The sleeping in the back of the truck incident

There has been a massive cry (two comments) from the masses (probably ten people) to elaborate on how I was effectively homeless for an entire semester. Granted, this is a technology blog and we were instructed to stick to writing about technology and careers so here is how technology was included in this story: I checked the Internet each night before I slept outside to see if the temperature was going to get below freezing so I wouldn't die. Done.

My freshman year in college I pledged a fraternity at Oklahoma State. During rush it was touted as the most elite group on campus; we had won grades 72 of 75 years, best fraternity on campus 32 of 35 years, and had more Homecoming Royalty, IFC Presidents, Student Government Presidents, and more trophies for academics, athletics and community services than any other Greek house on campus. FarmHouse only pledged the best of the incoming freshman and to be asked to join was an honor. So I eagerly signed a pledge card when they offered it to me and moved into the house my first semester at OSU.

While I was being rushed a lot of credit for the success of FarmHouse was given to our summer camp style of living that no other fraternity on campus employed. When I moved into the house we all had roughly 4 to 6 people in a room that held our desks, clothes, couches, and televisions. That was it. Your room was to be viewed as an office for getting homework done and hanging out with other members and pledges but you had to sleep in "The Rack". The Rack is a room that is painted pitch black from wall to wall and is kept at a chilly 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Perfect for sleeping... if it weren't for the other thirty people that slept in the same room.

Now, for those of you that have been in a fraternity, visited a fraternity, or watched Animal House, then you know that someone is always awake and requires much less sleep than you do.
I tried to cope and I made it through an entire year of sleeping in The Rack, but there is only so much one man can handle. During that year I experienced one six foot four, two-hundred sixty pound man land squarely on my chest on accident, a water sprinkler being smuggled in and connected to a hose... then turned on, fireworks being ignited, a motorcycle being put in the rack and fired up, people talking across bunks, people yelling across the room, doors slamming as someone entered/exited The Rack, girls being spirited in or out, and at least a dozen different occasions where a pledge would forget to wake me up. So, since I was the first person up almost every morning and with a job at stake, I saved up my money and came up with a clever solution to my noisy sleep environment. A hard tonneau cover.


This was sheer genius. When my sophomore year started I started going out to the parking lot when there wasn't anybody around and slide into the bed of my truck. It really wasn't too bad since I had a mattress, a sleeping bag, four quilts, travel alarm clock, and a push light back there. To be honest, some of the best sleep I ever had was in the back of that truck. Granted, there were nights when I would park too close to our basketball court or a sorority would come by and spirit chalk our windshields in the middle of the night and I would wake up, but for the most part, I was fine. That is, until winter hit. I still remember the first frost we had that season when I awoke to find that my breath had created small icecicles just inches away from my face. Neat. At least it was until another member accidentally bumped my truck and I ended up with a face full of frost one evening. But hands down the worst experience I had sleeping in my truck was when the first serious snow hit. I'll let you do the math: one chilly fraternity boy + one solid fiberglass cover + 200 pounds of snow inches away from my nose = PANIC! I was finally able to get out after I moved a bunch of bedding over to one side and used my legs to lift the cover. After that incident, I started waking up every few hours when it snowed to tilt the snow off the cover so I could get out in the morning. Sure it was irritating having to wake up all the time but it was better than being beaned by a soccer ball while I was trying to sleep.

After one semester of sleeping in my truck I finally decided to petition the membership to let me have out-of-house membership, something that was unheard of in those days. I went before the fraternity and pleaded my case and explained that sleeping inside was killing me and that I went to the extreme to keep my membership intact while preserving my sanity/health. In an overwhelming show of support, I was allowed to move out of FarmHouse and into my own apartment, which started a whole new phase of success for me. I could finally sleep and study in a clean environment and I watched as my grades and activities went through the roof.

This period of my life gave me a huge amount of respect for workplace and home environments. Since then I've studied a lot about members of groups and how their productivity and happiness is affected by their surroundings and I've taken a lot of it to heart when I put my workspaces together. Hopefully, you'll never have to go through something like I did in order to appreciate or change your working environment.

