Born Again Idiot

I feel as though I'm a living music video these days. The song is Born Again Idiot by Anthrax.

Why do I explain myself when everyone's an idiot but me?

Every day I'm surrounded by those that don't listen. I try to point out the obvious and they opt to not listen to me. When the floor of your living room i sagging significantly, is that not a sign that you should have that looked at soon? If you're having swelling as a result of a drastic medication change that your doctor prescribed AND you don't feel you can talk to the doctor in the first place, is this not the time to switch doctors? If everyone around you tells you that you're making a bad decision, is that not a sign that you should at least reevaluate your decision? If you take your car to a mechanic and he says he's fixed the reason why it shuts off after 10 minutes, do you turn around and ask him if he had the car running for 10 minutes to ensure it doesn't still happen?

Kicking and screaming and dragged back into a life
Kicking and screaming and dragged back into a life
Like ten pounds in a nine pound bag
Still I come back to give you something that you never had

It's not that I'm professing to be perfect. I have a nasty habit of being right a lot of times specifically because i constantly analyze situations and look for warning signs. It's not up to me as to how people live their lives. All i try to do is give my input and it seems that more often than not people ignore what is blindingly obvious.

Idiot rules, I never fight I only win

Idiot rules, and I didn't make them

What's the point anymore? Seriously. I can't possibly know what I'm talking about. Since i don't have a "real" job, i apparently don't know what I'm talking about. Because i have a grunt BS job, i get looked down at by older full time employees because "clearly if you knew what you were doing you wouldn't be here". Because I'm perma-single i can't possibly know anything about relationships. It's futile to try to educate those that refuse to listen. I'm tired of my words falling on deaf ears.

Finish my smoke, down my drink, wipe my mouth and I just walk away

I love this line. If my life were this music video, right here is where i would get up from the bar stool and walk away with my hands up in the air while mouthing the words "F**k it". Surrendering to the idiots that surround me and letting them exist in their empty lives with blinders on.

What's the chance of finding something real and make it last
For that I'd carry all my bags and leave them in the past
Because I spend my life fixing mistakes that left me scarred
And when I stand and meet my maker, I'll be born again hard

Well put. What i wouldn't give for someone to actually listen once in a while so i know that i'm not wasting my breath. My motives are pure. My delivery is a little harsh but that's the only way that anyone listens it seems. No matter how straightforward you are, most people just don't get it.

Why do I explain myself when everyone's an idiot but me?

Idiot rules, I never fight I only win
Idiot rules, idiot rules
Idiot rules, and I didn't make them
Idiot rules, idiot rules
Idiot rules, I never fight I only win
Idiot rules, idiot rules
Idiot rules, don't judge me by my sins
Idiot rules, I never bend, I only break them

Yeah some of the lyrics were edited out. So what. Isn't that how it always is? We latch onto segments songs/poems/speeches and rarely keep it in context. It's a human element. We latch onto those elements which we believe to be the closest to our hearts and embrace the words as though they were our own. No song can truly explain what i'm going through. It's this very reason why writers continue to write every day to best describe what is in their head.

My point was that i'm tired. Tired of wasting my effort on people who won't consider my words. Tired of wasting time trying to help those that don't want to help themselves. Tired of trying to show others an outside and unbiased perspective. Seclusion draws me in more and more day by day. Tired of putting up the good fight to keep my head above water in a turbulent sea.

In a round about way, this is something that goes through my head when interviewing. I'm tired of trying to explain to people who are blinded by their ideas of interview etiquette that there is more to me than what they see on a piece of paper. How do you explain to someone that irregardless of your documented history, you're much better than a piece of paper with past accomplishments? More often than not, i walk out of interviews believing that i just wasted my time on people who are both blind and deaf. The irony is that they may be blind and deaf to me but they're still the ones with the money while i'm not. :(

Time to get ready for another night of mind numbing work for minimal money....

I can't help but laugh

The other week, i was on the way out the door when the phone rang. By some miracle, it was a company that had seen my resume online. This is where i'm supposed to get excited. A year ago, i would have been excited. Today i'm far too jaded to get excited over a phone call.

I talked to the HR lady for about 15-20 minutes explaining my made-up work situation (freelance work as opposed to being just professionally unemployed). Conversation went really well. At the end, the lady told me that i should go to their website and apply for one of the positions that are currently open. Huh? What do you mean? I already applied there a month ago! You did? Yes. That's why i thought you were calling me. Well, no... you're not in our database and I found your resume online. Really? Well i have the confirmation email from you guys from last month saying that someone would contact me shortly. Well, i'll make sure that your resume gets passed along!

