January 2006 Blog Posts
**UPDATED, I misread my previous source, it wasn't child pornography but pornography accessible to minors**
So let me get this straight.
It's being reported that Google has given into China and is not only censoring its search results but also outing people that could possibly be arrested by the chinese government for their beliefs.
It's also being reported the Google is refusing to work with the US Department of Justice to locate child accessible pornography.
Now I'm generally a free speech advocate, and I know that the other search portals are also caving into China's demands... but wasn't Google supposed to be the "good...
I gave the microsoft line of wireless keyboard/mouse combo a shot a few weeks back and I just wanted to say that I ended up returning it. It states that you should keep the receiver "8 inches away" from any sources of interference. I moved the receiver all over the desk in varying distances and I just couldn't seem to get a steady, reliable signal. This meant that it would cut out when I was typing so I would lose keystrokes when coding and during gaming sometimes the mouse not moving would get my head blown off in Unreal Tournament.
Maybe...
I often see a lot of posts on newsgroups and job boards about recruiters. Are they useful? Will they give me a fair shake? Why should (or shouldn't) I use them? I have used recruiters off and on throughout my career so I figured I'd share a few tidbits about what to expect and how to cope.
Bad Recruiters
Here are the symptoms of bad recruiters:
They try to get you to interview for jobs you aren't qualified for. This means they either don't understand your skillset or that they care more about their commission than putting you into a job that you'll...
I had the opportunity to pick up The Mythical Man Month the other day when I was visiting the local Borders and I must say that this book literally drips truth. Many of the essays resonated with me at a very deep level, oftentimes pointing out reasons for pain in software projects that I had experienced but never really thought through previously.
This is not really a book, but a collection of short essays, each readable easily in a single sitting (even with a compressed schedule like mine). Being the 20th aniversary some of the examples speak of systems and languages...
I was over at the Cleveland .NET Special Interest Group meeting on Tuesday and the presenter talked about some of the new stuff in .NET 2.0 and the Base Class Library. It got me to thinking about what my favorite new additions have been thusfar:
1. Generics- hands down, they rock.
2. String.IsNullOrEmpty()- It's about damn time.
On a side note, I'll be moving into my new house over the next week or two, I don't think Time Warner has the neighborhood wired for cable/internet yet so I'll probably be scarce until that hookup happens. So if we have any fans in Northeast...
In customer service, it's important to make sure that you treat all customers with respect... you just never know who you are dealing with.
Case in point. A friend of mine is a high ranking IT person at a school district. He has a personal Nextel phone which was going to be replaced by one that would be provided by the school district since they were in the negotiation process for a district cell phone plan. So he calls Nextel and asks them to disconnect his personal phone and references the new contract that will be replacing it. The service rep...