Try as I might, I can’t seem to nail an offer in a reputable mnc that I wish I could get into. The “I’m-sorry-we-do-not-have-an-opening-to-match-your-current-skillset” rejection email gives me a bit of a smack to the ego. I can’t seem to get a hang of interviews and let them know that I could adjust well with the company’s culture or know and have the work experience enough to be hired. It is kind of depressing, really, getting rejected, but after a while I just try to look at it as some kind of a challenge; it is just a meaner way to help me identify in which areas of my career building that I need to work on.

There are news of right-sizing left and right, and not from sme’s but from those huge mnc’s: 500, 1000, 1500 employees laid off, eoc’d or what-have-you’s. It has got me thinking, how safe is it to venture out there just to get away from a depressing and seemingly dead-end job with this current employer? How could I recession-proof myself? I guess I just have to deal with the red tape and embrace the small annoyances here as opportunities for learning, for now; it is safer to suck it up and stay than go out there and jostle for that limited number of openings of that “better employer” against the thousands of recently fired IT professionals and just graduated college students.

—

Now, I wonder how low will it cost to hire an IT professional here in the Philippines with the recession going on? I wish this will even out soon.

I decided I’ll have to find a prototyping tool for the changes mentioned in this morning’s presentation. Though html,css, and jQuery are fun to work with, I think I’ll have to forgo with the fun and make do with the straightforward. I have all the time in world before to use html, css, and jQuery but since my next presentation is up in a few day’s time, I have to find that prototyping tool!

The googled solution: Pencil Project

I got the Firefox plugin. Weird though because it has nothing to do with any viewed pages. It works in a separate window.

Although you can get the Pencil Project as a standalone application. I think I’ve used a free prototyping tool before but it didn’t impress me much to have me happy to use it again like Pencil. Luvit!

After that inexcusable hiatus, I’m back.

I’m playing around with jQuery now. I have to come up with prototype screens for this loooong running project I’m working on. Since I’m not much of a designer, I stuck close to what the most comfortable medium I can work on: tags and codes.

I was trying to toggle a select field to enable/disable through a checkbox with:

$(”input#change”).click(function() {
if($(”input#change-pm”).is(”:selected”)) {
$(”select#select1″).css(”disabled”,”");
} else {
$(”select#select1″).css(”disabled”,”disabled”);
}
});

Nothing happens.

Why? Because 1) It was a checkbox. I should use a :checked filter instead, and 2) disabled is NOT a css property! It is a input tag parameter. Aww… Doh.

So… I changed the lines to this:

$(”input#change”).click(function() {
if($(”input#change-pm”).is(”:checked”)) {
$(”select#select1″).removeAttr(”disabled”);
} else {
$(”select#select1″).attr(”disabled”,true);
}
});

And it worked like I intended it to be.