Hahahahaha!!!

I had applied with this company back in March. I had also applied with them last year. Once you apply for a job, their online application won't let you apply for the same position again until the end of the calender year. That means that since i applied in March this year, it won't let me apply for the same position again in October. More often than not i see the same position posted online which implies there's a nasty turnover rate or they're just that incompetent. After this phone call, i'm beginning to lean towards the latter.

So here i sit with a big grin on my face. I know they won't call me back. I know i can't apply again for the rest of the year with them. I was my usual pleasant and courteous self on the phone with the HR lady on the outside chance that they actually do contact me again. On the plus side, at least they bothered to call me unlike most companies that i submit my resume to. Then again, they didn't call me for the right reason but then what else can i expect these days?


At least i'm finally getting over my latest plague so i can get back to blogging and reality....

FTP server on a winXP box (II)

After a brief hiatus (3 months) , I'm finally back to working on this project. The results have been mixed and the growing pains have been... well... painful!

The current candidate that I'm experimenting with is Cerberus. After fighting with this off and on today, i believe i finally have it semi-successfully configured. The hardest part about this ordeal is not having access to a machine that is outside of my network. There's been a lot of configuring/tweaking followed by waiting around for someone to be online to test this out. Hurry up and wait. The story of my life it seems. :)

Initial install was a snap. Click next a bunch of times and nothing major to worry about configuring really. Creating a user account and granting them permissions was pretty intuitive.

The problems began to arise when i had my guinea pig... er test subject attempt to connect. No luck. According to log files, he could connect to my machine and authenticate but then after about 30 seconds would get booted.

(log file excerpt)

Apr 06 17:06:31 16 Incoming connection request on interface 192.168.1.101
Apr 06 17:06:31 16 Connection request accepted from 76.229.xxx.xx
Apr 06 17:06:31 16 USER wwwww
Apr 06 17:06:31 16 331 User wwwww, password please
Apr 06 17:06:31 16 PASS ***********
Apr 06 17:06:31 16 230 Password Ok, User logged in
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 FEAT
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 211- Additional features supported include: MDTM SIZE REST STREAM AUTH TLS AUTH SSL PBSZ PROT LANG EN* SITE CHMOD SITE PSWD 211 End
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 SYST
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 215 UNIX Type: L8
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 PWD
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 257 "/" is the current directory
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 TYPE A
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 200 Type ASCII
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 PASV
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 227 Entering Passive Mode (24,160,xxx,xx,xx)
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 Error closing connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
Apr 06 17:06:32 16 Connection terminated.

What's going on here? What did i miss? Why does he keep getting disconnected? Port forwarding has been set and is active in the router so all port 21 traffic is going to my machine. I created firewall exceptions in the Windows firewall just to be sure it works. Target directory is set to share with all users now. He kept getting booted after 30 seconds and was unable to transfer any data either way. I've seen this work no problem at a friends house so what is wrong on my end?

The fact that he could authenticate and access my box was a huge step but something was bothering me about him getting booted whenever it went to PASV mode. Documentation pointed to making sure that was configured properly. A-hah! When behind a router, make sure that you specify the ip address for PASV (typically the ip of the router). Still no luck.

After some consultation with a friend, i got a crash course that most documentation doesn't spell out for you. Yes, i had port 21 open which is correct. The problem is that when in PASV mode you need other ports open/forwarded. The default ports are 1025-3500. That means i had to forward all of these (excluding 3389 which is RDP for my roommate) to my box also. NOW things were making more sense....

After finally getting these extra ports forwarded, a friend was able to successfully connect and transfer data. Success! Essentially everything i'd tried to do earlier had no real effect on the situation because i missed something very simple early on. I made the mistake of assuming that i just needed 21 routed and that wound up costing me a lot of time. In hindsight this appears to be the same issue that i ran into with FileZilla Server a couple months ago. Lesson learned.

Now that everything is up and running I'm content. I can always open the ports if/when i plan to use this server app but for the time being they'll remain closed. What can i say? Why leave your doors unlocked when you're not home? Mission accomplished. I can share files if need be with people and they can download at their leisure.

Grumbles:
-No SFTP capability
-No means by which to limit bandwidth usage.
-Server Manager menu is clumsy (IMHO).

