Screaming into the void...

Some days, it really feels like I'm just screaming into the void, and not getting anywhere on the professional front. I've been spending upwards of six hours a day tuning resumes and sending them out to employers, and thus far the callback rate has been .02. 50 resumes sent out: one callback. This just sucks. Today, I found a vaguely secret weapon, a list of Seattle-based start-ups, along with a calendar of when and where they hold their meet-ups, so maybe I'll go check those out and see what gives.

On the other hand, remember that little Wordpress customization job I did awhile back? I got paid for it, and like a good little drone reported my earnings to my unemployment insurance officer.

Today I get this letter from the unemployment insurance security enforcement office, with this incredibly threatening note at the top that if I'm now "self employed" and earning income as well as drawing unemployment insurance I'm committing FRAUD and could be subject to FINE OR IMPRISONMENT, and that I had better EXPLAIN that income report and how I could be earning money when I'm supposed to be LOOKING FOR WORK. (Yes, all of these words and phrases were capitalized in the original.)

I called and the nice woman at the other side said they had this come up "a lot," especially recently, and they understood that people were doing odd jobs, and yes, I was doing the right thing by reporting it, and that if I get an offer to do something like that again I should probably take it, as long as everyone understands that they're little patch assignments and I will drop it like a hot rock when the first full-time offer comes along.

So I won't get screwed. I hope.

Hey, look, my last client has gone live!

Oh, but there is good news. That little side job? They've gone live. See that menu on the left? That's what I did for them. This is a marketing site they have for their co-op. The old menu looked nothing like the one on their main website. Their main website was done in Dreamweaver. The co-op is in Wordpress. My job was two-fold: port the menu on the main site's "look and feel" to the co-op pages. That was easy. The co-op's menu, however, is a list of Wordpress categories, and (here was the doozy) they wanted the menu to show Wordpress Pages associated with a category, and they wanted that menu item highlighted when you were on that page.

Wordpress knows not of what you speak. Pages aren't categorized; that's for Posts.

But it was possible, with a bit of a SQL magic and a dig deep inside the Wordpress "Category Walker" class. And now I am much smarter about how Wordpress works internally.