Back in late 2001, after I lost my job with Tellme, I looked for work at, among other places, Google. I had long been impressed with Google, which by all accounts offers a great working environment. And like me, they were also in Mountain View. I submitted my resumé and a recruiter contacted me and said they had a Junior position available, and the salary would be about 2/3 what I had been making at Tellme, where I had worked as an underpaid technical lead. I explained that I was more interested in and better qualified for some of the more senior job postings they had open on their web site. “Well, this is the position we have available,” was the ultimatum offered by the recruiter. I politely declined.
Two months later and it was very clear to me that the job market was terrible, and that if Google was willing to talk to me about a junior position, that was far better than the stresses of being broke and idle. I contacted the recruiter and she set up a phone screen, which was followed by an on-site interview. (more…)
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I am trying to install some software that isn’t working. So, I’m trading messages with the company’s technical support, who suggested I add an argument to a wrapper script, which I tried, but nada, so they clarified:
Hmmm, when you add the -nosetjmp make sure you go through custom install using ___setup and select 2 for run setup utilites then select 2 again Perform ___ configuration then select each step except number 3…this will override your changes that you made to the script. Once that is all done you can add -nosetjmp to the ___v9.cfg file and let’s see what happens.
All this while walking back and forth to the machine room to swap through a series of three CDROMs. Ah, the glorious work of being a SysAdmin!
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As posted by Dave:
<yohan> For future reference:
<yohan> the right tool for the job, when the job is drilling a hole in soft plastic, is a Forstner bit.
<yohan> Someone with a blog should put that up, because Google sure didn’t give me that answer.
Thanks Dave, thanks Andrew.
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Back during the boom I read some fluff piece on my “stealth mode” startup attribute the description of “intelligent bulldozer” to one of our senior employees.
I have long wondered just what that is supposed to mean, but from time to time when there is a series of problems to deal with, and I just start knocking them out, one after another, like one of those video games where you have to fight the bad guys one at a time, I start to get it. Some problems are rough or tedious to deal with, and feel like they are pushing you back, but if you’re on your game, you take their blows and keep gaining ground.
Not so much emotion, not so much ego, not so much pride, not so much artistry, just that sense of inevitability . . . the thing will be done, and it will probably be done on time.
I’m not a big “intelligent bulldozer” fan . . . my style is different, but sometimes there’s this complicated task that doesn’t stir your soul, your ego, your sense of artistry, and there really is no way to go about it except as some unconcerned, powerful piece of construction equipment, patiently wielded by an experienced operator, punching out one obstacle after another. And once you knock the whole thing down, you can step back and grin for a moment with pride at your ability to finish something you aren’t so eager to do.
For what it is worth, our “Intelligent Bulldozer” came from Microsoft.
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I’m flipping through the latest New Yorker, which this week has page after page of old New Yorker covers. This seems like a cheap ploy at generating the week’s content except that every New Yorker cover is, literally, a piece of art. Some are from way back, and so I have never seen them before. Others are familiar to me because I have been a subscriber for about two years. I turn from a full-page ad for Microsoft and see an old acquiantance. (more…)
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I am an NPR junkie, and my new place gets awful reception. And for a long time I have admired TiVo and wondered if my life might not be better if I had a DVR for NPR programs. Add to that KQED’s obnoxious plugin/popup window and the fact that I use an older version of RealAudio to avoid Spyware, which stutters and rebuffers all the time, and I have enough motivation to rig up something different.
I have rigged up a simple system to schedule rips of programs broadcast on the KQED audio stream in to easily manageable .mp3 files. If I had one of them iPod thingies I could even listen to the radio programs on the bus. I might even get around to warezing this to interested friends via BitTorrent and CSS, which would leave us another technical explanation. (more…)
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This past week I read an article in the New Yorker magazine about the policy of my government to secretly kidnap terrorism suspects, without any due process, and to hand them over to foreign governments to be “rendered,” which is a euphemism for “tortured.” There are many in law enforcement who have grave doubts about the efficacy of torture. If you torture a man, he will pretty much tell you anything you want to hear. And, you can not use testimony from, or evidence that leads back to torture in a legal trial. Anyway, the article, found in the Feb 14 & 21, 2005 issue, is very long, very engaging, and left me feeling very disgusted and frustrated and just plain old upset. What follows is the last section of the article, that briefly puts a human story to the situation. It is with a heavy heart that I type this out, but the story bears being re-told. (more…)
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So, a user has a laptop whose batteries are shot, and he needs a working battery before travelling next week. (more…)
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(In tribute to and with apologies to the late Hunter Thompson . . .)
We were just outside San Jose when the technology lifestyle began to kick in. Diploma in hand, I was offered a job in Mountain View, as chief IT monkey for an Internet startup. I was sufficiently underqualified that the job presented a compelling challenge, and a great salary, for a cocky young English major from Illinois, so how could I ever refuse? Fellow alumni and I were recruited by the tens of thousands, and found ourselves settling in the Silicon Valley in quick, overpopulated waves in a mad dash for riches; In my mind, we were the ’99ers, the prospectors from out East who had followed the gold rush to California as the original ’49ers had done a century and a half before. (more…)
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If you want to listen to KQED using FreeBSD, install mplayer:
mplayer mms://wmbcast.kqed.speedera.net/wmbcast.kqed/wmbcast_kqed_jan032006_0957_103495
UPDATE: I just discovered the -playlist feature. So, this works even better:
mplayer -playlist http://www.kqed.org/w/streamingfiles/kqed_wmp.asx
I have also figured out how to convert the Windows Media Player stream in to mp3 files, and may set up a system to “record” programs on a regular schedule, at which point I can listen to public radio as I would watch TV on a DVR. (Radio TiVo!)
If anyone might be interested in getting in on a non-RealAudio “NPR audio archive” via a bittorrent setup, I’d love to hear from you.
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On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, you might enjoy some audio and video of a speech and an interview with Malcolm X, at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. That being over fifty years ago, it is a nice time to pause and reflect on the evolution of race relations in America over the past forty years.
Happy President’s Day.
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“There he goes, one of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered mutant, never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die.”
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