This is what I got for my first order of business today…

In case the image is too small it reads:

We’re sorry…

… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:

I know I work fast but this is ridiculous. AVG is up-to-date and reports no infection and AntiMalware Bytes is running right now but I am 99.99% certain I am not infected with anything doing automated Google queries.

I was having problems with GoDady last night while uploading some Wordpress Updates to a client’s account but that seems to have been a GoDaddy problem. Of course CMA Acces high-speed Internet cable here in Angleton sux the big one and I recommend avoid the service if you can get DSL. The added speed of cable is substantially mitigated by the continual Connection Reset By Peer errors. In many cases wireless Internet is faster than CMA Access Cable Internet. Getting a reset error really fast is hardly worth it. And they charge twice as much for worse service.

As I thought, AntiMalware Bytes also reports nothing.

I hope this is a one-off and I don’t need to start worrying about entering captcha codes to use Google search. I get the codes wrong about 1 out of 3 times.

Courtesy of BillShrink.com

Short and sweet: The multitasking is going to be an issue with the iPhone as well as the lack of expandable memory.  I would expect both issues to be addressed in a soon-to-be-released upgrade. I mean, they pretty much have to, right?

Also if you take photos with your phone 5 megapixels is a significant improvement over 3 mp. Don’t let anyone tell you different. There may not be a big difference between 12 megapixels and 10 but if you take a lot of pictures you will be happier with more resolution at image editing time,especially when cropping.  If you don’t take pictures don’t say you never will; camera phones take ridiculously good images in many situations.

Total cost of ownership is kinda surprising since I’ve never seen the figures before.  T-Mobile’s Nexus One  with its outrageous talk time seems to be the best deal if the network is decent in your area.

Seen on Twitter

I haven’t seen this technique before but I already don’t like it. In my email:

MATRIX Prof Services (MATRIXpServices) is now following your tweets on Twitter.

MATRIX Prof Services may not appear in your follower list. MATRIX Prof Services may have decided to stop following you, or the account may have been suspended for a Terms of Service violation.

I added the emphasis to show why MATRIX Prof Services sucks so bad. Of course they are not following me. It’s all automated: Follow someone, autogen the email alert, unfollow. These sumbitches learn a little something about the Internet and they think they know something. What really sucks is they will get thousands of followers.

If you go to their site let me give you a warning: Many jobs listed by these staffing services don’t exist. You heard me. Vapor ware. A staffing service sells people and to sell people you have to have a big supply of resumes. To get resumes one needs to advertise jobs. To get the most resumes with the fewest ads is why so many job listings on Monster and such have so many buzzwords in them, and why you never get a job from them. No real job is going to have 50 proficiency requirements.

If you work through one of these agencies as a contractor, you need to know how much the contract is paying and how much of a cut the agency is taking otherwise you can’t negotiate a fair deal that compensates commiserate with your skill and experience. Most will not tell you; it’s a take it or leave it deal and that’s how you can know you should walk away.

If they do tell, you might be very surprised to find out you’re making $35/hr on a contract that’s paying $65, or more. If you are a straight up 1099 contractor paying your own FICA and have no benefits that’s a whopping shitload of money you are just giving away for nothing in return. If you are struggling to raise a family, $1200/wk for the length of the contract is a lot of dough to trade for someone running a key-word search on a bunch of resumes and making a few phone calls. $30,000 on a 6 month contract. Just half that amount is the difference between making a decent living and just making it. One person should not have to earn a living for 2 people.

Make no mistake, if you take my attitude, you will find it hard to get work because the corporations who use the agencies, which is almost all of them, care more about saving a dollar than they care about the people who work for them and the agencies have a big, big stack of resumes, remember. Whether the next person is half as qualified doesn’t matter to the agency if next person will take $5/hr less, or even a dollar less for that matter. All they have to do is tell the customer the top candidate became unavailable, but they have these other candidates available, many of whom they may or may not have spoken with in months, if ever.

