Curri...cu...lum... what ? [Part 2]

Howdy all.

I'll just have a quick look where I was and where I'll continue on for a little while in this post as part two of the riveting (typo no.. you get the idea, these will now follow as the signal [t] for ease of read).

Right, back up to speed.. job search centre, free inet and the likes. It just so happened that neither ourselves of the housemates doing security for a living since ( I think it's been May last year or something) knew about the inet-enabled job search centre about 200 metres from the front door. Luckily the landlord ( on his return to London after going to SA to view the house his wife bought) told me about it, because he was now living next door and the au pair always went to the job centre to check her emails. Great news. ( No really, this was some welcome relief from doing about 12 - 16 pounds per trip [ that's 2 ppl, travel and 4 hrs of inet time in an inet cafe in Oxford (cheapest) ] ).

Would have saved loads if we knew that.. even more if the house was online when we got here..

Anyhoo. So we walked down to the job centre one morning, walk up to the dude there and ask what we need to do / pay to use the facilities... "Ah no mate, no worries, just fill in this form and then sign your name in the log book for firedrill purposes, and there you go.. next time you just sign in and sit down and surf, telephone and faxing services for free as well sir."

Nice dude, bet it helped that they were offering everything for free, but he's a nice enough dude as it is as well :). So there we go.. I started searching.. for both myself and Grieks (blog here,and ya that's what I look like under water, and yes I did the superman stunt thing, I blame Benz.. those who dive, you know what I'm talking about).

The IT market has experienced a bit of a boom lately here, even though some papers say it hasn't. Evidance on the web was at first staggering. Little background if I may : Go to something like ITselect.co.za in SA, type in Web developer, and try and find someone that's looking for anyone other than either PHP (which I don't do yet, cause I don't make time to learn it) or ASP.NET.. there's maybe one or two J2EE stuff, but that's it.. nothing about classic ASP without ASP.NET ( which to my dismay is where I'm at this very minute in my life.. sad I know.. true though), for that matter, try and find more than 10 - 20 jobs in web dev.. righto.. now... little bit of a scope thing here.. go to cwjobs.co.uk and punch in the words Web developer in there.. and select all jobs.. and wait for it.. a whopping amount of posts..loads..

What was naive Zodan thinking when he saw the job count ? .... come on, some of you people actually know this vain boet from Brackenfell.. yup, that's it.. I was thinking this was going to be a cruise mate.. ( I can see Oct sniggering.. piss off :) He knows I love him and I say that in the most affectionate tone imaginable ( just for the sensitive at heart).

The thing that I did not know, and only got to learn last week, through 2 different sources was that there are perhaps 1 in every 1000 recruitment agents that read your CV in this country... 99.9 % of them import your cv directly into a recruitment database and do what.. a word count match between the client's spec list and the whole database, then selecting the top 10 of the cv's that jump up, phone those guys up, ask if they are available and then select 3 CV's to send to the client.

Rest of the world 1, Zodan 0.

It was about to get some mighty more interesting, cause then during the week of being at the job centre we organised that the broadband got hooked up here and was running.. this happened on a Friday.. uhm... interesting. So after making sure everything is stable on the broadband, by doing load testing for some 9 hours overnight ( so what's a few episodes of cars driving around :) I was behind on the series anyway :).

I set off on the Saturday evening on the mission of all mission with my choc chip cookies next to me on the bed to start applying for as many web dev asp jobs I could find. And I found a few.. I think I have about 40 - 50 confirmation of application emails in my inbox.

The call back ratio on Monday.. well atleast it wasn't nothing.. I got two guys phoning me back, one even from a direct company in Soho who wanted me to come in for a SQL test interview. (will get back to that later, other post by the looks of time, and boredom on the nation's eyes from reading all the pages and pages of posting.)

Blimey, my posts seem to be fairly.. long. Think I'll kill this one and move along to tomorrow, before people are kept out of work for to long reading things while suppose to be working :)

[Part 3 to be in the post soon, promise I'll try and get some pics in there somewhere]

Curri...cu...lum... what ?

