Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

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Mistakes were made

I broke all the rules. I ignored the same advice I gave my clients. “For success, have a niche and stay on topic. If you are going to have a YouTube channel, publish on a schedule and stay on topic.” I have done the opposite. The Internet is my playground and I’ve treated it like a toy instead of a marketing tool. My YouTube is adhoc and experimental. Recently, I’ve been playing with black and white videos as a stylized character. What I really should be doing is putting up videos discussing programming, coding lessons, and helpful hints like how to be more efficient using Visual Studio Code.

The biggest mistake I made was not treating myself as a client. For the past two decades, I have put so much hustle into my employers’ work that I left no time for my own projects. All of my websites are down or extremely dated. My LinkedIn profile has shortcomings. I have not maintained a CRM to manage my relationships nor have I stayed in touch with the people who could help me find my ideal job. My Twitter feed has too much politics on it for job searching. Let’s not even talk about TikTok or Instagram. And of course, this blog is blog is all over the place and currently using the default StoreFront theme which probably isn’t even configured correctly.

Tomorrow I have the unique honor of going on a podcast of a person I respect and I’ll have opportunity to promote my social media and websites. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the time to clean up the social media and websites. But I’ll make an effort.

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Today I learned about the Fedex Label Evaluation process

To get Fedex working with PluginHive’s WooCommerce Shipping Services I divided the day between working with my client to confirm settings in WooCommerce and WSS, time in emails with PluginHive technical support (they are excellent), and a very lengthy phone call with a very helpful person at Fedex technical support. What I learned was that none of this will work until you submit two paper forms to Fedex and wait two days. Oh, and there could be a difference between the billing address Fedex shows in your profile and what the Revenue Department has on file.

So you want to be a programmer? Some days there is no code and all navigating bureaucracy to get to the one person who knows the correct checkbox to check.

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The job search continues

I keep polishing the resume like an artist who cannot find the final brush stroke.

It’s interesting to look at the array of jobs openings, see some of the specifics, know you can do the job, and then figure out how to market yourself to the position. It’s almost like I want to update my resume to say that I’m currently employed as a full-time marketeer. A marketeer of me.

I find myself torn between the things I could or should be doing. For instance, do I take a few days to turn dougmccaughan.com into a marketing site? Do I use that same time to build a Vuejs app to demostrate skills in Vue? Or learn SharePoint migrations? Or go to meetups and work on social networking?

I’m reading “What Color Is Your Parachute?” and one sentence that struck me is “You are always looking for a new job.” I knew that. But I didn’t have time for that when I was working. Funny enough, now that I am not working, it feels like I don’t have time for it. Because looking for a job is a full-time job. So, it you are gainfully employed, polish that resume, update LinkedIn, and keep your people network current.