Bill on the Information Technology job market

Employers sometimes impose "term limits"

2012-01-31T05:19:00.000-08:00

The Huffington Post reports today on an employment policy that it considers controversial. A new casino in Atlantic City. NJ, the Revel, will hire workers with “term limits”, the provision that they must reapply every four or six years. The story is here.

The idea may be as bizarre as it sounds. Employees who follow contracts from one company to the next experience the same thing in IT and engineering. And as far back as the early 60s, GE once had a policy of firing the weakest 10% at a location every year.

If you can take the chance, travel for a year

2012-01-27T06:32:00.001-08:00

AOL and Huffington this morning offered a video by Bill Hemmer, who describes how he “took a chance” and quit a job and traveled around the world, being of service in some places, and started a career in “professional” journalism. He says, “do it”. Actually, Anderson Cooper did something similar, and so did Sebastian Junger.

Hemmer, now 47, is a Fox news anchor for America’s Newsroom.

Employers demand submission of online presence without traditional resume; does the employer "own" the associate's web presence?

2012-01-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal has a story indicating that some companies may be demanding a web presence, in fact that’s all they want, no resume. They want “one identity” on the Web. (Isn’t that Facebook’s philosophy? Anything else shows lack of “integrity”.

Rachel Emma Silveman has a story on the policy of Union Square Ventures, here.

Applicants are asked to send a “web presence” such as identifying a Twitter account, or “Tumblr blog”? They also want a video self-presentation. (It helps to be cute.) What about Facebook (and the Timeline)? What about Blogger? What about Wordpress?

I guess the old text-based format (Web 1.0) of doaskdotell.com wouldn’t make a good impression.

But some employers are starting to act like they want to own the associate’s web presence.

The company says that venture capital firms rely heavily on associates’ use of their own social media. See related story Jan. 23.

This is beginning to sound more like a world in which the character "Nolan" from ABC's "Revenge" does very well.

More technical employees will be encouraged to share public school teaching duties

2012-01-25T20:31:00.000-08:00

Today I heard station WJLA report on efforts by computer companies, especially Microsoft, to place technical employees into volunteer or part-time teaching positions teaching computer science and possibly math in high and perhaps middle schools around the country. WJLA did not have the story online yet, but there is a similar story from Washington state here.

A good question would be, whether the employees would eventually be required to get the clock hours for teacher certification.

Presumably these are eager students so the discipline problems I encountered as a sub a few years gao would not apply.

Technical employees will probably find they are approached to share teaching responsibilities more often in the future as part of an economic recovery plan.

Students will be learning to work with paperless textbooks, online with laptops or notebooks or possibly iPads in some school districts, such as Fairfax county VA.

Microsoft's "Partners in Learning" page is here.

What happens to social media accounts when employees leave, especially if the employer "used" personal accounts?

2012-01-23T18:46:00.000-08:00

Sam Richter has a discussion at “Know More” on the question of “what happens to social media accounts when your employees leave”, Jan. 23, link here.

Some employers encourage employees to use their own Facebook or other social media accounts for corporate purposes with detailed policies as to how to use them, rather than depending just on “branded” employer accounts. But then tricky questions arise when an employee leaves. This almost sounds like the "no personal use of company resources" problem (which started to become very clear during the mainframe age) turned around.

SOPA/PIPA bills probably would hurt IT jobs; a look at their jobs today

2012-01-18T07:35:00.000-08:00

Does the SOPA blackout on the Web today (by Wikipedia, Reddit, and even Google’s blacking out of its own trademark on its home page for the day) have a lesson for the job market?

I think so. As conceived (I’ve covered this at length on the main blog), SOPA would cost more jobs in lost startups and established service companies than it would save in media companies. For a variety of reasons, it actually would be very ineffective in preventing piracy and saving Hollywood and music industry jobs in legacy companies, although allowing legacy companies more of an oligopoly on what can be produced and distributed at all might protect some guild members.

It’s well known that it could burden service companies with having to police “user generated content”, not just for direct copyright violation but perhaps for linking to or inadvertently supporting “rogue” foreign companies beyond the reach of usual US (and Interpol) law enforcement. It would be a kind of conscription against a "foreign enemy" (to legacy companies).

Yes, SOPA could put “amateurism” in jeopardy, but that’s a bit ironic as the effect of social networking sites, forcing people to lead “unified lives” on the web to remain employed, may be having the same effect.

As for the Occupy movement and the support from Anonymous (which have vigorously opposed SOPA), I wonder one thing: Someone with the skills to useful to “Assange” has the skills to get any job he or she wants in the Internet security industry. There’s no reason to live in tents in city parks, or to wind up in jail. I wish I had the skills and quickness of a “Lisbeth” (“Dragon Tattoo”), a Nolan (“Revenge”), or even V. (Yup, Nolan is even "cute".)

By the way, I've actually looked at Hollywood employment before. After the 2001 layoff, I actually looked at the jobs on the Warner Brothers website in early 2002. At the time, there was a lot of DB2, but they seemed to want mainframe and C++ in the same person. The jobs actually looked pretty good. I didn't contact them, though, when I went to California in February 2002 for 10 days.

Actually, their IT job listing (for Time Warner) now is pretty interesting. It's here. I wonder what they mean by "workbrain".

Capitalism's "creative destruction" (by Mitt Romney) and the changes in the IT job market

2012-01-12T08:02:00.000-08:00

Jia Lynn Yang has a major story and video about the GOP candidates’ – especially Mitt Romney – record in creating and destroying jobs in their own histories today.

Everyone knows that corporate raiders merge companies and eliminate jobs to “eliminate redundancies of function”.

What I found in my own career is that companies would try to give incentives to stay to key employees to keep a ship running based on older technology, which would not be helpful to them in finding new work later. That was especially the case at Chilton, which was bought by TRW in 1989. I left and didn’t stretch my luck, since the background was all Datacomm DB/DC, which died by the wayside.

It was interesting to see how companies wanted specific technologies for short times. In the early 90s, mini computers were the rage (Vax/VMS, AS400, Silverlake, etc), but soon the Internet took over the job market. Then the Internet itself cycled over – the dot-com boom going bust and settling into a few companies (like Google, Apple and Facebook) that demand a culture of super-talent and constantly test people to see who is “hottest”. (That’s great for 20-year-olds who grew up on computers.) The mainframe market grew with Y2K, but then became fragmented into rotating professionals how knew specific packages (Vantage, MMIS) or databases (DB2 or iMS internals).

Conventional wisdom is that mergers get rid of jobs already being done inefficiently – and that’s true – but they also force established professionals to retrench into arcane areas of expertise and troll the country looking for contracts.

Now all registry cleanup programs for Windows are created equal

2012-01-09T19:23:00.000-08:00

Here’s a little review of Registry Cleanup programs (five of them) for Windows 7 and Vista, on Tech Republic. I wasn’t aware that the “deeper cleaning” might make a computer unbootable.

I used RegCure during the last year of my first harddrive on a 2003 Dell 8300; but the drive failed at the end of 2009 anyway. The boot up process took longer and longer and would stall displaying Nvidia icons. Regcure only helped marginally. When a hard drive starts to fail, slow operation, especially at bootup, seems to be a major symptom.

The bootup process on this machine, Windows 7, Dell XPS, sped up after installation of Webroot Secure Anywhere.

Facebook seeks talented programmers with its January Hacker Cup

2012-01-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

Remember the line from “The Social Network”, “let the hacking begin”. Now, the Facebook Blog entry today, “Announcing Facebook’s 2012 Hacker Cup”, starts with “Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook”. The post goes on to explain its programming contest Jan. 20-23 in Palo Alto, CA, link here. It sounds almost like a USCF chess tournament.

Laurie Segal has a story on CNN Money, “Facebook seeks world champion hacker”, here.

You can’t get quick and good enough at this without not just “curiosity” (as one coworker said back in the 1990s) as with dare-devilness. What happened to all the plodding care involved in regressive testing, elevations, and on-call production support so familiar from the old mainframe world?

Adventures with the newer iMovie

2012-01-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

Something weird happens when I connect a new Sony Handycam with movies in memory to the MacBook in iMovie.

Actually, in Finder, after the USB connection (to memory), I can find the directories but not the .mov elements.

If I go to "Import" and try to go to "other", it never finds the movies. If I go to "Import from Camera" before doing the USB connection, I get invited to record myself through the webcam, and to then connect the external camera. But then it works, and finds and IMPORTS all the movie clips (as .mov) from wherever you point for your "Event".

Finder "File" function doesn't "eject" either. I don't understand why the Mac Finder doesn't work with the Sony Handycam (HDR CX550V) in a straightforward way. Sony documents only the Windows PMB (Picture Motion Browser) interface, which is complicated.

Final Cut Express, by the way, always asks for a Firewire interface, which I don't have. It doesn't seem to be able to import movies on my MacBook by USB, but can open and manipulate the iMovie elements, showing them as individual editable frames.

Today's "cable guy" -- a paradigm for the future job market?

2012-01-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

First, I wanted to notice that the record of companies I worked for over the years for customer service, at least internally, was outstanding – that being so even given some occasional performance problems.

As a user in “retirement” I’m not finding that all companies have the infrastructure to deliver that kind of customer service at least to home users.

But the job market is certainly tending to place much more emphasis on skills appropriate for visiting customers at home. That varies from Geek Squad “black tie agents” to “cable guys” – who now have to be geeks who troubleshoot as well as people who can climb poles.

Conversely, the emphasis on “home work” could change the nature of much of the job market to something that stresses physical capabilities (like climbing) too. Did you ever want to have to pay your dues by repairing storm damage on poles? Wonder what it is like to be a utility worker?

The New York Times on Jan. 1 has a relevant article, “Today’s Cable Guy: Upgraded and Better Dressed”, by Amy Chozick, link here). Today’s home users are demanding much more infrastructure, and cable companies may also be selling home security soon.

Around 2002, I recall, after my own layoff, that Time Warner Cable had jobs “selling” cable service in new real estate developments (in Minnesota, then), claiming possible earnings of $75000 a year. And it was door-to-door.

Hospital in PA will deny employment based on legal nicotine (tobacco) use even off the job

2011-12-31T17:20:00.000-08:00

Geisinger Health Systems in Danville PA says it will screen job applicants for nicotine use (even at home) starting in February of 2012. The CNN story is here.

The hospital says that second hand smoke should not cause positive tests – a concern raised in the past about employer drug screening for marijuana use. I had to undergo one such screening by urinalysis in 1990 for the last job I had – for 12 years – even though the practice was later dropped.

Existing employees will not be affected by the policy.

There have sometimes been controversies over other ideas, like testing for HIV, which some people on the radical right have tried to encourage at times.

One could also consider the ethics of screening applicants' personal online activity, not only for non-work related activity, but because of the likelihood of identifying wrong people or of believing material posted by others.

This is probably also not the first time employers have screened for tobacco use.

Physicist Stephen Hawking has a job opening

2011-12-30T06:59:00.000-08:00

Here’s a single job opening: Stephen Hawing is looking for a technical assistant who can maintain the hardware and software he uses to communicate with the world. I presume the job is in Britain.

Here is the link.

You would really have to be a super geek to get and hold down this job.

And you’d need unusual people skills.

Is there anyone out there who can fill the opening?

Production support (and responsibility for live systems) makes the IT professional grow up

2011-12-29T06:25:00.000-08:00

My “conventional” information technology “career” (as in the last movement of Shostakovich’s 13^th Symphony, maybe) lasted about 32 years (1970-2001), and it’s instructive to see how much of that lapsed time I was actually responsible for stuff that ran in production.

The “first experience” with this didn’t really happen until early 1976, with the NBC General Ledger system, running on a Univac 1110, in “ASCII COBOL”, right in 30 Rock. (It must have been replaced by now.) To “get IBM” I moved to Bradford National, and from Nov. 1977 until I left at the end of 1978 I was responsible for batch MMIS end-of-month reports (called “MARS”, no connection to the Viking Lander). But at the Combined Medicare Consortium (CABCO, of Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans) in Dallas, there was no production from 1979-1981, in fact, a project failure (not good for the resume). I moved to Chilton Credit Reporting, in an Ahmdahl (like IBM MVS) environment with ALC, COBOL, Datacomm DB and DC (sorry, not IMS and CICS) in late 1981, but didn’t move anything to production until Labor Day weekend, 1985, with monthly billing. I still remember the Sunday morning drive to the office along I-30 to support the production run. Pretty soon, I had made changes to the daily system, and we replaced all the billing in late 1987. When I went to (effectively) Lewin in 1988 back in Washington, I was responsibl for COBOL and SAS reports (“tables”) given to clients (for health care lobbying support). And at ING-ReliaStar-USLICO, from 1990-2001 (Arlington VA and then Minneapolis in 1997) I supported a variety of production systems all the time, including a salary deduction billing system that ran all day. I have to say that in my “post-retirement” world managing an estate, knowledge of life insurance (and the details about how IT processing really works) has come in very handy, particularly recently. Sometimes I feel as if I had never left work. It’s déjà vu.