The Agricultural Hole...

There is a market that the tech industry seems to be ignoring when it comes to a simple solution: Agriculture. The Ag industry has been crying out for a simple solution that goes beyond the everyday accounting program, a vast array of untested programs, and spreadsheets that can be misleading. Why are spreadsheets misleading?

An average farmer will generally look at the bottom line, that is, what they made on each crop as compared to their general expenses. Problem with that is there is no way for the farmer to discern whether or not one crop, piece of equipment, or input is losing them money. The best system that I have ever seen for recording farm costs and analyzing if they are being productive is the Ferguson System.

Roy Ferguson has been doing financial analysis on mainstream crops and niche' crops like pumpkins and other exotic staples. Now, Ferguson has more experience with agriculture than 95% of people in the industry and even at his advance age he is still making major headway. That is, with one exception: his software. The Ferguson site has a way to track farm expenses but it is based on depositing "tokens" that you have to pay for in order to continue to keep using the site. But the worst part about the Ferguson system is that you have to be online in order to record your farm transactions. And if you have ever used a dial-up connection with a very data intensive site then you know how difficult it is to try and use something as useful as the Ferguson system.

So, my charge is to the Ferguson Group to come up with a software suite that is not memory intensive, because most farmers don’t own cutting edge computers, that will do everything that the online system can do but on the desktop. This will easily give the average farmer the ability to track all of their expenses and chart progress without having to hassle with the slow connection speed and wasted time and money of other accounting programs.

Why do I want to work for a tech company?

I've been asked this by a number of people who have always known me as the guy who works for lawyers. To be honest, there isn't one really good answer for this, instead I have a whole range of experiences and skills that have turned me towards the most exciting industry I can imagine. With that, here is a summation of my ultimate goal.

About Me

I'm going to level with you, I'm a nerd. A huge nerd. But not the type of nerd that gets all excited and falls over forward in a ritual that resembles lost contact lenses when I hear about the awesome marketing and customer outreach that tech companies do. Why do I love this so? I mean, to a lot of people it is just a clever and cheeky way of touching your user but to me this is actually "GETTING IT"! Ever since I got interested in technology I have always harped about the end-user being the fountainhead of wisdom. The end-all and be-all of your product should be the guy sitting at the end of your supply chain tinkering with your product. And I don't mean just giving the customer a quality product, I want the customer to be able to take whatever it is that I helped to produce and set it free. Use our ideas to his or her own advantage and create something that nobody I work with would have imagined the product doing. Let the user become more incredible and creative than they could have ever imagined through your efforts.

Treating the Employee as a Valued Resource

For the last five years I have been lucky enough to work for two lawyers in Stillwater that have all but taken me in as their own son. They have worked with me through tests, grueling event planning schedules, projects and ideas for the office that failed and succeeded, and an entire semester of sleeping in my truck. And in return, I have worked my posterior off for these wonderful people, giving them as much as I possibly can in return for their kindness and respect. Now, I am ready to take this ethic and mentality into a larger office environment. While I don't expect the same type of attention and care that I am receiving now in a corporate environment, I am ecstatic about working for a company that has a clear directive that is aimed directly at making the user's life better. Plus, I would love to get my hands on bigger tasks and responsibilities and see the direct results follow through for the benefit of the company.

Environment

I've always been a HUGE proponent of attention to the office environment. This last summer I took on trying to renovate my office in Stillwater so the office would look as high class as the talent inside. From everything I've read about tech companies and their office environments, they are laid back with flexible hours but they require a lot of productivity for all this leniency. This is the perfect match for me because I am in top form when I am relaxed and not forced to wear clothes that are professional yet incredibly uncomfortable and given an even mildly stimulating environment to work in. I don't expect something crazy like this but being able to feel stimulated and relaxed while not having to suffer through second hand smoke would be amazing.

