waider

* davema has changed the topic to: WELCOME TO ADMIN. TWO-DRINK MINIMUM

Him and mbroad, both of whom are smart, funny and apparently abberations in the normal $company hiring policies.

Last September, I went to Barcelona to hang out with the newly Linuxised Novell and their posse, many of whom hadn’t actually got the message and looked sort of blank when asked Linuxy questions (hello InstallShield/Macrovision!) and one of whom keeps sending me spam despite my repeated attempts - per instructions - to unsubscribe to their spam (hello AGAIN InstallShield/Macrovision). But I digress. Novell were giving out freebies during the workshops to people who answered questions or generally appeared to have functioning braincells, and dear god but there were a whole lot of people in there who either weren’t trying or shouldn’t have been there because really, I was freewheeling through these sessions and still scored bags of swag.

Anyway. One of my scores was a nice little wireless optical mouse with Novell branding; it’s really an A4Tech wireless optical mouse, but let’s not quibble. I plugged it into my Linuxy laptop and lo, it Just Worked. Having utterly failed to read the manual, I eventually divined that when it blinks the LED on the left side, it’s run sufficiently low on juice that I should change it. It’s not terribly obvious, though, since I tend not to look at the mouse when I’m working. So every so often, the batteries give out, and I’m staring at my screen and shaking the mouse around thinking, "oh no. it’s LOCKED SOLID. OH NO." before I think to glance at the doodad and realise, phew, it just needs new batteries again.

<rachel> abusebot: abuse Miloud
<abusebot> Miloud: You are a fishmonger.

This totally cracked up the office.

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.

Friend @ $company sends mail to a coworker inquiring if said coworker would be interested in hiring me to $company's Unix team. Response from coworker, unedited: "YES!". So, that's a good start to my job hunting, I guess.

...damn, I can't get a one-syllable word that sounds like "dead" and means "not working" or "made redundant".

Anyway.

Much as I would like to take the time to tour various places and visit various people, part of the Not Working thing is Not Having Money To Travel, so thanks for all the offers of places to stay and whatever but it's not like I'll be able to avail of them. We will handwave my entire "Not visiting the US while the current administration is in power" thing.

Waider (mayo.dev.ie.alphyra.com) $ > cat gnee
1109 find . -type f | perl -ne ‘while(<>) { chop; $f=$_; $f=~s|^./([^/]+)/|$1:|; $f=~s|/([^/]+)$|.\U$1|; $f=~s/\//-/g; system(“mv $_ $f\n”)}’
Waider (mayo.dev.ie.alphyra.com) $ >
Um. Yes. Looks like it might uppercase filenames and do something like replacing slashes with dashes, but I’m certainly not running it to find out.

I may have an acknowledgement in a book, but my coworker Niall has a book.