Month: March 2015

Posted on

I’ve really become suspicious

NewImage

In my on-going search for a permanent job, I’ve had some very negative experiences.

In some cases, those experiences were due to my own failings, in other cases I, like a lot of the aging boomers got victimized.

As a result, I’m always suspicious of headhunters.

My experience with placement personnel has been universally negative over the past decade. Even within the headhunters, there are gradations of suspicion.

For example:

My suspicion is heightened when the headhunter is from well out of the local area.

Why would a company in California hire a headhunting agency in New Jersey?

Hunting party

Based on past experiences and lots of wasted time, I’m a tad more suspicious when a New Jersey based headhunter has an obviously Indian name and they’re telling me about a temporary opportunity 1200 miles away from my current location.

How well does this person know the job market or geography?

The odds are they don’t. Often these folks are actually in India and the address they’ve given in New Jersey is essentially an empty office suite.

This is not to say that American Headhunters don’t do the same thing.

Recently, I drove to Huntington Beach to personally hand my resume to someone. The office was actually an executive suite with a receptionist who told me flat out, she’d never seen anyone from the company I’d come to see.

I’m likely to flush an email instantly if it’s obvious that the headhunter didn’t read my resume, or if their email is rife with typos, or worse yet, obvious and incorrectly copied HTML

I realize that I may be tossing out viable leads, but from the old school perspective; “If you can’t be bothered to at least look at your work before you send it out to the world, you can’t be very diligent in negotiation for salary on my behalf.”

Lets be honest here. Technically, a headhunter is your agent. If they look like shit in their correspondence or can’t communicate, YOU’RE going to look like shit too

If a headhunter references their “database” but I’ve never done business with them, heard of their company, or the email address they’re using is very old, I’m very suspicious.

Beginning any relationship with a lie is a bad idea. Beginning a business relationship with lies is especially bad. Why don’t they tell you something like “I saw your resume on Dice, or Monster, or LinkedIn.” At least then I’d know what information they’d been privy to and might not be quite as circumspect. I’ve had way too many experiences where I spend the time, answer their questions, and then… The sound of one hand clapping.

In my case, I go right to the memory of working very hard with a headhunter daily, I was writing letters and tweaking my resume for weeks on end, for various jobs, only to discover that I was doing the headhunter’s job and he was using my letters and chunks of my resume to sell other candidates.

Lamprey

The parasite would have continued to bleed me for who knows how long except that I was at an interview and the interviewer asked if I used aliases.

When I said, “No” he presented me with a poorly edited version of my resume with someone else’s name on it, and one of the cover letters I’d written.

Needless to say nobody got the job. The headhunter in question and his company, were barred from submitting candidates. I noticed recently that headhunters office was for lease.

The point to all of this is that I’m getting interest in my online profile, but I’m very curious as to why all that interest is from companies outside of California.

Not that leaving California is necessarily a problem, but these are for positions within California. Why aren’t local headhunters working these positions?

The real problem is,how do you know if these headhunters and the positions they offer are real, or if these positions are bogus, designed to get you to turn over information “necessary to get the job” that is really being given to identity thieves.

At the risk of sounding like a luddite… 

I don’t like this new internet job thingy. I don’t like it one little bit!

Here’s an update.

After 5 headhunters contacting me, one of them twice. Then me following up with them politely and providing the information that they requested yet again…

…The sound of one hand clapping. 

I checked these companies out to the best of my ability. I did due diligence but lets face it anyone can make a web page and have a phone number forwarded to a cell phone.

Another colossal waste of time. Time I might add that I don’t have to waste. 

Posted on

Chasing my Tail

DishnGlobe

As I reported a week or so ago. We’ve gone to satellite for our Internet.

This is cool, and generally works really well.

Of course it meant that I started looking at our aging infrastructure and began removing older devices that perhaps weren’t being used anymore, but were still attached to the network.

Ever heard the term “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie,” next time I’m going to heed that cautionary tail.

neatswitch

It started out simply enough.

I thought, “I’ll swap in the faster more modern router.”

I did and everything seemed to be going along just swimmingly. Then I sat down and started evaluating the network disk storage.

There are some drives that are used for backup pretty muck exclusively, and there are other drives that are used for data of all kinds. I think perhaps I could consolidate the data on the newer drives and then simplify the network by removing the older drives before they become problems. 

I’ve been hearing noises from a couple of the older units that are worrisome.

spaghettimonster

In all, these changes should cost me nothing but a little time.

This also takes me toward the final goal of permanently mounting the shiny new gigabit switch under the shelf in the wiring cabinet with appropriate length cables and generally neat and pretty connections, instead of looking, as it currently does, like a flying spaghetti monster is living in my network cabinet.

So I move some data, I’m making progress, then suddenly I notice my usual computer is making backups really slowly. After a fair bit of investigation, I’m not sure why. As time goes on the backups are slower… and slower… and it makes no sense.

CRAP!

TimeMachineIcon

I’m seeing 52MB backups taking an hour. I can transfer 52MB with file copy in seconds, so what gives? Dying drive, screwed up connection, nothing makes sense.

Shoulda let sleeping dogs lie

I’ve narrowed it down to something going on with specifically my computer, and specifically my backup utility. 

Great!

WTF has gone awry in my baby?

Hit the internet

Skipthisbackup

Gee! That satellite thingy is pretty cool. 

Problems with Time Machine backups appear off & on for years, across all flavors of Mac OS X.

