LinLog

The world's most accurate Twitter account

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Thanks to Carl and Richard from DNR for pointing out the best Twitter stream even. They mentioned it on show 379. You can find it at: http://twitter.com/thisispointless.

There are 3 things I like about this stream. First, it's actually kind of funny. Second, I think the username pretty well sums up everything about Twitter. And third, I just love the open mockery when there are people out there who are actually trying to communicate over Twitter. Because apparently nothing worth saying could possibly take more than 140 characters.

I'm sorry, that was a cheap shot. I was misrepresenting the true purpose of Twitter - to send pointless messages that people really shouldn't care about.

The truth about government

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Leon Bambrick had a really great blog post today. You know the "one laptop per child" program? Well, he thinks it's great that the IT industry is doing this and that other industries should have similar programs, such as "one handgun per child." My favorite, though, was the program for government:

Governments could offer "One soul-destroying job in a miasma of bureaucratic inconsequentiality Per Child"

If you're a regular reader of this blog, or a member of my family, then you probably know that my last job was as a Systems Analyst in the IT department of a local government, so that quote really spoke to me. I know you hear people say things like that about public sector jobs all the time, but based on 6 years of experience, I can say that it's all true. There's a general atmosphere of hopelessness, where most things don't make any sense, lots of them don't really work, and everything is more complicated than it needs to be, yet nobody seems to think this is a problem. The only way to keep your sanity in such an environment is to simply stop caring. After all, nobody else has.

Of course, the private sector is no panacea. But at least there's always the possibility that you can improve your organization or you lot within it. Or at least change something.

The one thing I will say for government work is that if gives you a different angle on conspiracy theories. After a job in public service, it's impossible to waste even a second seriously considering any of those grand, sweeping government conspiracy theories you see floating around the internet. I mean, most government offices can just barely manage the job they're supposed to be doing. How are they going to manage some sort of vast cover-up? That would require motivation and initiative, and those aren't allowed in public service.

Advance your career by losing hope

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

This week I finally decided to take the plunge: I started working on my résumé. That's right! After six years I have finally decided that it's time to get my career moving and so I have officially entered the job market.

Ah, job hunting! It's quite the experience, isn't it? I'd almost forgotten what it was like. There really is nothing like a good job search to make you feel like a useless, incompetent sack of crap!

I don't know about other industries, but this is definitely the case in the IT world. If you've ever looked for a job in software development, you know what I'm talking about. For every reasonable job listing you see, there are twelve that absolutely require a 10 years using laundry-list of excruciatingly specific technologies, strong interpersonal skills, a Mensa membership, and a strong track record of miraculous healing. And that's for an entry-level position. With a typical career path, if you start early, you should be ready for their grunt-work jobs by about the time your kids are graduating from college and moving back in with you.

The listings that have really been killing me, though, are the absurdly specialized ones. Not the ones that require 5 years experience with ASP.NET, C#, Java, Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, Netware, Active Directory, LDAP, UNIX, SONY, Twix, and iPod - they're just asking for the kitchen sink and hoping they get lucky. I'm talking about listings like the one I saw that required advanced training in computer science, a doctorate in medical imaging, and 10 years of experience developing imaging software. Or, perhaps, all those listings for a particular defense contractor that required experience with technologies I had never even heard of. I mean, I couldn't even begin to guess what these abbreviations were supposed to stand for, and I'm pretty up on my technology! When you come across a lot of listings like that at once, it can be a little depressing. "How am I ever going to find a job? I don't even know about grombulating with FR/ZQ5 and Fizzizle Crapulence GammaVY5477 or how to do basic testing of quantum microcircuits using radiation harmonics with frequency-oscillating nano-tubes on a neural net. Every idiot understands that!"

But the real killer for me is location. I'm in the southern tier of New York state, which is not exactly a hotbed of tech startups. I like the area and don't really want to move, but there's practically nothing here in terms of software development. The best possibility I found was a local consulting company 10 minutes form home. However, when I sent them a résumé, I got a message back saying that they were currently unable to add new positions due to the fact that they were going out of business. I've applied for a couple of other semi-local positions, but of all the possibilities I've found, the closest is about 50 miles from my house. Workable, but not a situation I'm crazy about.

I'm now starting to think seriously about relocating. I don't really want to move to the west coast, both because of the cost of living and on general principle, so I'm thinking of looking either downstate (i.e. New York City) or south to the Washington, D.C. or Atlanta metropolitan areas. All three of those seem to have a fair number of positions in software development.

However, I'm faced with something of a moral dilemma. You see, having been born and raised in upstate New York, it is my patriotic duty to hate New York City. But as a New Yorker, it is also my patriotic duty to look down on the South and New Jersey. That leaves me wondering whether I'm forced in to choosing Washington, or whether it counts as "the South" too and I'm just out of luck.

In the end, I guess I'm just not that patriotic. All three of those cities sound good to me. But New Jersey is another story.

