June 2, 2004
Steaming
Meet Kyle Rankin. This new male O'Reilly WebLogger's claim to fame is that he is a 2004 year old married sysadmin for a heterogeneous network who has been running Debian since (only) 1998!
WTF, over?? What books has he written? What articles? What in the hell does he know that a dozen members, at least, of LinuxChix don't???
Why are they having a total blog newbie, without a single book published to his name, on their blog? Who'd he sleep with?
What's worse is, he can barely write!! But don't take my word for it, check out this half-baked, lame rehash entry on DRM. He writes more run-on sentences than I do, and not as well!!
Lets face it, they have, as a professional blogger (read by thousands of people) a kid who was in kindergarten when I worked for my first high tech startup. This kid has contributed not a single damn thing to the field other than running a mixed shop!!! Big, fat, hairy deal!
I am, quite frankly, insulted, personally and professionally. As one respondant put it "How does one who has never blogged earn the priveledge of an O'Reilly Network weblog?"
Posted by ljl at 2:6 AM | Comments (1)
June 19, 2004
The Other Hand
Well, I've done it. I present to you The Other Hand - Technology Reviews by L J Laubenheimer. It is TypeKey enabled for comments, as is this blog. (Non-TypeKey comments are moderated to rule out that awful link spam.)
The Other Hand is a blog of nothing but reviews. Primarily focused on technology, the items reviewed will fall into categories like hardware, software, gadgets, assistive devices, and things like that. The reviews are all my opinions and experiences, of course, and don't promise to all be kind and positive. Like life itself, not everything is good. They will, however, be my honest impressions. Eat your heart out, O'Reilly Bloggers
There is already one review up, of a smattering of USB Keys. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
Posted by ljl at 2:15 PM | Comments ()
June 12, 2004
Considering
Last night I had a odd idea for a new blog that is nothing but reviews. This came up, in part, as a result of a conversation I had at work about gadgets and disability. The review would not be restricted to any one type of item, but would be mainly be technology, hardware, software, and gadgets. I would also review adaptive devices for hemiparesis victims, tools, apparel, books, and maybe even websites, etc.
I would not feel obligated to be nice, because I wouldn't be writing to recommend things, but to honestly review the items and describe my experiences with them. My reviews would not be focused only on the disability aspect, of course, but if it was particularly advantageous or punitive to those with my type of disability, I would say so.
But, what should I name it??
Posted by ljl at 1:49 AM | Comments ()
June 11, 2004
Prophetic
Remember this entry: Another Contract Concern? In it I essentially presented my concern that they would hire, temp to permanent, a younger, able bodied, male to replace my iconoclastic self at $Job-1.
Well, that's almost exactly what they did. They hired, permanent, not one but TWO (2) younger, able-bodied, males to replace me, (plus one contractor) and had me train them (and pass my work to them). Then, when they did the code freeze, they ended my contract, on March 3. Can you say age and gender discrimination, at the very least?
They didn't want to pay me more than $76K as a permanent employee, nevermind that I worked an average of 45 hours a week, and even with not getting holiday, sick or vacation pay (about 4 weeks worth) I cleared $89K in the 1.5 months I worked in 2003. Not counting the time off, I would have cleared $11K if it was all year. They wanted me to take a 2005% pay cut, just to get 4 weeks holiday/pto, and a lower insurance cost (for kaiser, IIRC - bleah), but they didn't even have 41K matching (which was worth ~$21+ per month, and just about paid the difference between the insurance costs.) I would have lost money, and still worked slave hours in an abusive culture.
The cherry filling the cake, of course, is that about 2 weeks after I was let go, they sacked the VP of Engineering who I'm fairly sure set up the scenario for my departure (he "resigned" abruptly).
The chocolate fudge icing on the cake is that I am now working at a new $Job for a nice, well established $Company, with a cluefull $Boss, on an embedded Linux product. Yes, it's contract, but if I can get my brain around some of the low level stuff involved, it is pretty good for my career in Linux systems development. I'm also not working 1 hour days yet, and it's kind of nice. My new $Boss doesn't micromanage too much, and I'm working with bright people.
Still, should I look into suing the old company for wrongfull termination?
Posted by ljl at 3:4 PM | Comments (2)
June 1, 2004
Business Category Linked
For now, I've linked in new entries the old entry files in the business category. It's schlocky, but I don't have a lot of time to spend on it. It's taken me months to chisel the time to do this.
Posted by ljl at 11:52 AM | Comments ()
D&B Listing of Modusvarious
Old Entry D&B Listing of Modusvarious
Posted by ljl at 11:5 AM | Comments ()
How Not To Promote A Company
Old Entry: How Not To Promote A Company
Posted by ljl at 11:48 AM | Comments ()
More Dysfunctional Organizational Behaviors
More Dysfunctional Organizational Behaviors
Posted by ljl at 11:47 AM | Comments ()
Dysfunctional Organizational Behaviors
Old Entry dysfunctional organizational behaviors
Posted by ljl at 11:45 AM | Comments ()
Drain Circling
Old Entry Drain Circling
Posted by ljl at 11:42 AM | Comments ()
Server change, blog reborn
My previous hosting screwed up my berkeley DB files for this blog (the software wants version 1, they "autoconverted" them to version 3). I couldn't even log in after their stupid upgrade.
I still have the entries, in html format, but I need to convert them into a format that can be imported. I am now using a different host, and a MySQL database. I will be probably writing a script to pull the entries out and put them into a format to import into the reborn blog.
But the Blast Lives Again!
Posted by ljl at 11:2003 AM | Comments ()