Author: Brian J. Noggle

If you reveal these 3 things in an interview — you most likely won’t get hired, says CEO.

To sum up, the three things are:

1. ‘I want to start my own business someday”
2. you “value work-life balance.”
3. Another thing that should be kept under wraps in an interview — although it’s a common experience with many corporate workers — never say you were let go as part of your company’s recent layoffs.” [I am not sure where the quote actually begins since the paragraph ends with a quotation mark, but there’s not an open quotation mark–ed.]

You know, the first trips me up. I already own my own consultancy, and interviewers will ask if I’ll still do contract work, and I say, “Well….” And I explain how sometimes former clients and friends will ask me for a little help with something, a couple hours a week for a couple weeks, and I’ll take that, but not another full time contract. But the truth does not satisfy them as much as the lies told by people who will actually do just that.

The second doesn’t trip me up.

But I dodged the last when I quit my last full-time job. The company I worked for was absorbed into the parent company, and they let go the operations staff and management and kept the engineers. But they didn’t have any QA engineers, so they were not sure what to do with the two of us. They decided to turn us into full-stack engineers (along with the front-end engineers), but I looked at the collection of 250 engineers brought into the mothership from the other companies, and I knew that somewhere along the line, that number would be trimmed. A lot. So I was kinda given the option of being “managed out”–that is, they would give me a software engineer title (but not the pay, natch) and start the process in motion to let me go, which would have involved writing me up for not being a good software engineer and putting me on an improvement plan (whatever they do in big corporations) that I would not meet and then they would let me go. It would get me a couple extra months pay and maybe an annual bonus, but I said, nah, I have my pride. Which means I can honestly answer that I’ve not been laid off (except for my first job, but that was a headcutting for the stock market move–my manager there worked his network to get me a second job, and he convinced them to hire me even though they’d just hired the two technical writers for their open positions).

But you know what does trip me up?

I am probably too comfortable in the interviews. I overshare stories of my experience, I draw parallels and explain evolutions when they just want me to declare I have such and such experience. And I can be a little glib.

I’d like to try to improve on this, but I have not had even a screener in a while (and that one was to prove that Americans could not do the job). Still, I applied to a couple of interesting-looking jobs today, and I’ve got two active part-time contracts, and I’m making progress on my next mobile app project. So don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Jeez Louise, everyone has been slagging on that imported communist who would be mayor of New York:

One little probably spur-of-the-moment and probably impromptu TikTok video later, and suddenly everyone is Hans or Franz.

I’m not jumping on the bandwagon. Because I tend to plateau around 45. Coincidentally, that’s why I dodge the question when someone hears that I go to the gym and asks me how much I can bench. I can sleep on a bench for hours, I say.

As you might know, gentle reader, I am an intermittent weight lifter and have been a member of one gym or another for most of my adulthood.

I tend to be diligent in spurts, and then slack off, and then be diligent again for a while. Generally, I tend to get to a certain point and then rather plateau before I slack off. And I tend to plateau right around that 45. And then when I come back to the gym after a couple of months of slacking off, I have to start my way back to it.

In a bit of my defense, my workout is not geared to driving toward a big number max for one or two reps. I tend to want to do a lot of reps at whatever weight. So I can do eight or ten at 45. I have gotten back into the habit of starting reverse pyramids there and then backing off the weight by five pounds and doing eight or ten reps all the way down to the bar. Which ends up being, I dunno, a hundred or so reps total. Not 1 at a couple of plates.

I don’t tend to work with a spotter anyway, so I have to make sure I don’t work completely to the point of failure, or I’ll have to hold a bar at the failure point until some stranger rescues me (it’s only happened once, and that was enough).

Bloody hell, I don’t even calculate the max. I just pay attention to how much weight is on one side. Because that’s all I need to remember, not the calculations of what a man I really am.

This is spoken as a guy who went into the weight room in high school and could not lift the bar alone if it had the heavy screw-on collars you never see any more.

So, yeah, not doing some sort of Internet clout dance on this particular instance. And it’s a waste of time to do so.

Well, unless you have blog-inches to fill.

But the guy was not afraid to lie on the bench, knowing his limitations. How many of the ha-ha! crowd would not?

It was fifteen years ago today that I initially built the outdoor toybox which eventually became our pool toybox.

It was true; I overengineered it a lot because I fully expected toddlers to climb on it.

It was a year ago that I rebuilt it since it was rotting in a lot of places from years of water dripping on its bottom.