Man I didn't think this through properly. And that's just the honest truth.

Honesty is the best policy so here goes.

You remember how in English Second Language ( those of my buddies who didn't do the honourable thing and had 1st language : you suck) you had to do those Creative Writing assignments which involved creating a CV and covering letter for the dream job you just spotted in the newspaper. Ironically enough our example in highschool was of a reporter.. figures.

Anyways. Wondering how I can phrase this.. I was always told that I was gifted at school ( by the teachers, bah.. what they know.. they just mark your papers), but somehow I think I spread my "gifts" to thing on doing a lot of different things.. and on the honesty side again : I wouldn't change a thing, I had a blast, especially in final year.

This did however mean that Zodan wasn't what you'd call an A student.. not a bad B one at times, but not the par excellance (as my typos show).

So when I had to go to my 1st job interview (ever) in Jun 2003, I had a fairly basic CV which did the basic thing of highlighting some (completely irrelevant) "achievements" from school and stating that it took me a little longer than what it should to get a 3 year degree.. a B.Sc for that matter, which isn't something to sneeze about.

The fact that the interview was being organised by someone that had met me some 2 years before and had found out that I can (apparently) do some ASP coding had nothing to do with it, I got into that interview completely on my CV (uncross my fingers at this point).

The fact that they company being mentioned (Flatspin) was in dire need of another developer to fill the needs of a very lucritive client, and that I have a cunning nack in making people think that they need the few skills I have to survive in the IT industry, yet again has nothing to do with the fact that I worked for them for the subsquent 2 and a half years. Honest.. nothing (uncross legs at this moment).

Oh before I forget, give credit where credit is due : Oct thanx for the initial CV template mate, couldn't have gotten anything down on e-paper without that one, and it looks classy too :)

And so we continue, [yup I talk a lot, ask Oct and Micon, and especially anyone that's played the boardgame Risk with us, verbal diarrhea], I digress.

So back to the present,or rather, not just yet. Over the months of December 2005 and Jan 2006 I had the time to update and change my CV, scope out what was available online in the line of jobs for ASP (classic, 3.0, not .NET) blokes like myself, with a little (enough to be very very dangerous... DELETE comes to mind) SQL experience, some DTS (again.. wonderful the things that happen @ 2:00 am in the morning when you are working from home on the launch date of a HUGE database driven website and you've missed a tick on that list of tickboxes before clicking continue.. uh hu.. I can see Oct feeling the enema (typo no.. million and counting ), very little PHP (no seriously, very very litte.. I know the open tag starts with
Lost my train of thought.. right. But being that I was on "holiday"the CV updating only really started getting into swing in about the last week of being in SA. That time when everyone else around you is going "Did I leave the gas on ? No, I'm a squarrel..." and is running around organising everything regarding clothes and the likes for the big trip to another country. So time for CV updating was, spent on something else.. most of the time.. and then there's Discovery channel on DSTV.. and and and... you catch the drift.

Don't get me wrong. I did do some work on my CV, but when I got here that all changed.

Run back almost a month now : We land in the UK, cold, tired and annoyed at the food.. (yup, we flew cattle bunk style, although with Virgin, which I heard was better than most.. especially Air Namibia ? )... and not in the mood for anything else but to put my luggage in a cupboard and put my head on a pillow, after a decent shower though as well.

We had landed with the impression that the house we were going to pay rent to live in was already online and that the cost of that would be covered by our rent, only to arrive here and find out that both the broadband and phone line had been cancelled because the owner closed the accounts before going over to SA... uhm.. strike 1.

After about 2 weeks of hassle, and finding a provider that does unlimited downloading (it's important, if you can get it why not.. and still only pay 14.99 pounds per month) we finally got online here @ home. Before that... yup, Inet cafés. If you ever come to the UK and you are here to try and find a job.. your first Inet cafe visit should be to do only a few small things.. email/sms your parents (or whoever you deem NB in your life) that you are ok and living the high life...second.. use the web to find a jobsearh centre near you (this all being if you don't have inet at home in the 1st place, but being that you are in an inet cafe that negates the above fact.. that verbal d word coming to mind again.. yup, same here).

