NAS = Network attached storage = a big array of hard drives he puts all his stuff on. NAS backup = backing up his NAS array, probably to an attached tape drive or tape autoloader drive that spans several tapes for that night's scheduled backup (every night.) Tower of Hanoi method = a way of cycling the sets of tapes in and out of the backup queue that lets you use a limited number of tapes while insuring that you have both a baseline tape (generally made on the weekend) in which the entire system is backed up, and incremental tapes made every night of the files that have changed since the baseline. The phrase Hanoi doesn't imply complete data integrity, but merely implies that if you have data corruption or a ruined file you may or may not be able to recover it, and that if you try to suggest that the file is unrecoverable Jane Fonda will call you a liar on television and assure the world that your data was being handled properly and fairly.
Yet another successful project spearheaded by the Sales Prevention Team!
Tune in next week when we bury our customers in Spam, sell their contact information to telemarketers, and (yes!) actually call them at home while they are eating dinner.
Customers getting complacent or even borderline happy with your service? Is your Accounts Receivable department bringing in money faster than Accounts Payable can spend it? Those pesky customers interfering with your real work, or even your Solitare games or web surfing? - Call us and we will send one of our Sales Prevention Professionals right over to straighten matters out. No job too big, no product too good - at SPT we guarantee results!
Get his contact info from his resume and follow up, if you could really use a programmer with his specific background. Take his resume, change the format to suit your needs, and hand walk it into some big dog's office and tell him you found the guy that may be a perfect fit.
Business needs always trump personal needs, if a person is going to be an employee. He is just out of college and is ready to start a real life so I'm guessing he will give moving a serious consideration. People get hired when a company needs an employee, not when a person needs a job. Finally, if he is a perfect fit now is the time to jump on him while he is available and open to suggestion - in six months it sure would suck to have the company decide they need a guy and have this guy no longer available. Never know, you may be eligible for a referral bonus (this is exactly what they were designed for.)
If you really think he is a good fit, pursue it. This is exactly how jobs get got in real life.
Disclaimer : I just moved all the way across the country and started a new job when I got here. The first paragraph describes exactly how I got this job.
I appreciate the difference between 'Cum Laude' and 'With Honors', and it is something that can be brougth up during the face to face interview.
However, if the resume is in DOC or PDF format, will automatically get scanned?
It's a gamble - are you willing to bet your job (the potential for a face to face) on it?
The word Niggardly is a perfectly good English word, means stingy or tight with the purse strings, but I wouldn't use it in a phone interview with HR of a prospective employer. That's a good way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, because you never know how someone is going to take something when they don't really know.
Unless you are going to work for Vivid Entertainment, I wouldn't send in a resume with Cum on it.
Experience above education, even though you just graduated. Take the word 'cum' off your resume (Graduated Cum Laude (GPA: 3.77)). No joke. Lots of people have their email filtering simply delete any inbound email with the word in it. Use 'Graduated with honors (GPA: 3.77)' instead. There are two factions for 'Computer Science' : one under the department of engineering (the good one) and under the department of business. If your degree was under the department of engineering, a few places make it say so proudly : 'BS in Computer Science under the Department of Engineering' so you don't get confused for a MIS from the Business Department. If your degree is from the Business side of the college, ignore this paragraph. "Received the Edward G. Goman Outstanding Senior Award, given to one graduating senior in the combined Math/CS department. " - Change to "Exclusive receipient of the 2004 Edward blah blah..." Note that I'm drinking tonight and it might be ok the way it is, but it becomes more evident that you were one of one, not one of many. The choir scholarship is cool, unless you are applying for a position that is exclusively tech in nature without any music emphesis. Lose the high school information. The only purpose of high school was to get you into college, and day one of college everything you did in high school (even an National Honor Society graduate) is considered 'Paid in Full' and no longer a valid currency. Yikes - double ditto on Jr. High. Go into more detail on your C++ coding as an intern. Sounds cool. If a decision was made regarding going with Java or C++ based on your testing, you 'did influential research differentiating between C++ and Java, aiding in helping define corporate direction in development.' Under Director of TS, what database (unless it was Access.) Bonus points for MS/SQL, Oracle, or Sybase. Resume readers want to match up the technologies to the points of experience. Might want to match them up, because they are going to ask exactly like I did : 'what database? what driver? what language and technologies were you doing the Audacity in?' Someone else has addressed the 'Objective' line. Personally I suggest you tailor that line on a submission by submission basis, pretty much echoing the job description of the position you are applying for.
As for the rest of the site - Honestly I wouldn't give the url to anyone that is working with you to the effect of hiring. You really need to be a faceless entity until you have passed the initial screenings and have your foot in the door, and you never know what sets people off. The serene yoga picture on the front page is pretty cool, except to the guy who caught his girlfriend in bed with a yoga guy. The information about you attending the all boys choir school is great, unless the guy interviewing you was one of the Catholic abuse victims from Boston or wherever. HR's purpose isn't to insure they hire the right person - HR's purpose is to insure that the company doesn't hire the wrong person. They can't hire you, their only purpose is to disqualify you. Don't give them any ammunition. If it doesn't pertain to the position in a positive manner, they don't need to know.
Remember - nowadays when a job listing hits Monster a company will get 400 resumes. Even if you are the top 1%, you are still only one of four.
Finally, you are an alumni of a few high powered schools now. Your are going to get your first job because someone you know (or a friend of a friend) is going to hook you up. The four years you spent as Lab Manager at UofPS wasn't about rebooting computers or helping users print / get their email. The year you spend at D/TechServices wasn't about implementing a web based calendar or using a database. The time you spent at AAC wasn't about the difference between Java and C performance using floating point math. All of the above were building your contact list for future references and networking. 2004 is the Year of the Good Ol' Boy Network - so forget Monster.com and work your contact list. When your Godfather lines you up an interview the paper resume is a formality. Unless you give HR a reason to reject you.
