Category: Rant

Jealous, much?

So less than a week after I start using my new upgraded Linux box for lots of stuff, my laptop suddenly decides not to wake up out of sleep, and when you reboot it the light comes on and you can hear some minor activity inside, but you never get the start up chime and the usual special keys to boot in diagnostics mode or single user mode didn’t work. I think it’s jealous because I haven’t been using it as much. Or maybe it’s just under more stress because I’m opening and closing the lid and moving it around instead of leaving it tethered on my desk all the time.

Vicki has been talking for a while about getting a new laptop because her old MacBookPro with only 3Gb of RAM keeps freezing up, especially when she’s doing Second Life, and especially since she “upgraded” to Lion. So we went off to the Apple store, her to get a new MacBookPro, and me to get some help from the Genius Bar.

The Genius poked around, tried a few things I’d already tried and a few things I hadn’t, all to no avail. It wouldn’t stir. So he said “well, it looks like it needs a new logic board. We had a few problems with nVidia chipsets back around that time, so I’m going to write it up as one of those even though I can’t boot it far enough to run the graphics system diagnostic.” The upshot is that I’m going to be without my laptop for a week or more, and I’m going to get a new $500 logic board for free. Not too bad, I guess. Although if they’d tried to charge me for it, I probably would have just bought a Macbook Air instead. So maybe that’s a mixed blessing.

Another boring paddling story

I’ve haven’t been writing about paddling much, mostly because I haven’t been paddling much. And I haven’t been paddling much because my shoulder recovery is not going as well as I’d hoped, and sometimes when I’ve gone paddling I’ve been in pain for days afterwards. But I’ve been making slow progress in getting some fitness back – on my best days, I can paddle about 2.5 miles without stopping, at about a mile per hour slower than I used to go 10 miles.
Continue reading “Another boring paddling story”

Help me, smart people

This is how the v-rack is attached to the rack
This is my new v-rack. The connection is simple and strong, but it’s too simple for me. It doesn’t allow for access to my hatchback – I could probably get it open a tiny bit, but I’m afraid of the sharp edge of the square bar and what it would do to the glass of the hatch. What I want is either a quick and easy way to remove the rack entirely, or to undo the back clamp and pivot the whole thing forward around the front clamp, or even better, a quick and easy way to loosen up the connection once I take the boat off, so that I can slide the whole rack forwards so it’s not interfering with the hatch, and then slide it back and tighten it up again.

Some of the ideas I’ve had:

  • A quick release skewer from a bike. Not sure if I could get the size I want or whatever.
  • Something like a cable clamp, preferably one that goes over center and locks down really well.
  • Something like a cotterless hitch pin.
  • A plastic knob or wing nut to make it easier to unscrew.

Better ideas, or better explanations of my half-assed ideas above would be welcomed in the comments.

Yeah, I think I’ll pass

As an hourly rate contract programmer, I feel it necessary to always keep my eye on the local tech job postings, and apply for anything that looks interesting. Because there is no job security in my position, my goal is always to be ready to take something else either before or as soon as possible after my existing job ends. That means not just looking to see if there is anything better than what I’ve got now, but also making sure my resume is still attracting attention and making sure my interview skills are honed and practiced.

I’d never take an interview just for the sake of an interview, though. I always intend that if the job is sufficiently good, I’ll take it. (But “sufficiently good” will vary depending on how much I like my current job and how secure I feel in it.) It just wouldn’t be fair to the other people to waste their time just for the sake of practice. But because you can’t get a full sense of how good a job is just from a description on Monster or LinkedIn, though, you may not know if the job is one you’d take until you’ve been there and talked to the other developers and managers about the project. That’s especially true if you’re going through a head hunter because they try to hide details from you so you don’t bypass them and apply directly. (I’ll bypass the rant about the time that the head hunter hid the minor little detail that the job was only open to US citizens until after I’d accepted the job and handed in my resignation on my current job.)

I saw this ad on LinkedIn. It was pretty vague, so I asked about it. The person gave me a few more details so I sent her a resume. The only problem is that their main line of business is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Management). That’s a bit of a red flag – there are two ways of doing SEO and SMM, the ethical way, and the “spam every blog and forum and Facebook and Twitter with links to your site” evil way. So I knew I’d be spending any interaction with them examining them minutely for any sign of which side of the fence they sit.

I got an invitation to an interview. Ok, I hadn’t noticed before that they are in Buffalo, not in Rochester. That’s not a deal breaker, but I’m not happy about it. They also sent a “Employment Application”, and it’s a typical one you see from certain companies that look like they wrote it for every position in the company from janitor to CEO. I find it slightly insulting to be asked if I have any “Special skills” with checkboxes including Word and Internet Explorer as special skills. As far as I, or just about any other software developer in the world, is concerned, the only special skill you need with IE is how to use it to download a real browser. Again, not a red flag, but annoying.

And then I got to the “Consent and Disclosure Form”. The form asked for permission to produce this “investigative consumer report” for processing my application. It said “the report may include, but is not limited to, searches of … financial or credit agencies; criminal history information… and motor vehicle records”. It authorizes them to do this report “now, or at any time while I am employed by the Company”.

I wrote the HR person back and said I’m not interested in signing away those sort of rights to a company before I’ve even talked to them. She insisted that they wouldn’t actually do the search until after they’d made a conditional offer and accepted it, and said that they wouldn’t actually look for credit information or motor vehicle records. To which I replied that if they don’t want those rights, don’t make people sign papers giving them to them, and reiterated that I wasn’t coming to interview with them.

Car accident

[youtube l82nXRr_D0A]
I was driving home from lunch, and I managed to smash into a guy in an intersection. I have no idea how it happened – I thought I had a green light, but as I hit the guy and we spun, I looked up and saw a green light facing his direction. I wasn’t distracted in any conventional way – my cell phone was in my pocket, I wasn’t reprogramming my GPS or anything else. I just didn’t see the light.

The car is a mess. I had to really body check the door to get it open, and it looked like both the gas engine and the hybrid synergy drive box were knocked off their normal mounts. I don’t think the front wheels would turn. I don’t know if the car will be totalled, but I wouldn’t be surprised. They hauled it off in a flat bed.

The other guy’s car looks ok. It’s a Jeep Cherokee, and I hit the door behind the driver. Afterwards, that door opens and closes fine and the electric windows go up and down. So unless I bent his frame, he’ll be ok.

The worst thing is that it has badly shaken my confidence. How could I have not seen the light? There is another light about a hundred metres south of that one that I went through just fine. I have no recollection of thinking of something else, or looking elsewhere. I just blanked. And while nobody is hurt, I’m just glad I didn’t do something like that when I was flying.