I Bring Something Amazing to the Table

How many potential employees have six years of experience in the legal field by the time they are 23? How many college grads have worked for two internationally known criminal lawyers and in Oklahoma's largest medical malpractice law firm? How many applicants have slept in the back of their truck for a semester, written for the school portal and started their own freelance web site company to help put them thought college?

I haven't taken the normal route through college. I've always worked, always been involved on campus, and always balanced it all with an active social life. I've been given responsibilities that were well beyond the realm of what a normal 21 year-old would or even should be given and I've succeeded beyond expectations. I can bring a wealth of insight and excitement that no other applicant in your pool can remotely begin to parallel.

If you have a position that you think I can absolutely immerse myself in and want me to blow your expectations out of the water then send me an email at clint (dot) james (at) gmail (dot) com.

So, another crack at this online job finding business...

In a previous post I talked about how it was very unlikely for me or generally ANYONE to get a job from just submitting their resume' online. Well, my good friend, former roommate, and hetero-life partner asked me to give the online route of finding a job another try. He suggested that I give his company Zoominfo.com a try.

What it is

Zoominfo is essentially a search engine for people. Instead of looking for pictures of Halle Berry or the latest on Fed-Ex, this search engine will find staff for people in different industries via any number of variables. For example, I looked up Marketing Directors for Technology Industry in California and immediatly received an avalanche of names and contact numbers. The results are incredible and there is more information there than I could possibly sift through over my entire Christmas break.

Why this is a good thing

Instead of going through the normal route of submitting your resume via the company web site, you can now contact the decision maker directly and tell them who you are, what you are about, and why you are wonderful and excited about working for their company. This gets you past the HR Directors who are already immune to your witty coverletter and dazzling resume' and puts you right in the face of your potential employer.

User's Review

Using the Zoominfo system is a little like filling out a profile for Facebook, or MySpace, or Orkut. But instead of cruising for women to spend money on you are looking for jobs, which avail you of the means to spend said money on said women. You can even "friend up" with other people you know that have profiles on Zoominfo's network.

Filling out the profile starts with your basic contact info, employment history, organizations / professional associations, and biography. The biography is what sealed the deal for me. It is so easy to just fill the normal stuff out and leave it be, however, Zoominfo likes to give you a little more leeway and provide a personable part of the profile that shows just how brilliant you are. A resume and cover letter will only go so far when it comes to displaying your writing ability so this is just more pie on the plate.

While the idea of adopting social networks for other purposes is not new, this is by far the best execution of a user driven site that is meant for something other than bolstering your imagined social status. The interface had a very... Web 2.0 feel, which is strange to say because I don't thing there is really a clear standard for what this means but Zoominfo seems to have captured its essence. How? Well, the icons and colors are all very organic, and there is a direct emphasis on the user and their experience. I could almost liken it to having a sumptuous personal masseuse for your job search. Maybe that is why I spent two hours playing with it last night.

If you are interested, here is a link to my profile. Hopefully by the time any sane person gets a chance to examine it the errors that I had on it last night will be corrected in my job title. Feel free to friend up with me or leave a link to your profile in the comments.

Diggers

Diggers, submit your questions for Kevin in the comments and I'll tape his responses and the responses of the other digg.com staff members. Any question goes.

When it comes to implementing new technology...

your biggest enemy is undoubtedly going to be the user's tastes and preferences. Here is a little story about how I tried to integrate Gmail at my office.

I work at an office with two lawyers, two secretaries and me, the utility infielder of the legal profession. Generally there is a lot of collaboration between the lawyers and secretaries and both sides of the office generally need to know where the other lawyer is going to be so they can schedule meetings.

At the time we were using AOL and their calendar, but one of the lawyers was having SEVERE problems with the calendar actually saving and sharing events. Enter Google Apps. This would give us the ability to chat across the office, share calendars, use almost unlimited email, and have a firm start page. Plus it would have given both lawyers the ability to check and add to their schedules from home or anywhere else they were. All of these features, for free.

