WDI

For the first time in nearly seven years, I am now unemployed. Yesterday, along with several other people, I was laid off from my job at The Omni Group, and I’m now looking for new work. UPDATE: Here is a link to my resume PDF and my complete CV.

First of all, thank you to all of my friends and colleagues at Omni for being one of the best groups of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. I’ll be forever grateful that taking a job at Omni is what got me out to the West Coast, and to the lovely city of Seattle. I learned a lot there, and they believed in my abilities enough to give me some truly interesting challenges, including some professional development that was rather tangential to my scope of video production, in the interest of seeing it enrich my work in unexpected ways.

I won’t go into what happened at Omni in much detail (if you’re interested, my fellow layoff-ee Brent Simmons has more to say about that on his blog). Suffice it to say that with a spouse who is an essential employee at a bakery, I never suspected that an economic cascade leading to this layoff would be the way that the COVID-19 pandemic affected our family. Omni are doing everything they can to make this necessity a little less harsh, and I’m certain they never would have laid people off if it weren’t truly necessary for the company’s survival. I wish them the best, and hope that they come out of this stronger than ever.

But still, I am out of work. Do you have work? Hire me!

People probably know me best for my video production work — please see the output of my last seven years in The Omni Group’s video archives — but I have also done a lot of related development work, and would love to push my career in that direction. Here’s a quick list of some relevant skills:

• My biggest area of experience: video production, post, editing, and motion graphics. 24 years and counting.
• I’ve produced two long-running podcasts, The Optical, which I also host, and The Omni Show.
• For the last 13 or so years, I’ve been working on my programming skillset.
  • I write scripts to automate my video production workflows in Python and JavaScript/ExtendScript
  • I’ve built websites with a Django back end, and I have a working knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and REST APIs
  • Just about a month ago, I took a Swift + iOS Development Bootcamp at Big Nerd Ranch, so I’m continuing to refresh my skills
  • I developed and published an app guide to Star Trek for the iPhone, for The Post Atomic Horror Podcast (no longer in the App Store)
  • I was a founding member of NSCoderNightDC, collaboratively learning Objective-C, Mac, and iOS development, and am a member of Xcoders in Seattle, keeping in touch with the local community of Mac and iOS developers
  • I’m currently in the process of learning Unity and C#, so that I can build a virtual map of Scarecrow Video, the largest publicly-accessible film archive in the world, where I volunteer on a regular basis. I suppose Unity is useful for other things too.
  • For my own themed tiki bar space, I’ve become very familiar with Raspberry Pi and Arduino programming, to control lights, smoke, and (in progress) animatronics for an immersive themed experience.