From BusinessPundit.com's How to Network: For Introverts.
I have a problem. I'm an introvert. I'm not shy. I'm not afraid of being in public. But I am horrible at chit-chat and gossip. If I spend an evening at a social function with people I don't know or don't like, I get home and feel like I've spent all day at the ocean. It's that fighting-the-waves and drained-by-the-sun kind of tired. I would rather spend four hours with my head stapled to the carpet. I would be more comfortable that way.
The article has some good advice for those of us that have trouble in social situations. Definitely worth a read if you, like me, are indeed an introvert.
Joel on Software was talking about how much of a time saver phone interviews can be because it can weed out half of the people who looked good on paper. I thought the article was interesting from a psychological point of view too though.
From The Phone Screen:
With a phone interview, because you can’t see the person, it’s easier to focus on the quality of what they’re saying rather than other external factors not relevant to their job, like their appearance, or their nervousness. Ever since Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink, I’ve been terrified of the prospect that we might be judging candidates too quickly based on things which are not relevant to their ability to do their job—their appearance or confidence or height or general nerdy demeanor might make us way more apt to look on everything else that happens during the interview with rose-colored glasses.
The great thing about a phone interview is that it’s much harder to form these kinds of snap judgments; you actually have to listen to what the person is saying and decide if that corresponds to what a smart person might say. This isn’t completely true, of course: you may have prejudices about certain accents or dialects. But at least you are moderately less susceptible to appearance prejudice.
I was doing some work on the Limey Dragon Games & Hobbies site today and I killed it. At least for about 20 minutes. It was bad.
I was trying to fix a problem with the forum software on the site (from Plesk and tried to upgrade the forums. It failed, so I did a restore from the backup.
The problem is that Plesk's backup utility will ignore anything that isn't inside of the public html directory. That isn't a problem for most sites, but this one uses Geeklog. Geeklog puts a lot of it's core files, including configuration and plug-ins somewhere else. Plesk not only failed to back up those files, but it also deleted them when it did the restore.
Twenty minutes later, the site is back up and running, but I'm sure I've missed some configuration settings I tweaked the first time. We'll just have to locate them over time.
D'oh!
I'd gotten over my last encounter with their Customer Service department (or at least mostly gotten over...). Then I discovered they'd overcharged us $45 this month. It's fixed now, but I'm still waiting for the day I get a correct invoice from them. They are 0 for 3.
When you've planned for every contingency, you know something is going to go wrong. I even said so yesterday (repeatedly) before I went to install the Isolated Wireless Network I mentioned in my last post.
The ethernet jack that was wired up for the router was installed when the building was built, by the same people who installed the telephones. I wasn't sure which jack was the other end of it, so I cheated and hooked up a tone probe the the line. What I discovered was that the ethernet jack was wired into the phone system punch down block. This is bad.
The Initial Problem: I've got a customer who has an existing LAN. He wants to add a public access point in his office. He's a doctor so he can't just let the wireless users have free reign on the LAN, they must only have internet access.
Solution A: Insert a new wireless router between the cable modem and the exisiting router. Then set up the exisisting router as a DMZ host on the new router so any traffic will get passed to it.
The Problem with Solution A: This puts the wireless router in the wrong position physically.
Solution A Revision 2: If a wired router is inserted instead, a wireless access point could be added to it. This has additional costs I would like to avoid.
Solution B: Obtain a second IP address from the cable company and put a switch between the cable modem and the routher. Assign the second IP address to the wireless router. This may be a less costly solution in the long run, but I don't remember how much the cable company charges for additional IP addresses for businesses.
I'd appreciate any additional suggestions.
It's 8:30 am on a Wednesday morning, and I'm already homicidal. That's bad.
I just got off the phone with ValueWeb, a hosting company I currently have 2 dedicated servers with. It's their fault. I will enthusiastically recommend that you never, ever use their Dedicated Hosting.
I just came across an article via the Journals at ArsTechnica that offers a sharp contrast to the environment I work in.
From Solitaire Game Gets NYC Worker Fired:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg isn't playing games â€â after he saw a game of solitaire on a city employee's computer screen, he fired him.
...
"It wasn't like I spent hours and hours a day playing, because I had plenty to do," Greenwood said. "If I had been working at something exhaustively for two hours, I might get a cup of coffee and play for a minute but then go right back to my work."
There are several people at my work, including management, that subscribe to this sort of philosophy (the "playing games on short breaks is ok" one). Personally, I'm not big on solitaire during breaks, but I have been known to browse websites when I get frustrated with what I'm working on.
My big problem is have trouble telling if I'm goofing off or not. Mostly because what a lot of the websites I read for fun are also informational and pertain in some way to what I get paid for.
It would be interesting though to see something like Mayor Bloomberg's idea of how an office should be run implemented at my work:
Bloomberg, who left his financial information company for politics in 2001, managed Bloomberg LP with a style that has become his signature. He created an office setup, which he repeated at City Hall, where everyone sits together in an open-air environment â€â an arrangement that facilitates communication and eliminates fooling around.
I was cleaning out some of my bookmarks, all 10 of them, and found this article in there. It's old, but it still amuses me.
From: Outsourcing Rejection on Salon.com
When I launched into the actual interview, it really pissed them off. They'd get furious that the freaking receptionist had the audacity to waste their time by ... And then round about question 5 it would dawn on them that this was the interview. I could hear the quick catch in their speech as it hit them, and the sick pause as they thought back over how they'd been behaving for the past several minutes. It was the attempts at damage control that I really found hilarious. Suddenly, we were best pals. They almost always thought that using my first name as much as possible might somehow make up for their earlier suggestion that I make it snappy. Too late, Mr. Jenkins.
From: Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want to Work at Writing
5. Grammar matters, but not as much as anal grammar Nazis think it does:
The problem with grammar is that here in the US at least, schools do such a horrible job of teaching the subject that most people are entirely out to sea regarding correct usage. It's the calculus of liberal arts subjects. But grammar need not be stupendously complicated; in the final reduction the point of grammar is to make the language as clear to as many people as possible. Frankly, I think if most non-writers can manage to get agreement between their verb and their subject, I'm willing to spot them the whole "who/whom" conundrum.
Now, obviously, you should know as much grammar as you can; the more grammar you know, the better you can write. But the bottom line is just this: Be as clear as possible. If you're not confident about the grammar of a sentence, re-write it and strive for clarity. Yes, it's possible that in doing so the resulting sentence will lack style or something. But it's better to be plain and understood than to have people admire your style and have not the slightest idea what you're trying to say.
The rest of the article is great too. Entertaining and educationial. There's also some other good links in this entry from Coding Horror, one of my new favorite blogs.