In sum, for about 19 of those 32 years I was exposed to production responsibility (including off-hours on-call support or “nightcall”), including the last 16 years in a row. Most of the time the exposure was daily and could impact weekends. But that leaves quite a bit of time that I was not (especially 1979-1985, and before 1976), and so some of that help explains why I wasn’t more mature about some things when I should have been.

We all have to pay our dues.

How often did programmers hold down "real jobs" while moonlighting?

2011-12-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

How many programmers did I know that also held down “real jobs” at the same time? Over the years, a few.

In Dallas, around 1980, when I was working for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Consortium (“CABCO”) and never wrote a line of code (I was a “systems consultant”), a coworker, himself an evangelical Christian and quite open about it (on the “Buckle of the Bible Belt”), took a second job selling cars to “feed his babies”.

In the early 1990s, while at a life insurance company in Arlington VA, a COBOL programmer, returning after just a week on another job he didn’t like, worked evenings for “Tos ‘R’ Us” – and maybe that was for “Babies ‘R” Us”.

And as far back in 1971, an operations research analyst at RCA (then in Princeton, NJ), himself a well-hardened West Pointer and Vietnam veteran, held seminars in his home (I went to one) about starting Amway distributorships.

And at Chilton, in the early 80s, our female manager “Donna” used to talk about “real jobs” and called the Tuesday afternoon staff meetings “devotionals”.

And also later in 1971, when I worked at NAVCOSSACT in Washington DC, a friend and co-worker, who got a mathematics thesis published while working there in a professional journal (I proofed it for him), worked weekend nights at the Giant supermarket, even boiling live lobsters. A former teacher in Florida, he was "just" a GS-7 and had married an "instant family".

When working for yourself, you still have to approach "moves" and software changes very carefully

2011-12-20T09:27:00.000-08:00

I wanted to reiterate that even when working at home on my own ventures (self-publishing, music composition and soon video or movie making), I find that I have to be “strict” about making software changes.

Any time that I contemplate a significant change, I need 3-4 hour uninterrupted time to allow for the possibility that things will break or not work, and that I may have to call and reach support, or, in extreme cases, take a laptop or other item over to the Geek Squad or Apple Store “Genius Bar” for investigation. These days (especially during the holiday season), I don’t have a lot of 3-4 hour periods free. I had hoped that dropping the Census job and completing some major personal travel would free more time, but I still find myself short on periods to work alone without interruptions.

It is important, when developing and deploying content, to have extended periods to work on material without disruptions. There are many sources of interruption, from software updates to these unstoppable telemarketing calls. Volunteer work needs to be meaningful to me and related to my own circumstances, and not just based on emotion or on what “feels good”.

Modern home systems frequently perform automated updates. Microsoft supplies updates about once a week or two weeks. These usually work without problems, but one or two have caused problems and disruption. The Windows Vista and Windows 7 restart process requires “configuration” of updates during both shutdown and restart. Microsoft does not give very good indication of the progress of the configuration. In one or two cases, configuration processes have hung. But they never seem to hang if you do the update manually with the system up and restart , rather than at shutdown. Also, my smaller Windows 7 laptop sometimes does not want to restart without closing the running program (windows update) and requires manual intervention.

My larger XPS laptop (Dell) had Vista from mid 2009 to the end of 2010, when I had it converted to 7. At that point, I had to replace the Microsoft Word programs with 2011 versions and new licenses. All of these changes on an “older” machine could contribute to instability.

I can recall back in 2004 having to load Windows XP Service Pack 2 to a desktop 8300, six months after purchase. That took about an hour and required multiple restarts, but worked. Then there was a SP3.

Likewise, Windows 7 has had a Service Pack 1 on each machine.

When one buys a new laptop or any computer, one likes to have current operating systems and service packs and updates. But it seems that one always has to run multiple updates nonetheless, causing possible instability. And remember, in my circumstances, stability is everything. I have to get my work done.

PC Security packages also have to be updated. As noted on my Internet Safety blog, there have been some issues with my Webroot Security Essentials Firewall suddenly overblocking. Yesterday I got a comment from the company urging me to load the new Security Anywhere product. But I have to make sure I have several free hours on a weekday when everyone on their end will be at work. I’m not sure I have that time until after Christmas day (and everyone is back to normal Tuesday Dec. 27). Right now, I still have the current product protecting me satisfactorily despite the glitch, so I can’t take unnecessary “risks” until I have the time.

Remember how it was when I was working? Moves (elevations, promotions, whatever you call them) were done to applications on Fridays only, before the weekend cycle when there was more time to recover from abends. System software changes were usually done on weekends (particularly Sundays). ISP’s typically do their maintenance late on Sunday nights. These kinds of things need to be scheduled.

Microsoft Word 2011 continues weird behavior under W7 sometimes

2011-12-19T19:38:00.000-08:00

Here’s a good little problem with Word. I have a particular work file that I found with the Windows 7 “Search” to be on a “Geek Squad Backup” which was done a year ago. When I try to save the Word document in one of my c: directories, it just doesn’t save it. Windows Explorer just doesn’t find it. Finally, if I change the name of the file by one character, it saves it.

Weird.

I’ve had trouble with Word 2011 locking up under the autosave. The first time I try to copy a file that locked up, the copy locks (whether in command mode or Windows Explorer); the second time always works. Weird, again.

School districts start making rules at personal social media for teachers; what about regular employers? What about pictures taken by others appearing on the Web?

2011-12-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

Although it used to be that the rules for computer use just applied to workplace computers, now employers are having to pay much more attention to employee Internet and cell phone use at home with their own dimes.

Jennifer Preston has a front page story in the New York Times about school systems and their new policies for teachers and probably administrators, “Rules to stop pupil and teacher from getting too social online”, link here.

The obvious issue would be friending between students and teachers, but there are many others. There have always been implied barriers between teachers and students, like teachers didn’t socialize with kids or call them at home.

Actually, in some of the newer charter schools, some of those barriers are changing, because teachers are required to be available to help students with legitimate work off hours.

But the broader issue concerns what teachers post on the Internet . (Yes, some teachers post their course syllabi and materials on the public web, when they could restrict it, for openers.) Some school districts have policies against postings that show teachers in "questionable" but lawful behavior like drinking. Why is this a problem. Teachers are adults. (Yup, I wouldn't like to see a pix of a teacher smoking cigarettes now, but when I went to school, teachers had smoking lounges and everyone accepted it.) What if a teacher appears in a picture drinking, in a picture taken by someone else at a bar or disco and then posted on a blog – and then a student (or school district administrator) recognizes it? Actually, as I’ve noticed recently, people have become antsier about photography in bars in the past year or so, possibly because of this concern, and possibly because of tagging – although Facebook has supposedly made it easier to avoid being tagged if you don’t want to be.

Another question could concern whether a posting had been intended to be public, or was restricted to a private list. Social networking sites are refining their capability to target content to specific circles of friends, almost making the postings circulate the way they used to with listservers or virtual offices.

The obvious extension of this question becomes, what about the workplace as a whole? What about online friending between boss and subordinate?

I have, on my blogs, previously discussed my own history with “conflict of interest” and public blog posting. I’ve said, in the past (as far back as in a 2000 white paper) that people with direct reports in the workplace, or who grade others (many teachers) or make underwriting decisions, have to proceed with great caution about making their views known in public and searchable areas in the web. Even subtle postings that give hints of various personal prejudices (let’s say, about personal appearance) could create legal problems in the workplace later, if it could be shown that the person “in power” was predisposed to hold certain prejudicial beliefs.

But, in theory, restricting the audience of a posting on a social networking site could answer some of these concerns, if it’s unlikely that subordinates (or students) will actually be able to find it and see it.

As for school districts, there would be a question as to whether the policies apply to substitute teachers as well as regular teachers, especially those who take only short term assignments and don’t grade students.

I’ve had my own personal experience with this sort of issue, actually with a “fictitious” screenplay that I had posted on the web in 2005 in which I “appeared” to be a character who did some bad things. This led to an incident at West Potomac High School near Alexandria VA in the fall of 2005 when I was subbing there. The details are on the “BillBoushka” blog July 27, 2007. I also mentioned this yesterday on the Drama blog because of a “coincidence”.

It's only fair to mention that the argument goes in the other direction. Some school districts try to teach social media use in the technology and sometimes English curriculum. Around 2006, a Fairfax County English teacher (at another school) created some controversy by teaching blogging in her English class -- keeping all the content rated G.

Picture: Proof of concept. The disco picture is vague, but theoretically someone in the picture could be presumed be drinking if employed in a school district with such a policy. No tagging. But in theory facial recognition software might someday be able to troll the web for violators. Bring on the “troll hunters” as in a well-known Norwegian horror film.

Some employers seem to think you need a large Facebook presence; Linked In is not good enough (no more "separate lives" from work)

2011-12-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

Today, the Business Section of the New York Times had an article on people who resist joining or quit Facebook, and offered a comment by “PurloinedKarma” (after Poe) to the effect that some employers have told rejected job applicants that they need a large social media presence, that Linked In (which a couple applicants had without Facebook) is not enough.

I couldn’t find the exact comment online; it’s at the bottom of p B5 in print.

The idea seems sinister. Facebook insists that a person has only “one life online” with its “real name” policy, and employers could use such a policy to insist that employees not have separate identities or political initiatives offline.

The original NY Times story (paywall) is here.

A site called Sodahead had an article, “is your Facebook profile employer friendly?” (Aug. 9, 20110 here

The Wall Street Journal had an article by Joe Light around Aug 8 about employers trolling Facebook for candidates, here (paywall subscription).

Seeking Alpha, on Dec. 5, 2011, has an article “Linked In: Living in Facebook’s Shadow”, link here. The general thrust of the article is that Facebook is more advanced in offering employers applications, and practically every major company is on Facebook. Therefore, it’s harder to make the case for a “workplace oriented” social network and keep it separate from the rest of the world.

Here's another wrinkle, just in: WJLA in Washington reports that KLM is planning to allow passengers to check Facebook and LinkedIn profiles of passengers in adjacent seats (for people who opted in). The UK Dail Mail reports on it here.

Today is the ten-year anniversary of my Big Layoff

2011-12-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

Well, ten years ago, at about this time, (9:20 AM CST), my manager stood in my cubicle and said “Bill, we have a meeting.”

At 9 AM sharp, I had gotten a message from Netware saying “your account is disabled. Please log off now”, right while I was talking to an internal client resolving a problem in the GUI.

The help desk called back when I returned from the “meeting” saying, yes, my account was disabled.

Fourteen of us on the “Fourth Floor” were laid off that day, Dec. 13, 2001, 92 days after 9/11. One of the people had been on nightcall that week. The nightcall responsibility was split among the fewer people who remained (a 40% cutback), three days at a time.

I do believe that, had 9/11 been prevented, the layoff, at least on this scale, would not have happened then, not until well into 2002. 9/11 had affected the company.

This would be my first involuntary termination since 1971. I had worked over thirty years with stability, quite a record, I thought.

I never quite climbed back on the mainframe and conventional IT wagon. I came close a few times. I’ve rehearsed many of the reasons, but one of them is that I had suddenly become spread too thin. Exposure to a lot of things was no longer good enough as it had been; you had to be an expert at something. To get a Medicaid MMIS contract, for example, you would need 5 years MMIS, fairly recent. A mainframe contracting world would evolve (after 2000 and Y2K) where the same people rotated among similar contracts, much as had been the practice with defense contractors back in the 1970s. Typically, employing clients already knew who they wanted.

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic discusses the "hiring crisis" (5 months ago):

No, the Mac is not perfect. Some little glitches appear

2011-12-12T09:21:00.000-08:00

Well, Apple is not perfect. In the past few days, I’ve had a few little glitches on my MacBook, which I am using to go through Logic right now, and on which I plan to load Sibelius soon and get my own music encoded.

Once, when I booted up, the touchpad cursor wouldn’t move. It stayed frozen in the upper left corner. I powered it off (the button) and hard-rebooted and it then worked.

The evidence online is that the problem could have something to do with the fact that the touchpad is located right over the battery.

And here’s another link discussing problems like this.

