Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/09/jilted-by-google/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/04/like-programming-a-vcr/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/01/microsoft-new-yorker/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/26/enemy-combatant/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/24/dell-inept-customer-service/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/21/remembering-malcolm-x/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/16/skype/
Skype is an Instant Messenger client with a twist — if you hook up a microphone you can CALL each other. Like a telephone, only you can see if your buddy is online before you interrupt them. The audio quality is very good, and clients are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. The Linux client works on FreeBSD.
Even nicer, you can dial out on Skype, for exceedingly low rates. It costs us about 3c a minute to call Japan, though we’re going to get Noriko-san on Skype soon enough, and then the calls will be free.
If anyone wants to try it out, you can ring me at dannymanTM.
To answer a question you may have on your mind, Skype is not a telephone, so it is different from a VOIP service, where they send you a telephone that you hook up to your broadband. Instead, Skype is a way of making telephone calls from your computer. Unfortunately, people can not yet dial in to someone using Skype.
For me, though, it is as if the Internet has come full-circle: we used to have to find a cheap local number to dial in to the Internet on our existing telephone. Now, we are finding cheap services to make telephone calls on our existing Internet connection. Yow!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/16/pizza-in-redmond/
Hehe, this is good, it appears that Microsoft has physical banner ads around Redmond bragging of MSN search. It says “pizza in redmond” … suggesting, of course, that if you go to msn.com, and type “pizza in redmond” you should be able to find pizza.
MSN’s competitors get it right, but MSN search ends up with . . . janitorial supplies!
The repeated search attempt made by seattlepi.com kind of remind me of some of the early early experiences with Tellme. I wrote a Caltrain schedule app way back in the day before the advent of VXML. “Mountain View,” I’d say, with my midwestern accent. “Millbrae?” “Moun-TEN View …” I would shout back. “San Francisco Fourth and King.” “No, you f_cker, I said Mountain View!!”
But, at least Tellme didn’t go advertizing their speech recognition features without first making sure they worked.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/16/happy-kyoto-day/
Well, although my nation isn’t participating in the Kyoto protocol, I still take the bus to work, which is really nice because in bad traffic I get more time to read.
The Japanese national I live with observed that we were somewhat lacking in hot water last night. We are still lacking this morning. One might think the hot water heater is busted and the building people will repair it soon, but in the mean time, today is a good day to skip the hot water and pretend, for just a moment, that we are a bit greener.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/13/choosing-morality/
It was the vision of the founding fathers to have a nation of independent, land-owning farmers. Each farm run by a man who was the equal of his peers in freedom and opportunity. Wealth may be inherited but much of it was to be determined by personal enterprise, not to mention the ambitions of the creator …
It is a common belief that a complex entity derives much of its character from the characteristics of its component parts. In a remote colony aspiring for independence, the nation, as a republic, was to be formed in turn by independent states, composed of democratically-run communities, comprised of independent, self-determined farmers, each man his own lord over his private fiefdom. E pluribus unum — from many, one. The strength of independent men makes the strength of the communities makes the strength of the states makes the strength of the Republic, the sum of our national strength, to stand in defiance of the awesome might of the British Empire.
The conservative philosophy is that the moral failings of our government and power structures are the result of moral failures among the constituents that represent society as a whole. Their solution is too often a reaction — we will impose morality. Abortion will be illegal, as will self-serving homosexual relationships. We will seek to weave the notion of Godliness through the public discourse, for it is only through Jesus Christ, our savior, that redemption, and thus morality, is to be found.
But morality is not something you can get from the law, or from uttering some profession of faith. Morality comes from honest dialog with the self and those around the self. Morality comes from looking at the other as a different version of the self, and accepting that as a point from which to work with others. In short, morality comes from personal initiative, and requires independence and responsibility. Morality comes from the need to choose morality. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/04/seatguru/
Dave is flying to China for two weeks for business.
Another Dave suggested SeatGuru.com for advice on selecting seats for his sixteen-hour flight.
I will have to remember this, for I will have to fly to Japan in May.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/04/my-sister-kicks-butt/
Well, it started as a gigantic screw-up. Getting pregnant, right? Well, these things happen, even to responsible people.
And, there are a number of ways to handle such a screw up. My sister has come a long way, I think, nine months is one way to put it, but I think she has come farther than that.
Though she is not prepared to be a Mom, she decided to have the baby anyway, and place it with an adoption agency. Well, on February 2, with the help of our Mom and my sister’s awesome boyfriend, (who is not the father,) my sister gave birth to Evan.
