Saturday, October 27, 2007

Jay: Happy Birthday

To my father’s cousin Barbara Alice Ellis Kierstead, who is 64 today.


10:26 AM | Birthdays • (0) Comments • Permalink

Friday, October 26, 2007

Jay: Pretty In Pink



01:36 PM | Kids • Pictures • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Bootcamp Report

Sadie is basically trained.  No pun intended.  Once she was told there would be no more diapers except at night, and she was spending the day bare, that was it.  She’s gone whole days with nothing on the floor, just like that.

Meanwhile, Valerie was all but trained by herself, then backslid for bootcamp.  Late yesterday she went back to diapers.  Speaking of which, Valerie wears size 4 and only recently grew out of size 3.  For adequate containment, with his combination of shape and large size, Henry is up to size 3 already.  He can wear a 2, so we’ll get to use them up, but at night it must be a 3 and we’ll buy only those from now on.

Knock on wood, Valerie seems to have had an internal switch flipped this morning and is intent on staying out of diapers, using the potty successfully.  We shall see.  It would fit, though, as she climbed out of the crib herself for the first time this morning.  Flip.  She also seems to be teaching herself to read.  I forget what it was she did yesterday along those lines, but this morning she pointed to the number 8 on Deb’s shirt and announced “eight!” Later she did the same with the letter A.  She’s shown a lot of interest in general, so not as surprising as it could be.

Speaking of smart, I may not be remembering that Sadie or Valerie did the same, but 2 months old seems awfully young to recognize and respond to multiple words already.  It’s a pleasure to have a communicative baby.  Who is also like happiest ever.

Anyway, it appears we are well on our way to buying diapers for only one.  Yay!


09:22 AM | Kids • (1) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Happy Birthday

To blogger and celebrity Pat Sajak.


08:42 AM | Birthdays • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Happy Birthday

To blogger Scott Kirwin.


08:39 AM | Birthdays • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Happy Birthday

To Hillary Clinton.


08:37 AM | Birthdays • (0) Comments • Permalink

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Jay: Human Duct Tape

It occurs to me that I could sum up much of my work with XTreme in those three words.

The confluence of my description of keeping the big client’s network cobbled together with duct tape and baling wire and my father referring to the eleven years of being in that business as “the lawyers” brought the thought to mind.  While there were several clients and projects, enough of it was either for the one client or similar enough - including as applied to holding our business together, since any time I had chosen to leave it after 1997 would have probably ended it entirely - that it’s wonderfully descriptive.


03:32 PM | Business • Humor • Job Hunting • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Page Rank Crisis

There is a crisis of Google Page Rank out among the masses.  It seems Google changed its formula and some people descended unhappily.

One theory involves text link ads.  Certainly link farms have always been a problem, getting people sandboxed completely for allowing subdomains under their domain to be used for massive link farms.  But within reason, some paid links on main pages shouldn’t be a big deal.  Though they apparently had also gone after link counts in general, devaluing you for too many, shades of when NZ Bear’s Ecosystem had to do the same to fight manipulation of blog ranks, mainly through open inline trackback parties.

The thing is, some affected blogs or sites wouldn’t seem to qualify for such a reduction based on paid links.

A better theory is that the new formula takes on blog groups that cross-link each other to build rank, as well as drive traffic.  That would explain why the one affiliate blog I checked had dropped from PR of 6 to a still respectable 5.

Ours didn’t drop, unless it had gone up while I wasn’t looking.  I’m pretty sure we never reached 6, so being 5 now means we’re unchanged.  It’s the same at AV, here, and bizosphere.com, the home of CotC.  Elhide.com and my original blog are both 4, and everything else is lower, also not a change, to my awareness.

It is kind of interesting, reliance on an artificial rank that lives or dies by the decisions of the company behind it, and can make you more or less money, depending.  At the same time, it’s interesting that they setup the game a certain way, creating a system that encourages certain behavior, and then get unhappy with the results.

I sympathize, but I also find the actions and reactions all around to be a fascinating study in business and human behavior.


01:35 PM | Blogging • Business • Geekery • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: It Impresses Me

That my LinkedIn connections include three of the twelve people I started with in Word support at Corporate Software in April 1994.  We were the largest new hire class ever, and the place was so crowded we trained in a hotel conference room.


11:25 AM | Business • Geekery • Job Hunting • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: I Was One Too

Via Glenn, Stephen Green with I Was a Card-Carrying Libertarian: Confessions of a Black Sheep Republican is a great piece on being mostly libertarian at heart, but disappointed with the party… and the two main parties.  I’ve mentioned this kind of thing before.  Since I commented at such length, I thought I’d turn it into a post.