But despite my intensive work on the project and the time and effort spent training the other secretaries and trying to get the host we were on to work correctly with Google Apps, the users rejected it.

How could that be? The system was superior to anything we were using. It had a cleaner interface and would have actually reduced a cost for the office. So how could it fail? Simple. User tastes and preferences.

Despite the fact I had been in the office for four years at that point in time, brought about a successful technological revolution (I built a high speed network into the office and took us off of dial-up along with going from 386 IBMs to Pentium III's), and helped make the office faster and more efficient, I fell short of the mark. The only thing I can honestly chalk it up to is that despite the initial excitement that came with creating the system, my boss' tastes and preferences were with the old AOL system. Try as I might, I couldn't get the lawyers to make the switch after everything had been put into place. Ever tried to lead a horse to water? It isn't always easy. So, I've compiled a list of things I wish I would have done before I started switching us from one system to the other:

1. Make it seem like the user's idea.
- If it is a great success then they will look like a genius and absorb some type of social gain. Pitch it to them as a the best possible option amongst two or three other options, almost like you are forcing your hand so the boss will hopefully go with your suggestion.

2. Put it on paper.
- Most bosses run by the numbers and if you can give a SMALL inclination as to how this is going to quantitatively improve the company then it will help facilitate the migration.

3. Slowly migrate them over.
- Granted, most of us reading the blog are tech savvy and ready to rumble when it comes to technology but most people our employer's age aren't so brazen when it comes to technology. So, the best thing to do is give them a slow, gentle migration, something akin to massaging a grizzly bear. First take them over from their old email to their new ones, then the calendar, then the chat program. Much like massaging said bear, this will not be painless or easy.

4. Make sure the office staff are ahead of the decision maker.
- If the secretaries and everbody else are loving the system and raving about it then the decision maker's adoption will be that much easier. They won't have to wait for the new users to figure out what they are doing or suffer through painful and costly errors that could be a result of the transition. Plus, if the support staff is already onboard, it will appear that there is work ready and waiting for them when they finally do adopt.

Here is something of use.

Console War Breaks Out - Nerds Rejoice!

I'll be the first to admit that I am not a gamer. The last game I even remotely played in any serious fashion was Tribes and that was only before class at OSSM. However, the new console wars have struck a chord with me. Maybe it is the inherent nerdiness of it all, or maybe its the nostalgia of getting my original NES (the only console I ever owned), but I've stayed glued to the release of the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. So, here are my impressions from what has appeared to be the biggest fit of nerd hand slapping since Episode 1 was released.

XBOX 360

Here's what I can tell you about the XBOX 360 and their marketing.... not much. As a non-engaged-non-gamer I couldn't even tell you when this thing replaced the original Xbox but I can tell you that I most defiantly sucked when it came to trying to play Halo on the original console.

The release didn't stir up a whole lot of media attention or electricity in the blogosphere. This could have been a direct result of Microsoft's questionable reputation and their noted lack of marketing acumen.

What I can tell you is that this is probably the system that I am most likely to buy and here's why. However, if it weren't for the price breaks this would just be a small asterisk in the back of my mind as something that is going to try and beat Apple into the living room with their new box that streams video from the net.

PS3

Sony has taken a HUGE hit in the PR department. What, from the constant delays of the PS3, to the fight over blue ray, to the laptop battery fiasco, Sony was hurting when it came to consumer confidence and a relative lack of excitement when it came to the capabilities and rumors about the PS3. Now, it looks like the consumer reception to this next generation box that should have up to 10 years of playable life is flaming hot.

WII

How can you not love this little console? It has a controller that is a nunchuck, which I immediately relate back to my days of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles. The Wii almost looks like it was made from Apple which means that it is a clean and simple design and from the gameplay reviews that I've heard about, it works as well as anything coming out of Cupertino. But what really sold me on this console was the fact that the premium version will play DVDs. Suddenly, I can see myself working this one over with my fiancee' and actually convincing her that this is a good idea.

Molly: "But its a video game."

Clint: "Yeah, but it plays DVDs!"