I also had a problem with the pulsating circle when I was browsing with Safari. I was on a National Geographic site, getting ready for the show on big cats. Safari seemed to hang. Some applications (like iMovie) still worked. But when I went to shut down from Finder, the circle still pulsated even while tryiny to shut down. I had to use the silver power button. Upon restart, everything was normal. All I could find online was a discussion of hanging on Safari blacklisted sites. NatGeo should be OK, but there could be a glitch.

Here’s a writeup.

Both problems occurred when I was running off battery power. I have not yet had a problem like this with the power cord connected and charging.

I have had some similar problems with my 2002 iMac. When a DVD gets stuck because of a scratch, the system loops and I have to turn it off and restart it to eject the DVD. That's very annoying on a rented DVD that forces you to watch all the previews again. I also had a lot of trouble burning DVD's with it from iMovie -- it would get stuck. I finally took a digital tape to a studio and had a DVD made, and now find its easier to let CVS process my DVD's (from film stock) than to make them myself -- not too expensive (about $50 for 30 minutes).

Interim jobs of the past ten years : a lot of them involved personal regimentation: Become a prole!

2011-12-10T07:39:00.000-08:00

I’m coming up on the ten-year anniversary of my career-ending layoff (Dec. 13, 2001, and more reliving of that day will certainly take place.

But I thought I would note this morning the litany of interim jobs I either did or considered over the past ten years, reaching age 68 now.

For example, one of the longest jobs I held was the first one, a “telemarketing” (call it “telefunding”) job with the Minnesota Orchestra Guaranty Fund, from April 2002 to June 2003. It was part time, but still in easy walking distance on the Minneapolis Skyway and it gave me some stability.

I then took a job that wound up just going two months, at RMA (Risk Management Associates), a collection agency, near the MSP airport, before deciding to come back to Virginia. I applied for a job with a collection agency in Rockville – getting there would have been much more of a hassle – in early 2004, but I “wasn’t selected”.

Before settling in an becoming a substitute teacher for a while, I had actually applied for an hourly job at Hollywood Video in 2004.

I also considered jobs with the US Post Office. I found out that rural delivery wasn’t good, but almost had an offer as a letter carrier in Nov. 2004. The hooker was that they couldn’t get a hold of my medical records from Minnesota on the hip fracture I had sustained in a convenience store fall in 1998. It’s a very physical job, to say the least.

The most intimidating possibility was to become a TSA screener. Having resumed flying recently, I can say that this is a job that I don’t think I could do now. But I went to the open house at a Bloomington MN hotel in August 2002.

Another idea that I looked at was newspaper delivery, in my own car. But can I imagine getting up at 2 AM every day to start the runs?

One theme that comes up repeatedly with many of these jobs is personal regimentation. I accepted it when I was in the Army, but it seems unthinkable now. Imagine the regimentation of low-wage workers on assembly lines in China, whose labor we depend on.

Get kicked out of the bourgeoisie, and welcome to the Proletariat!

When a little camera (Cannon) gets a "Communications Error"

2011-12-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

Today, when I returned from observing the “Take Back the Capitol” demos and tried to load my pictures and videos, I got a “communications error” on my Cannon Powershot, on all computers.

It turned out, as I gumshoed, that the problem occurs if you have “too many pictures” on your memory card, even if there is space left on it. It was about 80% full (8 G) and had about 3000 pictures. It sounds like one of those coding problems where a register fills up, or when you code out of addressability – based on my experience 20 years ago with IBM assembler.

So, the solution, the say, is to get a USB memory card reader, which did work just fine to recover the pictures and video. Just a couple hours lost driving through the rain to Best Buy. Oh, yes, it’s time to replace the little camera too. The cheap ones are only good for about a year anyway.

At the end of 2010, a Nikon digital camera started giving IO errors after the USB connection, on all copies-from after the first one. Perhaps this is a variation of the same software problem.

I’ve heard a lot of moralizing on the Occupy movement. We could say it is a natural result of hyperindividualism. We can’t sustain prosperity just by politicking and hucksterism. I’m all for protesting the over-influence of “professional” lobbyists. It’s not a job I would want.

Summary resignations from intermin jobs: they do happen when they present unnecessary risk

2011-12-02T16:33:00.000-08:00

I want to note here that I admit that I have sometimes shown a short fuse to resign suddenly from interim jobs.

In 2003, I resigned suddenly from a job selling orchestra subscriptions by phone when someone I called informed me that we are calling past hours, and we were, and that we could be personally liable.

In 2005 I stopped substitute teaching suddenly after an incident outlined on my main blog July 27, 2007. I resumed in the spring semester of 2007, but stopped suddenly after the fall semester started when a situation that I believed could present unacceptable risk occurred.

But back in 1963, while working for the National Bureau of Standards in the rheology lab, in my first wage earning job at 20, I dropped organic chemistry, taking it at night, when I fell unacceptably behind in the lab after cutting my hand, and the course didn’t allow makeups.

On the other hand, I called for the Minnesota Orchestra Guaranty Fund for 14 months, before taking a job as a debt collector in 2003 – and then moving back to DC, causing me to leave that job after 2 months.

My old background in clientization and address standardization: in retirement, two "mishaps" in the same day!

2011-11-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Well, when companies and governments lay off or “buy out” older experienced workers. It looks like they lose a little bit of edge on their work ethic, particularly “attention to detail”, especially in systems. When I was “working”, people would ask cynically, “how many of us are any good at our jobs?”

On a just-completed trip to Texas, I left my “postal store” land mailbox address as a contact point for mail with a particular group. I got a call today that the computer system in which they entered my address would not accept more than the first three digits of my box number. And, behold, I noticed that some of the mail I have received recently has only three digits, which means that employees there have to look up the physical box manually.

What happens is that many organizations put their mailing addresses through a “clientization” or “address standardization” software editor, to make it compliant with what the US Postal Service calls “Code 1” and uses for its National Change of Address software, which is maintained by a few contracting companies, including Group 1 Software (Pitney Bowes) and Hart Hanks. Large companies that do mailing usually purchase interfaces from these contractors. But mailbox store services also need to make sure that Code 1 has stored correct formats for their actual addresses and box numbers, which is a normal responsibility of a USPS Audit. I know all this because I worked on NCOA for ING-ReliaStar back in 1998, putting in a complex Group 1 interface.

In fact, my detailed resume reads “Reduced volume of return mail (by about 20%), by implementing new NCOA (National Change of Address) interface and by clientization of major Vantage system. I analyzed USPS (Postal Service) audit requirements and coded (in COBOL II) forward and reverse interfaces to a client management system (CMS), as well as creating a batch database (IMS) update job. I also helped operations support the Fast Forward and Group-1 (Windows NT) portions of the system. I later helped to convert and test many of the IO modules in this client management system to DB2, using SQL and cursors.”

In the meantime, I luckily get some mail with shortened box numbers, a lot of it recently. Somewhere, somebody made a change to a production system without enough QA testing. The programming problem may have to do with data typing, length parameters, or format options, or even the way some SQL subqueries are coded (there are minor differences between DB2 and other ANSI, but they can matter).

No wonder Brainbench tests for technical proficienty and certifies in all this!

That’s not all. I also found out on my recent trip to Texas that my driver’s license has two digits in my street address permuted. I had never noticed it. I checked Arlington’s real estate tax system and found that the address as printed isn’t recognized. Why didn’t Richmond’s DMV catch it? In fact, I didn’t get my 2013 tags mailed for a while this summer because of the same problem, but I never thought to look at the license. I suppose that the TSA, and car rental company or hotel could refuse to accept it. That hasn’t happened yet, but it needs to get fixed before I travel again.

I’ve also noticed that I sometimes get an item or two of other people’s mail. Casing of mail is not perfect. With more USPS employee cutbacks, these problems will only continue.

Also, when I worked as a substitute teacher, I wasn’t paid properly at first for hours in afterschool extended day assignments. I found out that was related to how the system’s SQL calls worked.

Think twice before cutting back on “mature” IT workers. You’re losing the maturity it takes to “get it right”.

(See also my "identity security" blog Sept. 25, 2006 for a proposal.)

Pundits still tell interns they have a privilege in paying to work

2011-11-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

There are several variations of a piece “Getting Started: Making the Most of an Internship” around, such as here. The piece says that an internship is a privilege, not a right, and that an intern holder should “treat the internship like a lucrative full-time position” and that “interns should treat their internships as if they were getting paid lots of money”. Sure, while students accumulate more debt while not being paid very much or even at all. This kind of opinion takes some nerve. "Pay your dues" so as not to become a prole.

What about Ross Perlin’s book “Intern Nation” (June 8, 2011 on my books blog).

Windows 7 on a Notebook -- weird behavior on the road

2011-11-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

Weird stuff happens in the field. My little W7 Toshiba notebook gets caught in a loop being booted, with the circle on a dark screen. On forced restart, it tells you it didn't close normally, then gets caught in a restart loop. It doesn't present the log on option. Finally, I hit a circle one more time and it books up normally (I turned off the MiFi first, and then back on).

Once in a while, if you try the notification icons after book up before completely ready, it goes get stuck and loops. Don't know why. I suspect it's specific to Toshiba and I have to get a fix specifically from Toshiba, not Microsoft.

Also, if you let it do updates during the shutdown, it can get stuck. Eventually, you can get it to boot up if you try a few times, and finish the update manually with the machine up, and then everything works.

It' s beginning to look as thought the Mac world is simpler and more reliable. With this little computer, there are just too many interruptions with little updates all the time. And they can break. Maybe the grass just looks greener across the street (which isn't always the other side).

I was driving around a dam with a big power plant, don't know if electric fields nearby could affect a laptop. Didn't think so. But it is working now, again!

Microsoft Word hangs during autosave; jumping cursor on some W7 laptops

2011-11-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

I type this posting in Microsoft Word 2010, and I’m pretty sure it won’t freeze during autosave, because that’s already happened once this morning since the last reboot in Windows 7.

Sometimes Word can recover the file automatically. Other times, it hangs trying to restart. If you try to open the file, either in Word or Windows explorer, it hangs. Even when trying to copy the file at the command prompt it hangs and says word can’t open it. If you try to copy it, Windows says it got an unknown error.

But there is hope. If you try any of these ideas a second time, they work. As long as you give the file a different name, you can open it and go back to work.

This seems to happen only once after a reboot. Sometimes when you try to save the file yourself the first time, Autosave tries to run anyway. I suppose I should disable autosave.

Microsoft forums has a discussion of the problem here.

My machine, a 2009 Dell XPS, could be more vulnerable because it has had a replacement of Vista with Windows 7, and at least one major service pack update.

I’ve also had trouble (on my Dell XPS) with the jumping cursor since W7 replacement, in all applications. (It doesn’t happen on a small Toshiba Notebook with W7 starter.) The antidote is to type very lightly. The touchpad picks up the motion or vibrations from the keyboard and interprets them as commands.

Here’s a typical Microsoft answers posting on the problem (link). It doesn’t seem to be limited to Dell.

I don’t have time to play with restore points and rolling back drivers and updates. I’m thinking of moving a lot of my Word work to the new MacBook upstairs, which seems a lot simpler. (The Mac boots up much faster, too.) But a lot of my web work depends on Microsoft Expression (replacing the defunct Front Page), which depends on a .NET environment, which keeps on throwing huge updates.

By being all things to all people, the Microsoft environment has just gotten too complicated, with too many potential points of failure. It’s rather like the power grid, when you decide go get a generator.

Facebook is hiring! Mark Zuckerberg visits Harvard

2011-11-08T05:46:00.000-08:00

I have to chuckle (or maybe cackle) at this story on MSNBC.

Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard at 19 in the spring of 2004 to form Facebook, traveled to Cambridge yesterday to recruit there. Here’s the story. Zuckeberg, now 27 (the biological peak), was in his usual informal jumper and jeans. He does look “cute”.

Here’s Facebook’s Careers page. It greeted me with “Hi, John: Facebook is Hiring”. Some of the areas are Software Engineering, IT and Security, Sales and Business Development, Online Operations. There are links for interns (a dubious concept with me), and new Grads (Masters and PhD’s).

I lost the edge on coding back around 1999 when I think I fumbled the transition from mainframe. You have to actually code a lot of OOP (java, C#, whatever) to learn it, so you need to get in on a development project from the beginning. (The Time article showed Zuckberberg coding on a Macbook laptop in a Palo Alto CA bar.)

The biggest area of strategy for Facebook is the way it has replaced self-publication with social networking as a primary “purpose” for being online – a concept with enormous legal and social significance.