Stupid user tricks

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

It's funny the things people fail to grasp when it comes to computers. Sure, there are always the "complicated" things that are the realm of "the IT people," but there are always some users who don't get the basic concepts. Kind of like Raymond Chen's relative who thinks everyting is Outlook. he user was complaining

My favorite example of this I wittnessed by accident. I was doing an installation of some crappy software that I own (read: was foisted upon me) and the last workstation I need to do just happened to be the same one our lead PC tech was working on. We had recently switched that location to a different Windows domain and the user was complaining that his bookmarks had disappeared. However, the tech had already checked the user's profile directory and the couple of Internet Explorer favorites he had were still there.

The problem? Terminology. When the user said his bookmarks were gone, he was really referring to the recently typed addresses in the location drop-down. It turns out he only ever visited the same handful sites, so the the "recent" locations were always the same. Since that's where all his links were, he apparently just assumed that those must be those "bookmarks" everybody's always talking about. In this day and age, you'd think that everybody would understand bookmarks by now. But you'd be wrong.

Then again, there are also those users who just don't seem to be paying attention. One day, I was walking back to my desk and saw one of the help desk techs sitting slouched over, shaking her head. When I asked what was wrong, she recounted the following call.
Tech: "Help desk. What can I do for you?"
User: "I'm having trouble printing."
Tech: "OK. What are you trying to print from?"
User: "My computer."

I think this tech is an example to us all. Or at least to me. She calmly and professionally answered the user's question. I, on the other hand, don't know if I would have been able to prevent myself from openly mocking the user. "Your computer? You're sure you don't mean your calculator or your phone?" "Oh, your computer. I'm glad you cleared that up. I mean, this is the IT help desk, so it's sometimes hard to tell if a call is going to be computer-related. Thanks for saving us that extra question." I mean, it's just too easy. You almost have to take the shot.

It's across the hall

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

There is one good thing about working from a cubicle: you get to overhear an interesting converstation every now and then. The following is from the tail end of a conversation I overheard this afternoon. It was between one of our a help desk techs and our telecom person about a user trying to send a fax from one office to another. Note that I was not involved in this conversation. I thought about sticking my nose in, but I had nothing useful to add and figured it would be unprofessional to ask about it just so I could mock the user.

Telecom: "I don't know why she'd dial that. It doesn't make sense."
Help desk: "But if it's a direct inward dialing, it shouldn't matter. She should be able to just dial the extension."
Telecom: "Yeah, but that extension was a phone."
Help desk: "But still, if the fax machine is on a DID line and she dialed its extension, it should have worked."
Telecom: "Well, yeah. But what really didn't make sense to me is why she would send a fax instead of just walking over and handing her the paper."
Help desk: "Yeah, I know. It's across the hall."

So there you have it. A user tried to fax a document to someone just across the hall, but screwed it up and ended up wasting her time and the help desks' time. What is the world coming to? The building isn't even that big, for God's sake! Even if the user was crippled, it still would have ended up taking less time to walk the paper across the hall.

Oddly enough, this reminds me of a Slashdot story I read some years ago about an interview with a well-known UNIX elder. I want to say it was Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie, but I really don't remember. Anyway, the interviewee said his current work involved moving multi-terabyte of GIS databases across continents. When asked what technology they used to do this, his answer was "FedEx." They just put the data on a server set up with some flavor of Linux with pre-configured NFS and Samba, so the customer can just plug the box into a network port and turn it on. His argument was that, when trying to move that amount of data, FedEx overnight shipping was actually faster and more reliable than a network transfer.

This incident is sort of the opposite of that: using technology, despite all reason, to make a five-minute delivery into a big ordeal. There truly is no limit to what mankind can accomplish.

I hope this was machine-generated

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

In the spirit of the "Code SOD" feature on Worse Than Failure (formerly The Daily WTF), I present the following image. It's from my organization's "electronic bulletin board," which is really just a few static HTML pages maintained. We impose this on our users by adding it to the Windows startup items so that it comes up with every log-on.

I am, mercifully, not involved with this particular item, but I can only assume that this code was generated by an older version Front Page, Word, or other intellectual abortion that Microsoft passes off as a "web development tool."

So, what's your favorite part? Personally, I can't decide between the italicized image and the nested, redundant font and italics tags.

The answer is VS 2005?

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Here's a funny one. I saw the image below while reading Kode Vicious's latest column on ACM Queue. Someone going by the name "Scanning for answers" wrote in with a question about static analysis tools. Note the ad that appears between his signature and KV's response.

I thought that was hilarious. Microsoft couldn't have bought better text placement. They should use that in their advertising campaign. "Scanning for answers... Found 1 answer: Visual Studio 2005."

Cheesy? Maybe. But seeing how they're the face of big, soulless corporations, Microsoft could use a little humanity injected in every now and then.