Sitting in a Tree

The more astute among you may have noticed someone named Karen has been popping up with increasing frequency on this site, culminating with her post. (I had urged her to post and she finally took me up on it.) You may also have noticed that some time back I modified the about us page to reflect the fact that I was in a committed relationship. Being the sneaky sort that I am, I didn't say with who.

Well, now I am. In fact, my girlfriend Karen and I have decided we make so much sense together we should get married. Since we are both geeks, we have a wedding web site [Link removed 12/21/2004] all about it. Since it was Karen who built it, it's a postnuke site. My Best Man and good friend Monte, also a frequent Zen Haiku commenter, has been an enthusiastic contributer.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Friday, October 3, 2003 (Link)

(See entry on its own, including comments)

Feeling laid off back

So Thursday of last week, the 26th of September, I saw my boss and her boss in what looked like a serious talk (door shut, faces serious) with a co-worker. About 20 minutes later, as I was working, they came in and as soon as I heard "reorganizing", I thought, I wasn't paranoid Tuesday when another co-worker out of the blue said he needed to be the backup on a site I'd been the HTML/CSS guy on.

Sure enough, they were laying me and the other web guy off. They said they couldn't make money on this whole web design thing and wanted to focus more on backend stuff. This being the third quarter they were supposed to be profitable by of course is completely irrelevant.

Anyone who's been reading Zen Haiku for a time may have seen posts that made me seem burned out. So now I'm feeling primarily anger and a sense of freedom.

So if anyone out there wants to hire a guy who really knows his usability (my Usability applied to life column is sufficiently amusing that Jakob Nielsen linked to it from his Ten Usability Heuristics page), HTML, CSS ( Owen first-child hack anyone?), Javascript (use location.replace() to avoid 0 second bounces!) , HTTP (I've done multiple GETs by hand to track down miscreant ad servers) and been on the Internet since 1991, take a gander at my resume.

The fact that I posted about my cable modem on the 27th, the day after I was laid off, says something. I plan to focus on usability as in the past. I am not going to turn Zen Haiku into a job search blog. Nor am I going to put the name of former employer in my blog proper: anyone who cares can look at my resume.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Monday, September 30, 2002 (Link)

(See entry on its own, including comments)