One Month Checkup

Well, it's been just over one month since my layoff, so what's been going on?

I received three job offers on the same day. One was from a company that I have nothing but respect for, but I couldn't afford to live on what they were offering. One was a QA Manager position for a web development firm that had a development process that made the organizational schizophrenia at my previous job seem reasonable. The other was where I'm at now.

I started my new job on the 18th. Most of the last three weeks have been spent adding in all of the various helper functions necessary to make working in an Oracle/ASP.NET environment doable: stored procedure parameter templates, data abstraction layers, etc.

I still don't have my personal effects from my previous job. "We'll ship them to you" turned into "we'll have someone bring them to you" turned into "have someone with access to a vehicle drop by and pick them up for you." Will it turn into "we sold your autographed Xbox, so there"?

It takes me thirty-two hours of work to make as much as I made in forty hours at my previous job. Unfortunately, my first check was a week late. Fortunately, it, along with my next week's check, were enough to cover the vast majority of my bills, and my next week's check will cover the few that remain. Only a couple of late fees, but the wage increase will cover those.

I finally broke $100 on Google AdSense, and if I understand the program correctly, I'll get the check sometime in February.

My apartment lease expires the end of this month, and my rent is going up $35 a month.

I keep sitting down with XNA Game Studio Express, and every time I try to write anything, I just feel as if the soul was sucked out of me. I don't think it's because of XNA, though. I think it's just that I'm...weary of working on games. Any role in game development, be it development, testing, content creation, etc., is an emotionally draining experience. It takes a lot of effort and energy to create even the most simple of games, let alone the 20-plus gigabytes of assets that ended up getting distilled down to a reasonable size and baked into the final DVD of "Gears of War." I guess it's a shame that most of the draining experiences occurred AFTER my last piece of art...

I'm still getting phone calls and E-mails regarding my resume. There may be news regarding this shortly...