Molly: "So, we already have a DVD player and we can ask for another one in the wedding registry if that one breaks."

Clint: "Yeah, but can it play MarioKart? Can it play virtual tennis? Can it keep me out of your hair for hours while you go shopping?"

Molly: "Sold."

True, the PS3 and the Xbox both have DVD playback but to be honest with you, they don't break the same kind of ground and offer the same general coolness factor the Wii does. If I had the money, I'd be investing in Nintendo this Christmas.

So, the Internet has jobs right?

When I started my job hunt I thought for sure that I would be able to find a job online that would be perfect for me. I thought that my resume and my huge list of qualifications, skills, and activities on campus would make me the clear candidate from what I figured was a relatively large pool of applicants.

WRONG!

If you think you are getting a job just by uploading your resume and clicking a few buttons to fill out a profile then you are going to be sorely disappointed when you realized that your degree has just earned you a trip BACK to living in your parent's basement. For the most part, you are going to have to be a carbon copy of what the HR director or whoever is divining these things out before you even get a call. Even having inside help won't matter.

GOOGLE

Here was my first serious attempt at trying to get a job online. I used to work with a darling woman who had a little brother who just happened to be an executive at Google. So, abiding by the maxim of "It's not what you know, but who you know." I called Rita up and asked if she would get me an inside track if she felt comfortable doing so.

As luck would have it, she was more than happy to oblige and gave me an introduction to a gentleman who had extraordinary talent, intelligence, and writing skills. (Granted, I gleaned all of this from his emails but you don't get to work for Google by just being lucky). So I began a dialogue with the gentleman in New York and he agreed to submit me as an insider for three different jobs at Google. Now, normally, Google gets around 2,500 resumes a day and I think they hire around 50 to 75 people. So, with that in mind, I figured I had anywhere from a 2 to 3 percent chance of getting hired. Then, you take into consideration that I was submitted as an insider so that probably doubled my chances so we're now looking at around a 6% chance of getting into one of the best companies in the world to work for.

During the time from resume submission to rejection email, I was one of the happiest guys you could have ever met. I envisioned working long hours for a company that finally understood that you will get more out of your employees by giving them a clear directive and an environment in which their creativity can roam free. I thought about what it would be like to hunker down and work in a corporate legal office or marketing department that would be a drastic change from the brazen and wild small criminal firms that I work in now. You could have popped me with a pin and rainbows, Skittles, and free beer would have burst forth like a piñata.

Even when I got the rejection emails from Google HR I wasn't downtrodden or disappointed. I knew my information would still be in their system and I kept applying even after I was turned away for not having my degree yet. (Something that I failed to mention was that I can actually start on December 18 but that is a lesson learned). Either way, applying and getting rejected from Google has been a positive experience and I am still plugging away and trying to get my foot in the door there.

APPLE

This blog post is coming to you from a 12" PowerBook that has become my inseparable companion for at least a year now. Addie, as I call her, follows me from my room, to class, to the back porch, and anywhere there might be a wireless connection. So, naturally I thought that I might want to apply at Apple because I love what it is that they do.

Filling out the profile was easy enough but it is now about four weeks later and I haven't heard a word back from them. No news is good news right?

MICROSOFT

Like fanny packs and wine from a box, this is something that I really wish I would have not spent any time investing myself in. Why Microsoft? To this day I looked at it as a game of probability. They are one of the largest employers in the world and I figured that there would be SOMETHING open in Redmond.

It took me around 30 to 40 minutes to try and fill everything out and get my potential employee profile filled out. When I went to submit it I got a fatal error on the page. Oops. Maybe OSU's connection died. So I went back, filled out any information that was cleared and hit submit again. Error. Hmmm.... Maybe I'm using the wrong browser. So I switched from Firefox to IE and found that I was thwarted by the same error at the same point in time. I figure that they must not be hiring.

