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:
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.
If you tried to access anything here over the past few weeks, you might have noticed some problems.
The quick version? I contemplated not renewing my webhosting. Nothing against the new host (OCS Solutions); they’ve been great. But I just wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the money considering how little I’ve actually done with the site.
Then I changed my mind. Even if I’m not updating as much as I want/should, I still enjoy having the space to mess around with. I am, however, outsourcing stuff that’s done better elsewhere. The road pictures are probably going to flickr. All mail handling is through Google Apps. Other stuff will go where it goes.
I expect I’ll try my hand at another redesign of the home page. There’s plenty of software I can use to make some changes here.
Of course, after I start talking about my switch, the folks at Lifehacker go ahead and do it better. They’re covering some different ground, though - I’m just sharing what I found that interests me. (And they write better, too.)
Another pair of programs that I really love are Entourage and Growl. Entourage is the Outlook replacement within Office 2004. For the most part, it covers the same functions - and since I lived in Outlook at work, I needed it to keep things moving there. However, what sold me on it was the Project Center. It allows me to keep everything - calendar, contacts, notes and emails - in one view for each project… while still keeping things in their “normal” locations.
Growl is another stop on the tour here. It’s neat because every application tries to let you know something is happening in a different way - a pop-up here, a bouncing icon there, some use sound and some don’t. Growl can be used to corral these notifications so that all applications (at least, all that are aware of it) use the same method.
As I keep playing and working, I’ll keep updating as to what else I’ve found that’s made my switch easier,
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