In the meantime, let Zuckerberg develop his benevolent “timocracy”, which gives him (not Obama or any GOP candidate) the ability to rule the world. (That’s a good new word for political science, isn’t it; after all, our partisan democracy can't get things done, so it might as well cede power to an extraterrestrial.)

In this Charlie Rose interview, Zuckerberg discusses competition with Google and Amazon, but he says what they do is different. His sister says Facebook is just about the social connection; Facebook isn't where you watch movies or read books and online newspapers (like this blog).

Picture: no connection to Facebook, but it looks great at night on Washington's Lafayette Square.

Good work habits?: check the backups or archives you are responsible for

2011-11-05T17:12:00.000-07:00

Here’s another little workplace caution, which I may have mentioned before.

If part of a project you implement has the purpose of archiving something, with a low likelihood that the archive will actually be used soon, it’s important to access and try to validate and use pieces of the archive created by the production elements. Otherwise, a large inventory of unusable backups could accumulate until the customer suddenly requests it. It’s part of “good work habits”.

The issue will become more critical now as many company are starting to outsource backup capabilities to “cloud computing”.

With my 12 years in life insurance IT, could I really have become a "financial" huckster?

2011-11-01T18:08:00.000-07:00

Based on some current developments, I’ve had reason to ponder what a second career as a financial planner or insurance agent could have been like.

I’ve had agents court me (both for regular and long term care policies), and there’s a lot of hustling involved to set up meetings, often lunches, with potential clients. New agents are expected to develop leads very quickly. Because of my brief discussions with two companies in 2005, I still get lots of emails about leads, which simply show me how the business works.

A financial planner may have to do this, particularly if he works for a brokerage company (like in the movie “Margin Call”) but if he or she works for a bank where potential customers are likely to have deposits or more conventional accounts, the job of getting business is obviously “easier”.

With retired clients, or those unlikely to increase income, financial planners often focus, in fact, on offering whole or universal life products for insurance and annuities for income, as if they were the “participating general” agents.

All this sounds like a far cry from Prime Vest’s gimmick of converting as many people as possible from whole life to term.

By the time I was approached for any of this, I was too far gone into the rabbit hole of my own journalism.

BDO uses "Bit9 Parity Suite" to allow traveling associates to use corporate laptops for personal use when playing on the road

2011-10-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

This morning, the Web Buyer’s Guide generated an email leading to a pdf download of a report by a company BDO USA, a professional services firm (link), on how it decided to allow its associates to use corporate laptops for personal and family purposes while on the road, since the associates have to travel so much. It would be clumsy for employees to get two laptops (a personal and a corporate one) through TSA when flying (although this is usually permitted, at least domestically).

But when laptops were infected by malware or otherwise disabled, employees could be severely disrupted when traveling. This risk increased with an “open” approach to personal use. So BDO used a product called “Bit9 Parity Suite: Adaptive Application Whitelisting” to control the problem, link here. An application must be preapproved before it can be downloaded and installed on the travel all-purpose laptop.

As an HR matter, questions would still remain. Contact with family would be all right and ordinary social networking (Facebook and Twitter) might be OK, as would personal banking. But blogging to advance a personal political agenda might still be regarded as a “conflict of interest”. Jobs requiring a lot of travel to visit clients do have their disadvantages. Sometimes you need "home field advantage" or that last at-bat.

It’s hard to give a specific URL for the download, as Web Buyer’s takes you through a questionnaire (for sales and probably tracking) and generates a “personalized” URL.

Misadventures with an ink jet cartridge refill (HP) -- not in a perambulator

2011-10-24T13:42:00.000-07:00

For what it’s worth – don’t buy ink refill jars for inkjet printers. That’s what I found on the web for the HP61 inkjet printer. You get these three black squeeze bottles with squirt pipettes that look like they would go with ecstasy . You peel off a tight label on top of the cartridge and squirt the thick ink (as if from a squid as escape camaflouge) into one of a number of holes, and it’s supposed to saturate the sponge.

Don’t believe it. It didn’t work. The second time I tried to print a page with only black ink, HP finally, through Windows 7 and IE, linked to its correct site for replacing ink cartridges, only $14 for a replacement. I don’t know why the link didn’t come up the first time – is it something that had worked in Vista only before? Would it work OK on the Mac? Why didn't the correct HP repurchase link come up on Google, Bing, or Amazon the first time? (as in the Sirius XM song!)

The real reason my "mainframe" IT career faltered

2011-10-10T11:42:00.000-07:00

As I ponder my new directions at age 68, I still sometimes wonder, what brought my old “IT career” to cardiac arrest on Dec. 13, 2001?

I think one big factor is what happened for about six years two decades before. When I left Bradford National in NYC at the end of 1978 and went to work for a BCBS consortium (called CABCO) in Dallas, on a new “combined Medicare Project”, I wound up spending until 1985 until I implemented anything into production again (and that was at another company, Chilton Credit Reporting). I had become a “systems analyst” who had to depend on others (“programmers”) to do the dirty work. It would wind up that those "others" could be located in India, maybe China today. The US Economy needs to be able to do some of its own work!

I’d spend 16 more years hands-on, though, until the Crash of December 2001, the so-called Fourth Floor Massacre.

Of course, now, as I contemplate how to get a movie made, I have to kick myself upstairs and prepare to be able to manage the work of others, again. All that “project management” ought to put me in good stead.

I realize that I need to decide what to do about my Dice resume, and that matter will be addressed soon.

The life and legacy of Steve Jobs: Imagine the world without the Apple

2011-10-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

A friend tweeted tonight, “Thought experiment: Imagine life without any Apple products”. Indeed, one realizes "It's a wonderful life."

Indeed, I “came of age” in the mainframe world (Univac 1100 before IBM), then learned the PC (TRS-80 before the Microsoft world), and have been slow to get to the MacBook, which I bought in March. I did buy an iMac in 2002, from a waiting list, and used iMovie with a passion on it for about a year. I still do most of my heavy work in the Windows world now (that’s where I’m typing this posting).

Think back to the late 90s, when the dot-com boom was swelling into a bubble. In the 2000 decade, the big survivors would be companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple, which among all these stands out as maybe the most innovative just in terms of pure end user convenience. I may well wind up doing most of my future work on my MacBook.

Apple and Steve Jobs kept his medical situation as quiet as possible. In medical terms, pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly and inexorable of all malignancies, and he survived it for at least seven years.

Here is Stanford’s video of Mr. Jobs’s commencement address at Stanford in 2008.

Job interviewers really might ask if you "believe" in UFO's

2011-10-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

Here’s a funny piece from “Career Builder”, run on MSN, as to how to answer trick questions (or maybe overly personal questions) about your own beliefs on job interviews.

The leadoff batter here is, “Do you believe in UFO’s”? To sum up the advice: be equivocal.

Who would ask such a question? Maybe Facebook, if it was planning to set up its service in another solar system (and had gotten around the speed of light problem, like neutrinos). How about "Do you get spam from other planets?"

A couple of other “personal” questions: “Are you a pencil or a pen?” (or word processing program?) Or, “Can you drive in bad weather?” How about, “Can you take cell phone calls when driving?”

Here is the link.

One other thing: On his giggly “Ridiculist”, Anderson Cooper made fun of interns who expect to be paid (very much). That’s in stark contrast to the view of the issue presented in a book on interning by Ross Perlin (“Intern Nation”) reviewed on my books blog June 8, 2011.

In life insurance I.T., does "Vantage rule the world", still?

2011-09-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

I could say, “I remember Vantage” is a bit like “I remember Mama”.

When I was working for USLICO in the early 1990s (to become ReliaStar and then ING), I was working in a different area, salary deduction (called EPIX), and IDMS and COBOL system, and was a bit too lost in my own world to get into the idea of going onto the new Vantage team across the street. At the time there were other legacy administrative systems, namely CFO, VLn (which faded but could have become the powerhouse instead of Vantage had it held together) and a proprietary home-grown assembler system for USL. A lot of smaller insurance companies had their own homemade applications at the time.

It seemed that Vantage took forever to run, too, for only 30000 policies at first. The reserves job took all day to run on the mainframe with all the random VSAM access (slow in those days). I remember even getting an angry SYSM (mainframe email) from someone who wondered why I was so nosey about how long it took to run.

But in time Vantage overcame its resource-consuming architecture, and by the late 90s was running smoothly, and had become the mainframe legacy system that every programmer in the life insurance business needed. As they say, “Vantage rules the world”.

With systems like these, you had to understand the entire database-driven system, with so many record types and scheduling segments, as well as the calling architecture in the link decks. People became gurus on the internals of Vantage. They have remained in the mainframe world, in high demand, while the rest of the economy has its wild fluctuations, and while the old-fashioned mainframe culture (with its nightly batch cycles and S0C7's) declines, in a world where younger people don’t have the patience for it. The mantra is no longer “IBM”. But I don't think Facebook can replace legacy insurance systems.

Should webmasters make their sites mobile friendly? How?

2011-09-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

In the past months, I have heard a lot more about the desirability of making one’s web presence mobile phone compatible. This issue might, for some people, have an effect on their online reputation, or at least on the market penetration of their business.

For example, Blogger has encourage publishers to make a setting change that causes most blogs to display in simplified single columnar mobile format on most devices. I have done this so far with my “smaller” blogs.

There are many factors that influence this question. First, not all mobile phones treat content the same way.

Some phones might be able to view content in landscape format and not need the single column view.

Columnar format does not even work yet on my own Blackberry, but I will talk to Verizon soon about this. My own blogs (those I have converted) do display “properly” on other people’s Androids.

Generally, content that has lots of detail and that is relatively static and “academic” in nature probably does not need mobile friendliness much. It is more likely to be viewed on conventional PC’s, Macs, and laptops from both.

However, the way people behave “on the road” is changing. I carry a small Toshiba W7 laptop and MiFi card, and it works almost everywhere, but already it seems cumbersome; I imagine I will eventually need to be able to work with just a “very smart phone” when on “the road alone” (pun intended).

Generally, mobile content needs to be stored on a database, scraped into areas defined in XML schema components (like DTD’s and XSD’s) and use formatting (various kinds of style sheets) to display the content. (Wordpress uses MySQL, and Blogger uses a proprietary dababase that functions in a way similar to MySQL, I think.) This may right now be a lot more work for some webmasters (like me) who have a lot of intricate content, where tables (in traditional HTML) are much more efficient to code. The mobile-friendly web object will have scripting (ASP, PHP, etc) that can determine the kind of device accessing the site and format properly accordingly.

Mobile friendliness would be most critical for people who have “breaking news” from a business of a narrow area, or for whom the speed with which customers receive information is of tactical importance. It’s obviously important, for example, in reporting sports scores, and probably for news sites with quick scoops (as opposed to strategic arguments). It’s more important for “winning converts” than “winning arguments”.

The best article that I found on website mobile compatibility is by Arfa Mirza, “How and Why to Make Your Website Mobile Phone Compatible”, link here.

On Plaveb, Web Paradigm Shift, Mark Spenser writes “How to Make Mobile Compatible Website”, link here.

On Tech Radar, “How to make your website mobile”, by STE Brennan, link here.

XSitePro has this tutorial on YouTube

Note that this service presumes you have a separate site for mobile (with link duplication, which some search engines may not like), but that it provides the ability to update both sites simulataneously.

Note (Oct 10): I've found with doaskdotell.com's new home page, that if you use Expression Web to set up the tables, and set up the page in columns, the Blackberry browser will adjust the columns so both fit automatically.

Your email address may indeed affect your professional "online reputation"

2011-09-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

Tech Republic has a piece on choosing a professional email address. In sum, you should have your own domain based on your domain or business identity, and use that address. The comment particularly applies to people seeking independent IT consulting jobs, and probably people seeking assignments through staffing firms, the W-2 market.

This also sounds as though it’s not a good idea to use AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, gmail, etc. on resumes.

The Tech Republic article is here.

It looks to another blog that talks about typical mistakes in email addresses, here.

Now, I used my AOL address in the early 2000’s, and it might have seemed lazy. It’s hard to say that it hurt me. But in today’s world of “online reputation”, it sounds like if you want to work as a techie, you have to act like one online, and that includes email address.

Do Facebook employees have public email addresses at Facebook? Does Google use gmail for its employees?

MSN strikes up the workplace dress code wars; it is OK to wear shorts for work?

2011-09-13T06:23:00.000-07:00

Workplace dress has the attention of MSN and Bing this morning. I guess MSN's content editors got out of the right side of bed this Tuesday morning. How about Huffington Post?