Given the current economic environment and high-profile business failures, corporations might want to take a closer look at how they staff their technical positions. Continue to let morons staff your critical business functions, such as IT, and your enterprise could fail. Just think, a company using Matrox Professional Services might get their next .NET engineer come from a Twitter spam.

I guess there are some reputable IT employment agencies out there but many, if not the majority, have nothing to offer except for taking a huge cut of what YOU earn. Read this earlier post to get a further idea of what I think of I.T. staffing services, and by extension the companies who rely so heavily upon them.

Related posts:

• Hey, psst, do I have an opportunity for you
• AIG bites the dust but is “too big to fail”
• A Great Opportunity
• ROI Best Metric in Measuring IT’s Value

If you have a laptop with some kind of Windows Vista version on it and you would like for your laptop to actually function you might have been considering an upgrade to Windows XP.

If you have SATA hard drives and no floppy, here is some good advice regarding drivers you need to consider.

I still have some work to do on the infrastructure changes I’ve been making over the last several weeks. First, let me recap what I’ve done so far.

I bought a hosted account where I have ample space on a Linux server. I can use the provider’s packaged services or I can load my own. I am using the MySQL service and phpMyAdmin utility which is provided with the account, including up to fifty databases. Each database can only be 100 MB so that may have to be upgraded eventually.

I passed on the blogging software offered by 1and1.com and loaded Wordpress for my content management system. As a test I saved several categories of technical and business related blog posts from incongruities as .xml files that I could then import into Wordpress. Wordpress did a pretty good job of importing those articles considering I know the xml was not well-formed.

After the import process worked so well on the test I decided to move my blogs and point my domains to 1and1.com. I activated this blog first and it was a simple affair because I bought the domain name from 1and1.com.

Then I set out to move incongruities from Domainsite’s DNS servers with as little work as possible. The first idea, which was the simplest and one I should probably have skipped because it didn’t work, was to forward the domain name to 1and1 with a masked URL, meaning that the URL would still start with my domain name after the request was forwarded to the new address.

I got that configuration working but only half-assed, then I somehow trashed it completely. At that point I went back to what was probably the best simple option which was to change the DNS entries of incongruities to point to 1and1. After doing that I set up a virtual host entry in my apache configuration at 1and1 and pointed it to my webspace directory holding the Wordpress installation for incongruities.

All the while this is going on I am switching my internet provider here at the house. I finally have a high speed cable connection that knocks the old DSL in the dust which means I have a new IP address here in the garage. To complete that change I had edit the A and MX DNS records for doncallaway.org to point to the new IP. My web server and mail server here in TheGarage will still be handling http and SMTP requests for doncallaway.org.

In summary, so far I have installed Wordpress on a remote host, converted and moved two blogs and one website to the remote host along with the MySQL databases that go with the blogs, and I have switched Internet service providers at the house. Though it doesn’t sound like much, it has taken my spare time over the course of several weeks to accomplish.

FINAL GOALS:

I still have at least three blogs and a substantial photo gallery to move to the hosted environment. One of the blogs is in Blogger and the other two are here in TheGarage. Of the two here in TheGarage, one is a photoblog so I have to figure out how to move all the images with the appropriate linkage.

After I finish all that I will have totally redone the way I operate my vast publishing empire. Only archives and backups… and a sandbox, oh and a mail server will remain here in TheGarage. Everything else will be hosted off site.

I will have bandwidth. I will have uptime. I will have industry standard software. I will be taking a big doo in high cotton.

One of the by-products of this move is that I will be able to decommission a few pieces of aging equipment that should have been put to pasture years ago–most notably the relic Dell Poweredge 6300 workhorse. Even though the Dell would make the perfect sandbox it is just too big, too noisy, too hot, and too expensive to operate. In other words it will make a perfect boat anchor as well.

