Boy I’ll tell you what, a bad job is like a bad relationship (I’ll leave drawing the parallels to the following description as an exercise for the reader). At first you are excited for the prospect of something new and everything’s great. Then if the stars aren’t aligned for you, you start to get cranky and any possible gaps in communication now pose a real threat to your happiness. If you were a contractor, quitting is less clear because they can always send an email asking for help on something small. Next thing you know it’s one year later and you have no idea what your status is, but it occupies enough space in your mind to become a problem. Eventually you have to cut all ties and go cold turkey, or face an eternity in limbo.

Once you are “free” of any previous obligations, you are able to start looking for some new ones ;). If you previously rose to any challenges provided to you, you may choose to aim a little lower next time to give your mind and body a break.

Anyway, I’m looking at starting a new job this week at a consulting firm here in Anchorage. This time it’s salary, writing C# swag for the state and local telephone companies. It’s not exactly (nearly) as exciting as building virtual instruments for Hollywood score composers, but I am glad to take on a workload that is “light as a feather.” But, being a mac guy I’m not too excited about the prospect of using Windows full time.

But lo and behold, Oracle’s VirtualBox VM is amazing! I hardly notice the speed bump on my i7 macbook pro, and I can just cmd-F to full screen Vista while running Mac OS X. The Dock still works well, and all the iTunes hot keys on the keyboard work. The integration is so smooth, I’m actually looking forward to this.

If you have a decent mac machine and need to use Windows, try Virtual Box VM. It’s free and works extremely well.