Great, there actually is such a thing as too much data.

Narrowing, narrowing, narrowing, and …

Time machine may take a long time in the preparing phase, or in the backing up phase if a backup was interrupted. This can also happen if the machine hasn’t been connected to the time capsule device for a long time.  Finally, this can be caused due to corrupted spotlight indexes.

Hummm so I wonder what would happen if I delete the local drive index and force a rebuild?

10types

Seems straight forward enough… Lets see what happens.

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

/:

Indexing enabled.

Well, no crash & burn… that’s a good sign and the nice snappy response is reassuring. I suppose that the first backup after the index rebuild will be slow. The system will probably act like it’s been disconnected from the storage device for a lone time.

That backup will have to wait.  Right at the moment, the shiny switch is getting a workout using rsync to move a bunch of files.

I brought a venerable 7 year old computer out of retirement to handle that chore. I really should get that machine a new hard drive. That’s the only problem it has. It’s down to 8GB and is slowing down because there isn’t enough scratch storage space, the machine itself is still fast.

Intel730series

Maybe a nice 500 GB or 1 TB solid state drive. Faster, quieter, lower power consumption and cooler running.

I’ll check into that on Monday.

Ahh, the CPU in this machine just pegged. Yep, the Indexing routine is a very busy camper.

I’m going to let this machine finish it’s assigned tasks, then I’ll test the backup on a USB drive. That will at least tell me if I’m on the right track figuring out what the problem is.

Cables

I want to get this taken care of. I want to make sure that it’s not something in the connections or devices I’ve moved around.

That’s important because I don’t want to mount all this crap, only to have to take it all apart again because I missed something.

I’m hoping that tomorrow I can say, “To Fry’s Electronics, boy wonder. We’ve got some cabling and mounting stuff to buy.”

Interesting.

Looks like flushing the index solved the problem. At least it solved the problem on the external drive.

I was seeing this long pause “Preparing Backup”, then an inordinately long time actually backing up the data. After flushing the index the “Preparing phase” was a lot shorter and the actual backup was as fast as normal.

I’ve got the TimeCapsule backup drive / router busy as heck right now so further testing will have to wait. On the plus side, I’ve seen an improvement which leads me to believe that I’m on the right track.

“To Fry’s, boy blunder!”

Posted on

Thank you Microsoft!

MicrosoftApple

While I’ve been using Microsoft products for years. I don’t often find reason to say thanks to them. I guess its time I did.

There are some versions of Windows that I absolutely hate, and there are some aspects of even the versions of Windows that I like, which are just annoying as crap.

That being said, as one of the most ubiquitous operating systems found in business, I’ll give credit where credit is due. I like Windows 7 since I upgraded to the 64 bit version.

However, the products that I’m thinking about today are those contained in the Office suite.

Even though I use Mac, I’ve had a version of Microsoft Office on every Mac I’ve ever owned. It makes sense, the first Macs, remember the Classic, ran Microsoft office. Albeit, Office was a word processor and a spreadsheet.

MicrosoftOffice

As Office has grown and changed on the PC,  Microsoft has in general, kept the suite up to date on the Mac platform too. Notice i said, “in general.” There have been long delays between updates, most recently a period of about 2 – 3 years. 

Microsoft has in that time, released a number of products and left Mac product development languishing in the wake of Windows, Office 365, and game console development.

MacClassic

I’m not a big fan of the subscription software model.

This has been especially true with Office. As a Mac user, if I’d subscribed to Office 365, I’d have gotten the same version of Office I already owned subscription free.

This is about to change, and I’m taking another look at Office 365 subscriptions.

Earlier in the week I became aware Microsoft had made a version of the new Macintosh Office suite available. This is a “Preview,” it is time limited, but fully functional.

It’s very nice.

Office365

I really like the new Word and Excel. Outlook has some odd things that I’m confused by.  

Outlook talks to icloud which allows email to be retrieved, but doesn’t link up with the calendar or contacts.  That could be a deal breaker for me since I rely on those items being up to date all the time.  

As an aside, I look forward to the day when manufacturers get over the childish creation of proprietary file formats and realize that producing and maintaining superior software is what wins, and keeps customers. Microsoft is listening and Apple is listening to that message too.

The level of completeness in this “Preview” is impressive, and makes it easy to forget this is not the final product.

MSOffice

Working with Word, and Excel I’ve been impressed and daunted. Some things have moved, others are more easily found, the interface is different from my Office for Mac 2013.

I’ll have a slight learning curve. More so than Windows users this time around since they’ve had the updated menus for a year or more.

From what I’ve read, Microsoft is making the tools, menu items, and shortcuts the same whether you’re using a Mac or Windows.  For someone like me that moves back & forth, this is welcomed and very much appreciated. I’m a boomer, my gears are stripped a little more easily than they used to be!

I like the interfaces. They’re clean, with few if any distractions. I even like the opening screen that presents the most recent files, or allows you to choose a document template. In Office 2013 I found a similar screen an annoyance but this one presents immediately useful information.

BenderApplause

All of which is to say that I’m rethinking the subscription model.

Office 365 offers, or will offer fresh up to date applications at a reasonable price. $99 a year for 5 licenses that include my tablet and phone is a good deal.

Especially when I consider I’d like to have office running on my PC and my Mac and that there are two other Macs in the house that need licenses.

So Microsoft, Kudos and a big Thank you.

I look forward to the final product.