GrantB.net

Topics may include programming, classic console games, comic books, kung fu flicks, spaghetti westerns, or giant cartoon robots.
Grant Birchmeier is from West Michigan but currently lives in Chicagoland.

The National Unemployment Rate Is About To Go Up

Last week, Motorola announced their latest round of layoffs, and I turned out to be an unwitting participant. If you take a look at the market, Motorola's share price has dropped $3 since the news of my layoff broke; the long-term effects of my layoff on the company are still hazy. No doubt Motorola will feel the effects of my absence for months (perhaps years) to come.

I was already starting to look around, and expected to leave (or at least switch departments) within the next 6-12 months. Frankly, I was getting a little bored by the work which was not often that satisfying. Embedded software is just not all that exciting. For my next trick, I'd like to move into applications (or at least something object-oriented). If you know of anything cool in downtown Chicago or the north suburbs, I'm all ears.

But if you're gonna leave a job, being laid off is definitely the way to go. Sure, it sucks when you're first notified, but since I was already looking to leave, I got over it quickly. The severance is pretty good, and I'm enjoying the free time.

(A special shout-out to my DVD player, which decided to break a few days ago. I finally have all the time in the world to watch the DVDs I've acquired in the past few months, and then you crap out. Have fun in the dumpster, asshole.)

In other news, didn't that black-on-green color scheme from the last update suck? I was going for kind of an old-school green-screen computer terminal look, but I sure failed. This black/white/blue scheme I just hacked up looks surprisingly good, though.

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2007-11-29 11:19am Late to the Social Networking Party

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2007-09-23 10:51pm A Long Overdue Mini-Facelift
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