State of Flux

For a few months now I’ve been hovering around the idea of buying a new replacement tablet for my old Wacom that died a while back. I’ve lamented, I’ve hemmed and hawed, and numerous times I’ve had to stop myself from breaking down and buying the Cintiq 12WX (which clocks in right at a grand). After much discussion with The Accountant, I was given the ultimatum that I could buy it so long as I fulfilled the following points:

Find a better job that I will enjoy (and by extension, not be an insufferable grouch all the time)
Find a job with a better salary.

While I’m sure that sounds somewhat mercenary, in point of fact it was a necessary law to lay down. I haven’t been what one would describe as happy with my current employer. In fact, it has been driving me to near distraction for the last six months (as my ulcer will attest to).

Starting over can be a bitch, especially when you hate it as much as I do. However, I temper my dislike by knowing that this had to happen. There isn’t much chance of me continuing where am now for the long haul. It’s not that I dislike the company (although there are a couple of small points that irk me), it’s just that the work is not what it was supposed to be. When I started here, it was to work on a new project doing web development using Java and JSF. That project, however, got canned a couple of months ago. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of work with Java Swing, which is the client-side GUI library for Java.

Yeah, apples and oranges folks…

I can do Swing, that’s not a problem. However, when you factor in that I consider myself a web developer first and foremost, and it becomes a problem. The now defunct project has had no word whether or not it will ever resume or be replaced and the road ahead did not lead to place I wanted to go. When faced with that scenario, there is really no other option.

Well, I am happy to say that I have found another job, after quite some time of fretting. I am going where there are two people from two different companies that I have worked with before (one a peer, the other a manager). From what I understand they have a general good impression of me (at least I hope they do, ignorance is kinda nice that way). The job itself gets me back to what I am good at, what I have spent the better part of the last 7 years doing plus a little bit more. Am I excited? Yup. Am I a bit scared? You Betcha. And the salary?

Lets just say that it’s good, and leave it at that.

So the long story to short is that I’m finally moving on to a new job. My stress-o-meter is adjusting to a different kind of stress, the kind that I generally think of has healthy. And, I will finally be able to pursue several art projects that I had shelved a long time ago, being dependent on a good functional tablet.

Oh that? It arrived last Saturday…