But we do have a new class of educated poor people.
Perfect description of Russia, right as their economy went from First World to Third World (continuing through today.) God I hope I'm wrong with what I'm thinking.
God I love doing this - mostly because it lets me be a prick from behind the thinly veiled pretense of being helpful. I'm going to critique your online resume and I'm going to be honest. Someone did it for (to) me a dozen years ago and I cried during the process, but I took their advice to heart and about a month later had a job.
1. Lose the picture. Getting past the first HR screening means letting them be able to prove lack of prejudice, so being a 'while male in his early 20's', while putting you in the 'good' bucket, means that HR can't say that they picked your resume on its merits without regard to race, color, creed, age, or sex. If they know, what are the odds they skip over you because they couldn't show lack of preferential treatment? 2. Double ditto on the horse picture. How do you know that the interviewer isn't a big Christopher Reeve fan? 3. Lose the personal stats, Title (Mr.), Date of Birth, and Marital Status. If the reason isn't blatantly obvious, see #1 above. 4. The personal stuff at the bottom, specifically the bit about being an avid four-wheeler and gun freak wouldn't go over too well in the People's Democratic Republic of California or the Communist Federation Commonwealth of Massachusetts (where Boston is.) I'm a bigger gun freak than you are, but I don't admit it on my resume or during an interview.
The good stuff: MCSE, CCNA, CCDA, and BS/CS (cum laude, in three years - good job.) Oh wait, that's not a degree in software engineering, it's a degree in multimedia on the computer (also known as Flash / Macromedia.) Hmm. That one could go either way, depending on how well you interview. If you were seeking a spot in America I would drop the classes / certs on equine behavior and being a certified murderer (that's how some people view firearms in the two states that hire the most tech guys, CA and MA - but in Texas that might be ok.)
Last thing - if you are going to post your resume, do it on a domain that doesn't have anything else on it. Nothing like finding a resume in www.yourdomain.com/resume and when the HR folks go up a level and find a blog talking about sex with a different college chick every night. Your main page is pretty tame, but I didn't probe too deep.
That wasn't too harsh - but not for lack of trying. Good luck on the hunt.
Here's a better way to get paid, OP : next meeting with the business folks, bring a chessboard and a pocket full of pennies. Set down the chessboard and put the pennies next to it - tell them the first license costs one penny and put a penny on the first square on the chessboard. Tell them the license for the second copy is two pennies and put two pennies on the next square on the chessboard. Tell them for each additional copy just double the previous amount, and put four pennies on the next square to reinforce the concept while explaining that those four pennies just paid for license number three.
If they go for it... send me 10%. That ought to be enough to buy me some nice toys, like maybe Brazil and Bermuda.
Wow, you are the first person to perfectly articulate that not only is the current situation (re: outsourcing) in America fucked up, it is even more fucked up than Communism. Good job, honestly.
OP: There is a saying in coding about documenting your code - 'If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.' It is a joke, mostly, but it offers insight into your situation.
You didn't pick up everything in your job in a week by reading over someone else's notes (or you would be leaving those notes behind.) I'm guessing you have been there a while and probably invented half the stuff in your shop (procedures, protocols, naming conventions, etc.) so none of it is going to be in a book. There is just some stuff you 'just gotta know', meaning it can't be learned by the normal knowledge gleaning methods, you just gotta know (above which ceiling tiles are the switches, for example.)
The good news is that he (your replacement) doesn't have to do it 'your way' - he just has to get it done... and there are as many different ways to do infrastructure as there are sys/admins.
Your company is about to learn that keeping all their tech eggs in one basket (having only one guy) is a bad idea. Even a part timer college kid to shadow you as an intern for $7.50 / hour would have been quite the safety net. Do what you can, but there is no way to safely insure the ongoing performance of all your systems in two weeks - hell it takes a week just for the new guy to figure out how the building is layed out, who is who, and what is what. After that, come up with a way to provide emergency support and price is slightly prohibitively to keep them from abusing it. Take your old hourly rate, times 1.3 and that's what they paid you 40 hours a week to be there, that's your baseline. Twice that per hour, with half an hour as the minimum charge, for all contact / questions leaves them with an emergency way to keep running and gives you a little money to keep your interest piqued.
As for the whiteboard, try to understand why the rookie uses it, in what fashion and in what capacity. A whiteboard in your cube is a mark of seniority, authority, and power in my shop (I don't have one yet as I just started.)
Whiteboard: Swapspace for your brain. Shared memory (your thoughts) to other developers. Organization of your thoughts in 3 dimentions (X, Y, color) Notices that can't be ignored or overlooked. 6'x4' = Twenty four square feet of low resolution display space. That's a 5' diag monitor with crappy fonts, ugly graphics in 3 bit color (8 colors). Low-tech voicemail replacement for visitors leaving you a note. Tape up printed pages and you have a lot of space for massive data flow diagrams.
It's spelled 'psychopath' but we prefer the term 'special' or 'gifted' and we are pretty good coders when we feel like coding.
