What Humanity Aspires to - In One Frame

http://www.theimaginaryworld.com/comic062804.jpg

There is a man (well, a bread) who is totally at peace with himself. When all you can ask for is ice cream and a balloon you are experiencing life correctly.

How Not to Apply For a Job

I own a domain similar to that of a mid-size Canadian medical group.  I frequently receive to them that is misaddressed. This one caught my eye.

aaaaa mehtar
to hrtoronto@....medicalgroup.com

Hi Mr or Miss :

I enclose my resume and cover letter to apply for Medical Office Administrator with your company , if your requirement match my work experience and skills please feel free to contact me. I look froward to hear from u.

thank you

sincerely

aaaaa variava

Really?

• "to hear from u"?  I would throw this away without opening the attachments.
• Signature should match your email name.
• "requirement" is in a different font.
• Oh, that should be "requirements".

I could go on, but it would be more cruel than illustrative.

Why LinkedIn is now no better than spam.

LinkedIn used to be a great idea. In the efforts to monetize, it has been reduced to little more than a spam sender. Today I got a friendly but precise solicitation from a headhunter in London. But there are two show-stopper problems.

• At the bottom of it, there was a link to see his profile. The link does show a limited profile, but unless I upgrade to a paying service, I don't get to see any useful information, like the guy's full name. This asymmetry is unprofessional. When someone solicits me with an offer, I should be able to learn about them.
• If I click the "Not Interested" button, I get a page which offers me a choice or reasons why. That's all well and good, but there is a pre-selected check box which says "Accept the sender’s request and share my contact information". Really? The default is a unilateral "Put me in this guy's tickler list and don't tell me anything about them." I think not.

The whole balance has tipped towards headhunters trying to build a portfolio of people and away from people actually maintaining a high quality network of colleagues.

TSA PreCheck at SFO rocks!

I don't want to get into a debate about security theatre and my right to transport with or without ID. I just want to say that I had my best security check in ever today at SFO. It saved me 30 minutes in line and allowed me to catch an earlier flight than I had planned.

Viva la POTS

I've had every form of telecommunications service known to man in my house at one point or another. In spite of that, I have steadfastly refused to let Verizon "upgrade" the plain old telephone service on my main line with their FiOS offering. My stubbornness was vindicated this week, as I have lived without power in my house for 7 days now. I have no heat, no internet, marginal cell phone signal, but my telephone has worked flawlessly.

They will have to pry the POTS line from my cold, dead fingers.

Hurricanes - nature's way to wealth redistribution

Hurricane Sandy is expected to do billions of dollars of damage. A pessimist would look on this as a loss, but, ever the optimist, I see this as a wonderful boost to local economies and a redistribution of wealth. There will be basements to pump, trees to clear, windows to replace, roofs to repair, lawn gnomes to recover. Most of this will be done with local labor, putting work in the hands of people who could use it.

In the best cases, insurance claims will be picking up the tab. That's a Robin Hood scenario, where we steal from the dividend payments of stockholders, and place it in the pockets of people who work with their hands. OTOH, I do own stock in insurance companies, and don't work with my hands, so this is not really directly serving my interests. Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.

Ubuntu 12.04 - a worthless turd

I've used Ubuntu daily at work and home for the last 5 years. It's been great.

A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of letting the update manager update me to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I have had a barely working system since then.

• 2 displays on an Nvidia card seems completely broken. One of my heads is just dead, no matter what I do.
• It is unstable as a deck of cards on the titanic. Every 30 minutes it freezes, give me a bug report window, and restarts the session manager.
• The new desktop is an abomination, but that's a minor bug. I installed cinnamon to get back to something usable.
• Chrome would not work at all. I had to downgrade to Chromium.
• Networking was broken after the upgrade. In the past, you used to be able to hard assign an IP address, but still use dhcp to get the name servers from the dhcp server. Not any more. The network administration panel seems to have removed most features, so I ended up having to hand edit the start up files to hard assign the name servers.

After 2 weeks of fighting it, there is no alternative than to downgrade back to 10.x or switch to another distribution. And, before you even consider disagreeing with me, let me give you some background.

• I've been using Unix daily since 1978.
• I've written and modified various X window and session managers.
• I've written network trace analyzers.
• I've shipped several commercial software products, that had to install correctly and I had to support when they didn't work.

I'm not some noob off the street. When I conclude 12.04 was not ready to ship, it's because I recognize that it really is too unfinished to give to experts, let alone casual users.