Patrick’s Rants

I received the following email from a mail list that I subscribe to. It contains a transcript of an online support session with Dell. It is purported to be an actual online session and I have no reason to doubt its veracity.

First let me say that I have always pushed Dell as a reliable solution to my clients. One of the reasons is their “stellar” tech support. It appears I was out of the loop. What follows is an actual transcript of my recent attempt to upgrade a client laptop from Windows Media Center Edition to Windows XP Pro. We purchased the C[D] from Dell for the upgrade and received a bad product key. It has been a month and we have still not received the new CD you will see promised in 3-5 days by the supervisor. I changed the names of everyone and obscured some address
data, but otherwise this is exactly how the conversation went.

Session Started with Agent (Dell_Rep)

Agent (Dell_Rep): “Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Support. My
name is Shivani and my rep ID number is xxxxxxxx. How may I assist you
today?”

Customer: “Hello”
(more…)

Hi Folks,

We have two software development positions open on our team – the one I announced a couple weeks ago has had its closing date extended, so both position announcements will close no later than May 7th. The positions are titled “IT Specialist (APPSW)” (which translates to “software developer”) and “Computer Scientist” (which is a software developer who has an educational background with a lot of math and computer science courses).

The Computer Scientist position starts at a grade 7 – if you are a Computer Science student (or possible Math major with CS minor) who graduates soon or have just graduated *and* have a pretty good GPA (3.0 or higher), you will probably qualify for this position and we encourage you to apply.

The IT Specialist position starts at a grade 9. It does not have the same educational requirement, but does require experience. If you feel you qualify for *both* positions, please apply to both!!!

If you need assistance figuring out which position and grade to apply for, please refer to the contact info at the bottom of this e-mail (and the official job announcements have links to the official documentation). Links to the applications are also near the bottom of the e-mail.

The positions are posted on the USGS Online Automated Recruitment System: http://www.usgs.gov/ohr/oars/index.html

deborah
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The flood of trackback spammers has been on. I’ve had hundreds of emails in the last few weeks for moderated comments from spammer bots. This could have contributed to the failure of my hard drive, but I can’t be sure. The thing is I have comments set to turn off after a certain time using Auto Close Comments, an older plugin for Wordpress. The thing is it leaves the trackbacks or pingbacks wide open. So I modified it. Now it closes trackbacks too. Of course if I was really smart I would have found Comment Timeout which is a newer plugin and is much more flexible. Maybe I’ll install and activate it next time.

This last week, I had to do “emergency repair” on two different computers. The first one is at the office. The fans decided to go belly up, slowly getting louder and louder. My business partner insisted on them being replaced ASAP – not a bad idea. When I cracked the box open I noticed a CPU fan not spinning. The other CPU fan was noisy as well as the fan in the case. Three fans had to be replaced. Great, it’s Sunday. Any of the computer repair type shops would be closed.

I decided to call Staples, since I won’t shop at OfficeMax. The Staples web site has both kinds of fans listed. I called the store and was told that they had case fans, but did not carry the CPU fan that I sought.
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New abortion ban upheld

I mentioned it in 2004 and again last February
We “reelected” George W Bush, who will never have to carry a child, and he proceeded to nominate a token woman to the Supreme Court: Harriet Miers. Since her shellacking, he has been able to nominate conservative men (who will also never have to carry a child) to stack the court in his favor. These men have read this law, that requires a woman to argue in court that this procedure is medically necessary to get a waiver, have determined that there are “enough” other procedures available that banning it does not put an “undue burden” on a woman whose life may depend upon terminating her pregnancy in this manner.

The debate seems to be framed in overly simple terms. Sure you can take acetaminophen, ibuprofen, naproxen or aspirin for a headache. So if congress banned ibuprofen no big deal right? What if that’s the only one that worked? Or if they banned everything except naproxen (which doesn’t work for me)? Does it seem like a simple comparison now? A caller on talk radio said that cesarean sections are available, so why use a method that is potentially medically safer? The caller happened to be female – scary.