I think maybe they were talking to the wrong people.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – One-quarter of the U.S. work force could be doing their jobs from home if all those able to telecommute chose to do so, according to a study on Wednesday which said many still elect to work at the office.

All those people working from home could translate into annual gasoline savings of $3.9 billion, according to the National Technology Readiness Survey.

The study found that 2 percent of U.S. workers telecommute full-time and another 9 percent do so part-time.

But another 14 percent of workers have the option of telecommuting, or have jobs conducive to the practice but choose not to, the study found.

The article goes on to give the usual reasons of schmoozing with the boss and the overwhelming need for water cooler time for this seemingly odd refusal to telecommute.

But there must be more to it than that: A lot of people are unhappy at home due to unruly kids or a termagant wife. Or both. But most likely the termagant wife. For them, the drudgery at the office is a respite from the worse drudgery of being at home.

I also think that those who do choose to work from home tend to alienate those co-workers who are not offered the choice. So it is not so much that they miss the socializing, rather they do not want to be ostracized.

The older I get the more adamant I become about not making a long commute during rush hour if there is no need. I have everything I need and more to telecommute to any location that has a 56k modem and a telephone. What equipment I don’t have and come to need, I acquire. Yet, over the last dozen years since telecommuting has become technologically feasible for even small companies and individuals maybe ten percent of my engagements have allowed for it. That equals about two or three. I haven’t turned down anything within 50 miles yet, but I think it’s coming. My willingness-to-commute-daily limit is about to come down to about thirty-five miles, I think.

That puts downtown Houston about twelve miles outside the limit which would probably force me to change professions. If you can c all computer programming a profession anymore.

For the most part I believe the reluctacne to let the contract workforce toil from the comforts of their own home is because they believe that if managers don’t watch contractor’s like a hawk they might bill for eight hours instead of seven and three quarters. Smoke on your own time.

Lastly, I don’t think this survey applies to those of us who live down here in the wide open spaces:

And with a median one-way commute of 10 miles and a median one-way commute time of 20 minutes, the daily trip for many workers is not that bad, he added.

“People actually prefer to go in, even though they have the option of telecommuting,” he said.

If all I had to do was drive to Richwood to make my money, I guess I wouldn’t bitch either.

A LITTLE OVER TWO YEARS AGO I dogged Dell Computer for their money-grubbing ways. Well, now it seems that a lot of other erstwhile Dell enthusiasts are getting on the wagon.

What is becoming more evident as the decades slip by is that no computer maker can hold on to the top spot. IBM fell. Compaq fell. Gateway fell. Dell will fall. Smart money would look for the next up and coming PC maker who will eventually dethrone Dell. Will the next winner be Wal-Mart with their new self assembly kit?

I just checked my email this morning and noticed the latest email from the most recent recruiter to jerk my chain. This time it was Maurice Boggs from Teksystems. He is about the fourth person I have spoken with from over there yet every time they call they say I was referred to them by the same guy from two years ago. They never bother to update their system to reflect that I even exist as a human being. Just someone who was referred to them a couple of years ago.

Maurice mentions he has a senior Lotus Notes/Domino developer opportunity available and asks was I interested. I give a big eye roll and mutter some curse words to myself and then work up the best smile I can.

“Hey, I’m always interested in any opportunities that come along,” I tell him. “Ya’ll should already have my resume. I’ve sent it about three times in the past four months. I recognize Teksystem’s phone number on the caller ID Ya’ll call so much. ”

“No I don’t think we have it.”

“Alright, I’ll send another one,” I say, still with the big smile.

“Great, we have a position…” and he reads off the standard job req for a senior Lotus Domino developer.

“That’s not for Very Toss is it?” I ask.

“Uh, yes it is,” Maurice says flatly, his hopes for an easy commission sinking before his very eyes.

