Onaar.com
I figure its time to update this bad boy again, even though I don't have anything profound, humourous or interesting to say, nonetheless I am writing. This past week has been quite difficult to look for jobs. I have a couple contacts that could possibly get me work quickly. But the problem is I don't want to get a job quickly in case I can get a job with
Stryker. See, the interview last week I think went really well, although it was short, but I think that I made a good impression. Now right now Stryker is a place I would like to work, so I don't want to use my contacts here in BC and possibly get a job when there is still the chance that I could work for Stryker. So that leaves me with feeling like I should be looking for work, yet not wanting to incase Stryker is interested. Because of that it is difficult to look for jobs, but I am beginning to realize that I don't have to always be looking for jobs, I can enjoy my time off, especially since it is sunny. Does that communicate what I was thinking? I think so.
Since I didn't feel like looking for a job sometime earlier this week I decided it might finally be time to get my website up. So I did. If you feel like it you can view it at
onaar.com. The purpose of my website? To provide a place to put my resume and show some of my past work, even if it is not related to engineering.
I think we're being followed...
With the lack of snow on the North Shore Mountains I decided to take advantage of it and go for a hike this weekend. It turned out to be an amazing day with the sun shining and fresh snow on the mountains above an elevation of about 900m. My friend Kristin joined me and we went up Lynn Peak. It was a good hike for the beginning of the year, 700m elevation gain in 3.5 km, a nice confirmation that I am still in decent shape. The hike itself is rather unimpressive, but the 2-3cm of fresh snow near the top made it nice. An amusing part of the hike was the group of 40 or so Korean hikers at the top. After Kristin and I checked out the view we decided to go find somewhere less busy for lunch, but as we left the whole group of Koreans started following us. I noticed that we were going on a different path than the one that we came up and that the Koreans were following us so we went off the trail into this little clearing area to let the Koreans go by us, but they followed us off the trail too. Kristin was wondering if all of them were going to come of the trail into the same place we were. But, once we stopped, I think they realized that we weren't going down the mountain and stopped following us. So we ate lunch while the 40 tried to find the correct path down the hill. I was quite impressed with them, they had walkie talkies to keep track of everyone, and they all had good equipment. Anyways they found the way down the mountain after about ten minutes. So now that I wrote that it doesn't actually seem as funny as it was at the time.
The Job Search
I decided that I might as well continue to post things up here, although they may not be that interesting. It could be fun to look back on what I was thinking at the time. So here I go.
The Job Search
Yes, the job search, a project that I've been working on for the past month. Somedays it is going pretty well, and other days I feel like quitting. But what would I quit from? I don't have a job. So I keep looking. Today I am having a decent day of job searching as I found two jobs online that I am going to apply for. One is down in Oakland for some mysterious company. I hate those personnel agencies that post job openings for companies. They don't post any information about the company, just the job description. Sometimes it is so vague - "Electrical Engineer: perform majority of electrical design duties, create technical documentation, lead meetings and report to Lead Project Engineer, must have 5+ years experience in design." Do I actually want that job? What does the company do? What sort of company is it? I'm not just looking for a job, I'm looking for a company to work for. Today's mysterious company job sounds like the skills I have, and it relates to medical devices which is one of the things I want to do. The other job I found today is at a place called
Westport Innovations in Vancouver. They work with diesel engines and fuel injectors, converting them to natural gas and possibly hydrogen. It sounds pretty cutting edge which is what I want.
I went down to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to the University of Washington Career Fair.
Lockheed Martin invited me. Well not personally, but on their website they said "We want to meet you!" in their recent graduate section, and said to come to the closest career fair. So I did, and found out that I can't work for them anyway because I'm not a US citizen. You have to be a US citizen to work for any of those companies that have contracts with the US Department of Defense. The good thing about that is that I no longer have to decide if I want to work for a company that makes missiles and other sorts of things that blow people up. I couldn't decide how I felt about that, but the decision was made for me.
There were some other companies down there that interested me like
Kenworth,
Fluke and some biomedical companies. I found out yesterday that I have an interview with one of the biomed companies,
Stryker, who is in San Jose, but the interview is in Seattle. So next week I've got to go back down to Seattle. That's good news, although there are 35 other people being interviewed on the same day. So that trip down to Seattle produced some results.
Other than job searching I don't find myself really doing that much. This last weekend I went away to my friend Nick's cabin with some other guys for a manly getaway. We ate lots and lots of meat, did some walking in the woods, some caber tossing, among other manly feats. We also did some discussion on King David. I stole some pictures (Ben if you mind let me know) of Nick tossing a caber so here it is... (For those of you who don't know, a caber is a large log)