Jobsearch centre : Free inet, free phone calls to companies to organise interview and free faxing, and in our case.. just 200 metres away from the house.. literally. I can pull up a Google Earth pic, but it's going to be to much hassle now.

Looking at the time I think it best that I get down and dirty at finishing the CV now, I need to have it working for me in about.. oh.. 7 hrs time ( and that includes me beauty sleep, which should be like 9 hrs in the UK).

L8r
[Z]

Overdue... by a long shot...

Well.. the previous post was... uhmm.. ya.. guilty as charged your honour (the 24th of Sept) when I created the blog. So, as in the words of the G-unit,Micon and Octavo.. I suck. I could put down a load of reasons why the blog has no more than ( after this one) 2 posts, and they would all be justifying (think the word exists) the aforementioned fact, but that's going to take away from the huge amount of info that'll be coming through in some bitesize posts over (hopefully, terms and conditions apply - private joke with Craig) the next few days and hopefully after that weeks to come.

So where to start.. uhmm.. righto.. Sept, can't even think back that far.. I know that after the 24th Grieks' dad sent his old 4x4 Isuzu down to Cape Town so that we had some transport after one of our housemates lost his car on his b-day in Obs (stolen).

Being completely green when it comes to car maintanace and handling all the other side ( I'm use to : get in the car, turn the key, maybe check the fuel gagde, and let rip) of the whole "owning" a car, the whole idea being able to use someone else's bakkie to drive around was a bit of a blessing and a curse.

Blessing : Independance, being able to take Grieks to campus when she needed it, and testing the boundaries of Flatspin's flexitime and flexiwork guidelines :) Other than that things like going to Sinful (Camps bay ice cream place, if you are anywhere in that area, ask the locals, believe me.. well worth it, and they're open until late at night in the middle of the week as well) when the mood hit either me or Grieks, especially when the world of work and varsity just got that little to much. And all the other things like being able to drive to Kleinbaai for a weekend with buddies, which only really happened once.. still feel bad about taking Cledan though, sorry Sherry.

It also made it possible to haul stuff around, for me to go drop in on Octavo being able to sit down have a glass of wine while we were trying to figure something out for a little on-the-side business idea, and go pick up Grieks' brother from Saldanha for things like training in CT for a week and getting him to the airport for those great things called home visits :)

The curse part of it : Well, as I mentioned, I'm not the mechanic in the family.. that I left mostly to my dad and brother. Don't get me wrong, I was/am one of those kids that took and still take everything apart when I can ( I don't really listen to the proverb : it aint broke, don't fix it), but I used to have the full compliment of 7 screws left after taking apart the expensive wrist watch my dad got me and my brother when I was 7, and then trying to put it together again... the result, a fairly warm butt afterwards, and the wrist watch became spare parts.

So, back to the bakkie. I have another built in thing that probably comes from my dad's side of the family. I really like being able to give something back in a better condition than I got it. And being that Grieks' dad is my to-be-father-in-law ( unofficially, but somewhere we'll make it official :) ), I was out to try and make a good impression.

In defense of my in-laws-to-be : They are a great bunch of wacky people, who I enjoy every moment spending with, especially on diving trips to either Sodwana or Mozambique (which has happened a few times now.. but more about that later), and they've lovingly taken me in as part of the family.. no, not the "ag shame there's a little doggy on the roadside" kind of take in, these people have given me another family away from home in Cape Town, and I love them all to pieces. They expect nothing from me, and keep giving towards me and Grieks in abundance. I owe them a huge debt, which I'm hopefully making a bit of a dent in by trying my best to look out for their eldest...

Enough about that now.... quick look at the post length, thinking it might be time to sign this one off and then start a new one.. why ? So you can go get some coffee and take a break from reading to much on the web, come back and get some more info, cause there's going to be loads, and I suspect only the die-hards will be reading all of it.

That Late idea sounding like a good plan right about now.

L8r