THE END

So, how do I plan on getting a job online. Well, I could continue to go the regular route and keep banging my head into the wall and not getting anywhere. Or, I could take up the same type of creative flow and irrational creativity reticent in my former roommate and hetero-life-partner Jeff Clark and create something really fantastic. Jeff did something called www.ihiredjeffclark.com and landed a job in his ideal industry in his ideal city. Well, success becomes a relatively easy thing to achieve once you have seen a friend get it so I have decided to create a job search site called www.hiremyroommate.com over the Christmas break that will relate how much my roommates wish that I would get hired away someplace so they can get rid of me. It should be entertaining at the least.

Why you need to hire me out of Oklahoma...

NOTE: THIS POST WOULD HAVE BEEN UP EARLIER BUT MY ISP DECIDED TO BITE THE DUST FOR THE LAST 16 HOURS.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it allows even the most inane and inept people to relay their surrounds to a worldwide audience of even more inane and inept people. As I sit in the computer lab now, I am across from two gentlemen... scratch that, two behemoths in cowboy hats worn Toby Keith style, Carhartt vests, cowboy boots with their jeans tucked into the top, and camouflage shirts. These were not real cowboys; being from Oklahoma it easy to spot a Cowboy wannabe.
If I could get any closer I'm sure they would smell like Charlton Heston after a bawdy night of liquor and song. But the kicker, ladies and gentlemen, is that they walked all the way across the room and placed a trash can between themselves and proceeded to use it as a spittoon.

The scary thing, readers, is these two can, with just a few clicks, actually create and publish their own blog. Perhaps we’ve set the point of entry too low for Internet users.

The problem with the Internet is that there is so much democracy. Now, before you haul off and start calling me an E-Communist, let me outline my platform for a cleaner, more beautiful Internet. Let me readdress my list of grievances:

1. There are too many angst-filled, emo kids with Xangas, MySpaces and Facebook profiles. Their bathtub mowhawks and tales of crying to the lyrics from bands with names like Mid-Summer July, Carson Midnight Dreams, and Hot Water Music is not a value added product of the web. My suggestion, make a "Kiddie Web" requiring proof of your emotional age. We could ask questions such as:

1. You've had a bad day at school. Do you:
A. Go to the gym and sweat it off
B. Hop on MSN Messenger and tell the world about it
C. Cry while listening to Hawthorn Heights
D. Post the experience to Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, Orkut, and Blogger

Standardization would not only keep you from having to view the atrociously designed sites found in 90% of MySpace profiles but the fear of stumbling across your cousin’s drunken weekend at your lake house will be diminished greatly.

*Sweet money making tip, if you do decide to transition from the “Grown Up” Internet to the “Kiddo” Internet, a short ad would be displayed during the jump. Just an idea.*

And then there are the sociopaths or the guys that really shouldn’t be allowed to have blogs at all. Like these guys. Although, I wouldn't say that to their faces.

I believe every blog program should come installed with a spell checker that automatically deletes the post or locks the profile if too many grammatical errors or spelling errors are detected. This might kill the proliferation of sentences such as:

ZOMG! The WII is 1337!

But this is one man’s humble opinion as to how we might make the Internet a better place. I will sleep soundly knowing the Cowboy hacks were only updating their résumés for jobs that will hopefully place them incredibly far away from the Internet.

Here is some useful information for you to enjoy.

What can Clint do for you?

Tonight my creativity and prose will be a heady mix of a weakened immune system, too much cold medicine, and the various plotlines and dramatic elements that I absorbed while falling asleep on the couch during a Star Trek marathon.

What does Clint have to offer you? The marketing industry refers to Clint as "whitespace" he's a product or service you didn't realize you needed yet. How many times have you been sitting in your modern, yet relaxed office space in Silicon Valley and said to yourself, "Self, I sure wish I had a hard working college kid from the Midwest that has a diverse educational background and a wealth of experience and broad range of skills to help me on this project?" If the answer is never then you are on track to discovering your need for a Clint James in the office. Allow me to elaborate all the features and amenities that you'll be getting when you hire Clint James.