Pros:
-Logging is very straight forward.
-I like the small pop up notification for when someone is attempting to connect.
-IP manager seems very straightforward.
-User management is easy.
-Help documentation was.... HELPFUL!


Still looking for an app that will enable me to do SFTP and limit bandwidth. Suggestions are welcome. Eventually I'll be doing this on a Linux box but not having a functional Linux box (thanks to yPerr) kind of kills that idea. Stay tuned....

Rejection... My Old Friend Returns

Struck out again. At least this time when they said "we'll let you know by the end of next week" they meant it. Too bad too. Seemed like really nice people with a lot of potential.

What's the starting pay as a rent-a-cop these days...?

Cell Phones

Like most people, i too have a cell phone. I've been a Sprint subscriber since 2000 and being a 20-something year old, I accept that it's part of my daily life. That being said, I've had an odd reoccurring experience lately.

While in school, classmates would turn their phones to vibrate (which is extremely loud in a quiet lecture hall) while mine was consistently turned off. I've found no statistics on what proportion turns their phones off vs vibrate even though it would be an interesting study. On one occasion i had a classmate who had his phone out but that's because his wife was pregnant and expecting any day which is 100% understandable.

Every couple weeks i turn my phone off for a day or even the weekend. I've come to accept that i am not considered "normal" because i do this. Once again, this weekend i had a friend call and was upset that i didn't answer my phone when they called because it was off. Because i have a cell phone, apparently i'm supposed to be able to take calls 24/7 from people. I find this idea to be deeply offensive.

It bothers me that in our culture of instant communication that people can have the nerve to expect that you should always be reachable. This is beyond a privacy issue in my eyes. When did we allow ourselves to reach this level of forced social interaction? There have been studies about BlackBerry users who are obsessively checking their emails and freak out when their service goes out for 10 minutes. (no url suplied but a simple search will find plenty of examples) Why is it that we as a culture believe now that we're supposed to answer the phone just because it rings? If you're in heavy traffic while searching for an address and the weather is terrible, do you answer your cell when it rings? I'm sure you said "of course not" but how many of you REALLY mean it?

I have one friend that doesn't have a cell phone and doesn't appear to be in any major hurry to get one. I have said repeatedly that if my phone dies or if Sprint pisses me off, i'll drop it completely and walk away from these devices. I know one person that was set on tossing his phone after his contract expired and just having a land-line. Even with his g/friend offering to pay for one, he seemed dead set on ditching wireless communication. Needless to say, he caved in and is still amongst us "normals".

The benefits of having a cell are great. I love the long distance for obvious reasons. It's also nice if my job needs to get ahold of me to call me in early (thus making extra $$). Internet access for a news fiend like me is another huge bonus. It's easier to get ahold of people if you go out and plans change. Despite all of this, i feel no true need to have one. I survived while in ireland for 3 weeks without one. I turn mine off all of the time. Oddly enough, the only reason why i carry mine as much as i do is because i'm used to the physical weight in my left pocket.

In the past 5-10 years we have made cell phones a key part of our every day lives. Most troubling is, walk into Wal-Mart (or wherever) and look at how many kids (under 15) are walking around with them in hand. Look at how many displays for cheap phones you see and how the packaging is geared towards that age bracket. Look how many kids you see using their cell phones as a music player as they walk through a crowded store. Now ask yourself if you see anything wrong with what is now the "norm".

My point???

It's politically correct to preach about energy conservation and recycling but heaven forbid if anyone looses their cell charger or even their bottled water!

We have artificial holidays like Earth Day and Sweetest Day. How about a day where people turn off their phones? I am seriously considering setting aside a day or even weekend every month that i will keep my phone off. If anyone is interested in participating and has suggestions as to when this should take place, i am willing to hear them.

The Joys of House Calls (Part I)

(I'm confident there will be follow-ups on this topic even though this is the first posting.)

WinXP on a p2-366mhz w/ 256mb is painful. There's no other way to put it. Every time the user clicked on IE it would open up and then blue screen. Turns out she had the full M$N messenger suite installed and it was the M$N toolbar that was ironically causing the BSOD's. How did i figure that out? Simple. Remove any and all toolbars. No mercy. Never met a toolbar that i liked (excluding Google because Google is our lord and savior). Removed it and machine runs... er... walks just fine now.

Did i mention that i'm EVENTUALLY going to get $20 for this mess?

