Diary of a Wolfeman

I’ll never understand why city, county and state job applications require such stupendous amounts of information. Today’s award for ridiculous requests goes to Clackamas County for saying “List ALL of your previous positions after the three most recent. Attach additional sheets if necessary.”

All? Excuse me? Do you really think that job I had mowing lawns when I was 10 really has any bearing on the position I’m applying for? Okay, maybe if I was going for Parks and Rec or something, but a computer tech? Cut me some slack here!

Personally, I can remember the names of the companies and what I did for them back to the beginning, but specifics like addresses and dates of employment are long gone from my memory. Frankly, some of them I would like to forget what I can remember of them.

Sorry for the lack of real content lately, folks, but I have been busy with some real-life concerns.

As I said, last week was spent in the job-search preparedness class out at PCC. this was an 8-hour-a-day thing that lasted all week. Not a complete waste of time, but I could have condensed the information I needed into a much smaller timeframe.

Now it’s back to the regular full-time job search, which I have been doing since way back in March. I’ve gone on a couple of interviews, but so have 3 million other IT guys, so it’s no real surprise that I haven’t been hired yet. It’s some tough competition out there right now, and employers are quite happy that right now they can get a guy with 4 times the qualifications they need for half the price.

When I’m not job-searching, I have been watching a lot of Stargate: SG-1 lately, since my girl works at the library and has been scoring us entire seasons on DVD. My regular watching habits were pretty hit-or-miss, so it’s nice to be able to see them all in order.

The only book I’ve had a cance to read lately was Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon. It’s the sequel to Trading in Danger, and both books are good quality space opera. The story follows Kylara Vatta, the daughter of a shipping conglomerate, through her life from being thrown out of the Space Force Academy and back into the corporate fold. Her first assignment goes haywire, and things pretty much get screwed from there. In the second book, things are getting more screwed, but she still manages to pull through – mostly by the skin of her teeth.

Unlike some other authors recently reviewed by Greyduck, Elizabeth Moon knows how to get her protagonists to do something stupid, and them beat them up for it.

Ok, back to the salt mines…

Y’know, there has been one really persistent comment spammer hitting me for the past few days, and I just don’t know what is more ridiculous: the fact that he continues, even though he has never successfully posted a comment, or the fact that the URL he puts in the comments doesn’t go anywhere. And he’s ostensibly posting for a flower-retailing website.

I mean, if it was cheap Viagra I could understand. But flowers? I think he’s smoking the wrong ones.

It looks like I have been able to save myself some work.

Spam comments that get sent to moderation get deleted, but I still get notified of what they were, so I can adjust the rules as necessary to allow genuine comments. Go ahead and test it if you’d like. I dare ya.

and it speaks binary.

Revelation for the day: it is quite possible that the next person that reads your resume will actually be an OCR scanner searching for corporate buzzwords. In a presentation from a former HR hiring director today, we were told that larger companies have resorted to page scanners to enable them to sift through the hundreds of resumes they receive from on-line aplications and email submittals. So, most resumes that they get are weeded out before ever being looked at by a human.

On top of that, those that are seen by a human are often sorted in a stack, so that only the top third or so of a page is visible, and that page has about 3 to 5 seconds to catch their eye before it gets tossed.

When I was instructed in the art of resume writing the first time around, I was told that it should be basically a good quality picture of your work history, and a longer resume equated to a studio portrait rather than a snapshot. When I started looking this time around, I shrank it a bit to make it more of a picture post card. Now I find out they want more of a thumbnail, and like a personals photo, it had better have tits to make any sort of impression.

To continue that analogy, put all your skills right at the top to get that wonder-bra lift, and using the most current corporate buzzwords turns that turtleneck into a little deep-v-neck number. That thick sweater of bullet points in your job descriptions is now crammed together into a belly shirt to show off that cute navel piercing, with maybe just a hint of a thong coming up over your low-rise jeans to suck them in.

Always make ’em ask for your digits though: References available by request.

I’ve been getting alot of spam comments for the past couple of days, and deleting them all from the ‘awaiting moderation’ list has become annoying. Over the next few days, I will be trying a few new techniques to determine the best blocks and deleters. For the two or three of you that actually leave worthwhile comments, I hope this won’t make things screwy for you. To prevent screwups, here’s the comments rules:

• 1: You don’t have to agree with me to get your comment posted. I’m a big boy now, and can stand a little honest discussion. Vitriolic, hateful comments, however, will be roasted, and I will invite all my friends to chop your ego to shreds as you so richly deserve. You have been warned.
• 2: Any reference to AOL in either email or URL fields will get your comment promptly deleted – if you aren’t smart enough to get a real ISP, you don’t get to talk to me. Plllbbbt.
• 3: You may post a single link in the text of your comment, provided that the target is on-topic. Multiple links will get you deleted, and multiple comments to post additional links will get you deleted as well. If you really need to tell me about several sites at once, either post about it in your blog with a link to said page here, or email them to me, and I may write a follow-up post with the additional links.
• 4: Blogwars: if you feel I have completely mispoken myself and wish to roast me at length, feel free to do so and leave a link to your article on my comments. I enjoy a lively debate.