Clint James is a fifth year senior at Oklahoma State University . He will be graduating with a degree in Agricultural Economics and Political Science in May but he is willing to leave in December if the right company decided he is a hot commodity and wanted to snatch him up. After all, he's already got one degree and only nine hours left on the other and that can be accomplished from just about anywhere.

Clint has worked for three different law firms for the past five years and he is currently looking to take his experience from the legal field and expand it to the technology industry. He feels he can offer a great deal to any company that hires him because of his extensive campus leadership experience and a background that is going
to be vastly different than most of the people applying for positions
in technology companies today.

Relocation is not a problem for Clint. He is currently looking to expand his horizons and explore the world. While he would prefer to end up in California, he has been quoted as saying, "I would be excited to live on either coast or go overseas just to try something new and see the world." With a vast amount of travel experience, some
of it was even pre-planned, Clint can travel most anywhere without getting lost. Disclaimer, there was one time in Holland that he was hopelessly and utterly lost but he isn't pointing fingers at his best friend Jordan anymore.

So, what can Clint do for you? Anything you ask him to, except for make your whites brighter or your teeth whiter but he's working on it. But he can do any administrative task imaginable along with a lot of geeky tech stuff, just don't give him too many tools because he is used to working with little more than a butter knife and a plunger in day-to-day activities.

If you are really interested in picking a Clint James up for yourself, please request a spec sheet (read: resume) at clint(dot)james(at)gmail(dot)com

Hello World!

So there I was, half dressed and nearly out of breath when I received an invitation to blog for a purpose other than providing an outlet for my semi-coherent thoughts and early twenty-something optimism during my five years of college. A delightful sounding intern (the term denotes "bottom of the pole”, something I am quite familiar with) called me during my transition from work to class. The thing is I have exactly thirty minutes to traverse town, change clothes from business casual to college formal, gather books, and inhale something to eat all while being cross-town fast enough to meet my fiancée in time to walk to class.

Here's the general gist of the conversation I had with the lovely folks at Experience.com while I was in mid-dress and attempting to make it to class.

"Blog for Digg experience, eh?"

"That's right, at the end of the contest whoever has the most blog readers will earn a trip to go to San Francisco to job shadow for a day at Digg.com." said Ally.

"Hmm.... and I don't have to refinance my mortgage or look at exciting opportunities in real estate while I'm out there do I?"

"No, we just want you to write about your interest in technology and your attempts to find a job in the industry and we'll send you to California if your blog is the most popular at the end of 20 days."

"Hey, as long as I don't walk into a room with a group of med students waiting to extract my kidneys I'm up for it. Oh, by the way … does it matter that I'm an Ag student and I'm not from the West or East Coast? Plus, I've never been to, around, or near Silicon Valley."

"No. We're actually looking for someone with a different perspective and would like to either start their own business or work in technology and your thoughts on technology and agriculture and law are very interesting."

"Sounds like an opportunity to me. I'm in."

And thus our adventure begins. Over the next 20 days I am going to do my best to convince you, random blog reader at a medium to large sized dot.com or tech company that I am worthy of hire. Would I love to go to San Francisco and meet Kevin Rose? You bet I would! Would I love to kick back, play some hacky sack and drink some Red Bull with the man that is helping to define Web 2.0? You bet I would. And would I try to give him my thoughts on how we can turn user - driven content into a profitable business model all while keeping the integrity of the site and the content delivered intact? Absolutely! While these are romantic and rosy visions of my near future, they are just short - term goals. I am looking to marry a company and spend roughly fifteen to twenty years at least in one spot working my way through an entry level position and eventually move to the legal department.

So chaps, what is it going to be? Are you interested in someone that is looking to be in a company for an extended period of time that will give you twice as much as you invest in him? Am I the "marrying type"? Are you afraid of commitment and willing to turn this into a facsimile of so many Matthew McConaughey movies? Or will you pass me over for fancier fare that might seem like a lot of fun at first but is going to be a pain in the butt once you find out they have eyes for your best friend?