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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

inspired by 27b stroke 6 dot com

I have my resume posted on Monster.com and the first line of text on my resume reads, "Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster." Some recruiters ignore this stricture. Perhaps they see it as a challenge. This week FOUR people from the same recruiting company have tried to contact me about the same job.

Mark,  I am writing in regards to your resume on Monster.  I am unfortunately not a principle but do have a direct client with a requirement in Waltham for a senior level Linux administrators.  This is a permanent position so my involvement would be limited to an introduction.  Please let  me know if  you would have any interest in this role.  I can be reached by email or my direct desk number is 666-666-2686

Wow. Cool. You're the fourth person from universal-recruiterbot.com to spam me about this job. Are you going for a company record or something?

Funny thing is, I actually replied to one of your cohorts and never heard back. That's probably because I replied to his email with email rather than using a phone. My bad. I broke protocol.

Speaking of which, why is it that recruiters can only send email and not apparently receive it? Or perhaps they are able to write but for some mysterious reason cannot read it. The mind boggles. But it's probably something simple like, you guys are so busy adding value-addedness to the economy you only have time to check email once a day.

Best of luck!


Matt sorry I offended you. I am trying to do my job and at the same time potentially find you a job.  Not exactly sure how you formed this opinion of recruiters and how we are not quite as noble as lets say a sys admin.  Good luck with all of your stereotypes and shortsightedness.


Hello Sean.

I accept your most sincere apology. I realize you are merely trying to help me in my hour of need, and your altruistic gesture should lauded.

How did you learn of my noble lineage? I am indeed a descendent of King Zog of Albania but I try to keep this quiet as I prefer to have people treat me as just another Joe Sixpack, though I do not have sixpack abs. Once people know I have the blood of kings coursing through my veins they insist upon kissing my pinkie ring and bowing when they greet me. This makes me feel uncomfortable and the ring kissing may result in the transmission of the Herpes virus.

Go forth and conquer!

His Royal Inestimability,
Archduke Zog


You know you are not exactly saving the world or even producing anything yourself.  This is a service driven economy and we both provide a service.  I wish you were met by such an asshole in your daily routine and you may think twice about your behavior, karma can be a bitch though so I will sleep well tonight. A little piece of advice if you are so adverse to people contacting you and are in such a great place that you need not consider any other potential opportunities, stop posting your info on Monster.  In another act of selfless altruism may I suggest you not spend one more second worrying about contracting herpes people as annoying as you cannot form the required relationships and I am fairly certain that is something you will never have to concern yourself with (unless of course you are paying) 


Dear Sean.

How little you know of me. I have made my humble attempts to save the world whenever and wherever I could. I am most proud of how I divested myself of my ancestral holdings in Albania after the Iron Curtain fell. bequeathed my most fertile lands to the poorest Gypsys and the two castles (winter and summer) were donated to the Sisters of The Holy Oatmeal, to be used as orphanages.

In my vocation I have vowed never to support the products produced by Microsoft, a company which has been convicted of monopolistic practices. I have no truck with felonious organizations. Instead I choose to support Linux, which can never become closed source or be owned by any person or corporation. I believe this is the path our Lord Jesus Christ would have chosen had be been born a sysadmin rather than a carpenter.

As for my Monster account, I have repeatedly asked Monster to close my account and they have been unable to do so. When I last tried phoning Monster, my call was transferred to a sweatshop worker in Hyderabad who could not speak proper English, nor could he fathom why anyone could want to have his account closed. The very concept was beyond his ken.

My original motivation for wanting to close out my Monster account was a news story I read on the Internet about a hacker who was able to download all of Monster's resume database to a single IP address in Russia. He's probably a billionaire by now from all the identity thievery he was able to pull off, but for us poor saps who trusted Monster to keep its Microsoft Windows webservers secure, it's a nightmare.

I bid you peace and a bountiful potato harvest.

-- His Buick Regalness, Zog.

Monday, July 26, 2010

twentyseven-b stroke six

http://www.27bslash6.com

This site is hillarious in part because Thorne does such a good job at skewering the stilted, lifeless, non-style of writing most people have been taught to use for business communication. It's funny for lots of other reasons.

The author is David Thorne. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thorne_%28writer%29

George Orwell lived in Apartment 27b on floor 6 while writing the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

27b/6 is also a reference to a fictitious, paper, work form in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, which will always be in my top ten favourite films.

Bogus Toyota Finance Charges

I just made the last payment on my 2003 Camry LE. Woot! I bought it used in Feb. 2007 after realizing I couldn't bear riding the MBTA anymore. I have no complaints about the car. It has not given me a moment's trouble.

So I get a letter from Toyota Financial Services stating I need to send them a cheque for $88.50.

Please forward your payment of $88.50 to the address listed above so that we may mark your account paid-in-full.and forward all applicable paid-in-full documents to you.


If you have any questions, please call us at 800 874-8822.