There you have it. So, how am I enforcing this? Well, I have installed what the author calls “weapons-grade plutonium in the fight against SPAM”. This handy plugin deletes any comment that gets held for moderation. How do you get moderated? Well, too many links, common spam words in your comment, or anything else that pisses me off gets your comment moderated, and then the plugin deletes it.

So, if your comment never shows up, well, guess what: time to re-think it.

On the assurances that my older brother would spot me the gas money for the trip, I packed up the kids Wednesday afternoon and headed over the hills and through the woods to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Definitely a good decision. A better decision was equiping my rather hyper daughter with a portable DVD player and several movies for the trip. I would have killed for one of those when I was a kid.

My younger brother is currently home on leave while recovering from a wound received in Iraq – seems some fucktard got himself a rocket launcher and tossed an incredibly well-aimed shot into the compound the family Marine was stationed at, and he took some shrapnel in the ankle. This was just before the push into Faluja, so they shipped him home to heal, since he wasn’t able to fight at the time. He managed to make it back to Mom’s house the day I left, so things worked out rather nicely. It’s not often we can get all three of us boys in the same room nowadays.

While here, he decided to put some of his combat pay to use and grab some wheels to drive himself back to base with. If you see a mostly black 1979 Trans Am with blue stripes on the hood on the 5 in the next week or two, get out of his way. He’s got places to be and terrorists to obliterate. We talked about what he wants to do when he gets back over there, and he says he’s going to volunteer to be a Forward Observer – the guy with the radio and the laser designator, otherwise known as the most dangerous person you could ever face. That laser designator is guiding large pieces of ordinance into your front door. Smile for the camera.

Ma, of course, outdid herself once again with one of the tenderest, juciest turkeys to date. This huge bird (22#) came out of the oven so perfectly cooked that I almost pulled the carcass out of the meat while trying to get it out of the pan – I ended up having to drain all the goodies out and invert it onto a breadboard, then lift the pan off. At that point it was still too tender to flip over manually, so I had to repeat the procedure onto a second breadboard before I could carve it.

Hey Ma – that ziplock of leftovers you sent us home with didn’t make it back to the house – Ratty and I munched ’em the whole way home :)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

This article discusses what Holo-Dek Gaming is doing for the gamers of New Hampshire.

Holo-Dek is using some existing (albeit high-end) technology to build a better gaming experience. Sure, you’ve played Half-Life at an Internet Cafe or other pay-per-play computer shop, but have you done it on a 13-foot screen?

Using some high-end projectors and Alienware gaming rigs, they are building some very interesting setups, including 180-degree screens and a 20-foot sphere with a flight simulator chair. The best part? They are smart enough to modularize the components to save on build cost and time – the whole system can be shipped by truck to the warehouse of your choice and installed in a minimum of time.

The really best part is so far they’re only charging $5 an hour for play on their 73″ screens. I would absolutely fork over 20 clams for four hour’s time on an Alienware rig with that kind of display factor – but only if they offer Mechwarrior.

Speaking of which, these guys aren’t the first to do something like this as a commercial venture. Virtual World did it first by building ‘pods’ that encase the player in what can only be called a cockpit. Once inside, it really enhanced the game experience, since it made you really feel like you were at the controls of a 60-ton BattleMech. While I never personally got the chance to play before they closed down the Las Vegas operation, I’m told it was great fun.

Looking at the website now though, it looks like they had to fork the game off of the Mechwarrior II code, since they just this year added the Madcat II to the lineup of ‘Mechs.

Bummer – that means they don’t have a Heavy Gauss rifle yet. Nothing says lovin’ like knocking a mech on it’s ass in one shot :)

The following is a rather long-winded rant regarding the trials and tribulations of a job-seeker in this ‘booming’ economy. I had originally planned to keep this to myself, but hey, if I can’t rant here, where can I rant? Read on at your own risk.

Read the rest of this entry »

My fellow asshole (and creator of the “Blogsniper” graphic) over at Frizzen Sparks is feelin’ a bit frisky tonight, having a good laugh about the “We’re so sorry” website that has been posting photos of people holding signs for the camera.

Graumagus, if you haven’t guessed (and didn’t see the warnings posted on his site) is flapping that right wing pretty hard. Okay, Grau, I have one question for you: in your own opinion, what has Dubya done wrong?

As a Bush supporter, you have mentioned many of the things you think the President has done right in the last four years, and I agree on a few points. Now that he has won by a slim majority (49-51 isn’t much of a gap now, is it?), what should the Prez be doing differently than he has in the past? No man is perfect, and the general swelling of bad feelings the world over towards our country in general and our President in particular have to have some basis in reality. Let’s put aside our political differences and try to change things for the better.

(Hey, if you’re really going to bulldoze all those fences, that means I get to play in your yard, right? :) )

Take your time on this, and give us a full list of the changes you want to see in this administration. When you’ve got it all down, you and I can hash it out and write the whole thing up with both of our opinions and mass-mail it to Congress and the President together.