Once a legitimate blog. Now just a collection of memes 'n menz.
…roll it up, and beat several well known bloggers over the head with it.
But then, I am a Grammar Nazi.
I can't tell you how many times I've argued with fellow bloggers (one of whom in particular—and no, not my Bubba) who say, "People know what I mean." Yeah, maybe so, but it makes you look uneducated, and therefore anything you've written not worthy of being taken seriously.
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My feeds don't seem to be updating consistently, so those of you who read Voenix Rising through some kind of RSS reader (Google Reader, Reeder, etc.) are probably missing some posts. Apologies to anyone affected, but at this point I'm not even going to try and troubleshoot it because I do enough of that crap at work and I don't want to mess with it at home too.
…if Voenix Rising goes dark for a few days. The monthly payment for my hosting account is overdue and I do not get my first full paycheck for another week. This ought to be interesting…
While it is true that I've been wanting to refresh this blog for several months, it's not entirely true that it was done just because we're moving to Colorado. It's because I did something very stupid (proving I am not immune). I sent off emails to a couple headhunters I'd been working with in Denver that had a link to this blog embedded in the signature line.
Oh shit.
While I'm not ashamed of anything I've posted here over the years, much of it was definitely NSFW and considering the amount of ranting I've done about work lately it probably wouldn't make the best impression on someone trying to present me as a potential employee to one of their clients.
That led to the knee-jerk reaction of blasting away all my previous posts.
But as we all know, anything posted on the internet lives forever. And anyone with the slightest bit of curiosity and know-how can find it. Some rather snarky comments I left on a discussion board nearly a decade ago about people stealing images for use in their eBay postings from a long-gone hi-fi website I used to run are still available just by Googling my name. Scary.
This made me realize that—for better or worse—Voenix Rising has become my brand and merely deleting a few years worth of blog posts is not going erase my presence from cyberspace. Not even close to it.
And you know, that's okay.
If someone doesn't want to represent me to a prospective employer because of my sexual orientation, political views, or the fact that I (like every other working person on the planet) occasionally bitch about my job, it's better to know it up front. Because for every headhunter out there who takes issue with these things, there will be another who will not.
I am reminded of an interview I had about a dozen years ago with a placement firm in Palo Alto for a position the company had been having trouble filling. The headhunter really liked me and thought with my experience I'd be a great fit, but she had an issue with my pierced ear. She said that the company she wanted to send me to was extremely conservative and I would be advised to remove the stud before the interview. I looked at her and said, "Seriously? This is 1997, the Bay Area and you're asking me to take out an earring? If they're that uptight, why would I want to work there?"
Honesty—something decidedly lacking in public discourse these days—is always best.
And the blog really did need to be cleaned out…
In honor of our impending move to Denver, I thought it might be a good time to wipe everything away and start fresh.
I may also be taking the blog in a different…direction. Stay tuned.