Gulash – another mash-up

I have been playing with the scheduled release of blog posts and liking it. If you do not know, you can write entries and choose when they will be automatically published.  This is awesome for me given that i go through droughts of not writing and then writing four or five posts at once.  Now, i can spread those out.  It is a little difficult to deal with both tense and timeline issues, but i think it is worth it.  I released two or three posts via the scheduler Fri-Sun.

A little job news – one of the places i applied that i was excited about was the Apple Store at the local mall here in Millersville PA.  They are revamping their Business Team (which is a great and necessary idea) and have some openings. It has been a week and i have heard nothing.  I did go in the day after i applied online and spoke to one of the managers briefly just to verify that they were still looking as the post had been up since september.  It was a nice chat and i left feeling positive.

There is an up and a down side.  The up is that i do not really want to stay in Pennsylvania. I was serious when i applied and i would take the job if they offered it today, but i would want to learn and position myself to move before next winter. The down is that i do not understand why i did not get any contact. I felt like my package was good. Some of the folks in the store know me, a few managers, lots of floor staff, the Business guy, and the Regional manager. I am considering contacting my Business sales guy to try to set something up to find out what happened. Not so much to be begging for a job there, but to learn what was wrong to help me in the future. Did i make some gross error i am unaware of? Is it the pitfall i have found many times – overqualified? Is it the employer second guessing the applicant game of ‘he can’t really want this job, he’s been a CEO!’

The other facet of concern – I also applied for the same job in Georgetown as well as a job one rung up in the business division also in Georgetown.  Those jobs i am very interested in, and i have a bud in Apple throwing a good word my way. Probably the Apple thing is not going to work out right now, but that is OK. I have some other consulting leads and am setting up meetings for this week (and next if necessary). I do plan to go into the Georgetown Apple store though while i am down NOVA way. I can probably make much more money consulting, but i imagine that i would be happier working at Apple.

State of the Blog – I believe it is about time to kick it back into gear with the move to a self-hosted blog.  I did seriously slow down on that effort, but i hit an unusual wall.  I could not make the self-hosted site work on the free space at godaddy.  I read that many people had the same problem, and a few people made it work.  That was only designed to be a temporary stage anyway, as it would include godaddy banners at the top of each page.

I have been working on a post about Malcolm X (and a little about Martin Luther King Jr.) and some decent ideas hit me while walking this morning and i used the voice memos thingy on the iPhone to capture them.  I wanted to intersperse these voice clips with text in the entry, but you cannot upload mp3/m4a on a free blog hosted through wordpress.  The upgrade package to be able to post audio is about $20.00 a year.  Not bad, but if i have to pay, i would rather pay to host it myself and get the rest of the features that i am missing and the additional customization.

But – all that will have to wait until i get a new job.  I refuse to spend money on my blog while under-employed!

The Malcolm entry is probably going to stay in draft form for now.  It is too important to me to not craft it well, and that is going to take some more time, and i need to get back to other things.

For now let me just say that i hope we all take a minute to remember Malcolm today (he died on Feb 21, 1965).  If you do not know much about Malcolm, i encourage you to learn.  One of the best places to start is here!

If you know some about Malcolm and have a negative opinion, i encourage you to read this!