Thursday, March 30, 2006

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Tech Fails

Oh poop. My uploads to Flickr from my phone are just failing. Don't think I am at any limit, but I already just lost one pic -- I used to delete from my phone right after I sent -- and other sends seem to require multiple tries.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Totally Morbid, Totally Fascinating

Thanks to BoyElectric .

If you are into trashy reality shows like COPS, this is gold. Trainwreck gold. When Euros ask me what life in America really is like for kids, this should be part of the picture.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Free Public WiFi!

Now that I work near MIT, I can see all kinds of WiFi nets. Only one is open, labelled MIT. I bet you need some extra token or so for it, or everything on it is logged and sent to a billboard. Should ask and about this.

However, both here and at LAX, a network called "Free Public WiFi" popped up. Having been in post dot-com computing and the US long enough to be suspicious of free lunches, in both cases before connecting I noticed XP had identified is as a computer-to-computer network. I suspect there's some software out there that lets your WiFi laptop advertise itself with that string, and will download every cookie, every password, every command that computers duped into connecting to that network send on.

I told Puppy IV to avoid it.

Monday, March 06, 2006

So Really, That's How I Can Help You?

I professionally re-cast myself and updated my resume to reflect what I think are the problems I solve well and want to continue to solve. I still need to update my page of case studies to include the latest work on the websites. I updated my monster.com resume as well yesterday at half past midnight, and went to bed.

These days, Monster.com is a strange place anyway. First of all, on the US site, almost every click to change your profile leads to an ad for some service that you have to accept or reject in order to be able to go do the next thing on monster -- and one of them was whether I would allow Monster.com to send my data to the Army for recruitment. Will dared me to click yes; he wanted to see what they would do with a 35 year-old high-tech homo goshdarn furriner. I told him that I would for a branch more befitting my level of snobbery, Air Force or Marines maybe, but the Army?

Second, I recently read some numbers that, at its most generous, Monster.com finds jobs for, oh, 3% of the people looking there. Which led according to the writer to the conclusion that Monster.com is only viable if you think your skill set and electronic presentation thereof puts you in the top 3% of your field. I can find fault with the math and assumptions all over the place of that statement, but there is a point there: you really have to stand out in that noise, I bet. Same goes of the jobs, though -- the best job ad for me I have seen in NYC in the last year was not on Monster, but on Craigslist.

This morning I have already received 4 emails and one phone-call from recruiters for jobs here in New England, which I want to leave. I just now amended my profile to reflect that by putting 'Seeking in Europe, Canada, NYC, LA" in my address line. All of them are hardcore development, which I am moving away from, most likely triggered by a keyword search.

I am not writing this as some 'Recruiters suck!' entry, because I have dealt with some nice ones when I have interviewed for companies, people who actually read what I wrote. I am writing this to mention that upon receiving my response that I was not available for the New England position s/he wanted to bring to my attention, I received a response to that asking
Thanks for the reply. I am trying to get in touch with someone that works with Nokia outside of the US. Can you tell me how Nokia's email is configured? Also since you are planning to leave Nokia would you be willing to give the the names of some referrals? I would really appreciate this.
Yeah, I am sure you would, hun.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Bug Report

When adding a Yahoo! account to the Yahoo software on the TiVo Series 2 bozes, note that TiVo will reject passwords with symbols like % & ! # @ in them. This while Yahoo! does allow passwords with these symbols. Consequently, a number of users will not be able to add their accounts until they dumb down their passwords, increasing the chance the passwords are cracked.