Since everyone else is taking the personality test I’ll throw mine in along with the Multiple Intelligences test. Nothing too surprising.
Finding Amazon.com products on Amazon.com
The last few times I’ve gone to buy something on Amazon I’ve run into the same problem; it is becoming more and more difficult to actually buy products fulfilled by Amazon and try to meet the $25 required for Super Saver Shipping. There is no straight forward way to tell Amazon’s search to only search products sold by Amazon. Some categories have an option to filter Amazon only products on the left, but that seems pretty hit and miss. Problem for us consumers who don’t like wading through third party products is Amazon is making too much money to care. Anywhere from 30-50% of the units that move through their site are through third parties. The only good solution I’ve found is a site, Amazon Light, that uses Amazon’s web services to search and filter out the third party results, leaving you with search results that are nearly all eligible for free shipping. This will come in handy during the holiday shopping since I despise going to the mall.
New wife, new home, why not a new job?
As some of you know I started a new job with Los Angeles County at the beginning of August and I have been there a month so I thought it is about time I posted about it. At the beginning of July I left my previous position with a consulting firm I had been with for a year and took a month off to get ready for the wedding, honeymoon, and moving out. We got home from Hawaii on the 2nd and I started on the 6th. They hired a group of new developers and put us all through 3 weeks of training classes in a bunch of different areas like communication skills and software testing.
Now that I’m out of training and getting settled into my team I find that I am really starting to like working for the County of Los Angeles. First of all I’m at the Imperial building in Downey so I have a nice 5 minute / 2.5 mile commute which has made a huge difference. This cuts down my time spent in the car by over an hour and fifteen minutes per day which means I get home earlier and incur less stress from the drive home. The shorter commute is also saving me about $1000 a year in gas.
I’m already plugged into a team and working on an active project so I’m feeling good about being able to contribute so quickly. Working for the county is a nice change in that I’m not working for some company whose only concern is making a buck. Here I feel like the money isn’t the only thing motivating me, there is also a sense of being able to help make a difference. A lot of the systems our group creates are used by other county departments to directly serve the public. I see this leading to higher job satisfaction and less potential for burnout.
The benefits were one of the biggest things that attracted me to the county. The private sector can only offer so much and the benefits here made up for the raw pay cut I took. The big benefits include excellent medical and dental coverage for both Sarah and me, 401k with 4% matching, paying into a pension instead of social security, and generous vacation/holiday/sick time. There is also a lot of room to move around since the county is so large and everyone is always looking for good talent.
So that’s what I’ve got going on.
Visit from Leaf Cat
Denise will probably be the only person that finds this interesting, but Leaf Cat paid Sarah and me a visit the other night. For the rest of you, Denise named the neighborhood cat “Leaf Cat” because she saw it walking around the condo complex with a leaf in its mouth. She decided she wanted to stop by, take a tour of the place, get some noggin scratching and then take off. Good times.
4 Hours
I’ll be married in about 4 hours and I have been looking forward to this day for a long time. I’m excited to start a new life with Sarah and I’m not really nervous. I’ve been getting lots of “your last days of freedom” comments and I’m slightly confused by that. Not sure if people are just joking around or if that’s how they really view marriage. I only see positive things happening by getting married.
You can probably get a good idea about someone’s attitude about marriage by analyzing how they would handle finances. Are accounts and paychecks kept separate and each partner does whatever they want with “their” money after the bills are paid? Or are the financial identities of the partners merged into one where all money earned goes into a pot and both agree on how it should be spent and saved. Financial independence in a marriage just seems strange to me.
See ya all at the wedding or stay tuned for a plethora of pictures when we get back from Hawaii.