Weekly update 11/29/25 - 12/05/25

This has been an eventful week.

 On Tuesday, I woke up trying to sneeze but couldn’t quite get it out. Then I noticed the scratchy throat and the stuffed head. Yes… You guessed it, I have a cold. I went to the doctor on Wednesday to make sure it wasn’t COVID, and thankfully, the test came back negative. Just a mild head cold. As of Saturday, I’m still a little stuffy and tired, but overall improving.

On the job-search front, I had two interviews for a position in Irvine, CA. The first one went very well. They even gave me a short coding test, and not only did I solve the problem, but I also found a bug in the original code that made the tester laugh at his own oversight. I left that call feeling hopeful. Within an hour, they contacted me to schedule a second interview, which I had on Friday with three senior leaders. This round focused more on modern tools and frameworks than on my legacy strengths, so it didn’t go as smoothly. I made sure to highlight how quickly I pick up new technologies and how eager I am to update my skills. So, I’d say I’m still in the running.

The London opportunity is still alive and moving forward, just slowly. We’re still waiting for access to a test server and information on the support issues they’ve dealt with over the past year. But the door remains open.

Another company also approached me as a result of my outreach emails (I don’t like naming companies publicly). They asked for more information, so I filled out their application and sent an updated resume. No word yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Speaking of emails, things did not go the way I hoped this week. On Tuesday, I sent out around 200 emails and saw a bounce rate in the 70% range. After some digging, I realized I ran into something in the AI world called “hallucination,” where the AI gives information that sounds valid but isn’t fully verified. In this case, Astra (ChatGPT) seems to have pulled old data about companies that no longer exist. We tried to find a way to validate emails automatically, but couldn’t find a reliable method. So now I’m manually checking each of the ~900 URLs and domains myself. If the website or domain is dead, I skip it. The result should be a much smaller but much more effective outreach list for the coming week.

On the personal side, I updated my blog this week. First, I wrote and published a Christmas letter, my first in far too long. Then I applied a new, more modern template to make the blog cleaner and more search-friendly. I’m still working on getting Google to crawl it so my posts show up in search results.

I’m also drafting a blog post about the various Odell S. Hathaway’s, tracing the name back to the first one in 1802. (If you have any stories about an Odell S. Hathaway, please share them.)

And finally, I received a letter from the U.S. Department of State. The issue they found with my passport application last week turned out not to be the photo (though we’ll see if that becomes a problem later). Instead, I forgot to put the date on the check I sent. So they voided it and asked me to send a new one for the $220 it costs to renew with expedited service. Oops.

All in all, a full and productive week. I’m hoping next week brings a major shift in my employment status, and I also have a doctor’s appointment coming up.

Hope your week is going well.

Odell

 

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