back story. I suppose since I announced I was accepting a new job that I was genuinely excited about not even two months ago, it's alarming that I would be looking for a job again so quickly.

The actual story is that Boeing finally sent me notices for two jobs I applied for before the new year. One was in December. The other I applied for on May 6, 2009. My status shown on their site was changed to "No longer under consideration" the same day, so it seems there was no indecisiveness holding up the process. The best part is the line in the emails that reads, "We wanted to let you know as soon as possible so that you may consider other employment opportunities." I am in awe. Even the Lewis County Prosecutor's Office would probably be in awe (inside joke). According to Boeing, waiting 322 days to send one email is "as soon as possible." Of course, the experience isn't entirely new to me.

I still have my job and it's going more smoothly this week. It's challenging, but that's a good thing. Today there was a forklift training for all the new employees and a handful of old ones who had been missed. Around 30 people showed up. I'm pretty sure I can honestly say, I was never at NMHG as awkward on a forklift as some of the guys here were. After waiting about 30 minutes for perhaps 8-10 guys to take their driving test, with two going at a time on separate trucks, I hopped on and did the course in about a minute.

A few other things going on: I had my first game yesterday with the soccer team at work. I elected to join the newly formed B-team to feel things out. We got destroyed last night, but I had the comfort of scoring our team's only goal. Kerry and I tried wine tasting in the area last week with one of her friends from school and some others. It was a completely different crowd than I'm used to, but still fun. For some light reading, SAE wrote a short article on the factory my project is outfitting. The photo is of an extremely rough, 2/3 scale demonstrator unit a couple of the guys I'm working with now built for them, minus the really sweet drill and fasten machines. Lastly, congratulations to my brother on his secret.

I apologize for my site going missing for so long. My DNS registration was due for renewal. Yahoo never gave me notice, but simply charged my fortunately outdated card $35. I'd previously been paying $5/year. Since both the 600% price raise and their making an unauthorized charge were unacceptable to me, I transferred my DNS to 1and1.com at $8/year.

At that point, Yahoo deleted my DNS record despite my lease having two days left. My site was actually still up, but could only be found by some tricks. Yahoo also stalled the maximum-allowed 5 days to confirm the transfer, despite the process being almost entirely automated. I don't think I have anything positive left to say about Yahoo Small Business.

While this was going on, my hard-earned comfort with the CAD and PDM software at work proved to be ill-founded. After coaxing me into a sense of security, they cooperatively lashed out with new errors, lost files, and unexpected levels of complexity and interdependency. Hours of pouring through manuals and the aid of multiple coworkers were to no avail. It was only by fortune one of the three (as far as I can tell) people in the company who actually understand our PDM system noticed a lost file of mine during some system maintenance. He solved all of my problems in 10 minutes...Then the next day I finally had a PDM-training class that could have preempted about 3/4 of my problems.

To complete my IT triple fiasco, I spent several days without internet. When I moved in, I temporarily leached off a neighbor's unsecured wireless router. It turned out to be horribly unreliable got slowly worse. I ordered Verizon DSL and got the call Friday saying my service was ready. It wasn't. Furthermore, the neighbor's wireless completely stopped working. It still didn't work on Monday after a 30 minute tech support call, and they gave me an "appointment" for a 4 hour window (during work hours, of course) today for a technician to hopefully stop by.

As I could have told them, the problem turned out to be on their end. With that fixed, I went to configure the connection. This used to involve providing the modem with your account login and password. Verizon "simplified" the process with a program to download that requires irrelevant information, advertises add-on services, and then configures the connection. For as little as it had to do, it turned out to be remarkably buggy, ultimately getting stuck in an endless loop. Another 20 minute call to tech support (15 minutes on hold, 5 minutes of help) failed to fix the problem, but did present a circumvention of the program so that a mere 4-1/2 days after service was "ready" I'm actually online.

My counter-fortune to all these experiences was a drive down to Mt. Hood to go night skiing with Sarah, Dan, and Kerry, who hadn't skied in years. The weather was excellent and accented by a great sunset, but I managed to forget my ski poles, good set of goggles, camera, and food. Those weren't even inconveniences in comparison, however.

To add to the fun, I just retyped this entire post, as my log-in timed out and I lost the entire first copy.

Very slowly, I'm starting to settle in. I've got the basics covered: I found a grocery store and have a rough idea of the Mass times at churches around my new apartment. I still haven't taken time to explore the immediate neighborhood around me, but I had a decent, if slightly chilly bike ride down to the Edmond's ferry slip today. So far, King Burrito has been one of the things I've missed most about Portland. I also still get confused by the freeway signs that say "South to Seattle" and "North to Vancouver." I've almost taken the wrong on-ramp a couple times. Meanwhile, my living room is completely covered in boxes, but I've brought the last of them up from Portland and half of them are empty now.

I found a group of soccer players at work, so hopefully there will be some opportunity to play indoor. I'll have to ask around about outdoor teams, but I do know there's a league. Of course, I could always commute to Portland to keep playing with FC Orange.