And I have yet to meet a someone with excellent interactive and social skills, manners, grace, charm, wit, charisma, that could code worth a fuck. Their team mates like them because they are socially talented and integrate themselves well into the social structure in a friendly manner, not because they can code. The average company can't afford a team full of real coders so they stack the deck with social butterfly pretty boys and one or two poor fuckers that look like they got dressed in the dark, would pick a weekend with a Cray over a weekend with Cindy Crawford, the guys that recognize a system manufacturer based on the machine's MAC address but don't know their mother's phone number... now those guys can code. (If you asked 'which Cray?' you might be that guy.) In my life I have been on exactly one team with 100% coders and 0% fluff, and it was a pretty small team.
Maybe I missed the boat, but in my experience there are people with social grace, and there are coders. Not much overlap, and surely not enough overlap to fill an entire team.
I have to agree. That was the most amazing office design I have ever seen.
Key elements from a 'techie' perspective: #1 : Able to see outside, double points if you can see green things outside. #2 : Sunlight, triple points if you can block it when you want. #3 : Ability to close the door. Nothing improves productivity like being able to shut out the world. #4 : More 110v outlets providing clean power than you possibly imagine ever using. Triple points for UPS. #5 : Cable routing ductwork. #6 : Room for more than two computers, including network jacks and table space. #7 : Whiteboards, lots of whiteboard space. #8 : Bookshelves, lots of bookshelves.
Want some other tips: Find out what the individuals drink. Make it available, free. The wholesale cost of a six pack of soda per day is inconsequential compared to the cost of building and staffing that office. Real hackers don't want to socialize with other people. Collaborative coding can happen in their offices, but the real producers could give a damn about a foozball table or artwork by famous painters. True hackers don't participate in group activities or group sports. Caffeine. Lots and lots of caffeine. More caffeine than you think a normal human could possibly consume. Twin 18" LCD monitors hooked up to a twin-headed video card - will give a coder about 90% more real estate than a single 20" LCD while costing about the same. Most new computers come with a $6 keyboard and a $3 mouse. Throw away both, get him a high quality rig.
I am going to be open minded and ask - even more importantly than 'is it legal' : is it even a good idea? Television is generally available anywhere anybody that would have enough bandwidth to watch your rebroadcast would want to live. I can think of a zillion better uses for my ISP's bandwidth (upstream and downstream) than to have someone rebroadcasting a television show.
Before I lapse into a profanity laced flame/troll post, johnrob, share with us your motivations and justifications behind doing such a thing. Understanding why you want to do this will undoubtedly motivate us in helping you understand how to do it.
Go to Best Buy and get a Linksys BEFSR41 router / firewall device. Plug your computer into the LAN side. Clone the MAC address of your computer. Change the password on the router to something other than 'admin'. Plug in your cablemodem into the WAN side. Enjoy your new worm/virus/trojan free existance.
Chyea, right. Check your history pal. Negros never get taken hostage. It's sort of an undocumented benefit of being black.
I can see the phone call now: Terrorist : Allah Akbar! We have taken this contractor hostage, and if you do not set our terrorist friends in Gitmo free we will chop his head off. US Embassy : What you say! OMFG! Let us see the videos. T : Here you go, do what we say or we chop his black head right off. US E : (watches video) US E : You took a black guy hostage? T : Yea, so we got a deal or what?...... T : Hello?...... T : Hello?...... T : Shit, I think they hung up on me.
Actually the ideal would be that there was a chemical compound that they could soak the disks in to reverse the process, seal them up in their 'airtight containers' and redistribute the exact same disks with the exact same movies again.
Of course this would be 'ideal' because then we would find out what chemical they used and do it ourselves.
Personal file server? RAID is good, RAIC is better. Here's how I would set it up:
Two partitions : your OS partition (4G) and your shared partition (the rest). Back up your OS partition by making a drive image / ghost image - burn that image to CD. Make a directory on the second partition and share it.
Second computer (RAIC stands for redundant array of inexpensive computers) : same thing, but don't share the shared partition to the public, just to the admin user tasked with maintaining the system. From time to time synch your shared drive to the new computer.
Benefits:
No downtime if the first computer crashes for any reason (RAID doesn't protect you against power supply, CPU, drive controller, liquid spills, psycho ex-girlfriend with a baseball bat, or other failures), instantly be back online by powering down the primary computer, renaming the second computer to the name of the first computer, and making the share on the backup computer public.
Protection against user errors, deleted files, mistakes, virus / worm infection, file corruption. RAID doesn't protect against any of these but having the files on a hot spare that isn't actively being shared does protect against all of these. When you know everything is good, synch the drives manually.
Not particularly complicated.
Any reason to add a new computer to your network is a good reason.
If that is out of the question, I agree : RAID 1 is the best cheap way to go. Better than nothing, that is, but it doesn't alleviate the need for backups.
First, the post itself was funny to all the sys/admins out there that saw through it. Second, it was funny when I got some serious responses asking questions and wanting clarification. Third, the +3, Informative caps off the Trifecta for the day. I think I get a little green dot next to my name (or something.)
To answer question #1 : an IP address isn't generally represented as a 32 bit word, it is generally represented as four octets. The little dot between numbers separates each of the four numbers, and those numbers range from 0 to 255. Thus when the early (expensive business class) routers were designed using four 4-bit processors, one for each octet, as long as each number in the octet was less than 16 the processor could process the number in a single pass, but the number 192.168.1.101 (ie, the number your Linksys router assigned you when you logged in today) the first octet, 192, took 2 passes through the four bit processor (because it is larger than 15 but smaller than 256), the second octet took two passes through the 4-bit processor assigned to the second octet because once again it is larger than 15 but smaller than 256, the third octet was processed in a single pass through the 4-bit processor assigned to the third octet, and the fourth octet (101) took two passes through the 4-bit processor for the same reason. On the really expensive routers it was simply a two pass process to resolve the IP address because it had four 4-bit processors working in parallel, processing octets, but on the consumer grade single 4-bit processor equipped routers from the mid to late 1970's that single operation could take as much as 12 operations when you factor in moving the intermediate results in and out of the registers.
