KaiSchaller.com

My first day of work at Paradigm New Media Group (hereafter referred to as PNMG) is behind me, and I’m very happy to say that it’s everything I wanted it to be. An open, creative, fun work environment with friendly, entertaining and like-minded people makes a world of difference.

Also, I have a new theory: you can tell a lot about a company by how they name their servers. Examples:

• Truman State University names their servers after elements and precious metals (hydrogen, silver, etc.)
• My previous, cubicle-rich employer picked seemingly arbitrary letter and number combinations (QXL87, etc.)
• PNMG uses comic book characters.

You tell me who you’d rather work for.

A quick update:

I’ve accepted a web developer position with a company in St. Louis and will start working there in the new year. This also means I need to brush up on my ASP, since they’re running IIS and the like.

Finals week is upon us and I find myself with little desire to labor through it. But alas, I must. Thank goodness it’s over soon.

I sometimes find it hard to focus on one certain area of technology because I constantly find myself wanting to do everything. Even though my true passion has again and again proved to be web development, I can’t help but want to try my hand at various other facets of modern creation. For example, I dabbled quite a bit in 3D modeling and animation throughout my high school and early college years. These days I want to write software for OS X (it’s just so pretty!).

On the one hand I like that I’m exploring several different skillsets, but at the same time I worry that by not focusing entirely on one thing I’m falling into the trap that the saying “Jack-of-all-trades, master of none” warns us about. The trick here might be finding a way to combine these interests under the same roof of “web development”. I’ve used the 3D know-how in web projects before, and being able to write desktop applications would surely come in handy for certain web-related uses. Guess we’ll see how things turn out — everything should become much clearer once I find a career that has me working in a certain area.

I finally booked my trip to San Francisco yesterday. I’ll be there between Saturday, August 11 and Wednesday, August 15. Hotwire came up with a great deal: roundtrip airfare (United/Frontier) and 4 nights in a 4-star hotel (Hyatt) for a mere $450.00! Not too shabby at all. I’ve never been out to California, but the purpose of this trip is to see if it’s somewhere I would like to live and work after I’m done with school in December. Lord knows there isn’t a shortage of web-related jobs in that city!

Jill and I went to a Royals game with my mom on Saturday. It was a great game, with the Royals winning by a run in the bottom of the 9th inning. Got myself a lovely green ball cap while I was at the stadium.

In freelance news: I’m continuing work on a large project that may or may not still interest the customer that requested it. I figure if he still wants it, great; if not, it’ll still be a good site for my portfolio since everything is being built from scratch. More details later, perhaps.

I’ve started re-reading all of my Terry Pratchett books. I’ve accumulated so many that I’ve forgotten most of the stories. It’s like having new books all over again! A picture of most of the collection: http://flickr.com/photos/kschaller/759053096/.

Bye for now.

Here’s the way I want things to work out over the course of the next year and a half: I’m going to take a 5 hour chemistry class over the summer in order to be able to fulfill all additional graduation requirements during the fall semester. This means I’ll have my BS in computer science in December and be done with school for the time-being. After that I will take some time to visit my family in Germany — I haven’t seen them in a couple of years and would like to before I dive into my career. All of this time I’ll be working on my portfolio (for web work) so that I can find a decent (and fun; fun is very important) job in the San Francisco Bay area. This means improving and fine-tuning the XHTML and CSS knowledge I already have, but also getting a much better feel for design.

I think one of the biggest challenges will be getting the ideas in my head to be accurately converted into a PSD; there’s always been something lost in the translation because I “build” them differently depending on if I’m thinking about a design or actually trying to create it with Photoshop.

While I have a very heavy course-load this semester I’m still finding the time to do whatever I can in my free time. Currently I’m reading CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, which is an incredible book. So far it seems to be the most practical CSS book I’ve ever read, maybe I’ll be able to give a full review of it once I finish.

That’s it for now, I’ll keep you updated.