I'm also settling in at work, and just in time. Bombardier announced a third customer for their CSeries. That seems to have quenched a lot of rumors of cancellation, but also makes the general atmosphere around the project more serious. Learning how to use our Product Data Management (PDM) software and CATIA hasn't exactly been a smooth process, but I think I'm at a consistently operable level now. Perhaps sometime in the future all of CATIA's idiosyncrasies compared to other CAD programs will make sense, and I'll feel like we're actually on the same team, but I currently get what I need done either by sheer persistence that French software can't match, or by an underhanded cunning that allows me to trick it into doing what I want.

My first week of work went by appreciably fast.

I've said before this doesn't look like a typical place to work. It has proven very much true. My first task on arriving, after filling out the regular forms and all that, was not to attend an orientation, but to find myself a desk. I literally wandered through the various buildings the company owns to find a desk, then hauled it back to my group's area and cleared a place for it among the detritus from other engineer's projects. That last part led to my second task (along with another recruit who started the same day): design a new floor plan for the overcrowded area we were crammed into.

This typifies the self-sufficient nature that work here seems to take on. However, I also got into the actual project work, as well as spending a fair amount of time getting set up to use the CAD program and data management system. I'm still getting my hands around that, but I'm at least at a semi-competent level now.

The great desk-moving came today. Naturally, being the guys who forced everyone to move all their stuff around, and in many cases lose some space, made us very popular. However, while everyone raised a cacophonic fuss leading up to the move, no one really complained after it was completed, and the overall work area feels far more spacious and orderly than it did when I was sitting with my desk sticking halfway into an aisle.

You'll have to excuse me for not writing very often for the next couple weeks. It's been and will be pretty busy with packing, moving, and starting work. My first day is this coming Monday.

On Monday, I drove up to the Everett area to look at a couple apartments I had scoped out online and a few that I found passing by. Kerry came along to act as my expert counsel, since I've never actually lived in an apartment before. I ended up seeing quite a range of places, but ultimately decided on the 2nd to last one I visited. It's a 600 square foot place in Lynnwood, about 8 miles from work, so I'm hoping to be able to bike in when the weather is good.

I actually left really early in the morning in hopes of seeing the first flight of Boeing's 747-8, an advanced derivative of the iconic airliner. They delayed for 2-1/2 hours waiting for acceptable weather, but ultimately they made it. It wasn't as exciting as a space shuttle, but I still found it pretty cool.

I took this morning off from packing for one last chance to work on the steamboat. I'm perhaps unjustifiably proud to get to work on that vessel. Hopefully I can make it down again on an occasional weekend, especially if they're planning on raising steam.

It took a ridiculous amount of time, but it looks like I have a job!

I spent about 2-1/2 hours with Electroimpact on Monday, starting with a detailed tour of the facility. The equipment they make is really impressive. It's primarily drilling and fastening equipment that works with extremely high precision over large distances on complex shapes. Some of these are purpose-built machines that would fill a gymnasium. Others are large industrial robots customized with their tool heads and improved controllers.

After the tour, I spent some time with one of their lead engineers reviewing an engineering test I had taken earlier. I think I got three wrong, and they got one wrong. Completing a 25 question test in one hour had me sweating a bit. Although the questions were harder back then, in school we'd usually have three to ten questions in a class period. I then talked to the president and several other engineers. Of the dozen or so people I met, only one didn't laugh at me for wearing a suit. I knew it was a casual workplace, but figured I couldn't go wrong by overdressing. I may have been wrong. Even a visiting group of foreign customers started cracking jokes when they saw me.

They got back to me on Wednesday, and on Friday I accepted their offer. Unless something changes, I start in two weeks.

The timing is fortunate since Kerry is in the middle of moving up to the Seattle area to help her parents get their veterinary clinic off the ground. We had a going away party for her last night and I spent most of today helping her move. I'll be on the other side of Seattle in Mukilteo. Hopefully I can find an apartment in the next two weeks.

Of course, this is going to complicate getting the Formula car running. I'm still figuring out where to keep it and hopefully still work on it.

It sounds like I will be assigned to work on a project for Short Brothers in Ireland. They're involved in the C-Series regional jet Bombardier is in the process of designing. They also have the distinction of having built some of the goofiest looking planes in the world.

I did it. I put off the decision for a while, but in the end I concluded that one of us who built the Formula SAE car had to give it a good home. I wasn't going to leave it to neglect...or worse. The UP shop technician dropped it off this afternoon. I haven't been very productive since.

There's plenty of work to do on it. In our rush to finish it, not all the metal parts got painted, so one of my first tasks will be to clean up the corrosion and paint all those bits. At the same time I need to get an ECU for it, repair a lot of the wiring and control cables, and replace a few other assorted parts. One of my eventual goals is to make new fairings, as the existing bodywork was made for minimal aerodynamic function and not given much attention for appearance. I might also consider restoring the engine to its stock configuration. Some of the modifications required for competition substantially limited horsepower.

