Thought of the Day- Harry Potter
Harry Potter is one of the best Fantasy series of all time. It will stand forever next to Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials…
That is all. Carry on.
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BuyMyTronics - The Taste of Theft
If you’re reading this blog, then chances are you know about BuyMyTronics. But for the uninitiated, it’s a place where you can send your old and/or broken gadgets, phones, and other electronics and get paid for it. Even if it’s broken. They’re not clear about what they exactly do with them (recycle for cash? strip and sell parts? refurbish?), but who cares if you’re getting paid.
Sounds good, right?
Wrong. You see, this is a great idea … if it would be executed as advertised. You send them your crap and they pay you for it, or not. Whatever works.
This is what you are! From Santa, With Love!
I had a disasterously broken iPod in December last year (2007), right before I got on a plane: while syncing, the hard drive failed and it was 4+ years old… definitely out of warranty. Despite my urges to throw it out the window, I held on to it, and mailed it to BuyMyTronics in January.
And never got paid.
I contacted them, via “Brett” (also known as “CEO”… but how many people are really in the company?)… who claims that it got “lost in the mail” thanks to “the USPS and Christmas”. I wasn’t happy, but went with it.
And I sent them my now broken phone a little over a month ago, this time taking care to include a note inside the box with my name and address… got absolutely nothing in return. I emailed Brett again, and he said it was “being processed”.
Oh, hello Brett. Didn’t see you there!
I got an envelope a few days later with a “thank you”-type letter… and no check. Once again, I emailed Brett regaling them with a lovely tale of their incompetence, which received a response of “I’m truly sorry, I’ll deal with this myself.” We’ll see what happens.
————-
Bonus: this post seems pretty tame for how angry I should be, right? Well I vented all my hatredy via email (only from the most recent debacle… iPod not included): check it out… my best email to him is near the end.
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Thought of the Day: Me and Computers
Me and computers usually get along pretty well. But my old computer (laptop) had been “on the fritz” the last few days, and my new computer (an Alienware… came yesterday, pics soon!) is not being very friendly about me installing Ubuntu on it’s RAID1 configuration [part1 part2].
Why am I telling “you” this? It means I haven’t gotten any work done recently, and contacting me via IM is pretty difficult… and I don’t have a dev environment since it’s Windows, so hang tight if you’re looking for more code from me.
And if you want to get in touch, email is best, for now.
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E-Book Update III
Three new e-books have been added to the “repository”:
- “Flash” - L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
- “Battlestar Galactica” - Jeffery Carver
- “In The Midnight Hour” - Patti O’Shea
I think that last one is probably not a reference to Madonna.
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Idiot Interviewers
I really hate people sometimes.
I just got off the phone with the “Lead” on a project over at Slide (very much like RockYou), who was supposed to gauge my technical abilities. He asked about my experience - fine. He then asked me a database question that I answered, but prefaced with “I’m not a db admin, and this isn’t what I want to do/was told the position entails”.
Next question was a “data sorting” one… I gave him a correct answer, but he wanted a faster one. I gave him one. But he wanted faster. Said I couldn’t think of any more, but this is the sort of thing I’d do some quick research and documentation digging on. The guy told me what he wanted… I immediately recognized it, and it was the type of thing that only academia and Google care about/use.
You need to teach your people about “interviewing”
The best part? He ended it there, and said I was “too junior” for what they were looking for. After asking me a n/a question, and then giving him an answer that was correct… just not “enough”.
And then he called the hiring manager and told her the same thing.
How the hell do you judge someone’s programming talents based on that? You can’t. Even if you’re going to talk by phone, it’s difficult. This sort of crap is what pisses me off about snooty nosed academia idiots… you don’t know everything unless you’ve used everything, and apparently that’s not a good answer.
Even if you’re awesome (like me), how can they know if they don’t bother to go any further than two questions - one of which you answered right, but docked on?
Yes. Yes it was.
God damn bullshit. Good thing I don’t like companies like them anyways.
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Thought of the Day- Jeff Loomis
I don’t talk about Jeff Loomis (of Nevermore) very much as a guitar god… especially when you compare him to my “I wish I was like him… *sigh*” idol of John Petrucci.
But he’s on my list of “Top 5 Shreddingist and Most Awesome Guitarists”, and he has a solo album coming out soon… which I’m very excited about.
Don’t know who he is, or don’t believe me about how awesome he is? Check out this video. It gets good about :40 in.
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Thought of the Day- Me and Art
I’m just not an artist. Never have, and never will be. I can do some “digital art”, but it’s pretty limited.
So, I thought for everyone’s amusement, I would post a sketch I did on Monday. It’s related to a project that we (Intuitive Industries) are starting, and I needed to be able to let people know what I was seeing in my head. I can’t say any more now, but just enjoy the sketch.
click for a larger version
Feel free to laugh very hard.
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Thought of the Day- Massive Traffic
I got massive traffic today… for the “SuperJesus, An Overview” post. I kept getting comments throughout the day and knew I had unusual traffic levels, but had no idea from where or how high.
Holy Spaghetti Monster!
Almost 8,000 individual people. That’s a new record for me.
The best part? DoubleViking and GorillaMask were the major sources.
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Thought of the Day- Protein Cookies
[another “Thought of the Day for Yesterday”]
I recently bought protein cookies, courtesy of “Tri-o-Plex”.
They’re delicious, full of protein, and not all the other crap cookies normally have.
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Maintenance Info
A few things about the structure of my blog…
Logo
I just changed the stock photo of a tunnel to a custom graphic. I was playing around with my initials and came up with a pretty clean logo that I liked… it almost looks like a flag!
Comments
I’ve added Disqus comment support for all future posts, and past posts that have no comments. Basically, anything that already has comments will continue to use the Wordpress comment system… until they allow importing of old comments into Disqus.
If you don’t know what Disqus is, it’s a way to track your comments across different blogs that use Disqus, and it’s also a way to self-identify. But if you don’t have an account you’re still allowed to post anyway… I made sure of that.
Lists
I’m still having a problem with both ordered and unordered lists on here. If you see something that looks funny and might be a list, please be patient. This theme didn’t come with support for formatted lists, and setting it up to do so is a little difficult (thanks Wordpress!).
That is all.
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