First, let’s get to the spiciest item, wearing shorts at work. After all, mail carriers wear them. So do a lot of delivery drivers. The Workplacebuzz weighs in on it here as do some readers. Remember the NY lifeguard who got fired at 61 for wearing too much when he said that older people should be seen “less of” in public? I feel that way. Remember how Ronald Reagan looks in “short shorts” in “John Loves Mary"? The gay rag “Christopher Street” back in the 1980s said that his appearance this way demonstrated heterosexual carelessness. You don’t want people to see you went down hill fast. But, then again, maybe you enter bike races or swim meets.

I wouldn't want to be required to wear shorts to work, or remain shirtless. So I wouldn't look good as a bartender or barback. One time, at a seminar in Philadelphia in 1998 sponsored by Group-1 Software, at a concluding motivational session, some executives paraded in front of everyone in their shorts while the speaker said "You don't worry about what you can't do anything about."

Career Builder also has its “10 Commandments of Workplace Dress”, (website url) here including rules for “business casual” on Fridays.

Remember John Molloy’s notorious old handbook “Dress for Success”? He actually wanted younger male business executives to add a touch of gray to their hair so they at least look like they’re in their 40s. For TV host Anderson Cooper, genetics took care of that. So it will for Prince William; early male pattern baldness may help him look more like an authority figure. (I think William looks a lot better in casual jeans than in royal ware.)

Remember the dress code for EDS back in the early 70s? Suits, white shirts, and coats kept on at work. That help keep computers a “mystery” from the customer. I actually saw a copy of their policy when I worked for Bradford National in New York City in the 1970s; a coworker had worked for them and had a copy of their policy.

IBM, in fact, used to check male employees in parking lots for stocking garters, way back in the 60s, even before the 360 was introduced. That sounds prudish.

By the way, Sept. 13, 2001, ten years ago today, I received an unsolicited call to join Prime Vest. I was still working and my job at ING-Reliastar had exactly 90 days left to live.

Picture: from my "Public Speaking Is Easy" experience, "lecturing" about my book at Hamline University, while on crutches in 1998.

Young adult employment drops while senior employment rises; lack of jobs growth in August jolts stock market on pre-holiday Friday

2011-09-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

The stock market is tanking Friday Sept. 2 as the employment figures show no job growth in August, a month that showed the debt ceiling “resolution” and the downgrading of US debt by Standard & Poors.

CNN Money has an interesting video showing that young people age 16-24 have seen a sharp drop in employment since the late 1980s, even accounting for the fact that more are in college; summer employment is weaker. But people over 65 are working more, partly because of longer lifespans and weaker retirement portfolios.

Chilton, TRW,and Experian: a progression of three companies (and one Aug. 31 date)

2011-08-31T17:59:00.000-07:00

On Monday, August 31, 1987, I was sitting in my cluttered cublicle, with its CRT screen (still monochromatic) with Roscoe and various RPF’s to watch production jobs, and back off the beaten trail, when I heard management walk by the bulky laser printers and talk about the sudden $800000 budget cut.

The next day, we started a month long parallel of the new daily billing system for Chilton Corporation in Dallas, a credit reporting company. It had been acquired by Borg-Warner, and in the era of hostile takeovers, it was under pressure to deliver heavy profits, or else be sold to a competitor and wipe out our jobs.

We had to get the parallels (from an old ALC system with BDAM files to a “modern” Datacomm DB system with COBOL on an IBM-like Ahmdahl) perfect for a month, or the system couldn’t get in. And we might wind up on the market with nothing accomplished.

The parallels did go perfectly (we cluttered up a conference room with printouts on the floor). On October 1, a Thursday, we went live. That night, I and another man watched the batch cycle. We got through it with no problems. The “reports file” balanced.

I went home Friday morning to my Pleasant Grove condo to sleep, and came back about 3. My manager told me about a meeting that had just been called. This had been the best implementation ever. (“Many people can code, few can implement.”) But there was a “down side”. Due to budget cuts, New Systems Development would be phased out. Four people would be laid off every three months.

I remember walking down Turtle Creek later that sunny afternoon (still hot in Dallas), and thinking, I might go back “home” to DC (rent the condo, since the real estate market had tanked during the Texas savings and loan scandal), and deal with the job market there. I was apprehensive, because many of the jobs were defense oriented and would require security clearances. This was only 1987, and I wondered if my sexual orientation would stop my getting a clearance if I needed it.

It would, as the 1990s unfolded, but in a way no one could have predicted.

I was offered a “transfer” to “maintenance” so the NSD layoff couldn’t affect me. I took it. In those days, employees who could keep a place running as it decommissioned were perceived as more “valuable”. Such was the world of hostile takeovers. But in time, merged companies would place less emphasis on “merging applications” and tend to keep legacy systems, and use mid-tiers with replication or direct-connect SQL technologies.

Nevertheless, I would go back to DC in 1988 with a consulting job, and Chilton would indeed get bought by TRW (Equifax barely missed us), and the systems we had worked so hard on would be eliminated. But eventually, TRW would spin off its credit reporting operation as Experian, and much of it would be located in the northern Dallas exurbs, effectively becoming the modern day Chilton Corporation, but with all systems completely replaced (again).

I wonder if anyone at all there knows me.

For me, an "announcement" and a career "correction"

2011-08-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

I do have something to “announce” tonight.

Today, I did resign from an intermittent, part-time job which involved interviewing people to gather statistical data, about employment. Because of a confidentiality agreement, I may speak only in generality about the experience, from which I learned a lot during the past eight months.

One reason was to focus more on my “journalism”, music and filmmaking plans. I do need “full time focus” on my dreams at age 68. Another is that, given my own goals, I don’t think that contacting individuals for someone else’s goals (essentially by phone or “door-to-door’) is appropriate activity in my circumstances. I hinted at this in my previous posting Wednesday. Yet, there is a question of karma. “Somebody has to do it.” By nature, this kind of work is proportionally riskier in a part-time situation than in a committed, full-time career environment.

I am left with one strong impression. To do well consistently in our kind of market, you have to be good both with people skills and with manipulating content, and with abstraction. You have to get into the game and be good at it. And it’s more than playing chess, or piano.

I'll have more details about my "direction", and what I will do about my presence on sites like Dice, soon.

Job interview questions on "niceness" and "passion"; and "The Big Give" of bonuses

2011-08-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

Adam Bryant has an interesting column on p 2 Business Day of the Aug. 28 New York Times, “A deal-breaker question for job interviews”, about Andy Lansing, CEO of Chicago-based Levy Restaurants.

One of the questions is “Are you nice?” The article gives a nice spin on the property of niceness, as if it were an attribute of a quark.

Then, “what are you passionate about in your life?” That’s a good one. If it’s coding, or composing music, or writing novels, or journaling and blogging, you may not like a job predicating on tracking down, “taking care of” and selling to individual clients, even if you have a lot of the technical background (say in insurance) required.

The article is here.

I can remember a similar question from ARCO back in 1983, "what are your goals?"

The Washington Post, on p G2, Jena McGregor has an article “Bonuses for others tied to happiness, report finds.” A paper from Harvard, University of British Columbia and Liege examined “The Big Give” (Oprah’s) in job bonuses, the incentive of a bonus that must be spent on charity or for others, link here. Are people motivated best by bonuses they can spend on themselves? Maybe not.

Generational changes affect jobs requiring "sales culture"

2011-08-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

One trend that I’ve noticed in the workplace since the 2000-2001 period is the proliferation of jobs predicated on building up lists of clients that one “takes care of” – starting with lists of leads. Since about 2006 or so, social media have become important in building these lists, so that the agent’s whole public identity is consumed by “selling.” There are many examples: life insurance agent, tax preparer, agent selling long term care, financial planner, etc.

This does not appeal to me, even though I have a lot of the technical background (particularly in the life insurance area) that would made me look attractive for such a “career switch”.

A couple of generations ago, people accepted the idea of receiving solicitations, by phone and door-to-door, from salesmen, and they accepted the idea that a “professional” agent takes care of a major part of their lives. This was seen as a necessary part of being a social creature, ready to fit in to society in such a ways as to survive in a group in a world with many unknown dangers. People (family members, chosen or not) were more important than personal interests and agendas. So I view my own resistance to this kind of work as double-edged.

My own father was a manufacturer's agent, but he sold to department store chains, not to individual people.

The era of the PC is over?

2011-08-13T07:25:00.000-07:00

Jason Hiner has a provocative Tech Republic article about the “end of the PC era”, link here. Mark Dean, who helped design the original IBM PC around 1981 (built around PC-DOS and then MS-DOS) says that the emphasis in computing has changed, from a workstation or box where content is created and consumed, to the social spaces where people interact. That does sound a lot like a plug for the way social networking sites work – but even more, it means an emphasis on smaller, more mobile devices. His ideas apply as much to the Mac world as the PC.

That may commensurate with Blogger’s recent effort to encourage bloggers to offer a mobile-friendly version of all their blogs.

Perhaps this is a slam on authorship itself: where an author or composer sits at his instruments and computers and creates works for batch-style consumption. Dean admits that the newer tablet devices are more apt for those who work with people rather than content (including coding, testing and implementing applications and systems).

I could backtrack his arguments even further, to the early 70s, when my career started, to the days of submitting card decks for once-a-day shots.

I keep getting calls for opportunities to hucksterize, for insurance companies

2011-08-09T12:04:00.001-07:00

Last night I got an automated cell phone call from what sounded like an insurance company (was it Vanguard) to become some sort of agent. It was annoying, and maybe it was a scam, maybe not. But it highlights my concern that so many of the “jobs” around seem to comprise going out an “bothering people” to buy things, trying now to use social media to build up “referrals”. And many of them would probably pay just commissions, although some people can do well on commissions only (in the life business, there are renewal commissions, too).

No, I don’t like the idea of have to go out and sell someone else’s agenda for a living. I wrote about that yesterday on my main blog.

Why should a family depend on "me", someone who was so non-competitive socially and physically in conventional terms earlier on life, to "take care" of some of their personal matters? Why should I be in someone's home trying to "sell" the ability to do so?

It seems that the unemployment crisis is dragging us back into hucksterism and tribalistic behavior. But societies have always needed people to take care of others and sell the idea that they can.

What about becoming a “financial planner”? Although financial planners make it easier to execute trades, it doesn’t seem like they know more about what his happening than the alert “amateur” home customer.

The old idea of using social hierarchy in the workplace, especially in the sales area, has unraveled, but it keeps trying to come back.

Jobs4America, FCC support adding a lot of customer service jobs by 2013

2011-08-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

A group called Jobs4America aims to create up to 100000 customer service jobs by 2013, and the group is said to have the backing of FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.

Jobs4America has a blogger entry here and a regular site here.

It’s a good question what these jobs would offer in pay and benefits, and if many would be “work from home” (like Alpine Access or Live Ops, already discussed here), raising all the new security and stability issues raised by depending on hardware and software owned by the employee. It’s not clear how many jobs would use “employees” or associates and how many would use freelance contractors.

Customer service jobs tend to pay hourly, run on the clock, are often non-union, and cover 24x7 with shift work. It is difficult to train people to be really good at this and to provide consistent solutions to customer issues. The movie "The Future" by Miranda July has a character who does IT customer support from home (Movies blog, Aug. 5).

Back in 2002, AT&T was using a T-F personality test to screen applicants, and would not allow people who "failed" to reapply for six months. I don't know if this is the case now. It sounds silly.

USA Today has a story by Gary Strauss, here.

Customer Service, anyone? There are more potential points of failure than there used to be

2011-08-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday my Verizon Blackberry (the same model the president has) battery had stopped changing, one year after acquisition (no warranty). I was “out” on the road, and it took two Verizon stores (and waits in line) to get the replacement. And $39.95. Customer service?

This morning, after “La Retour” (Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Sonata), my Arris cable modem downstairs, to which my digital voice Xfinity (landline) is now connected, wasn’t working. Fortunately, the reset button did work and get it up. I’ve never had this happen. It appears that some IP addresses were changed last night during maintenance at Comcast, and it didn’t come back up automatically. Customer service first told me to unplug it, unaware that it has a battery. Fortunately, everything worked with the reset button, and the Netgear home router accepted the new addresses and everything then synched up. But the literature says online that sometimes the home user has to remove the battery before a modem will reset if IP or MAC addresses have been changed. That didn’t happen here. (Or you would have to let it run down a few hours.) Since I plug into a UPS box, the extra battery is redundant.

What’s bad is that I could be away for an extended period, there could be an IP reset, and the modem controlling the landline phone would not work again until I got home. That means the ADT home security system is out of communication. This sounds like a flaw in having digital voice through a cable provider, unless the technology can reset everything reliably with no one at home when the provider reconfigures its network for more customers.

