Well, here we are. The end of another successfully-completed NaBloPoMo, and that's the "badge" to prove it. I'm sort of in a "grey area" on these ... on one hand I can pretty much blither on about anything, and as long as I have something to blither about, I can crank out a post (and, although I've never used them, they have daily suggested subjects on the NaBloPoMo site, in case you're "drawing a blank"!) ... however, on the other hand, I have LOTS of stuff to fill my days, and needing to block out an hour or so per day (and, preferably, before midnight), gets to be a challenge, especially if I'm way wiped out from the day's activities. So, completing one of these is both easy and hard, but I guess "hard" wins out as I've never been seriously tempted to try to string two NaBloPoMos together in a row (although, I have now completed two of them in the first half of this year). Amazingly, I got through this one with The Job Stalker screen caps yet to bring you. Speaking of which, today is the day that the change goes through, and everything is different over on Chicago Now. In fact, if I keep doing screen grabs, they aren't going to look anything like the previous ones have, as now there's a consistent look-and-feel across all the Tribune blogs, rather than the fancy headers and individualized color schemes. Things have not quite worked themselves out over there as yet (none of the in-post photos are showing up, for instance), but it's a lot more boring look, so I may give up on that particular quirk. On the plus side, you can now access all the posts going back to the beginning (with Job Stalker #1, Julie Wernau's posts), which had been a particular irritation previously, leading me to do those occasional "directory" posts.
Today was "Social Media Day" and there were a number of events around the city. I was off at one at the offices of Be Found Online, which was quite the gathering, with a program (that included a presentation by pizza/social-media maven Ramon DeLeon), lots of food (Domino's, Wow Bao, cheesecake, frosted cake balls, brownies, etc.), and drawings and prizes (I got two t-shirts for The Girls and a $20 gift card from GrubHub). I schmoozed with a bunch of folks I'd not seen in a while, chatted with some of "the usual suspects" and met a bunch of folks, some of whom are actually hiring (need to crank out a bunch of LinkedIn connects tomorrow and follow up with resumes!). All in all, a worthwhile evening out (it was also good that it ran late, as if it had ended when originally scheduled we'd be heading out into a massive thunderstorm with torrential rain and marble-sized hail, which had blown through by the time things started to wrap up).
Anyway, you may not hear from me tomorrow, or you might, I just don't "have to" post for a change!