Sincerely,

TFS 

In essence, they're holding my title hostage for $88.50 and they won't tell me in writing what the $88.50 finance charge is for. Their unwillingness to put it in writing makes sense. In business matters, never write when you can speak, never speak when you can wink, never wink when you can nod.

I guess this is another "creative" way to fleece us. I'm going to post this to reddit and see if anyone else has encountered this.

Update 1. I called the above number twice. The first bloke I spoke with said he didn't know what the $88.50 charge was for. The second time I called I got a woman who also had no idea what the charge was for but eventually she waived the fee. I hope she did anyway. Yay me!

Update 2. The fee was waived and the title was mailed to me. /win

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Reuters story on BP's Hayward stepping down

Too bad he's not stepping down into a pit full of venomous snakes. He, along with the entire chain of command responsible for the disaster, should be given the option to commit seppuku or hang by the neck until dead. That would be justice, but it wouldn't help the Gulf ecosystem. BP should be liquidated to pay for the cleanup.

Dell sourcing FAIL

I knew there was another, as yet unknown reason I didn't like Dell. This time it's a spyware trojan in their SERVER motherboard firmware. Yeah. I'll just let that sink in.

New Scientist dot com article

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Another Huge Ubuntu FAIL

I tried setting up openldap on Ubuntu 9.10 today and ran into bugs immediately when using the slapd, libldap and ldap-tols packages from the Ubuntu repository. I can't imagine how anyone in QA could have allowed these packages to ship. The init script for slapd is looking for a files that do not exist!

Dirka Recruiter Droid LULs

This email is proof that our visa policy needs to be re-written; assuming this Dirka is actually in TX where his employer is based.

Hope you are doing good. We have an urgent opening with one of the reputed client. If you feel the requirement is suitable then please send us your updated resume along with rate and contact details. Hope you do the needful.

Job Description

Linux - Windows / Hardware work - Networking and good to know XEN customer is switching to the tool XEN.

Trouble shooting on consoles installation of systems
console access only
Hot swaps of disc.
Trouble shooting for Linux and Windows
Jump start and Kick starting servers
Rebuild hard drives
conduct " Chasey Swaps"
install new switches ect.....
verify open space

"Backfire"

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." -- Mark Twain

Monday, July 12, 2010

summer allows for barefoot walking

I just walked all the way 'round Fresh Pond barefoot because I have a bleeding wound where the strap of my Teva sandals chewed up the skin on my Achilles tendon area and my running shoes were digging into the wound as I walked. I guess the only real downside was that it slowed me down to about half my normal speed. The balls of my feet are a little sore but otherwise my feet are fine.

wine afficianados beware

Somehow beer and ale is more interesting than wine. Although I'm pretty snobbish about beer and ale I really don't care to educate my palate with regard to wine. Wine seems expensive, gets me drunk way too fast and is too complicated in general.
A neighbor of mine is of a similar opinion and her favorite anecdote about wine tasting is as follows. She was having a dinner party and everyone was passing judgment on the wine they had just poured. Each dinner guest weighed in, describing the wine using the standard technical wine terminology such as "fruit, tannin, nose, oak," blah blah blah. Finally one of her friends said, "I like it; it cuts the grease."
To be honest, beer geeks use this same descriptive vocabulary but in the case of beer, I can recognize the flavours they are taking about. For example, some cask conditioned or "imperial" ales taste like grapefruit.

Bongwater, the movie.

Bongwater movie @imdb.com

What? Ann Magnuson is not in this movie? WTFLOLBBQ

Saturday, July 10, 2010

xkcd luls

People do use Word and Excel for literally everything and the results are shabby at best.

http://xkcd.com/763/

Speaking of fish . . .

What's up with barramundi in the fish tanks of Chinese restaurants these days? It seems like every Chinese restaurant in Chinatown has switched to them now. Or perhaps they were always there; just not labeled barramundi. Are they being raised on farms here in the US? Apparently so. I found an aquaculturist in Turners Falls, MA who raises them. They are also known as Asian seabass although they are a member of the perch family.

Panfish at Walden Pond.

I found a spot on the shore of Walden Pond which was unoccupied and jumped in. After swimming across the pond and walking back to my spot I jumped back in to cool off. As I sat back against the smooth boulders the state had sunk into the pond's shore I was bitten by something. Turns out I had invaded the home of a school of juvenile panfish. These guys are fiercely territorial and ravenous. It's a good thing they don't have real teeth.

At one point while picking and eating blueberries from a bush that overhung the pond I noticed a daddy longlegs. I caught the bug and tossed it into the school of fish who promptly tore it to pieces.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Friday, July 2, 2010

OpenWRT has some competition.

I had no idea they were making these. I wonder what distribution this thing has? I dare say it's not as "open" as OpenWRT but hey, good thinking, Cisco.

Cisco/Linksys' Linux-based Router