Everyone talks about the “smart home” with the Internet controlling everything, including energy use, but that only leaves homeowners or renters, probably not trained well in their new “responsibilities”, more vulnerable to lengthy disruptions. Modern utilities seem to have too many new potential points of failure.

Remember how it was, in the workplace, as a mainframe programmer. Users depended on me to get everything right with a promotion or “move” to get their jobs done. Now the shoe is on the other foot. I am the end user, and I depend on others (providers) to get my own work done at home. When they make unannounced “maintenance” changes, I can bear the consequences.

Budget simulation: It's hard to prove that the numbers are right!

2011-08-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

The recent debt ceiling fiasco, especially inasmuch as it required a number of simulation model calculations from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), calls to mind one particular issue: the importance of the reliability of the numbers that it publishes: that is, the correctness of the mathematical model used and of the translation of the specifications of that model into applications programming code, using the right data elements and typing them correctly.

I may have reported this matter before, but in January 1989, while I was working as a COBOL programmer for a small Blue Cross/Blue Shield subsidiary called “Consolidated Consulting Group” (CCG) in Washington, we had a crisis where a major client did not believe our numbers. I had kept very detailed paper records of all our simulations. Fortunately, I had access to Propac’s computer code and found it did not match the formulas printed in the Federal Register, with one data element (on a Medicare-related policy file) being different.

When I changed to use the data element actually found in Propac’s code, we got the same numbers as Propac and the client believed us. I may have saved the business, which later that year got sold to Lewin/ICF.

Keep your backup travel notebooks in use all the time, if you need to depend on them when playing on the road

2011-07-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

Here’s a quirky problem. My little Windows 7 Starter Toshiba notebook-laptop hands after I enter the admin password on the “please wait” screen. I cut off power, re-power, say yes to normal restart, and it finishes immediately (after asking for the admin pw one more time). It’s true that I hadn’t used it in about a week. There will be beaucoup updates, although it did load W7 Service Pack 1 last week. The computer had done several other small updates after SP1 and reconfigured normally. But this morning it still tells me that it installed updates the last time, when it wasn’t the last time?

Anyone else seen this kind of “behavior”?

Moral of the story. If you have a travel computer and its Windows anything, use it frequently, even when you are home. Too many updates at once confuses it.

"Social Intelligence" start-up offers employers a way to do "safe" social media "background investigations"

2011-07-21T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Business Day Section of the July 21 New York Times centers with a disturbing story by Jennifer Preston, “Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle”, link here.

There is a start-up called “Social Intelligence” (with a service mark) whose website says to employers “Are you putting yourself and job candidates at risk by using Google as a job screening tool?” It also rotates among a number of other questions about managing online reputation issues for candidates, employees, and the employing companies themselves. The link is here.

The company apparently offers a service to address questions of unfair employment practices in doing haphazard “Internet background investigations” which run the considerable risk of finding wrong people or of judging people on the basis of categories not allowed to be considered under federal and state laws (including race, religion, and often sexual orientation).

The company would look at the candidate’s media activity in public places (it’s a little unclear what happens with Facebook profiles where privacy settings are high). It can also look into message boards and into the deeper Internet and is supposed to be able to determine if a candidate’s photos were unfairly tagged by others.

One can draw interesting and unclear parallels between using credit reporting histories of applicants and social media histories. So far, the FTC regards some of this BI investigation as "legal" if it is based on information the applicant made public; it's less clear when it invokes material or photos made by others.

The service does seem to locate unusual connection to drugs or weapons activity, or extremism (which could be a subjective concept -- remember Barry Goldwater). For example, electric utilities have been warned by Homeland Security to be very careful about whom they hire because of the possibility of sabotage from home-grown terror groups.

If I were subjected to such an “investigation”, I think SI would not turn up anything negative in the usual sense; the main question would be the motive behind the enormous volume of postings accumulating for the past fourteen years. That is a topic for a chapter of a book (or maybe a movie)! But I do have a "sharp edge" (like Mt. Katadhin's Knife Edge, maybe).

Social Intelligence is headed by Max Drucker, who may become a player in the "online reputation monitoring" business similar to that established by Michael Fertik (below).

There is another story (already) about Preston's NYT article on "Reputation Communications" here.

(My "BillBoushka" blog has a coordinated post about Michael Fertik's "Reputation.com" July 20.)

"Bridge Jobs" appeal to seniors who contemplate retirement (or buyouts)

2011-07-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

Several media outlets today discussed the concept of “bridge jobs”, especially for active seniors or people who accept large severance or buyout agreements, as an alternative to “retirement”. Some employers could provide part-time bridge jobs for training other workers, or for part-time customer support. Other ideas could involve substitute teaching or career-switching, or various part-time jobs that emphasize selling to the public, conducting surveys or research, and the like.

Employment Digest has an article on the subject here.

ABC presented the concept as part of its “retirement revolution” tonight.

On a weekend trip, I visit old haunts (when I worked for Univac, in 1973)

2011-07-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

On a trip this weekend, I passed through my own haunts from 1973 or so along Bloomfield Ave. in northern New Jersey, on a beautiful summer day after torrential rains.

In the town on Montclair, I found the “side street” Claremont Ave, and the old three-story building where I went to work for Sperry Univac as a “systems analyst” for the Montclair branch in September 1972. I would actually spend most of the first six months at Public Service in downtown Newark as a “site rep” for Fortran! Then I would work on the 1110 benchmark. In those days, Univac was credible competition for IBM with JCL (Exec 8) with a simpler syntax, a bit like today’s Linux. COBOL would eventually be ASCII, not EBCDIC as with IBM.

Univac rented the second and third floors of 205 Claremont Ave, which is now a municipal building for Montclair. The SA’s and branch management had offices and cubicles on the second floor, and on the third floor they actually had a sales force selling keypunch equipment back then! Montclair was a beautiful place in October.

Two towns and four miles west on Bloomfield Ave and on top the next “mountain” at about 800 feet elevation, I lived in the town of Caldwell, on Espy road, which spins off just as the hill slopes down to the west and approaches US 46 (West Caldwell first). My old garden apartment building was still there.

Bonus picture: Grover Cleveland birthplace, Caldwell.

A job fair on another planet

2011-07-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

In a dream, I went to a jobs fair on an M-Star planet, like that depicted in AMC Theater's trademark ad of an outdoor theater with a view of an extraterrestrial city.

The career that everyone dangled in my eyes was "legacy financial planner". Then another guy tries to get me to become a busboy on a local Hilton Hotel on the planet.

It's as if people could chose to go back in time and live in times when you could count on social security.

I guess if a habitable planet always face the same side of its Sun, its economy would be affected. I doubt it would have "legacy systems" with nightly cycles written in COBOL.

I wonder, maybe in fifty years, people who can't find work will become settlers on Mars.

Update: 7/11:

More team building at work: a dream about a bicycle race inside the Metro tunnels, riding on the rail guard. Wind resistance protections mandatory. The lesson of team building sessions at work: "You don't worry about what you can't do anything about." I remember a jam session like this at work in 1998. And so last night's weird dream. You never retire.

Some recruiters want more liberalized H-1B rules for highly skilled workers,graduates

2011-07-08T05:14:00.000-07:00

Recruiters for techies in specialty areas say that H-1B visa rules should be more liberal, and should allow different quotas from different countries, especially India which always has a lions share of skilled applicants.

The Politco story is “Tech execs seek visas for ‘hotshots”, link here.

Laid off IT professionals have sometimes complained that immigrants have taken away job openings from them. But in the mainframe area, the same set of people tend to stay within a group of related contracts (like MMIS) and employers often know more or less whom they want.

Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) is sponsoring a bill allowing foreign born graduates with advanced degrees remain in the country more easily. An earlier typical blog entry of hers is here.

Why was Microsoft Front Page such a pain at one time, anyway? Getting started with Expression

2011-07-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

This week, I finally got around to playing more with Microsoft Expression Web. I did find it very easy to set up the kind of tabular and link-laden web pages common in my work. However, I was not able to connect to my doaskdotell.com domain directly as I had with FrontPage.

Of course, with WS-FTP, export to an external site is lickety split, as always. Expression also offers the same FTP connection, so maybe there is no reason to bother with signing on and updating directly.

What I do recall is that Front Page Extensions used to be a big controversy for webmasters ten or more years ago. Back in January 1999, a friend, who hosted my sites, got mine working through TelNet from work, which raised an ethical question with my manager if that was inappropriate use of resources (after all my contortions with “conflict of interest” as I have written about), except that everything was done through Telnet, so there was not use of company computing resources. (Curiously, I never hear this scenario discussed in perambulations about corporate computer use policies. But, it’s not good to invite even small ethical lapses; they just invite more uncertainty later.)

At work twelve or so years ago, I had always used Allaire Home Site to code the HTML, and then an intranet copy script of some kind. Later, we went to builds and did everything through Unix.

So why was Microsoft Front Page ever offered the way it was and why was it such a big deal?

Microsoft appears to be pushing Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 automatically now

2011-06-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

Today, Windows 7 threw its Service Pack 1 at me on my main “big Dell XPS” laptop. I didn’t know what it was until I let it run. It took about 20 minutes to install, and about 25 minutes to “configure” before the Restart shut down. In fact it went through a second “Configuring Service Pack 1” cycle a second time, more quickly, before shutdown. The reconfigure after restart didn’t take as long as expected.

The update report says that KB2547666 and KB2547698 failed. I ran the “troubleshooter” and it says it repaired some problems. I suspect that Windows will throw these updates at me again soon.

On my smaller Toshiba notebook, I see that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update failed (see 6/24 posting). I’ve had some other troubles on it with configurations hanging. Maybe a similar fix is needed there.

Here is what Microsoft says about SP1 on 7, link.

The SP was available Feb 22, 2011. “How to Geek” says that the SP is option and will not install automatically, but on both my W7 computers, Microsoft has tried to install it automatically this week, the last week of June. It appears that it is becoming “mandatory”. (The article has a humorous illustration about dropping what you are doing and staring at “0% Complete screen”.) Here is the “HowTo” link.

It does say that if you get regular updates, you don’t need SP1 for security reasons.

Windows 7 Forums from Microsoft publishes the following 47 “short film” on YouTube:

Don't know why the embed is "supersized"!

Major league baseball teams are employers too; the Jim Riggleman mess teaches HR a lesson

2011-06-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

The recent sudden resignation of Washington Nationals’ manager Jim Riggleman may seem distant from the world of I.T., but it does show how any corporation should not run its Human Resources.

Riggleman was upset over the team’s general manager Rizzo’s unwillingness to discuss a longer term contract.

He said, at age 58, he was “too old not to be respected.”

At 67, I know the feeling.

There is something unsettling (to say the least) when “you” think that management thinks “you” should be the one to make sacrifices. Think how this can play out in the workplace, when some people, for example, seem to have more “family obligations” than others.

If you don’t respect your people enough to act in good faith with them, why did you hire them in the first place? To use them?

As for the Nationals, they won a protracted thriller Friday night (blowing last inning road leads three times), but lost today. But the players sound focused. A split in the first two games after a management fiasco is OK. But Ryan Zimmerman said of this, “shocking”.

I do hope the Nats’ management and players stumble on this posting. In baseball, as in everything else, it’s the organizations with dependable management that perform well year after year. The Nationals still have to prove themselves, and this incident (just after the club had won 11 out of 12, including a sensational 4-run-deficit walkoff) doesn’t help.

Misadventures with automated Microsoft updates on a little travel notebook

2011-06-24T07:01:00.000-07:00

Thursday, with my Toshiba notebook with Windows 7 starter, I experienced my own adventures in a perambulator, or misadventures, to say the least. The system immediately tried to do Microsoft update downloads, Kaspersky data files, and Adobe acrobat reader, simultaneously, three at a time. True, it had elapsed several days since I had booted up this little Notebook, since the Digital Media Conference Friday; it’s mainly a travel machine. It never has any problems with hotel WiFi or cable (when available) connections.

The MIFI Verizon Internet connection shut down, but when I switched to the faster Comcast, it did finish the Adobe and Kaspersky. Adobe demanded that I restart. I did so, using its icon. Soon I saw that the machine was in update 12 of 16 from Microsoft.

In fact, Update 13 took almost 50 minutes. I thought the machine was looping. But you couldn’t even power if off. It finally got to Update 14 and finished and configured properly.

The restart actually worked, but then the next cold start hung and the machine froze. Then another restart worked, but this time it demanded to load six more updates. Those took another hour. Maybe this was to fix the hang caused by an earlier update, but this time the machine didn’t have to reconfigure anything.

I haven’t tried the little beast today. I’d better, or maybe I’d better not.