I went through similar, but ten years or so before you, with Ron Paul being the last time I took serious interest in an LP candidate.

I first heard of “libertarian” as a more logical alternative to conservative and liberal in 1976 somewhere between 9th and 10th grades leading up to Ford’s election.  Er… I mean Carter’s election… ugh.  The description of socially liberal and fiscally conservative clicked like it was the most logical thing I had ever heard.

I followed Ed Clark’s candidacy in 1980, but I think I voted for Reagan because, hello, I had to vote against Carter, and Reagan smartly sounded libertarian in some of the most important ways, nullifying that threat when it was at its worst.

I discovered and subscribed to Reason in the early eighties.  Well, it would have been the end of 81 or beginning of 82.  It was around the same time I read 1984 and ended up with nightmares, to which I was not prone.  Then I read Atlas Shrugged, which made them go away.  After that, I joined the Massachusetts and national Libertarian Parties, attending about three annual state conventions.

My very first impression of Libertarians in person was the attractive young lady who manned the registration table bitching whinily because I, being a little late to arrive, was making her miss part of a film being shown.  It was, as I recall, Anarchism in America.

My lasting impressions of Libertarians in person, apart from the overall conclusion that at least the state party was too much of a clique, were twofold:

One was when I was shopping for books at the obligatory book dealer table at the convention.  I was looking eagerly at a book about a legal theory of strict liability, because it was a concept I had come up with entirely on my own and was intrigued to see in the title of a book.  An overbearing LP guy, aware I was a newbie, insisted almost to the point of forcing me that I would NOT buy that book, but would stick to more basic books instead.  I still can’t believe the gall.

Another was Rebecca Shipman, whose candidacy for governor fell during my membership, laughing at me for not knowing that men could belong to the League of Women Voters.  She was one of those overtly friendly yet obnoxiously smarmy and superior people.  The same thing made me uncomfortable with my marketing professor and helped ensure I didn’t choose that as a major.

So, yeah, there were cool people, and it would have helped were I less shy and more assertive, and more actively interested in hands-on political participation, but it was very much a clique.

I’ve never stopped being a libertarian, but the Libertarians are unrealistic (a more verbose and polite way of saying “crazy") and serve best as a fount of libertarian nudging.  This Presidency went completely off the rails when the scope or even the presence of the libertarian leaning elements among the voters was dsmissed.

The one thing Libertarians used to point out that was true is that most people are at least 51% libertarian.  Right now a Ron Paul, as much as 100% so, can’t win, but a 70% or so libertarian Republican could.

A shame there’s not one handy.

It strikes me how far ahead of him I was.  To me, Virginia Postrel will always be the new girl wonder who came along as editor of Reason, with a far away look in her eyes that I’ve otherwise seen on an enculted religious girl.  As I mentioned, Ron Paul was the last candidate I followed with any seriousness, in 1988, though I did keep up some of what was going on in the party.

9/11 Was a big demarcation point for what I call war libertarians versus pure, traditional libertarians.  I was always the least comfortable with the absolutism about defense stopping at our borders, at least in the world as it really is.  A case can be made for a more expansive view of that being still purely libertarian in philosophy, but you get increasingly grey as you get into levels of preemption or making the world safer, rather than protection or retaliation.

I could write at length about what it means to be libertarian or lean that way, just how the Republicans went astray as the predominant home of libertarian leaners, or how many people call themselves libertarians but aren’t.  However, I have things to do, even besides potty bootcamp.  Plus my mother just took the liberty of dropping in…

Update after a quick skim of the beginning of this:

I mentioned libertarian versus liberal versus conservative, and that is a distinction and a problem for the Libertarian party.  There is not a philosophy called “republican” that Republicans are expected to adhere to, but since Libertarian the party is named for and based on libertarian the philosophy, it’s expected to adhere to it, and at the same time, a change of platform at the party level might be taken as a change to the philosophy.  All Republicans and Democrats need to do is be a more logical home to people of strongly conservative or liberal bents (though frankly, each is dangerously authoritarian and, well, crazy, taken fully, just as most people consider libertarian to be crazy if taken whole, except without the autoritarian problem) respectively (and no saying that’s forever), but have platforms that widen their appeal.


10:39 AM | Massachusetts • News • Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Happy Birthday

To my niece Michelle, who is 15 today.


09:00 AM | Birthdays • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Happy Birthday

To blogger Denny Wilson, who notes it is also St. Crispin’s Day.


08:59 AM | Birthdays • (0) Comments • Permalink

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Deb: Clean hippie.

