What to do.

I'm supposed to be looking for job, but I've been looking for a year and a half and I haven't found one yet. Makes me think I'm not going to find a job, at least not by looking the way I have been.

I'm a pretty smart guy. Actually, I'm a very smart person, and I think that may be part of the problem. Most of the jobs I have been looking at are something I could do without trying too hard. They are just "grist for the mill", as I been telling prospective employers. You have some computer programming work to be done, let me at it, I will feed it to my brain, grind it up and generate a program that will do the job. I suspect that is not what they want.

There is a crew of guys armed with gas powered weedeaters in the swamp behind my house and they are making a heck of a racket. Makes it a little hard to concentrate, but I will try. I think they are part of the blackberry eradication effort, but they seem to spend all their time cutting grass. I have faith that whoever is charge of this project knows what they are doing. This weedeater crew was here one day last week, and a couple of days last spring. It just goes on and on and on.

I have been thinking that perhaps I should be looking for a management job. Most of the managers I have worked for in my career have been grossly incompetent. I have no doubt I could do a better job than any of them.

I have been working in this business long enough that I know what goes into producing computer software, so I have no doubt I could certainly do the job, and probably do it better than most. However, I have no actual experience in this area, so simply looking for a management job is not going to work. I would have to charm my way into such a position, and if I happened across the right person at the right time, this could happen. This would require endless hobnobbing with people in the business, and I could do that if I thought it would really pay off.

But is that what I really want to do? I could do it, and do it well, but would that be the best use of my talents? And just what are my talents? What would be a good use of my talents?

I get ideas, lots of good ideas on how things could be done. Some ideas are for completely new things, some are simply improvements on existing things. But like the old saw says "ideas are a dime a dozen". It takes a lot of work to turn an idea into something real. That may be the root of my attraction to software. Computers give you such a leg up on getting things done. They allow us to do things that a few years ago were inconceivable.

Right now I have a few abstract projects to work on:

• getting the sound on my Linux box to work
• getting the Linux screen resolution control to work properly
• my spiral periodic table
• my low distortion world map
• work on my gears program that would enable me to:

1. work out the gears for my toy clock
2. work out the gearing for my three speed bicycle crankset

• getting my online presence sorted out, including:

1. webpage for my job search
2. online photo storage for family
3. podcasts for lunch bunch

Maybe I should look for a job as a teacher at a college or university. Or maybe I should give up the job search entirely and just retire.