Question #2 : You are thinking in terms of the current way that IP addresses are created using today's high powered DHCP servers (there is more power in your Linksys router than NASA had at its entire disposal when they put a man on the moon.) Unlike today, when we pull IP addresses out of thin air, there was once a day that every precious clock cycle on computers was accounted for and billed to somebody. And since there fewer 10.x.x.x addresses (rare) and since those 'business class' addresses were so much faster (see Question #1) they were quite a bit more expensive.
Oh man, yes. That, and be PREDICTABLE. When a car operates in a predictable manner, nobody runs into it. It's generally when you pull some wild move that someone decides you weren't being predictable enough and runs into you.
Want the kid to learn to read other people's minds : get him a motorcycle. If he survives the first few years he will know what every car around him is going to do before they do it.
I have to agree, and add : if the kid is 15 and the parent is just starting to think about it - it is way late and the parent has done a serious disservice to his child.
First level driver : sitting on mommy's lap working the steering wheel when you are barely large enough to see over the dashboard and haven't even considered reaching the pedals yet. Second level driver : a beat up truck out in the country, or a farm tractor. Stay on dirt roads / fields. Third level driver : out in the country in a street legal beater (truck / car), keeping it in his lane and stopping at the one stop sign he comes across. When he rolls through the stop sign, bitchslap him and make him back up and try it again.
If the basic mechanics of motor vehicle operation are foreign to a 15 year old, someone dropped the ball. Want to make up for lost time, get a beat up car and go out into the country.
-And, yes, I've done power drifts in a real car (I was young and foolish then).
Get back to me when you have done power drifts on a street bike (motorcycle.) There was one corner leaving the college campus that was perfect - a smooth left hander, always clean, tires still cold... on a good day I could hang the back end out a good foot, foot and a half leaving a black scratch the shape of a massive parabola to mark my prowess. I will see your young and foolish and raise you a real young and completely stupid:)
As for computer games, the last one I remember being even semi-real with respect to street laws, etc... was Corvette! It was a long time ago, but as I recall it accurately recreated San Francisco, had stop lights and stop signs, regular stock Vette and not a nitro methane fueled car with guns, and if you drove too fast or rolled a stop sign (or ran over a little old lady) the cops would come hassle you.
You are right though - kids will teach themselves how to drive fast. Step in and teach them when to drive slow and you will be doing them a big favor.
Stuff I wish my dad had taught me: If you hit an animal in the road, that animal doesn't die immediately and leave a red splat mark. That animal thrashes about for 20 minutes crying in pain dying - and watching that animal die a slow and painful thrashing death is a particularly horrible sight because you know you caused it. Those sounds will haunt you forever, even if it was just a cat. If you cause a little tiny fender bender in a parking lot with nobody looking, leave a note and follow up. If you are in an accident bigger than a door ding, call someome to handle it and keep your mouth shut. You are too emotinal to effectively deal with the situation, let someone else do it. If you are going to speed, speed. If you aren't going to shave an hour off your trip, drive the speed limit / flow of traffic. Trying to drive 67 when everybody else is driving 63 is stupid. Either slow down to 63, or calculate how fast you need to go to get where you are going an hour faster and drive that fast. Don't tailgate. The punishment for tailgaters varies from paying to have two cars repaired - to death. Don't be an asshole or drive aggressively. In some states that will get you killed, or your house burned down. No shit. The first two snows of the year are the worst because the roads haven't built up enough salt to keep everything all melted. Find a reason to stay home if you are a young driver. Buckle up. Drinking and driving is way more expensive than you could possibly imagine. You can't afford it. Don't even think about it. If you have alcohol in your system, don't sleep it off in your car. Punk ass cops will still arrest you for DWI even though the car isn't moving and you are in the back seat. You aren't even good enough to operate a car when you are concentrating on it. Forget about trying to operate a car and other personal electronic devices at the same time. If you need to call someone, pull over. Never confuse horsepower with manhood. Shredding the tires and speeding in a residential neighborhood is about as macho as sitting on the curb crying because you just totalled your car by causing an accident, knowing that your insurance is about to go through the roof. Four wheel drive adds nothing to your stopping ability in the snow / ice. You can't outrun the Motorola. If the cops have to chase you, they're bringing an ass kicking with them. If you are turning onto a road from a dead stop and a car is coming, let the car go before pulling onto the road.
The 192.168.x.x address range was designed for casual / home users, while the 10.x.x.x address range was designed for business use. The reason behind this is that the business user was assumed to need a much faster connection than the home user, and early routers were based on 4 bit hardware : a 4 bit processor can handle the number '10' in one whack because it is smaller than 16, but 192 would take the early 4 bit processors 12 cycles to process - thus the early business user networks had the potential to move data 12x faster than the early home users.
Of course today we use wickedly fast and powerful hardware for routers so it all goes the same speed, but in the early days... business class users got all the fast toys - at a price. Early 10.x.x.x IP addresses cost a LOT more than early 192.168.x.x IP addresses, both because they were rare, and because of the obvious performance benefits.
You young kids don't know how good you have it nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
NAS = Network attached storage = a big array of hard drives he puts all his stuff on.
NAS backup = backing up his NAS array, probably to an attached tape drive or tape autoloader drive that spans several tapes for that night's scheduled backup (every night.)
