Dear Recruiters

Dear Recruiters,

Thanks for contacting me regarding job opportunities. While I am grateful that you have considered me for your position, I wish to point out the title of my resume posting, which clearly states that I’m looking for work in the Raleigh area. I do not consider (and I am sure I’m not alone in this) San Bruno, CA; Champaign, IL; Seattle, WA; nor even North Wilksboro, NC to be part of the Raleigh area. Contacting me again once I’ve pointed this out to you will do little to change my mind.

If perhaps in the future you can either find something in the Raleigh area or perhaps get a clue and actually read my resume posting, I would be even more appreciative of your efforts.

Your Pal,
Mark

in Rant | 130 Words

Back To Work Monday

I begin a three month test-drive of my new job starting Monday, when I’ll travel to Annapolis to start a contract with a certain open-source network management company as a Consulting Systems Engineer. Should everything go as planned I’ll come onboard full-time this fall.

I’m glad my six-week unplanned vacation is coming to an end. I’m excited about the work, the product, and the company. I feel I have something to prove after being unceremoniously laid off and I fully intend to prove it.

Let’s get started!

How To Create Groups in OS X?

A question for all your OS X/UNIX geeks:

I had to create a new group on Kelly’s Mac so that she could write to an NFS share. After poking around NetInfo, I created a group I thought would work but the group didn’t show up on Kelly’s group list. Finally, I duplicated an existing group and changed the values accordingly. That seemed to work.

How does one add users to a group using NetInfo? I can’t figure out how to get the user list to show multiple entries.

Cheap Thoughts: Taking Back The Tubes

Senator John Kerry (D-MA), speaking of an upcoming FCC frequency auction, reminded me of an important fact (emphasis mine):

With this auction, we stand at a crossroads—we can either provide extraordinary benefits to millions of Americans or tilt bandwidth policy to line the pockets of a privileged few.

There is a clear path I believe must be taken: the airwaves belong to the American people, and their use should serve the public interest.

See that part? The airwaves belong to the American people.

We own the airwaves. We own the tubes over which America’s media conglomerates make billions.
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Missing Sleazefest

My Dutch friend Guus’s recent introduction to Pabst Blue Ribbon got me thinking back to the days I wandered around Sleazefest, where PBR was prevalent. Few shows can make me willingly stand in a sweaty, smoke-filled room for hours on end, but Sleazefest could. Bands right in front of you (and sometimes on top of you) played sloppy surf rock while girls wearing bumper stickers shimmied in cages. Three days and multiple stages! Man, that show was a blast.

Last year, the Indy went searching for the lost Sleazefest. I hope it turns up soon.

Father’s Day

It was a good Father’s Day. Woke up to smiling faces, had a great breakfast, then took the family over to visit my own father before spending some time in the pool. After much splashing we returned home, ate lunch, and all took naps.

After naps were done Kelly made us a great dinner. We then topped that off with a visit to Goodberry’s for some tasty frozen custard. Then it was bathtime for the kids and then story time for them before tucking them in.

Now Kelly and I will likely spend time working on the 500-piece puzzle that Hallie and I started. It should be a fun ending to a fun day.

Drupal To WordPress Migration Snafu

Bah. I’ve found a fault with my hack of the Drupal to WordPress migration script: the authorship of posts isn’t migrated. This typically isn’t a problem if a blog only has one author. For a multi-author blog, though, it can lead to much confusion.

Its easy enough to copy user id’s from one system to another, and so I’ve updated my script to do that. This still doesn’t correctly show authorship, though. The problem for me as a SQL n00b is how to create WordPress’s wp_usermeta table with the appropriate INSERT statements?
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