the inevitable star wars post III: now that I've had a few beers

( I prefer my trilogy nomenclature to Lucas' )

and some politics

The French rejected the EU constitution. I have NO idea if this is a good or a bad thing, but given that our own government were looking for ways to railroad it through without discussion, I can only applaud the result. Go France!

why I hate dealing with recruitment agencies

I will readily admit that my resumés are sparse, plain-text efforts, but this hasn’t stopped me from getting a quiet trickle of cold-calls over the years. The agency that the boss put me in touch with, however, feels that I should make it a Word document, put in lots of bold text, and pad it out with crap relating to what I’ve actually done. I can see some reasoning behind this, but to be honest, from my own experience with interviewing, padding is definitely one thing that made me put an applicant on the bottom of the pile or in the round filing cabinet.

update: and, I was sufficiently peeved by the above that I neglected to ask directly, but from other comments she made I am guessing that she has completely ignored my requests to be considered for developer positions as well as admin positions.

updated update: Yes, I was right. When they told us on Thursday that there was plenty of development work out there, apparently they meant "no Perl or PHP jobs" because that’s what "my" recruiter said to me. Or maybe she’s only got sysadmin jobs to offer me, because there are certainly plenty Perl/PHP jobs going on the various recruitment websites.

alternative uses for The Force™

"I have a home theater, and I read all the home theater stuff," said Hunt. "We listen to the market, and when we sense a DVD system is not in compliance, we buy it, test it and tear it apart." (my emphasis; link)

please update your update

So there's a Windows box here on my desk to allow me to interact with Lotus Notes without killing someone (actually, it's supposed to be a dev platform for some project but that project got cancelled) and I decided I'd install some updates on it. From WindowsUpdate.com. In the optional section, there's the .NET runtime, so I figured I'd fling that on it. Fine, download, reboot, etc. Then I go back to WindowsUpdate out of curiosity and discover that it's now saying I need a critical patch (which it hadn't mentioned before). Turns out this is a critical patch for the .NET runtime I've just installed. Why, pray tell, can they not either update the base download, or include the patch as a non-mandatory dependency when you install the base?

*blink*

"NATO peacekeepers sent F-16 fighter jets to a northeastern Afghanistan province today in a show of force to disperse thousands of protesters."

some days, it's not even worth chewing through the leather straps

Man, I am trying so hard to just, you know, COPE with this recruiter, but she's really getting on my nerves. As mentioned in the last whinge, she asked me twice with less than five minutes interval if I had WebSphere experience. I don't. She's sent me details of a contract job (I'm looking for permanent, and said so) which requires 4 years of WebSphere experience. If she screws up just ONE more thing I'm going to cut her off and find someone who actually listens to the answers to the questions they're asking.