Tower of Hanoi method = a way of cycling the sets of tapes in and out of the backup queue that lets you use a limited number of tapes while insuring that you have both a baseline tape (generally made on the weekend) in which the entire system is backed up, and incremental tapes made every night of the files that have changed since the baseline. The phrase Hanoi doesn't imply complete data integrity, but merely implies that if you have data corruption or a ruined file you may or may not be able to recover it, and that if you try to suggest that the file is unrecoverable Jane Fonda will call you a liar on television and assure the world that your data was being handled properly and fairly.
Yet another successful project spearheaded by the Sales Prevention Team!
Tune in next week when we bury our customers in Spam, sell their contact information to telemarketers, and (yes!) actually call them at home while they are eating dinner.
Customers getting complacent or even borderline happy with your service?
Is your Accounts Receivable department bringing in money faster than Accounts Payable can spend it?
Those pesky customers interfering with your real work, or even your Solitare games or web surfing?
-
Call us and we will send one of our Sales Prevention Professionals right over to straighten matters out. No job too big, no product too good - at SPT we guarantee results!
Get his contact info from his resume and follow up, if you could really use a programmer with his specific background. Take his resume, change the format to suit your needs, and hand walk it into some big dog's office and tell him you found the guy that may be a perfect fit.
Business needs always trump personal needs, if a person is going to be an employee. He is just out of college and is ready to start a real life so I'm guessing he will give moving a serious consideration. People get hired when a company needs an employee, not when a person needs a job. Finally, if he is a perfect fit now is the time to jump on him while he is available and open to suggestion - in six months it sure would suck to have the company decide they need a guy and have this guy no longer available. Never know, you may be eligible for a referral bonus (this is exactly what they were designed for.)
If you really think he is a good fit, pursue it. This is exactly how jobs get got in real life.
Disclaimer : I just moved all the way across the country and started a new job when I got here. The first paragraph describes exactly how I got this job.
I appreciate the difference between 'Cum Laude' and 'With Honors', and it is something that can be brougth up during the face to face interview.
However, if the resume is in DOC or PDF format, will automatically get scanned?
It's a gamble - are you willing to bet your job (the potential for a face to face) on it?
The word Niggardly is a perfectly good English word, means stingy or tight with the purse strings, but I wouldn't use it in a phone interview with HR of a prospective employer. That's a good way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, because you never know how someone is going to take something when they don't really know.
Unless you are going to work for Vivid Entertainment, I wouldn't send in a resume with Cum on it.
Experience above education, even though you just graduated.
Take the word 'cum' off your resume (Graduated Cum Laude (GPA: 3.77)). No joke. Lots of people have their email filtering simply delete any inbound email with the word in it. Use 'Graduated with honors (GPA: 3.77)' instead.
There are two factions for 'Computer Science' : one under the department of engineering (the good one) and under the department of business. If your degree was under the department of engineering, a few places make it say so proudly : 'BS in Computer Science under the Department of Engineering' so you don't get confused for a MIS from the Business Department. If your degree is from the Business side of the college, ignore this paragraph.
"Received the Edward G. Goman Outstanding Senior Award, given to one graduating senior in the combined Math/CS department. " - Change to "Exclusive receipient of the 2004 Edward blah blah..." Note that I'm drinking tonight and it might be ok the way it is, but it becomes more evident that you were one of one, not one of many.
The choir scholarship is cool, unless you are applying for a position that is exclusively tech in nature without any music emphesis.
Lose the high school information. The only purpose of high school was to get you into college, and day one of college everything you did in high school (even an National Honor Society graduate) is considered 'Paid in Full' and no longer a valid currency.
Yikes - double ditto on Jr. High.
Go into more detail on your C++ coding as an intern. Sounds cool. If a decision was made regarding going with Java or C++ based on your testing, you 'did influential research differentiating between C++ and Java, aiding in helping define corporate direction in development.'
Under Director of TS, what database (unless it was Access.) Bonus points for MS/SQL, Oracle, or Sybase.
Resume readers want to match up the technologies to the points of experience. Might want to match them up, because they are going to ask exactly like I did : 'what database? what driver? what language and technologies were you doing the Audacity in?'
Someone else has addressed the 'Objective' line. Personally I suggest you tailor that line on a submission by submission basis, pretty much echoing the job description of the position you are applying for.
As for the rest of the site - Honestly I wouldn't give the url to anyone that is working with you to the effect of hiring. You really need to be a faceless entity until you have passed the initial screenings and have your foot in the door, and you never know what sets people off. The serene yoga picture on the front page is pretty cool, except to the guy who caught his girlfriend in bed with a yoga guy. The information about you attending the all boys choir school is great, unless the guy interviewing you was one of the Catholic abuse victims from Boston or wherever. HR's purpose isn't to insure they hire the right person - HR's purpose is to insure that the company doesn't hire the wrong person. They can't hire you, their only purpose is to disqualify you. Don't give them any ammunition. If it doesn't pertain to the position in a positive manner, they don't need to know.
Remember - nowadays when a job listing hits Monster a company will get 400 resumes. Even if you are the top 1%, you are still only one of four.
Finally, you are an alumni of a few high powered schools now. Your are going to get your first job because someone you know (or a friend of a friend) is going to hook you up. The four years you spent as Lab Manager at UofPS wasn't about rebooting computers or helping users print / get their email. The year you spend at D/TechServices wasn't about implementing a web based calendar or using a database. The time you spent at AAC wasn't about the difference between Java and C performance using floating point math. All of the above were building your contact list for future references and networking. 2004 is the Year of the Good Ol' Boy Network - so forget Monster.com and work your contact list. When your Godfather lines you up an interview the paper resume is a formality.
Unless you give HR a reason to reject you.