Update: June 28

Twice on the small laptop it's hung when reconfiguring updates while rebooting, and if I power it off, power it back on, it pick up where it left off and finishes. That isn't what other users report, here.

What happens when an employer Googles or Bings your name? The "rules" for online presence keep changing, as do publishing services

2011-06-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here’s a new little story on MSN “Careerbuilder” about online reputation, “What will employers find when they search your name?” by Selene Dehne from JIST Publishing, link here.

There’s no question that the public perception of online reputation has changed radically in the past ten years; in the 90s, people with others reporting to them were often advised to stay off the web as far as making themselves visible! Social media is the main reason, as well as an ideological change in the 20-something generation, advocated by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook particularly: you have only one identity. That’s a reverse from the sacrosanct right to anonymity and multiple persona on the web.

The article gives three dilemmas, including the now badly outmoded “there’s no online evidence that I exist.” That would have worked in 1998, but not now.

I think there is more to think about in strategizing an online presence than just one’s behavior on Facebook and Twitter, even though these matter. I think one needs to conceptualize at a high level how one wants to be found, and weigh the pros and cons of various strategies carefully. For many professionals in one area --- for example, musicians, composers, performing artists, or all the way over to software design consultants, even attorneys – a site that is predicated around a professional blog (equated to a domain name as close to your professional name as possible) with a banner that points to “about me”, itinerary, portfolio (especially for artists and musicians), biography, and contact info makes sense. One problem is that with almost any vendor you put all your eggs in one basket. But the advantage to organizing one’s presence around a “blog center” is that every time a visitor goes to your domain, he or she can tell what’s happening (it’s easier than wading through pages of other people’s tweets, believe me). But don’t become “delinquent”; have something new out there every few days.

You could arrange your material around a flat site that links to blog(s). This way, you don’t have everything invested in one approach. But then you need to make it very easy for visitors to navigate to your blogs and current information. I will be going through my own approach to this problem this summer. This approach appeals more to people who wear more than one hat (despite Facebook’s ideology!) under one name, or who focus on publishing or distribution and knowledge management for its own sake. If your business is a new independent film studio or distributorship, you’ll need “more than a blog.”

Be careful in choosing domain names, especially about possible trademark infringement issues. On the other hand, you may want to consider making a catching nickname your real name, because it will help “brand” you publicly (and may even help legally if there are ever any trademark issues).

There is some controversy over using “free blogging services” v. your own space. It sounds more professional to host everything in your own space, and this advice has often been given in the past; but that could be deceptive.

You need to use a responsive ISP with good support. Furthermore, many low-cost ISP’s actually ride on top of free services from Blogger or Wordpress (which I think are very close in capability now), so you could find yourself not getting “due process” if there is some problem (like incorrect accusations of spam); it’s “legally” safer if the ISP loads separate copies of blogging software to your account (not all of them do), but that’s more expensive and sometimes cumbersome to support.

You may want to maintain very well organized backups of your own content made yourself so you could change vendors if there is a major problem relatively quickly. Use a cloud service (Carbonite, Mozy, Webroot) but it’s a good idea to have your own thumb drive copies, or, better, optical CD (impervious to electrical or EMP damage – maybe an issue in the future, even if not yt).

Here is David C. Skul's video on Online Reputation Management and Blogging Best Practices:

Picture: No, that shouldn't be the first thing an employer sees (bong hits?)

HR world ponders "corporate liable" v. "individual liable" mobile and auto assets

2011-06-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

E-week has an interesting article on the debate about the pros and cons of using corporate-liable vs. employee-liable mobile assets (cell phones, smart phones, maybe iPads, maybe even notebooks).

The link is here.

We’ve covered this before somewhat. One of the biggest concerns here is that the employee may have corporate data and client PII (phone numbers and email addresses at least) on the phones, which could be lost or even stolen by force as by mugging.

Another concern could come with employee minutes use.

Similarly, if a job requires use of the employee’s car, there could occur issues with increase insurance premiums (business use) to the employee, or even mileage limitations (with leases or conceivably in the future with rationing). (Inverse problems occur with company cars with charges for personal use.)

But the old idea of separate business and personal use is becoming just that – old. The same holds with “online reputation” and social media use. Clients could be concerned with what they find out about a contractor from personal social media. And Facebook has this idea, “you have but one identity”. No wonder “don’t ask don’t tell” fell on its sword.

Dying industries: sales, and computer operations as well as middle management (AOL story)

2011-06-07T10:15:00.000-07:00

Lydia Dishman has a rather startling article on AOL from Career Builder, “Five Dying Industries: Ways to Get Out and Move On”, link (website url) here.

Everyone knows about manufacturing drops, but some of the others are startling. Sales, for example. But the cultural changes toward privacy (“do not call” laws and now maybe “do not track”)and more self-sufficiency weigh against phone and door-to-door hucksterism. It might get harder, for example, to make it as an insurance agent, too.

Weakening is computer operations and probably network maintenance, even if software engineering, in conjunction with specifics in areas like health care, security, and social networking grows. (Although it would sound as if it takes people to maintain server farms and very complex operations 24x7; imagine
“life after people” with no Internet either.)

The flattening of corporations and increasing of span of control would not bode well for midlist managers, any more than it does for midlist authors in publishing.

Use of employee-owned devices increase business security risk

2011-06-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

On May 31, Bryan Acohido of USA Today offered an important story on the workplace security issues posed by the use of employee-owned smart phones and sometimes laptops or other devices, especially during business travel, long commutes or long hours, “Mobile devices pose a big risk for security; New gear outpaces company safeguards,” link here.

One of the biggest risks simply comes from the possibility of the physical loss or theft of an employee-owned phone containing privileged stakeholder data or PII (even simply phone numbers that were called or received).

As noted before, travel presents a problem when the employee must carry a business laptop in air travel, even though the TSA will allow two laptops. Business could consider developing business travel laptops with multiple logon capabilities, one of which could be intended for personal use during travel. It’s possible, after all, to have multiple operating systems (both Linux and Windows) on the same PC.

"Take your training!" and watch out for ADHD at those sleep-inducing outsourced courses

2011-05-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

I guess one lesson from my own IT career was, if you want to stay current, “take your training.”

Back in 1981, when I joined Chilton in Dallas, new programmers were scheduled for self-study training sessions “upstairs” with a VHS video and book lesson, exercises, and quiz, all to be finished in 4 hours. The lessons were in a number of topics like Structured System Design, JCL, Assembler programming, and solving mainframe dumps. The pace was slow, but effective. Your course completions were considered in the performance appraisal.

Training has tended to outsourced to training companies, that usually visit most cities and conduct week long courses in suburban industrial parks (I-494 south of Minneapolis, for example), often near airports. (Business travel can be uneventful.) There is a tendency for them to start simply but for the pace to accelerate. Students are then presented problems which require a lot of “self-sufficiency” (using help) to work. This was particularly true in a PowerBuilder course in 2000, a little less so with a Java course in 1999. If you don’t code java everyday, can you define a “constructor”? This was really a problem in 2001 with BEA Web Logic.

There is a problem that in a typical shop, most of the material will not be used by the programmer, particularly in maintenance or support. That was much less a problem in the mainframe days where much more development was done in house, even with purchased systems (like Vantage in life insurance). It’s hard to pick up modern IT skills without being on board with a project early. That fact tends to give younger workers, especially college and graduate students, a big edge. (I heard plenty of stories in my libertarian world contacts about IT course projects at the U of M back in my Minneapolis days.)

Perhaps I experienced some ADHD in these courses (even a later one in version management on Unix in 2001; we actually had a class in FileAid two days before the layoff at the end of 2001!). I had a little publishing “empire” that I didn’t like to desert, and was in a space where it was hard to focus on stuff I wouldn’t ever use. After I went into book and web authoring on the side, I had my own world to maintain, and too much distraction was a problem. Like the world, I was changing, too.

More employers use social media for job postings; more people have to use social media for professional purposes only

2011-05-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

NBC Washington reported Sunday night that employers are rapidly turning to social media to post their jobs. In one survey, 95% used Linked In, 57% used Facebook, and 42% used Twitter. (Ashton Kutcher often posts openings in his own company, Katalyst, on Twitter.) (See also May 11 posting.)

The pressure increases on many job seekers to use social media for “professional purposes” rather than their own person motives. Social media are certainly starting to enforce a “one identity” policy on individuals, even older individuals who may have wanted to stay private. (At one point, as I have written, I had envisioned that some sorts of jobs would have required me simply to be off the web for my own political expression, but that was in the old Web 1.0 environment.) All the sudden, multiple identities, pseudonyms, and anonymity are coming to be viewed as evidence of lack of “integrity” in our new culture. Do ask, do tell.

Recoveries are no fun for IT staff; lessons from my own career, and for Blogger

2011-05-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

During the second week of May, 2011 Blogger encountered some problems that required a rollback of some new posts, apparently a database recovery, and restoration of the posts and comments. I wrote about this on my “BillBoushka” blog May 14. I’ll add that since then, on a few occasions “draft” copies of restored blog posts have reappeared on my dashboard.

The bigger technical issue was how companies manage “disaster recovery”, of databases once corrupted. (I presume Blogger has some sort of SQL-based relational database underneath; Wordpress uses MySQL).

I had a few brushes with these situations in my mainframe career.

Back in the 1980s, we had to rerun three days of daily billing at Chilton Credit Reporting after we found a member master had been incorrectly restored. Fortunately, each run took only about an hour, even in 1980s Ahmdahl technology.

Most mainframe shops have “incrementals” and “full backups”, for everything (including reporting packages like SAR and Dispatch). One place I worked in the early 1990s used to do full backups and “compactions” every Saturday night, taking everything down at 4 PM Saturday.

The ultimate nightmare for a senior programmer-analyst who “owns” a major application is to find corruption and the need for a major recovery.

Recoveries usually consist of going back to the last “full” and then applying “incrementals” successively. Or cycles would have to be rerun if there was actual application corruption. In the mid 1990s we almost had another catastrophe with an IDMS VSAM-transparency and the backup GCVEXPORT, etc, but a techie figured out the problem and bailed us out. Recoveries are not fun for support staff, anywhere.

In 1999, I participated in a twenty-four hour disaster recovery dress rehearsal offsite near Minneapolis.

Update: June 6

Blogger has a detailed explanation of its incident on Blogger Status, dated May 31, 2011, link. It's titled "Blogger Incident Report", authored by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger. I urge people who work in large IT production environments, even financial institutions, to read it (I don't know if you need a blogger account to see it), as it gives a perspective as to what can go wrong in companies with many servers and how harrowing recoveries can be. It's educational!

ABC reports that employers are deliberately saying they will consider only the currently or recently employed, complicating the stigma of unemployment

2011-05-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

Diane Sawyer, on World News Tonight, reported on six million unemployed Americans, and the disturbing trends from many employers to say (in position descriptions) that they will consider only the currently or recently employed. Only New Jersey makes this illegal, as unemployment does not make one a member of a “protected class”. So many employers are considering long term unemployment a kind of secondary social stigma.

In information technology, the practical concern is a candidate’s technical sharpness. If he or she is not current, he or she won’t be able to deliver for a client. That’s true of Internet-related skills, less so of older mainframe programming. You never forget COBOL.

ABC’s report recommended “volunteering” in your field to fill in recent gaps in your resume. How can you do that in IT?

Update: June 10: USA Today has a point-counterpoint on this practice by employers here. The opposing view says that when an employed person is hired, another vacancy is still created, so the problem self-corrects without government intervention. But USA Today says that to declare unemployed candidates as automatic losers is to show lack of ethics and "imagination". New Jersey recently passed a law partially banning the practice, and New York may consider it.

Employer use of social media is becoming more mainstream

2011-05-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

It is becoming more “mainstream” to include social media checks as part of candidate “background investigation”. Law firms and HR consultants are starting to say that the practice is acceptable, even desirable, if done carefully.

But there are several points to bear in mind:

Despite a recent flap at the Maryland Department of Corrections, it’s generally not all right to ask for a candidate’s social media password, and it might violate the TOS rules of the social media provider.

Generally, it’s all right to look for items that come up as available to the public from search engines. But the employer should inform the candidate or employee that it will do so. Furthermore, it is very easy to misidentify someone, especially with a common name or even with a name you think is less common. My name is rather unusual, but I use both “John” (the legal first name) and “Bill” (the nickname) online. That has actually created an issue in the past with a school system (back in 2005). Note that Facebook and maybe some other social media sites may require that users actually disclose their own legal names, under the “one public identity” norm for “public integrity” which is an idea that Facebook says it believes in. It is important to have a specific procedure to allow the applicant or employee to answer potentially negative information on social media, which always has the chance of being false. It is also easy to misidentify facial images on the web, and there is no guarantee that tags provided by others are correct. Employers generally do not have the accurate facial identification software available to government and intelligence, and should not behave as if they did.