Later in the same day i went on a call to another house. Nice guy and very easy to work with. Not afraid to ask questions or call for help if he thinks he's even getting close to breaking something. Basically all i had to do was swap a networking cable with a known good one. Fired up FireFox afterwards to make sure the global interwebs worked and weren't clogged.

"Firefox did not close properly in a previous session. Would you like to restore the session?"

"Sure!" i foolishly said and clicked accordingly.

There's a naked dude on this dude's browser window. Well. At least it was artistic. As he's looking over my shoulder i just grab the mouse and click on HOME right away and don't say anything about it. Mutter a couple comments about various widgets popping up with the weather and how i would find them annoying and didn't say jack shit about the naked dude i just saw.

Sigh.

No charge for the networking cable swap because it didn't wind up solving the problem. Modem is probably dieing and so it's someone else's problem. I don't fix the problem means i don't get paid.

Sigh.

These two calls in addition to everything else that happened that day made for a very very odd day. Why the hell am i doing this kind of work again???

Yet Another Head Hunter Bytes The Dust (Follow Up)

When we last heard from the hero of this tale , he was patiently awaiting the call from the head hunter. "I should know by Tues evening or Wed morning about interviews," he said to me. Translation: I knew i wasn't going to hear jack until fri.

Today at 1pm this joker called me up. Wanted me to interview tomorrow @ 830am. That's less than 24 hours notice for an interview. The problem with that is that i have a doctors appointment from 9-10am which means i can't do the interview until after. Realistically it would be 1130am at the earliest that i could actually be there (it's appx 30 min away) and that includes hauling ass. So the guy tells me that he'll call me back later with a time that i can work with better. It's now 11pm and i never heard a peep from him for the rest of the day. Thanks. Real classy.

How much is it to ask for 24 hours notice? Companies can take their sweet time making decisions on whether or not they want to decide as to when they'll have a meeting about the decision to set the date that they want to decide on interview dates. In the meantime, people like me are supposed to drop everything and run and get punished for having prior commitments. They have no idea what my doctors appointment is about and it's honestly none of their business. It's called courtesy. Anything less than 24 hours and you're setting people up to fail. How am i supposed to properly prepare for an interview with < 24 hours? Banking an awful lot on me having proper preparation for the interview!

So....

Tonight i got home from work and there were to messages on the answering machine. Some head hunter from the 412 area code (Pennsylvania) called about a job. I wanted to punch her in her face when i heard the message. My name is Sean. It's NOT pronounced "SEEN". Got it? Why are you even bothering to call people when you can't pronounce their name? Not only is that annoying but i find that highly rude. I understand butchering last names. That's why you apologize for it and ask for proper pronunciation. It's called courtesy.

And so continues my stint of being "Professionally Unemployed"....

Yet Another Head Hunter Bytes The Dust

I was recently contacted by yet another head hunter. Phone contact went well and i got the honor of going to meet the guy face to face. As i think back on this experience, i can't help but laugh. I laugh and shake my head at the same time.

The head hunter i met admitted right away that he knew next to nothing about computers and "is happy when it just works". Oh great. How am i supposed to tell this guy that i'm a viable candidate when he doesn't know wtf i'm even talking about?

I knew i was in for a world of pain just based on the job description. Here are some highlights:

IT Network Technician

Duties:
5. Provide user training, including e-mail, Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel, Company internal programs and general Windows 95/98.
7. Present professional image at all times.
8. Follow procedures and rules in company employee manual.
9. Communicate effectively, both written and verbal.
10. Demonstrate professional attitude when approaching work assignments.
11. Promote positive, self-motivated atmosphere, promoting a team environment.
12. Maintain helpful, friendly attitude while always keeping internal and external customer service in mind.

Specifications:
2. Possess high level of self-motivation.

Physical/Mental Requirements:
1. Prolonged sitting.
2. Extended periods of computer use and keyboarding.
4. Understanding vague and implicit instructions.
5. Emotional stability and personal maturity.

For the love of all that is holy, what kind of person are they looking for??? The head hunter and i are hoping that the windoze 95/98 is a mistake!!! What little technical stuff they have listed relates to desktop support and NOT networking. Why for he love of Xenu is this listed as an IT Network Technician? Imagine what a Cisco-guru would say if they saw this description!

