Last week, my most recent former employer (The WANT ADvertiser) closed their doors. It was pretty obvious it was coming, which is why they became my former employer a month ago. And every time it happens, I think about the fact that, for new employers, checking my references is an exercise in frustration. I mean, let’s look at the list:
Bradlees - closed
Some cleaning company in New Milford - gone
Cablevision of New Milford - bought up in a series of mergers, I think it’s now part of Charter
Roy Rogers - my 3-day excursion into fast food. There’s still a few technically, but for all intents and purposes, they’re gone
Office Max - Okay, they’re still around.
Staples - The other survivor
Service Merchandise - was well into the descent when I got there. (Hint: if you fire someone for theft, don’t rehire them at Christmas. Just saying.)
Gateway Country Stores - I was part of their first layoff. Then they closed the stores and got bought up by Acer.
And now The WANT AD. That was the closest - it was barely a month from when I left until they packed it up. I won’t go into my thoughts on what happened but suffice it to say, it could have been avoided.
A few links to other people’s thoughts on their closing:
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This is a pretty interesting concept.
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.. and if we’re posting about that, this probably needs to show up too…
So, after some tinkering, I ended up not using the theme I had mentioned last time. I decided I really liked the idea of a three-column layout. I found one called Munch 1.0. A change of the header image (the new one came from www.stockvault.net), a few tweaks to the code (moving the menu down so it fits the image better, and disabling the mouseover titles) and I think it looks much better. There’s still more small tweaks but the bulk of the work is done…. which means that the blog pages are now the default for the site.
Can’t find something? Let me know.
I finally found a WordPress theme I liked enough to base the site on - missunderstood 0.91. There will probably be some more tweaks to the pages here within the blog before I make the blog homepage into the site homepage. I’m working on reconstructing the navigation pages into the blog as well (see the ‘exit guides‘ page for an example) and will probably use this style sheet site-wide eventually.
I’ve also stolen another page from Kurumi and am creating town pages for the Mass Route Log. I started with Worcester. Not much to it yet, but it’s the sort of thing I can do here and there.
Finally got around to getting the road photos back up… via flickr.
Two ways to get to them - road photos or the individual MA roads pages. (I won’t bother listing all the individual roadp ages - there’s about 30 or so and to be honest, I’m lazy like that.)
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