So when are we going to get to Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare”? If this administration and SC have their way it will only be rare. The elite who could afford them before they were legal will be right back where they were and so will those who cannot.

Every now and then I get a pile of returned mail for apache, the webserver this machine uses. I had thought that it was a sendmail misconfiguration and was attacking it from that standpoint. I disabled the apache user account, rejected any email to or from apache, etc. These don’t work for long, since the blog and my bulletin board send email as apache. Today, I dug deeper and found that a simple cross-site scripting vulnerability was being exploited. I was sure that I would find the culprit in my real estate scripts. They are heavy in php and could have had errors somewhere in them – and have. Instead I found that a super simple page that I made for my tax firm had unchecked variables for inclusion. Hopefully, you have not received any of the spam that has been generated. And hopefully I have it fixed.

So let this be a lesson – mostly for me – check your variables.

Happy Pigs
Are Tasty Pigs

The breakfast toaster thingy that Sonic has that has gravy poured over it is just the thing for our Sonic Guys – at least one of them. After realizing that he no longer has to clean up the left over gravy on his plate he proclaims that he has been freed. I never thought about “sopping it up with a biscuit” as chaining me down, but the sandwich sounds pretty good.

Lately there has been a push to make employers “certify” that the employees they hire are legal to work in the US. This push seems to focus some on companies that have government contracts, but it’s also being applied to employers in general. The thing is, we already do this. It’s called an I-9 form. The employer reviews a couple of forms of ID from their prospective/new employee to verify work eligibility. The employer keeps the form on file and has to renew it every so often – once every three years I believe. Employers can even, and are required to in some cases, verify the employee’s employment information – ensuring that the employee’s information matches the files at the Social Security Administration.
There are also penalties for not maintaining the information. Instead of making employers “certify” their work force, get out of the office and go see if they have the paperwork in place.

I just don’t understand why we have to write new laws to do the same thing that we can already do.

Some of the following information is not yet publicly available. Forwarded by a colleague:

We have a position for a computer programmer being advertised (see additional information below). This is one of two positions that will be advertised – we expect the other position to be posted under the title “Computer Scientist” in the next week or so, so keep your eyes on http://www.usgs.gov/ohr/oars.

The position is with the USGS Astrogeology Research Program in Flagstaff. We have some info about the benefits of working for Astrogeology on our site http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/About/Careers/. For more info about our program and some of the space missions and projects we’re involved in, visit our website http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/ – a good place to start is the About Us section http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/About/AstroToday/. Programmers typically work on our Isis image processing software – more info about that package is at http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/.

Announcement Number: WR-2007-0324
Vacancy Description: IT Specialist (APPSW), GS-2210-9/11/12 (KP-DEU)
Open Period: 04/03/2007 – 04/17/2007
Series/Grade: GS-2210A-09/11/12
Salary: $50,471.00 TO $82,709.00
Promotion Potential: GS-12

For more information, Contact: Karen Perez, 916-278-9389, kperez@usgs.gov

More info and apply online:
https://jobs1.quickhire.com/

Position description:
This position is with the U.S. Geological Survey, Western Region,
Geologic Discipline, Astrogeology Team located in Flagstaff,
Arizona. Major duties include but are not limited to: Designs,
develops, tests, and implements software programs for use in digital
image processing of planetary and terrestrial remote sensing data or
to provide efficient search and access to data products. Maintains
existing applications software by designing, coding, documenting,
testing, and debugging programs. Prepares proposals and progress
reports to customers.

Lower grade levels perform a wide range of tasks described in the
above listing of duties and responsibilities. At the lower level,
the employee will be assigned work designed to further develop and
refine their knowledge and skills. Assignments will typically
combine productive work with on-going training and instruction.
Supervision received at the lower level will be closer with
oversight and review being provided more frequently.

At the higher levels, incumbent will often act as a team leader,
directing the work of other team members and coordinating and
supporting team efforts.