Friday, October 31, 2008

a minor self-censorship

I do mostly Internet based programming for a living. Some Windows console stuff, but mostly web pages and Internet based programming. At least, I was until about a month ago--when I got laid off from my last job. Or had the contract terminated (it was a contractor job). Or however you want to put it. Probably since the economy is a bit slow, new opportunities for employment have been few and far between.

Anyway, enough whining. I decided it would be good for both my moral and skill set to learn PHP and MySql and set up a website that I can show to show potential employers. Though I do mostly C# and .Net on the job, these are just too expensive for me to do on my own. Anyway, if you can program with one language, you can pick up others. It's the general programming skill that counts most.

I am also doing it so that I can show off some of my writing skills by blogging. Yes, I have this blog, but there is a problem. There are a few things on this blog that could irritate, isolate, and offend potential employers. That is, I write a lot about atheism. It's just better to leave the opinions about religion out of the job interview. It sucks, but I guess that's the way it is for now. For this reason I am not going to link to this blog from my 'professional' web site, nor will I link to there from here.

I even wonder a bit about the potential fallout of the recent article in the Courier-Journal about atheists that mentions me by name (Mikayla Starstuff is a pseudonym of course.) A Google search on my name brings that article up, often as the top result. I just can't help but wonder what the effects of that could be on my life--things that I will never know about for sure.

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