Of course, now that I have a project that will beg for copious amounts of my time, I'm sure Murphy's Law will see me with a job again in short order. I guess from that perspective, I can count buying the car as an investment in my job search. In fact, I have an interview this coming Monday in the Everett area for a company that makes tooling for the aerospace industry. The company president woke me up Sunday morning to do a brief phone interview. That part seems a little weird to me, but the work sounds interesting.

Getting the car makes last nights dumb mistake a distant memory. I drove up to Mt. Hood to go night skiing only to remember as I turned into the empty parking lot that they're only open for night skiing Wednesday through Sunday. The worst part is that it wasn't just me. I also subjected two friends to the pointless drive up and back.

I had a couple unrelated financial misadventures this last week. First of all, I had a not-too-uncommon screw-up by the Verified by Visa system while trying to make a purchase online. It almost ended with a hold on my account, but after I cleared that up, it ended with Visa calling to verify my charges. There was a $1 charge I knew nothing about. I know some vendors, for reasons unknown to me, will do this, then refund the charge, but there was no notice this was being done in this case, so I told the computer calling that I hadn't authorized it. I've been told credit brokers penalize their merchants for things like this, so hopefully Skype will take notice (if it was them).

The second was more fun. The unemployment office told me my income for 2009 was enough that I needed to apply for a new claim. They also said since I hadn't properly reported the income, I might also have several months worth of UI benefits I would have to pay back. My response was, "What income?" Apparently at the end of the year, they compared the income I'd declared when applying for benefits to the income declared to the IRS for my social security number and found a substantial mismatch. To make a long story short, I suspect an illegal immigrant in Washington picked a social security number to use at random and ended up with mine. Fortunately, it sounds like this will get properly cleared up on my end.

As has been a little too common lately, I spent part of the weekend helping Kerry's parents with their vet clinic. In theory, I was just along to fix a vacuum system in their mobile clinic. When I got there, though, just about everything else broke, too. I fixed the vacuum, a printer (actually half-fixed two printers), the internet twice, and the laminator. The grand finale, however, waited until I got back home, when the toilet of all things, failed in two unrelated but compounding ways simultaneously. I was not happy.

I should probably get around to writing about the last three weeks, or I guess at least mention a few highlights.

Christmas was great this year. I've tried to impress people with talk about big Christmas get-togethers, but it seems I hang out with too many people who either also have big families, have really crazy families, or in the case of one person I know have both. As a result, I never seem to get much response when I say things like, "There were 38 people at Christmas dinner this year."

I was not looking forward to New Years, however. First of all, I decided because of airline prices, the need to stay focused on job searching, visiting people locally, etc. not to go to the MI New Years Retreat in Chicago I've attended for the previous five years. I'd gotten used to it as the way to celebrate the New Year. Secondly, this is scheduled to be the last year the space shuttle flies, not counting a probable slip of one or two missions into next year, and I haven't yet seen a launch in person. Third, the passing of the new year marks a one year anniversary I am not fond of dwelling on, but for which I have had plenty of time to do so.

I made it up to the mountain last week to go skiing for the first time of the season. The weather turned out to be fortunate, as a dry December left the snowpack low and the slopes mostly hardpacked and icy, but a gentle snowfall started as Sarah, Dan, and I left their cabin. The snow was decent when we reached the slopes and continually improved to great by the end of the evening. Now it's raining and the snow's melting again. Hopefully it will be back before too long, as I bought a 5 time night pass I need to use up.

After a little over four years of use (and six years after it went on the market), my original mobile phone had started giving crackling feedback and the battery was dying and no longer available, so I finally gave in and bought a new one. I had planned on buying the most basic $20 model again, but it had almost unusable buttons and was reported to have poor sound, so I shelled out an extra $10 for a Motorola "Renew." They call it Renew because the body and the box it came in were made from recycled materials (the box was still almost impossible to open), and apparently the extra $10 went into the shadow economy of carbon credits. I guess I did my part for the week to fuel a former vice-president's private jet. The phone works more or less like a phone should, so I'm happy with it.

I never heard back from Portland General Electric after the interview, which they told me meant I wasn't chosen for the second round of interviews. I got a call back last week on an application to a staffing agency for a temporary manufacturing engineer. It would have been work related to the test stand designing I did. He called the day after I sent a resume and cover letter and said they might be ready to interview as early as the next day. Unfortunately, that didn't pan out and he let me know this week that they'd filled the position internally. I have to say that he was far better to deal with than the staffing agencies I've dealt with for applications to Intel positions. Of course, all he had to do to achieve that distinction was speak English and remember what company he was hiring for.

Sarah's gingerbread party was on Saturday, which was a blast, as always. Don't forget to vote if you haven't. If we're lucky, Nick will even vote this year so the results can be declared official. He still hasn't voted on last year's houses.