It will be tricky to look at social media which are likely to disclose protected characteristics such as gender, race, and, in many jurisdictions, sexual orientation.

An article Feb. 24, 2011 by Jessica Ollenberg at “Ask HRS” is typical, with a link here.

She writes “how a candidate chooses to be known on the Internet as searchable by customers, co-workers, competitors, associates, vendors, investors and other stakeholders, is certainly a BFOQ. Such a presence affects on-duty performance, especially when easily detected by search engine or links to professional or company presence”. A “BFOQ” is a “bona-fide occupational qualification”, and that gets touchy in an area where it is someone’s job to manipulate others socially to sell to them. It’s obviously an issue for a member of the media, where objectivity is so importance. The best situation, from the employee’s point of view, is the situation where the job involves transmitting to the public ideas that the employee actually believes (a good example would be Anderson Cooper’s responsibilities as a CNN host for his “keeping them honest” on AC360).

Stokes, Lazarus & Carmichael at “Atlanta Business Litigation Lawyers” has a similar article from January 2011 in a paper “Considerations when screening applicants with social media” here.

Workforce Management also has an article on the topic this month, subscription required.

Twitter gives "me" a blank page; stability problems reported earlier today; are they resolved yet?

2011-05-10T20:05:00.000-07:00

Are a lot of users (as of about 10:45 PM EDT Tuesday May 10) still getting blank screens when logging on to Twitter?

Twitter’s explanation today is here.

So far, none of these steps have worked for me (I’ll try it on the Mac Safari shortly; in the PC environment, Chrome, Firefox, and IE all behave the same way, in XP and W7. In fact, Internet Explorer says “done, with errors”)

MSNBC had reported a similar problem Feb. 17, story. There is talk of the “failed whale”.

You can also check “Downrightnow” here.

I did get Twitter to reset my pw, no change.

I can go to twitter.com, not log on, and see my most recent tweets with a search. If I try some friends or people I “follow”, I get a similar result, no activity in the past few hours or so.

Update: I tried it on my new MacBook. Same result, in Safari (with Verizon instead of Comcast). My Mac has never been on Twitter before, so browser caching is not the issue. Also, Safari was just updated the other day, and the browser is as new as possible.

Second picture: from the DC Metro. Should IT people "pay their dues" with "real jobs", even as volunteers?

Update: May 11

Twitter's back now, for me. I wonder if the East Coast had a major Internet routing problem last night. Both Comcast and Verizon kept stalling, but work OK now (8 AM Wed EDT).

Emails invite former IT pros (me at least) to recruit

2011-05-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

Today (May 2), I got several emails from an outfit called “careerstaffings.com” (no MYWOT or McAfee website rating), saying it had reviewed my resume and could earn over $60 an hour screening other resumes. Although recruiting might be a promising income earning idea, as the economy slowly re-expands, I suspect that at best you get paid only when someone is placed. It all sounds like “a likely story”. Anyone know anything about this?

Primerica hires beaucoup agents and wants states to make the licensure test easier

2011-04-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

Leslie Schism has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Monday April 25, front page in print, “Insurer pushes to weaken license test”, about Primerica, which has an unusual business model. It hires a large number of agents but has lower qualifications, and many fail the state licensure tests.

The print version of the story has some sample test questions, which resemble those of LOMA exams. The online version (paywall subscription required) is here.

Until 2010, Primerica was owned by Citigroup, but there seems to have been a change (Primerica story here).

I reported my own interview with them in Minnesota here on July 26, 2010 (the "we give you the words" spiel).

Primerica has certainly come under criticism online, as with this blog ("Something I learned today") story.

Primerica should not be confused with Primevest, in St. Cloud, MN, belonging to Cetera. It was a subsidiary of ReliaStar in the late 1990s, before ReliaStar was acquired by ING. Here is the Primevest link.

Picture: A "polecat" (e.g. skunk) on a country road in Pennsylvania, near Sideling Hill. "America starts here". Wild animals get the right of way.

HP laptops in Vista, dropping devices

2011-04-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

Besides goofy behavior of the touchpad on my personal Dell XPS converted from Vista to Windows 7 (if you press too hard, it takes certain keys as commands and jumps or deletes text, in any application), I’ve encountered weird behavior on a Hewlitt-Packard Vista laptop for work. I can’t discuss the work, but I can say there’s goofy behavior, with the touchpad device dropping entirely, and with the cellular wireless card getting disabled.

It seems from the scuttlebutt that Vista tends to drop devices on some machines, particularly depending on how the machine was booted up. Many organizations specify specific startup scripts and procedures which may differ from what the manufacturer says, particularly to get to an encrypted logon screen. If these are not followed exactly, occasionally the HP, at least, will lose devices. It seems the Startup script affects how the devices behave later. I suspect this would not happen in Windows 7.

There is a way to access the device manager in Vista from the search box, with devmgmt.msc. Or use the command prompt. About has a writeup here.

There are some instructions online as to what to do if a VZAccessManager wireless device gets disabled, here.

Update: April 25

Tonight, on my own Dell XPS, the wireless icon goes out. Yes, it comes back when I press it (and "enables" in W7), but why did it go out?

Job applicants warned about the "context" of their personal online activity (social media and blogs) and job searches; In 2010, "Social Sentry" can monitor off-work social media use

2011-04-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

Here we go again. This morning, MSN has a compelling story on the way people could be kicking their own shins with their use of social media when they’re in the job market. The link is here.

The title is telling: "Social media can kill your career -- but not the way you think: Why you should avoid being overexposed in a digital world." That's not quite what the article says, however.

It’s not so much about the inappropriate photos (“drunken pirate”, etc). It’s more about creating an online presence that seems to dilute the importance of your career, or even whether you believe in it.

The article makes the suggesting of having at least two social network accounts. Let employers join only the “professional” one (the LinkedIn). Keep the other one (Facebook) social. (Or maybe the analogy is Facebook:MySpace; a good SAT question.) But it seems unlikely that wouldn’t contradict their other point. Employers may still see what you’re doing publicly.

There’s more to this. First, remember blogs and social networking profiles work differently, even though the results overlap. Blogs may expose “sharp edges” that contradict the mission of a job even more than Facebook, partly because of the way search engines work and the way those notorious “privacy settings” are usually implemented.

Morally, it’s a good thing that blogs and social media put employers on edge, particularly in areas involving sales and jobs requiring going out and “soliciting” people for business (whether door-to-door or through online leads). The old paradigms that sales jobs depended on have weakened as many people think they have become more independent (but maybe they really haven’t; we still have “a community”). One could ask similar questions about "public relations". It’s also fair to ask, is it “fair” for employers to monopolize someone’s “public life” (as in “Hannibal” – Anthong Hopkins said it so well) when they can lay people off at will so easily?

Here's another thing. It may be hard to remain "passionate" online about what you "did". Look at how mainframe systems lost popularity and mainframe employment became episodic. It seems no longer credible to sell oneself as "just" a "mainframe professional". Or is it?

Later on today, I found a story on Clark Howard news "Employers monitor your social networking profile" here, with software like Social Sentry (look at this other story on Venture Beat here). The stories date to late March 2010. Howard says six out of ten employers have a social media monitoring policy (for "off work" speech, explicitly) and consider anything you say (at least outside privacy settings) to be not "private" and potentially workplace speech. I've been warning about this for years! Workforce Management is also reporting on this (subscription) now.

I could not find this product on the Teneros website today; see the "BillBoushka" blog April 20, 2011 for more details. (I've since been told that the product was purchased by "SocialLogix". See that blog.)

Another company thinks I am a recruiter!

2011-04-13T20:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have gotten multiple emails from a Pittsburgh company named iBusiness Solutions (link) where the writer seems to think I am a recruiter able to submit candidates.

Most of the openings require specific subskill sets in areas of OOP (java), and various databases.

I suppose that’s because a script has picked up this blog.

No, I don’t recruit, because I’m swamped by what I am doing. It’s pretty expensive for a small recruiting company to subscribe to Dice, so there is a reason to consolidate, I suppose.

Do employers reimburse enough for business use of personal auto? What about $4 gas? What about "business use" auto insurance?

2011-04-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

People who take jobs involving their personal autos for business, when they have not done so before (including retirees) may want to be careful about their auto insurance coverage and make sure that the reimbursement rate offered by the employer is adequate for increased premium.

In northern Virginia, coverage for business use (reimbursed and “on the clock” or part of the workday) without special hauling tends to cost about $120 or so for about 6 months for about 200 miles a month of driving, or about 10 cents a mile for business insurance.

Here's a checklist from "Women's Finance" on "Does your vehicle insurance cover business use?"

Or check this question, "Do I need commercial auto coverage", from About, which is more about advice for small business owners, but it says you need it if you use (individually) "titled vehicles" for the conduct of business.

CompuQuotes has an advice page on business use of a personal vehicle, here.

Since gasoline prices have spiked, it’s instructive to do an “Algebra I” “story problem” with gasoline per mile costs. At 20 miles per gallon, $4.00/gallon gasoline would cost 20 cents a mile (5 miles per dollar, like a physics problem -- school gets easier with real-life allowance problems, doesn’t it).

The IRS business mileage rate for normal passenger vehicle use is 51 cents a mile right now in 2011. IRS rules are written up in a manner to suggest that insurance was taken into account. But the IRS will certainly face political pressure to raise the rate soon, as was done in 2008. In many urban locations, gasoline is already over $4 a gallon.

Here’s a link about the 2011 rules

The IRS publication on the matter is here.

Here’s a blog on what the IRS did in 2008 (during the Bushie pre-crisis oil price spike), from the point of view of nannies who use cars for business.

It was as high as 58 cents a mile at one point.

McDonald's franchises to add 50000 "real jobs" on April-teenth

2011-04-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

As I stopped at a McDonald’s off I-95 at Thornburg, VA (north of Richmond, south of Fredericksburg) today, I saw the sign for their national hiring day April 19 (link), and I thought I even overheard an interview as I walked to the counter.

It’s been said that McDonald’s (or any fast food company) is a test of whether “you can work” at all. It’s a “real job” (which “data processing” is apparently not).

Remember how Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book “Nickel and Dimed” about how she paid her dues with minimum wage jobs.

“Big Mac” could mean McDonald’s, or it could mean the special bonds sold during the 1975 fiscal crisis for New York City.

Second picture: after getting sidetracked to Route 1 by an I-95 wreck, I saw this "Great Pyramid" under construction near Woodbridge, VA. It takes real labor to rebuild The Pyramids. Ask the Maya.

Beta testing a film festival's advanced ticket purchase system

2011-04-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

Here’s another interesting little wrinkle. It seems like I’m beta testing other people’s systems since “retiring”.

This month, FilmFestDC has a movie that appears twice the same day at the same venue. The software would not confirm the time or print it on my bar-coded ticket receipt. I emailed MissionTix for support. At first, it still had me down for the wrong time. Support had to change it manually.

So, some film festival ticketing systems may not work properly when a particular movie has more than one performance at the same place the same day.

Another annoyance is that many festivals will not let you order the same day as the movie even when there are seats available.

MissionTix told me it would fix the problem today (Monday).

Cell phone companies should bill employers directly for associate business use; but no system knows how to do it

2011-04-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

Telecommunications carriers should develop systems to bill separately employer use of associate’s home landline or cellular phone service.

Cellular phone service presents an issue because it typically is based on a maximum minutes allowance during peak hours, and excepts calls made to mobile phones for the same company. If a large number of minutes are used during peak weekday hours for work, the minutes allowance be exceeded. Landline service billing is often simpler, but in some cities message units limits are present and more area codes are considered long distance.

A work related call could be made with a pin code that tells the telecommunications carrier to bill the employer separately to a different account with fees as negotiated in advance with the employer for business use. This is somewhat the “opposite” of the usual workplace problem; here, it’s business use of personal resources.

Architecturally, such a system could have a large mainframe component and could be similar to billing systems I worked on in the past (daily and monthly and consolidated billing for a credit reporting company in the 1980s; salary deduction billing for a life insurance company in the 1990s). I’m surprised I haven’t heard of such a system having been developed by an EDS, IBM, etc for the telecommunications industry to use.

For readers who remember me working in ALC at Chilton in Dallas in the 1980s (and "coding out of addressability" using R15), the program name "BA165" was a private joke. A coworker even had a dream about getting fired (or a "pink slip") over it.