Frank Street Sidewalk City Council Petition

FRANK ST. SIDEWALK SAVE THE DATE!

The Raleigh City Council needs to hear from YOU about the Frank Street Sidewalk!

Mark your calendar for Tuesday, April 1st at 7 PM and express your support for a sidewalk along Frank Street from Norris to Brookside!

Don’t know what to say? You don’t have to speak! You can support the sidewalk just by being there!

The meeting will take place in Council Chambers of the Raleigh Municipal Building, 222 W. Hargett Street, Raleigh. Parking is available in the city deck on W. Morgan Street between Dawson Street. and McDowell Street.

Questions? Contact Mark Turner at 919.741.6329

Dinner guest

I caught this fellow helping himself to the cat food on the porch this evening.

Raccoon

Raccoon

Lowering the sights

As I get set to embark on a new journey, I thought it would be good to look back at the job description that attracted me to my last job and compare it to the one advertised for my replacement. Here’s the first one:

Senior Support Engineer — Open Position Description

$COMPANY, a startup software company in Research Triangle Park recognized as a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner, is seeking talented individuals to help grow its expanding Engineering team.

$COMPANY‘s award-winning application management product — $PRODUCT — delivers transaction—based application discovery,
dependency mapping, and performance monitoring & analysis for complex, distributed applications in some of the world‘s largest data centers.

As a growing software business, $COMPANY is expanding our enterprise support team.

Responsibilities

– Quickly understand the dynamics of the $PRODUCT and maintain an extensive knowledge of any revisions and updates to the software
– Coordinate new customer implementations and provide effective and timely training to maximize use of the software by the customer
– Provide end-user application support via phone and email during support hours and on occasion during off hours when warranted
– Troubleshoot issues reported by customers and provide solutions in a timely, accurate, and professional manner
– Facilitate problem-solving between end user and $COMPANY development staff and make verbal and/or written recommendations for change and improvement
– Develop working relationship with $COMPANY sales team members and provide insight to sales reps regarding any current or future product needs as indicated by the customer
– Provide administrative support for the support portal and work flows associated with support tickets
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Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC has great customer service!

After losing my job in December, I signed up for an Affordable Care Act health care plan, a.k.a. Obamacare to cover the family. It could have been cheaper, of course, had our short-sighted state leaders implemented a healthcare marketplace (you know, free market competition and such) but the rate I got was significantly cheaper than a COBRA plan.

Anyhow, I recently submitted paperwork for an automatic bank draft for the policy but the paperwork apparently hasn’t gone through. This necessitated two phone calls to Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC Customer Service this past week. These calls uncovered a technical snafu that’s still being solved but still I have to say that the customer service representatives I spoke with are two of the finest who have ever assisted me with anything. They love their jobs, they love talking to people, and seemed to be willing to spend whatever time it took to get my issue sorted out.
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Nothing spotted by planes searching remote patch of Indian Ocean for missing Malaysian jet | CTV News

The continuing search for signs of Malaysian flight MH370 remind us of two things: it’s a big ocean out there and there is plenty of debris in that ocean.

Search planes scoured a remote patch of the Indian Ocean but came back empty-handed Friday after a 10-hour mission looking for any sign of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, another disappointing day in one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries.

Australian officials pledged to continue the search for two large objects spotted by a satellite earlier this week, which had raised hopes that the two-week hunt for the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board was nearing a breakthrough.

But Australia’s acting prime minister, Warren Truss, tamped down expectations.

“Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating — it may have slipped to the bottom,” he said. “It’s also certain that any debris or other material would have moved a significant distance over that time, potentially hundreds of kilometres.”

via Nothing spotted by planes searching remote patch of Indian Ocean for missing Malaysian jet | CTV News.

NSA targets system administrators

The Intercept describes the NSA’s efforts to undermine networks by targeting the system administrators who job it is to keep them secure. If this doesn’t make system administrators angry there’s something seriously wrong.

Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators or sys admins, as they are often called, before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.

The document consists of several posts – one of them is titled “I hunt sys admins” – that were published in 2012 on an internal discussion board hosted on the agency’s classified servers. They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency’s effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet. By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks.

The classified posts reveal how the NSA official aspired to create a database that would function as an international hit list of sys admins to potentially target. Yet the document makes clear that the admins are not suspected of any criminal activity – they are targeted only because they control access to networks the agency wants to infiltrate. “Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom’?” one of the posts says.

via Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators – The Intercept.

McCrory thinks taxes stifle startups

Gov. McCrory just came back from Silicon Valley with supposed tips about how to foster startups.

Says the Governor:

“Our tax code is not conducive to the first-round investors for venture capital, for high-risk, first-round investors,” he says. “If they make an investment, they often move (the startup) to a no-tax state, with the profits. That means we lose that money and we lose that sweat equity. We want that money to be reinvested in North Carolina.”

Oh really? Venture capitalists are seriously going to uproot the founders of their investments and risk losing them just so they can save a few bucks on their taxes? I have been deeply involved in startups for over 20 years and I have never heard of this happening to a North Carolina startup.
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Landed!

The good news is that I found a job that’s closer than Belgium. I’ve accepted a position as a Senior Systems Engineer at a large legal database company that’s recently set up shop on N.C. State’s Centennial Campus. My goal is to make the company’s SaaS platform as rock-solid stable as I can. I start March 31st and I’m quite excited about the opportunity.

Work local?

Got this email in last night and it really underscored just how off-target some of the job opportunities that have come my way really are:

From: diceletter at dice.com
Subject: NATO Windows Systems Engineer – Mons, Belgium
To: Mark Turner

Hi Mark,

I scanned through your resume and thought you may be a fit for one of our open positions NATO in Mons, Belgium

The System Engineer will require experienced IT security professionals to be part of this leading edge capability for Cyber Defence. Working as part of an incident management team you would be part of the operational support at the sharp end of the NATO Computer Incident Response Centre (NCIRC).

This role entails 220 work days a year and a 7.6 hour workday. Plenty of time to see Europe – and hour drive from Paris and Germany. You get 25 paid days of vacation a year (five weeks) plus 16 additional paid holidays ? that?s 41 paid days off to explore Europe

You can find more information and apply online via the following link if interested:
Please visit
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We Got A Badass Over Here: Doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson, Science and Social Responsibility | Geekquality.com

Here’s a great bio of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’ve requested his memoir from the Wake County Public Library but this will hold me over until it arrives.

In the latter half of 1958, two events occurred that would have a profound effect on the science of astrophysics: one was the signing of the National Aeronautics and Space Act by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which authorized the creation of NASA as a civilian space agency; the other, much more humble of the two, was the birth in the West Bronx of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Oh, and we got tickets!

via We Got A Badass Over Here: Doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson, Science and Social Responsibility | Geekquality.com.