Job hunting is in the online network

October 22, 2007

Marketplace Money had a story this week on the importance of online networks in looking for jobs.

Mark Gentry, a recruiter interviewed in the story notably said:

Right now, if you sent me a resume in a envelope, there's little chance that I'll even open it. And the first thing I'm going to do when I get it is I'm gonna look online to see where you are. And if you're not online, then I'm going to think, well, why aren't you online? Are you even current to the market? Do you even understand what's going on in the world?

This discussion comes after a recent discussion at the office over whether to require applicants to use an online system for recruiting to a high-level position. Of course I'm biased because the story on Marketplace Money reaches the same conclusion that I do in believing that Linked In is the premiere place for professional networking. Although I recently added a My Space profile, for example, I doubt much professional traffic will come from it.

Colorado State victory makes Monday morning easier

October 21, 2007

I'll freely admit that I was pretty nervous. The combination of a 13-game loosing streak and UNLV being a 2-point favorite for UNLV's homecoming game Saturday evening made for a real possibility that UNLV would beat the Rams for the first time in years. Sure there were all sorts of things that one can point to showing why CSU should win the game. The fact remains that CSU lost several games that they should have won in the midst of this streak. However, the Rams' 48-23 victory makes it a little easier to go to the office on Monday. The Rams' slide has raised the speculation around Coach Sonny Lubick's possible retirement. It is ironic given that what has made Lubick so successful is that his teams always have heart. Only once in the 13-game streak did the team seem defeated by their own lack of motivation. And that game, last week against Air Force, now seems a one-time event. Whatever happens the Sonny Lubick bobble head on my desk will remain proudly in place.

KNPR struggles with fundraising drive

October 20, 2007

Our local public radio station is at the end of the second week of it's quarterly fund-drive and with the extra week the donations are still more than $80,000 short. I gave up quite a while ago on the station because it doesn't serve us at all well. The only brief encounters I have are the clock-radio in the morning where I haven't setup a good podcast alternative yet. Apparently KNPR is aware that we listeners will turn to podcasting but there still seems to be a disconnect when it comes to how poor their services are for listeners in Southern Nevada. With that in mind here are some suggestions that might bring listeners back and get our donations to flow to them instead of the stations producing great programming:

Apple's "evil" iPhone update

October 17, 2007

A couple of disclaimers to start with. First I've already been called an Apple apologist for the analysis I'm about to present here. That argument may makes it easier to dismiss what I have to say but it isn't the case and in fact I still get much of my search traffic to this site from my criticisms of Apple which I'm derided for on Apple fan sites. Second, I'm the owner of an iPhone and at one time I may have had ringtones on it that weren't Apple sanctioned, rather weren't RIAA-sanctioned but we'll get to that in a minute.

Background

To be certain Apple is a publicly traded company. As such it has one real motive at the end of the day. Like all companies in a capitalist society it is in the business of making money for share holders. There are companies that pursue this goal in different ways but the profit motive is what keeps the board in place and Steve Jobs in the CEO chair.

HughesNet once again proves worthless

October 16, 2007

The problems with HughesNet/DirecWay are never ending. We know that the service breaks basic web services like XML-RPC and that there are plenty of service problems but I will be so happy when I never again have need of their services. The story this time goes like this. I haven't used the network connection in days. What use the family has made has been minimal so we've had a total of 50-60MB downloaded this week. I have been thinking that I should start iTunes at midnight some night so I get to the FAP-free hours for downloading podacasts. After several days of waiting until tomorrow I gave up and started iTunes today. I stopped all the podcast downloads and went about my way. iTunes wanted to download iPhone 1.1.1 update and I allowed it this hefty file. All was just fine until the usually reasonably-sized Career Opportunities podcast sent out a hefty 80MB wiz-banger.

So now thanks to a bit of bad timing and HughesNet I'll not have internet connectivity for the better part of a 24-hour window. To top it all off their interface for checking when you're victim to the poorly named Fair Access Policy runs more than an hour behind. Thankfully the AT&T Edge network is much faster here.

If only Google Calendar did time zones

October 13, 2007

With a bit of a busy travel schedule coming up I'm in the throws of entering all the flight information in Google Calendar. Google Calendar does many things very well and it works superbly with the iPhone. My one remaining wish is that it would handle events that start and end in different time zones. In fact, while it does time zones in a fashion the support for entering events in different time zones or changing events into the correct time zones is lacking.

Maddening Airport Extreme Disk Disconnects

October 9, 2007

Until upgrading to Airport Extreme software version 7.2.1 using my Airport Extreme to connect USB disks was working quite well. Now it works not at all. It turns out after spending a couple of hours trying to see what I might be doing wrong that there are many people with this problem. Sadly there are not reports of people being successful in working around it. In my case it was easy enough to swap them back to the iMac which is usually on when I want to connect to the disks. I sure hope Apple gets this fixed soon.

[Edit] -- Changed the incorrect mention of Express to Extreme per the comment.

Until they do there is a way to get back to a working version of the firmware.

  1. Open AirPort Utility
  2. Select a base station (to get mine to show up I had to power cycle it because although it was working it would not show up in AirPort Utility
  3. Hold down the Option key and choose "Check for Updates"
  4. A complete list of all updates will be shown and you can choose a previous version from the list

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