But we do have a new class of educated poor people.
Perfect description of Russia, right as their economy went from First World to Third World (continuing through today.) God I hope I'm wrong with what I'm thinking.
God I love doing this - mostly because it lets me be a prick from behind the thinly veiled pretense of being helpful. I'm going to critique your online resume and I'm going to be honest. Someone did it for (to) me a dozen years ago and I cried during the process, but I took their advice to heart and about a month later had a job.
:
1. Lose the picture. Getting past the first HR screening means letting them be able to prove lack of prejudice, so being a 'while male in his early 20's', while putting you in the 'good' bucket, means that HR can't say that they picked your resume on its merits without regard to race, color, creed, age, or sex. If they know, what are the odds they skip over you because they couldn't show lack of preferential treatment?
2. Double ditto on the horse picture. How do you know that the interviewer isn't a big Christopher Reeve fan?
3. Lose the personal stats, Title (Mr.), Date of Birth, and Marital Status. If the reason isn't blatantly obvious, see #1 above.
4. The personal stuff at the bottom, specifically the bit about being an avid four-wheeler and gun freak wouldn't go over too well in the People's Democratic Republic of California or the Communist Federation Commonwealth of Massachusetts (where Boston is.) I'm a bigger gun freak than you are, but I don't admit it on my resume or during an interview.
The good stuff
MCSE, CCNA, CCDA, and BS/CS (cum laude, in three years - good job.) Oh wait, that's not a degree in software engineering, it's a degree in multimedia on the computer (also known as Flash / Macromedia.) Hmm. That one could go either way, depending on how well you interview. If you were seeking a spot in America I would drop the classes / certs on equine behavior and being a certified murderer (that's how some people view firearms in the two states that hire the most tech guys, CA and MA - but in Texas that might be ok.)
Last thing - if you are going to post your resume, do it on a domain that doesn't have anything else on it. Nothing like finding a resume in www.yourdomain.com/resume and when the HR folks go up a level and find a blog talking about sex with a different college chick every night. Your main page is pretty tame, but I didn't probe too deep.
That wasn't too harsh - but not for lack of trying. Good luck on the hunt.
Here's a better way to get paid, OP : next meeting with the business folks, bring a chessboard and a pocket full of pennies. Set down the chessboard and put the pennies next to it - tell them the first license costs one penny and put a penny on the first square on the chessboard. Tell them the license for the second copy is two pennies and put two pennies on the next square on the chessboard. Tell them for each additional copy just double the previous amount, and put four pennies on the next square to reinforce the concept while explaining that those four pennies just paid for license number three.
... send me 10%. That ought to be enough to buy me some nice toys, like maybe Brazil and Bermuda.
If they go for it
Legal / financial / technical advice on Slashdot : good, accurate, free (pick one.)
Wow, you are the first person to perfectly articulate that not only is the current situation (re: outsourcing) in America fucked up, it is even more fucked up than Communism.
... and there are as many different ways to do infrastructure as there are sys/admins.
Good job, honestly.
OP: There is a saying in coding about documenting your code - 'If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.' It is a joke, mostly, but it offers insight into your situation.
You didn't pick up everything in your job in a week by reading over someone else's notes (or you would be leaving those notes behind.) I'm guessing you have been there a while and probably invented half the stuff in your shop (procedures, protocols, naming conventions, etc.) so none of it is going to be in a book. There is just some stuff you 'just gotta know', meaning it can't be learned by the normal knowledge gleaning methods, you just gotta know (above which ceiling tiles are the switches, for example.)
The good news is that he (your replacement) doesn't have to do it 'your way' - he just has to get it done
Your company is about to learn that keeping all their tech eggs in one basket (having only one guy) is a bad idea. Even a part timer college kid to shadow you as an intern for $7.50 / hour would have been quite the safety net. Do what you can, but there is no way to safely insure the ongoing performance of all your systems in two weeks - hell it takes a week just for the new guy to figure out how the building is layed out, who is who, and what is what. After that, come up with a way to provide emergency support and price is slightly prohibitively to keep them from abusing it. Take your old hourly rate, times 1.3 and that's what they paid you 40 hours a week to be there, that's your baseline. Twice that per hour, with half an hour as the minimum charge, for all contact / questions leaves them with an emergency way to keep running and gives you a little money to keep your interest piqued.
As for the whiteboard, try to understand why the rookie uses it, in what fashion and in what capacity. A whiteboard in your cube is a mark of seniority, authority, and power in my shop (I don't have one yet as I just started.)
:
Whiteboard
Swapspace for your brain.
Shared memory (your thoughts) to other developers.
Organization of your thoughts in 3 dimentions (X, Y, color)
Notices that can't be ignored or overlooked.
6'x4' = Twenty four square feet of low resolution display space. That's a 5' diag monitor with crappy fonts, ugly graphics in 3 bit color (8 colors).
Low-tech voicemail replacement for visitors leaving you a note.
Tape up printed pages and you have a lot of space for massive data flow diagrams.
Good call on 9-12.
It's spelled 'psychopath' but we prefer the term 'special' or 'gifted' and we are pretty good coders when we feel like coding.
... now those guys can code. (If you asked 'which Cray?' you might be that guy.) In my life I have been on exactly one team with 100% coders and 0% fluff, and it was a pretty small team.
And I have yet to meet a someone with excellent interactive and social skills, manners, grace, charm, wit, charisma, that could code worth a fuck. Their team mates like them because they are socially talented and integrate themselves well into the social structure in a friendly manner, not because they can code. The average company can't afford a team full of real coders so they stack the deck with social butterfly pretty boys and one or two poor fuckers that look like they got dressed in the dark, would pick a weekend with a Cray over a weekend with Cindy Crawford, the guys that recognize a system manufacturer based on the machine's MAC address but don't know their mother's phone number
Maybe I missed the boat, but in my experience there are people with social grace, and there are coders. Not much overlap, and surely not enough overlap to fill an entire team.