Vinegar.

I mopped my floor with distilled white vinegar, diluted in very hot water.

Gotta say, it worked better than the stuff made for the purpose ever has.  And I didn’t have to worry about Valerie splashing in the bucket.

Gads, but I disturb myself sometimes.

We won’t even talk about the sink I scrubbed with baking soda…


05:01 PM | Totally Random • (4) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Size and Everything (Update, See End)

I’m holding a printed copy of a first pass at a master resume.  Which isn’t really a mater resume, as it doesn’t include the jobs and experiences it could.  It does go back to everything meaningful I did since 1990, and appears to go back to 1986 by including my little business that overlapped the end of college and the subsequent years wandering in the economic wilderness, lowering my lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars while the economy writhed in agony and I regretted my degree.  Which did help me land work in 1994 making almost what I should have made in 1988, but hey, who’s counting.

Anyway, it is three pages.  Nice and neat.  Three pages, and not quite as much white space or large type as I prefer.  If I put on my “someone handed this to me and I shake your hand twenty seconds later” hat, I get nothing.  The summary doesn’t get more than a skim and a few words reach out.  The titles of the two jobs on the first page are what leap out, and they say nothing to me.

Which isn’t where I was going with the post; rather I was bringing up the perennial question of resume length, not to mention formatting - if you get it short but it’s in 8 point type, nobody will read it - and how it all works when your resume might be online as HTML, or as plain text somewhere.  Then what about the length, and what of the formatting one might have used on paper to draw attention, or does that even matter, since that renders it searchable and is the equivalent of warm rather than cold calling.

I’ll probably through it up as HTML later, off of elhide.com/resume again, in this or similar form.

At least I seem to be down to finer points.  I found myself going through the formatting and making substantial modifications to the text, tightening some things up.  There will be more of that, and from there the idea of emphasizing more for one thing (management) or another (technical).  What I always forget is the sheer amount of training I’ve done, and that I am good at it.  Not only does it date back to Christy’s Markets, training new employees, but it even goes back to Halliday, where I worked starting in 1980.  I will never forget the time I trained a guy at Christy’s and was his hero.  When he was managing or assistant managing a store later (weirdly, I can remember the store number, 81), he got all excited when I stopped in one day, introducing me around enthusiastically as the guy who trained him, and thanking me profusely.  I could almost emphasize that in its own right, not just as part of a managerial focus.

Anyway, thoughts on resume length and the internet age?  On varying resume focus?

Update:

Here’s a Word version of the draft resume as it stands.  It comes from Word 2000 and should be openable by Word 97 or newer, and anything that can open that format.

There were a couple minor typo corrections, but otherwise it is what I handed Deb, which she had some good ideas about, for when I dive back into it.  Right now I am thinking about making baked macaroni and cheese for supper, and some apple cobbler, neither of which I have ever made before.


02:07 PM | Job Hunting • (3) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Side Businesses and Multiple Income Streams

The other thing I’d meant to post about, mentioned in the previous post, is employer attitudes toward side businesses or other multiple income stream activities.  Where do things stand in general these days?  Is there a lot of resistance or need to hide such things?

I ask because of two experiences.

When I worked at Halliday Lithograph, they paid okay, but not so much that side income couldn’t be helpful.  It was made crystal clear that nobody was supposed to work a side job or have a side business, period.  That was 1980 - 1982, and seemed primarily to be a thing with my otherwise Best Boss Ever, who was an old guy near retirement.

At the time, I technically still had a side job mowing lawns and such, and I did continue to do some of that, but let it trail off in no small part because of the attitude.  I tried to avoid the fact being known.  A guy I worked with, named Kenny, had a full fledged side job at, as I recall, a lumber company.  That fact was top secret from the company, though I’m not sure how, since we all knew about it.  It was secret because it was frowned upon to the point of risking your job.

When I started at Corporate Software in 1994, one of the items on my resume was my own business, and it was current at the time, if not its heyday.  When I was interviewed, it was stressed that I “would no longer be doing the business, right?” It was fairly low key, but they made it crystal clear it was frowned upon, at least.

I drifted out of doing what little of that remained, in largest part because I was sick of the seasonal stress of doing taxes, but in some part due to the “you will give this up” that I had encountered.  I don’t even remember exactly when that was.  I had labeled the business as ending in 1994, but I may have actually continued to 1995.

I’d like to believe that attitudes have changed, and unless a company is paying well enough to practically own you, it shouldn’t matter.  I suppose it depends.


09:34 AM | Business • Job Hunting • Money • (2) Comments • Permalink
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