And…. It’s ultimately too small for proper sized floats. We’ve only had two this year: A large innertube shaped one that the oldest bought and a leaky mattress type that my beautiful wife bought for $2 on clearance at Walmart.

I’ve still gone out most days, or at least a couple of times per week. The wife likes to go out to the pool in the afternoons when she can. The boys have only been into the pool a couple of times, and one has had a couple of friends to swim once.

Our pool is an underutilized space for sure–and, as major systems have come overdue for replacement at Nogglestead coincidentally when our income is running on a lean mixture–we realized that the pool has been the only thing we’ve spent money maintaining in our time here at Nogglestead.

And the toybox? I shall probably deconstruct it sometime soon and turn it into additional record shelving or leave it in its component parts in my garage and/or shed for years.

But, briefly, it held plastic sports equipment, a giant bounce-on hopalong toy that I used more than my young children did, a plastic lawnmower, and whatnot. And then for longer it held a rotating collection of floats, including water wings and other toddler-sized floats, balls, and dive toys for longer. But nothing now.

To be honest, when I saw the Facebook memories, I thought I’d share the story of rebuilding it, but then I found I already had. Pardon the indulgence about musing about the same thing again one year later.

Wilder today posts about H1-B abuse and says:

But in some tiny newspaper in the middle of BFE, the company puts out a want ad. This ad isn’t meant to be seen by anyone nationwide, rather, its sole purpose is to be “proof” that the company looked for an American. The idea is that only their preferred Indian candidate will know about the opening and the very specific procedures and job code to apply. Then, bang, the company has proof that no qualified American exists and they can hire Poojeeta Ramdash whose uncle runs the division.

Jeez, does that explain the job posting for an SDET I saw in the Stone County Republican?

The Jack Henry world headquarters is not in Stone County; it’s in Monett, which straddles the Barry and Lawrence County line. I emailed the recruiter and never heard back. Perhaps part of the plan.

Interior decorator reveals five ‘ugly’ things you should never put in your home — and you probably have all of them

Let’s treat this as a quiz, ainna?

Bolded are the things I have:

• Televisions. We only have two: One in the upstairs living room which has not been used since 2020, when we played Karaoke Revolution on the PlayStation 2 as the kids’ music class during lockdown. We will probably remove it from the living room in the near future when I finally refinish the end tables and coffee table that I’ve been saving for a rainy day.
• A Microwave. How do you say, “I’m urban, and I go out to eat/order delivery and then discard the remnants.” in TikTokian?
• Laundry hanging to dry. We have wet towels, occasionally swimwear, and things that cannot go into the dryer hanging from convenient fixtures most of the time. Limited, I guess, by when our laundry equipment is down for one reason or another, which seemed all the time until we recently bought expensive “professional” quality things, which means “all the time” is postponed for a year or two.
• Overhead lighting. Although we don’t tend to use it all the time, we have canned lights downstairs and fans upstairs. So we’re guilty of this. I’ve only recently discovered turning on lamps to diminish the darkness in the corners of the house.
• Unused candles. We’ve got a dog candle that I bought for my sainted mother when I was eight at the Wisconsin State Fair and a scented candle my beautiful wife got as a gift somewhere in the little mirror shelf in our dining room, a pair of taper candles in holders that I inherited from my favorite aunt in the living room, and a heart candle-without-a-wick that I made for my beautiful wife as a gift when I was making candles (she does not like fire) in the bedroom. I think we have one or two others in our other knick-knack collection in the clock downstairs which I received as gift–maybe for being the best man at my brother’s first wedding? Regardless, they mean something and are personal relics. One presumes that a 35-year-old professional decorator, influencer, and TikToker is blessed to live in the eternal evanescent now. Although, to be honest, I don’t know him, but I’m not impressed with the depth of people who live on the Internet.

So a perfect five of five.

One wonders if books would come in sixth or seventh in the list, not to mention shelves of videocassettes, DVDs, record albums, or CDs on display. Or fitness equipment. Or, icky! sports team memorabilia (remember, gentle reader: You can see a Packers logo from just about any point in Nogglestead).

But I live in a house that I live in. Not one I’ve designed for Internet clout/clicks or even real-life approval by people who assess based on that sort of thing. If they don’t go to the bookshelves and see what kinds of books we have to make their determination, we don’t have them over. Which is why, I suppose, we don’t have people over. Or perhaps the ones who do come and would normally judge people by the books they have are overwhelmed at Nogglestead. I dunno. What was I saying?