See also : Asperger's Syndrome.
I have to agree. That was the most amazing office design I have ever seen.
:
:
Key elements from a 'techie' perspective
#1 : Able to see outside, double points if you can see green things outside.
#2 : Sunlight, triple points if you can block it when you want.
#3 : Ability to close the door. Nothing improves productivity like being able to shut out the world.
#4 : More 110v outlets providing clean power than you possibly imagine ever using. Triple points for UPS.
#5 : Cable routing ductwork.
#6 : Room for more than two computers, including network jacks and table space.
#7 : Whiteboards, lots of whiteboard space.
#8 : Bookshelves, lots of bookshelves.
Want some other tips
Find out what the individuals drink. Make it available, free. The wholesale cost of a six pack of soda per day is inconsequential compared to the cost of building and staffing that office.
Real hackers don't want to socialize with other people. Collaborative coding can happen in their offices, but the real producers could give a damn about a foozball table or artwork by famous painters. True hackers don't participate in group activities or group sports.
Caffeine. Lots and lots of caffeine. More caffeine than you think a normal human could possibly consume.
Twin 18" LCD monitors hooked up to a twin-headed video card - will give a coder about 90% more real estate than a single 20" LCD while costing about the same.
Most new computers come with a $6 keyboard and a $3 mouse. Throw away both, get him a high quality rig.
I am going to be open minded and ask - even more importantly than 'is it legal' : is it even a good idea? Television is generally available anywhere anybody that would have enough bandwidth to watch your rebroadcast would want to live. I can think of a zillion better uses for my ISP's bandwidth (upstream and downstream) than to have someone rebroadcasting a television show.
Before I lapse into a profanity laced flame/troll post, johnrob, share with us your motivations and justifications behind doing such a thing. Understanding why you want to do this will undoubtedly motivate us in helping you understand how to do it.
Go to Best Buy and get a Linksys BEFSR41 router / firewall device.
Plug your computer into the LAN side.
Clone the MAC address of your computer.
Change the password on the router to something other than 'admin'.
Plug in your cablemodem into the WAN side.
Enjoy your new worm/virus/trojan free existance.
How many times do we need to spell it out??
That last guy didn't actually die from gunshot wounds, IIRC.
A bullet proof vest doesn't protect from head lopper-offers.
Chyea, right. Check your history pal. Negros never get taken hostage. It's sort of an undocumented benefit of being black.
: ... ... ... ... ... ...
I can see the phone call now
Terrorist : Allah Akbar! We have taken this contractor hostage, and if you do not set our terrorist friends in Gitmo free we will chop his head off.
US Embassy : What you say! OMFG! Let us see the videos.
T : Here you go, do what we say or we chop his black head right off.
US E : (watches video)
US E : You took a black guy hostage?
T : Yea, so we got a deal or what?
T : Hello?
T : Hello?
T : Shit, I think they hung up on me.
Actually the ideal would be that there was a chemical compound that they could soak the disks in to reverse the process, seal them up in their 'airtight containers' and redistribute the exact same disks with the exact same movies again.
Of course this would be 'ideal' because then we would find out what chemical they used and do it ourselves.
Personal file server? RAID is good, RAIC is better. Here's how I would set it up :
:
Two partitions : your OS partition (4G) and your shared partition (the rest). Back up your OS partition by making a drive image / ghost image - burn that image to CD. Make a directory on the second partition and share it.
Second computer (RAIC stands for redundant array of inexpensive computers) : same thing, but don't share the shared partition to the public, just to the admin user tasked with maintaining the system. From time to time synch your shared drive to the new computer.
Benefits
No downtime if the first computer crashes for any reason (RAID doesn't protect you against power supply, CPU, drive controller, liquid spills, psycho ex-girlfriend with a baseball bat, or other failures), instantly be back online by powering down the primary computer, renaming the second computer to the name of the first computer, and making the share on the backup computer public.
Protection against user errors, deleted files, mistakes, virus / worm infection, file corruption. RAID doesn't protect against any of these but having the files on a hot spare that isn't actively being shared does protect against all of these. When you know everything is good, synch the drives manually.
Not particularly complicated.
Any reason to add a new computer to your network is a good reason.
If that is out of the question, I agree : RAID 1 is the best cheap way to go. Better than nothing, that is, but it doesn't alleviate the need for backups.
Check out the Robot Store and pay attention to all the cool things like engines, logic modules, and memory wire.
Have fun, make me one too.
Shhh! It was like the Funny Trifecta!
First, the post itself was funny to all the sys/admins out there that saw through it.
Second, it was funny when I got some serious responses asking questions and wanting clarification.
Third, the +3, Informative caps off the Trifecta for the day. I think I get a little green dot next to my name (or something.)
To answer question #1 : an IP address isn't generally represented as a 32 bit word, it is generally represented as four octets. The little dot between numbers separates each of the four numbers, and those numbers range from 0 to 255. Thus when the early (expensive business class) routers were designed using four 4-bit processors, one for each octet, as long as each number in the octet was less than 16 the processor could process the number in a single pass, but the number 192.168.1.101 (ie, the number your Linksys router assigned you when you logged in today) the first octet, 192, took 2 passes through the four bit processor (because it is larger than 15 but smaller than 256), the second octet took two passes through the 4-bit processor assigned to the second octet because once again it is larger than 15 but smaller than 256, the third octet was processed in a single pass through the 4-bit processor assigned to the third octet, and the fourth octet (101) took two passes through the 4-bit processor for the same reason. On the really expensive routers it was simply a two pass process to resolve the IP address because it had four 4-bit processors working in parallel, processing octets, but on the consumer grade single 4-bit processor equipped routers from the mid to late 1970's that single operation could take as much as 12 operations when you factor in moving the intermediate results in and out of the registers.