So when i met the head hunter the other day, i pretty much destroyed him. Poor guy. He had no idea what hit him. After about 5 minutes of me asking for more specifics followed by "i don't know" i threw in the towel. I came out swinging and wound up squaring off with the equipment manager of the grade school kick ball team. It was bad. Poor guy looked like a deer in headlights when i got on a tangent about the pros and cons of open source solutions vs the standard M$ suite of headaches. At least he didn't pull out the generic 5 questions that they seem to ALWAYS ask. "How much experience do you have with TCP/IP?" On more than one occasion i've laughed out loud on the phone when they ask that one because of how vague it is and they have NEVER been able to elaborate.

After a couple minutes of him turning pale and having a blank expression on his face i brought the conversation back to something that he can understand. Soft skills they call them. The job description is essentially looking for someone who can spell IBM and can play nicely with others. Personal maturity... yeah count me out right there! ;) I eventually took pity on the guy because he normally staffs skilled tradesmen and similar people. I took the time to explain a few concepts with examples so he could begin to grasp what i was saying. For example, when i mentioned open source he said he had no idea. I mentioned Firefox and all of a sudden he now has something familiar to him that he can relate to. *Sigh*

When i walked out of the meeting/interview/whatever, i was grinning from ear to ear. I know he's going to get me an interview with this company. I know i'm going to go to the interview and come out swinging which is what i do best. I'm going to sell myself and not short change my knowledge. I'm going to get turned down for someone who is cheaper and less experienced because they're going to view me as someone who will want to reinvent the wheel. I'm comfortable with this. They are going to say they want experience but they really want someone they can mold into their backwards and half-assed ways. Thus i will continue my current run of being "professionally unemployed". :)

*Sigh* (again)

I guess you had to be there....

One in 100 US adults behind bars

According to recent news article the United States:

More than one in 100 adults are now behind bars in the United States, home to the world's largest penal population, with a startling one in nine young black men incarcerated, a study has shown.

The prison and jail population rose by 25,000 to 2.3 million last year, out of a US adult population of 230 million, bringing the incarceration rate to one in 99.1 for the first time in US history, the Pew Center on the States said.

By comparison, China, with a population of one billion people, was second in the world with 1.5 million inmates, followed by Russia with 890,000 people in the slammer, the study said.

America also has the dubious distinction of leading the planet in the rate of incarceration, which is higher than nations like South Africa and Iran, the study said.

(continued...)

This is obviously a subject i'm very passionate about. A friend of mine and i talked about this briefly and he questioned what the results would be if you exclude all "white" people. Sad but true.

What bothers me the most about this is how do we as Americans allow this to happen? Are we so blinded by fear that we believe "criminal" is an ax wielding maniac who is going to loot and pillage because they've been convicted of a crime? Have we bought into the whole "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality that we would rather live in a police state than actually show empathy towards a fellow human?

This being an election year, one of the reoccurring issues is how a candidate deals with crime. Candidates will bend over backwards in local elections to demonstrate that they are "tough" on crime. Heaven forbid if they ever showed any leniency in the past. Ironically, these are the same people that we as citizens will be begging for leniency from if/when we find ourselves caught within the judicial system.

What's most disturbing about this news is that it reflects our society today. As wide spread as the results of this study have been, I have seen no attempts to put it in context. How exactly has the US gotten to this point? It's not as though we collectively locked up that large of a portion of our population over night. The reality is that these results took years to attain. An undeniably large factor in these total incarceration numbers is the Federal Sentencing Guidelines which have recently been recently overturned. The fact that one in 100 US adults is currently behind bars has been over 20 years in the making.

My biggest fear is that people will be too shortsighted to truly grasp the bigger picture. The knee jerk reaction that we collectively have is "we should do something about this." The problem is, in a couple days we will watch the news and hear about how a young black male shot someone while robbing a liquor store and only received 18 months in jail despite their history of being violent. The belief that this "menace" should be "locked up in order to make our streets safe" becomes everyones new attitude. Never once is it mentioned that this alleged menace has a history of substance abuse, physical/sexual/psychological abuse, and that this individuals father is currently incarcerated for 10 years for possession with intent to distribute (drug dealing) courtesy of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

After reading the article in question, I ask that you ask yourself why these numbers are so steep. As frightening as they are, now I ask that you consider the number of people that are on extended supervision (parole, probation, work release, or pending trial/conviction/sentencing).

Do the math.

Advertisements

Yep, i sold out. Thought i'd give it a shot to have an ad on my page to see what happens. This is currently an experiment of mine. Since i know virtually nothing about online advertising, costs, compensation, rates, etc this will be a learning experience. Any/all ads will be removed if enough people complain or if they become intrusive to my content.

With that being said, let the games begin!