Being pregnant, and giving birth, and then giving the baby away . . . of all the tough things you can do in life, that is up there on the list. I’m proud of my sister, and I am very happy that things seem to be working out great.
(And I’m a little frustrated that I can’t be around, but this is nothing new.)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/04/referer-zeitgeist/
So, take a look at backlinks. It is kind of a mess, culled from my web server’s Apache log, but gratifying to browse. Apparently, I am the top hit on Google for such things as:
I owe such “fame,” I think, in large part, to WordPress’ clever habit of putting title keywords in to the URLs of my posts. Google seems to lend a bit more credibility to URLs that match keywords as opposed to goofy URLs. “What’s in a name? Would a Rose, by any other name …”
Anyway, another thing you’ll see in there is some spam referers that companies will wrap in to HTTP requests with the expressed intent of appearing on a public “backlinks” page to boost their own Google ranking!
I have been thinking to hack up a little log-file parser that pulls the referers out, and checks on them to make sure they actually link to the pages they say, and if the referer is a search engine, to check the results on that search engine and report the ranking. It is nice to:
- Know what keywords are bringing you traffic.
- Filter out the referer spammers.
And, thinking 1.1, it would be neat to track this data by week, or month, and see gaining keyword hits, and declining keyword hits. A personal site “zeitgeist” if you will.
Has anyone ideas on implementation, or if it has already been implemented, or other features that would be nice, or how best to arrange the results? Drop me a line or comment here. Thanks!
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/04/friday-sun-god/
I am having such a Friday. I have been really productive lately, which heightens the sensation of coming in one day, and sitting at one’s desk, and really not doing anything. Not even slacking off, just sort of in suspended animation.
So, let us slack off for a bit. It is important to do. I’ll tell you that this morning, as I was walking across the foggy parking lot to get to work, I looked up in to the sky and saw a sphere. The moon, so late in the morning? But it was pure white, and a bit larger. What an interesting moon. Unless … it is … the sun! I was staring at the sun!
Normally, staring at the sun is a bad thing that will make you go blind. Don’t stare at the sun! But today, the sun was weakened by fog … it was stripped of its wrathful power, and was just an orb in the sky. I thought to take a picture of this, because it was eerie and alien, but when I pulled my camera out a moment later, the sun was gone. It had become invisible in the fog.
Talk about eerie.
As I finished my trip across the parking lot, I thought about how the sun is totally manifest each and every day, even when you can not see it. It is so powerful that usually you can not look at it directly or it would destroy your eyes, but you can feel it shining warm on your body, touching you and everything from up high. No wonder the early people revere the sun as a God. But then, the fact that you can not look at the original Sun God, and you can experience the sun even when you can not see it, well, that opens up people to the idea that you can experience other Gods, even when you can not observe them directly.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/31/right-of-way/
8:12AM, Ygnacio Valley Road at California
So, what just happened was that I took a look out for cars while crossing the right-hand turnout to the main crossing. An older lady in a red sports car came whizzing up to the turnout, took a look at me, and kept going. As I stepped in to the turnout, I smacked her red spoiler and continued on my way. I heard a honking behind me, as a few pedestrians already waiting at the main crossing looked around. After a moment, I turned my head too, to see the red sports car drifting lonely down the street.
I figure that if you fail to yield to a pedestrian, then the wholesome smack of flesh on plastic is a healthy reminder that plastic smacking flesh is highly undesirable. A healthy way of saying, “Good morning, and thank you for flirting with vehicular manslaughter.”
5:02PM, Bishop Ranch Bus Stop
I got downstairs late for the 4:54 bus. A co-rider suggested that we missed it. Then the bus pulled up, and we got on board. I did some reading up on web performance tuning, trying to think of more ways to debug the causes of trouble for one of our European clients. The bus roared along, and my studying was cut short, because by 5:20, the bus was already at Walnut Creek! It took another three minutes before the traffic light allowed the bus to cross Ygnacio Valley Road and drop us off at the BART station. As we waited, I noticed, out the window next to me, a guy in a blue Volkswagen shuffling papers in his lap, twitching with his transmission, and chatting on the cell phone, pulling a foot or two forward every few seconds, waiting eagerly for the light.
I figure that if you want to get work done on the ride home, you can take the bus. It works for me. “Can you believe that guy,” I said to the passenger in front of me. “And I have to walk home through that!”
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