Question #2 : You are thinking in terms of the current way that IP addresses are created using today's high powered DHCP servers (there is more power in your Linksys router than NASA had at its entire disposal when they put a man on the moon.) Unlike today, when we pull IP addresses out of thin air, there was once a day that every precious clock cycle on computers was accounted for and billed to somebody. And since there fewer 10.x.x.x addresses (rare) and since those 'business class' addresses were so much faster (see Question #1) they were quite a bit more expensive.
Oh man, yes. That, and be PREDICTABLE.
When a car operates in a predictable manner, nobody runs into it. It's generally when you pull some wild move that someone decides you weren't being predictable enough and runs into you.
Want the kid to learn to read other people's minds : get him a motorcycle. If he survives the first few years he will know what every car around him is going to do before they do it.
I have to agree, and add : if the kid is 15 and the parent is just starting to think about it - it is way late and the parent has done a serious disservice to his child.
First level driver : sitting on mommy's lap working the steering wheel when you are barely large enough to see over the dashboard and haven't even considered reaching the pedals yet.
Second level driver : a beat up truck out in the country, or a farm tractor. Stay on dirt roads / fields.
Third level driver : out in the country in a street legal beater (truck / car), keeping it in his lane and stopping at the one stop sign he comes across. When he rolls through the stop sign, bitchslap him and make him back up and try it again.
If the basic mechanics of motor vehicle operation are foreign to a 15 year old, someone dropped the ball. Want to make up for lost time, get a beat up car and go out into the country.
-And, yes, I've done power drifts in a real car (I was young and foolish then).
... on a good day I could hang the back end out a good foot, foot and a half leaving a black scratch the shape of a massive parabola to mark my prowess. I will see your young and foolish and raise you a real young and completely stupid :)
:
Get back to me when you have done power drifts on a street bike (motorcycle.) There was one corner leaving the college campus that was perfect - a smooth left hander, always clean, tires still cold
As for computer games, the last one I remember being even semi-real with respect to street laws, etc... was Corvette! It was a long time ago, but as I recall it accurately recreated San Francisco, had stop lights and stop signs, regular stock Vette and not a nitro methane fueled car with guns, and if you drove too fast or rolled a stop sign (or ran over a little old lady) the cops would come hassle you.
You are right though - kids will teach themselves how to drive fast. Step in and teach them when to drive slow and you will be doing them a big favor.
Stuff I wish my dad had taught me
If you hit an animal in the road, that animal doesn't die immediately and leave a red splat mark. That animal thrashes about for 20 minutes crying in pain dying - and watching that animal die a slow and painful thrashing death is a particularly horrible sight because you know you caused it. Those sounds will haunt you forever, even if it was just a cat.
If you cause a little tiny fender bender in a parking lot with nobody looking, leave a note and follow up.
If you are in an accident bigger than a door ding, call someome to handle it and keep your mouth shut. You are too emotinal to effectively deal with the situation, let someone else do it.
If you are going to speed, speed. If you aren't going to shave an hour off your trip, drive the speed limit / flow of traffic. Trying to drive 67 when everybody else is driving 63 is stupid. Either slow down to 63, or calculate how fast you need to go to get where you are going an hour faster and drive that fast.
Don't tailgate. The punishment for tailgaters varies from paying to have two cars repaired - to death.
Don't be an asshole or drive aggressively. In some states that will get you killed, or your house burned down. No shit.
The first two snows of the year are the worst because the roads haven't built up enough salt to keep everything all melted. Find a reason to stay home if you are a young driver.
Buckle up.
Drinking and driving is way more expensive than you could possibly imagine. You can't afford it. Don't even think about it.
If you have alcohol in your system, don't sleep it off in your car. Punk ass cops will still arrest you for DWI even though the car isn't moving and you are in the back seat.
You aren't even good enough to operate a car when you are concentrating on it. Forget about trying to operate a car and other personal electronic devices at the same time. If you need to call someone, pull over.
Never confuse horsepower with manhood. Shredding the tires and speeding in a residential neighborhood is about as macho as sitting on the curb crying because you just totalled your car by causing an accident, knowing that your insurance is about to go through the roof.
Four wheel drive adds nothing to your stopping ability in the snow / ice.
You can't outrun the Motorola.
If the cops have to chase you, they're bringing an ass kicking with them.
If you are turning onto a road from a dead stop and a car is coming, let the car go before pulling onto the road.
The 192.168.x.x address range was designed for casual / home users, while the 10.x.x.x address range was designed for business use. The reason behind this is that the business user was assumed to need a much faster connection than the home user, and early routers were based on 4 bit hardware : a 4 bit processor can handle the number '10' in one whack because it is smaller than 16, but 192 would take the early 4 bit processors 12 cycles to process - thus the early business user networks had the potential to move data 12x faster than the early home users.
... business class users got all the fast toys - at a price. Early 10.x.x.x IP addresses cost a LOT more than early 192.168.x.x IP addresses, both because they were rare, and because of the obvious performance benefits.
Of course today we use wickedly fast and powerful hardware for routers so it all goes the same speed, but in the early days
You young kids don't know how good you have it nowadays.