“I interviewed out there about six, seven months ago. First with the HR lady, then with the young lady in charge of the Lotus group,” I tell him. “Never heard anything back, not even a no thank you. I think the last person from Teksystems who contacted me was peddling the same position, as a matter of fact. ”

“Really? Did you talk with so-and-so?” he asked, naming the young lady I interviewed with.

“Yes, that’s her. I heard the job was cancelled.” I said in a deadpan.

“Oh,” Maurice deadpanned back.

“A friend of mine said he interviewed with the same person about nine months before I did, for the same position. He never heard anything back either. I know he’s a very good developer because I did a big job for him while he worked at Enron.”

“Well, uh, I think they at looking for a specific type person for the position.”

Huge eye roll. More mutterings. That is called discrimination when a white guy does it, I’m thinking. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“If they are still looking to fill the permanent position, then obviously I am not the right type for that. If they need someone to come out for a couple of months on a contract basis and knock out some work, tell them I’m available for fifty,” I tell Maurice and terminate the call.

I have had exactly one deal work out with these nitwit recruiters in the last two and a half years and that was from an outfit in New Jersey. I wont hardly deal with them anymore. But I am not through with Maurice yet. Or, he is not through with me. He calls back the next day.

“Hey, Don, I have another ‘opportunity’ at Exxon-Mobile.” Maurice then proceeds to re-read the standard job req for a senior Lotus Domino developer. “Do you have those requirements?”

Big fucking eye roll. He has no clue that he just read an almost word-for-word job description as the one for Very Toss. Not only that, there has been a standing Exxon-Mobile job req out there for as long as I can remember. Which is a long damn time.

“Yes, I meet those requirements.” I said with no trace of a smile. I asked a few questions about the “opportunity”. Maurice knew shit. With the corners of my mouth beginning to turn down just a bit I say, “Okay, I guess just send the resume.”

Usually I just tell them no thanks. But now I figure, what do I care? The knock on Exxon-Mobile is that they don’t treat contractors very well and that they want really cheap labor. Like $30-35 per hour for the senior position. I don’t mind getting treated like shit, but I wont do it for less than $45 and I always ask for fifty first. Even at that rate it is 2/3 what I used to make.

I have heard people say and I have probably said it myself, the days of making the big bucks in the consulting/contractor business are over. That may or may not be true. It is probably true for the near future, especially in the Houston market. But, if it is true that those days are over, it is also true that the days of having Don Callaway sit in a cubicle figuring out how to write sophisticated software to solve complex problems are over as well.

We are still not done with Maurice though. He calls again the next day. Before he said a word, I almost asked was he calling about an opportunity for AIG? Of course he was. He read the standard job req for a senior Lotus Notes position.

“Yep, that’s me,” I assure him.

“This job is a six month contract and it requires CLP or PLCP certification,” I’m informed. “You have that?”

For a brief moment I stand there in stunned silence. Obviously he hasn’t even bothered to read my resume. “Yeah, I’d probably have that on the resume if I had it,” I tell him. “I’ve been working with Lotus Notes/Domino since Beta 3, before it was even a viable commercial product. Twelve years. Anything that anyone wants to do with Domino, I’ve probably already done it twice.Tell these people if they need someone who knows what they are doing and who can knock out a lot of work in a short period of time, I’m available for fifty.”

“Can you send some references.”

“Goodbye.”

And therein lies the problem. Either they don’t need someone like me. Or they don’t know who I am. With idiots like Maurice and Teksystems representing me on the majority of work that comes available, it could just as likely be either case.

Can you relate to Kerri Skarfe ’s experience with Spider Solitare? And I thought I wasted a lot of time! Whew!

Someone over at Hewlett-Packard has seen the light.

The tech industry is undergoing “a massive wave of innovation as people start to program the Internet,” H-P Chief Technology Officer Shane Robison told reporters during a briefing Friday morning. This innovation is a natural piece of HP’s overall puzzle.

Start? Start to program the internet? Change the last word in the above quote to ‘puzzlement’ and I think you have the truth of their strategy.