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How much difference does a cable make?
I assembled my new server’s disk subsystem — 2 Ultra-160 LVD SCSI drives and an Adaptec 29160 Ultra-160 LVD SCSI controller — with a nice Teflon-insulated LVD SCSI cable and active terminator that I paid $75 for a year or two ago. When I powered it up, I was disappointed to see the SCSI card’s BIOS report that the maximum negotiated speed for the chain was 40 MB/sec, just one-quarter of what I was expecting. The drives worked fine, but the speed was low.
As you might have surmised, I am completely fed up with hardware problems, so I opted for a quick, certain, but expensive fix: a new cable and terminator from Granite Digital. The packaging wasn’t much… there was not one word of documentation… but I wired them up and rebooted, and now my drives are 4x faster.
I love it when a plan comes together!
CamWorld offers a good list of tips for reducing spam by keeping your main email address hidden.
On this website, I use a tool that creates a new email address daily. This gives readers means to contact me, without requiring me to publish an address that is useful to spammers. (Even if spammers were to harvest this daily address, it would have expired by the time they try to send spam there.)
In the year that I’ve used this approach, I have received 0 spam messages as a result. If you run a public website and have the need to publish a disposable address, you can use this software too; I’ve GPL’d it as part of the Monaural Jerk distribution.
I have plans to enhance this tool. I envision the result as an “address maintenance” system, which gives users the power to easily create throwaway email addresses for every online transaction. The system will track address usage so users can see at a glance whether an address has received any spam. This is targeted for release (free) in the unspecified future.
If you don’t run your own mail server, this sounds like a good solution to the problem. My only gripe about expireit.com is the banner on the front page that reads, “We guarantee you will stop spammers in their tracks in under 60 seconds.” This is terribly misleading. An honest description of their service can be found on the “Long Winded Nutshell” page.
(Thanks to Paul Fatula for the tip on Expireit.)
Bad news sells — it is rare that I read something in the newspaper that makes me smile, much less laugh aloud.
So I have to tell you that today I felt joy. The cause of my elation? A story in the Chron about how headhunters in the Bay Area are all losing their jobs.
I’ve suffered from the existence of recruiters for over 10 years. As a jobseeker, I was promised opportunities that never materialized. Recruiters sent me to interview for jobs that met none of my criteria, lying to me to get me to go. With one exception, an honorable guy who I trust has not been caught by the forces documented in today’s story, I have found recruiters to be the most duplicitous pack of weasels on the planet.
As a hiring manager, I learned that most recruiters do their sourcing at dice.com, which I was subscribing to at the same time. This means that the recruiters planned to charge me $15,000-$25,000 for forwarding the résumé of a candidate they’d never met. That’s good money for doing a keyword search at a résumé website.
At one point I did some contract engineering work for an ex-recruiter (who went on to stiff me for $800… go figure). He described the standard recruiter tactic of selling a candidate to the employer, by fabricating stories of other offers that were coming in for the candidate, to force a quick hiring decision. He described how he’d tell employers that they’d have to pay a premium if they hoped to have their offer accepted. This would drive the candidate’s salary (and therefore the recruiter’s commission) higher.
Most recruiting agencies have a no-return policy, too… if you hire someone who doesn’t work out, you don’t get your fee back. Instead you have to let the recruiter find a replacement, as if they could do a better job the second time around.
In the Chron article, the founder of a job-networking firm describes his experiences with the post-crash recruiting profession: “A guy in the Bay Area told me he was working part time at a dry cleaner… In Denver, I met a couple of (recruiters) working in food service, waiting tables…” Heh.
To be fair, recruiting was probably a less dishonest career prior to the dot-com days, which brought such a demand for workers that any idiot could get a job working on a website — or, failing that, recruiting other idiots to work on websites. Fortunately, one of the characteristics of a shakeout is that all the rotten fruit falls first.
Domain registrar Dotster announced a nice privacy option today: “you can now choose to have your personal information removed from the bulk Whois list that Dotster is required to provide to other registrars.”
I am sure this won’t stop most spam, but it appears that it might stop spam from other domain registrars, such as buydomains.com.
Dotster explains:
All ICANN accredited registrars, including Dotster, are required … to provide Whois customer data to any competing registrar upon request and upon payment of a fee. By logging into your account and choosing
the remove option, your personal information will not be included
in this list if we are asked to provide it to a competitor.
Kudos to Dotster for working to protect my data, rather than selling it as often as possible. (Thanks too for making this opt-out a simple one-click link in the announcement email.)
All week, my father has been telling my mother all the things wrong with her car. He had arranged to take the car in for service this morning.
He’s a bit of a schemer, though — he had no intention of having her car repaired. He’d arranged to have it replaced instead, just in time for my mom’s birthday. So at noon today they walked out of the house to go to a fancy lunch, and there in the driveway was her new car, a 2002 PT Cruiser in “Inferno Red.” With a matching red cell phone, natch.
Is that cool, or what?!
