8:30 PM Good evening - or more likely, morning. Hope you all had a good weekend. I did, I think... the only problem is that like all weekends, it was followed by a Monday. Bleh.

The Great Job Hunt continues, slowly. It's terribly frustrating; days spent waiting for a few hours of frantic activity. Still, at least it IS proceeding.

Had a long conversation with Tom tonight, and a very enlightening conversation it was, too. In between the smartass comments and other trivia, we discussed something that really got me thinking. Why am I doing things this way?

I mean, think about it. I'm working with people I've never met and don't really like, as a rule - headhunters, recruiters, demonspawn, call them what you will - in hopes that they will fairly and accurately represent me to these other people I've never met, in hopes that I can find a job. I do this, for the first few steps at least, all without talking to a single person other than through the keyboard.

On top of that, I'm a professional sysadmin who prefers to work in small, adaptive, young environments. Ergo, startups. So what it all boils down to is that I'm trusting people I don't know and don't like in hopes of landing a job with a company that's most likely never going to make a profit, and if the statistics are to be believed, will likely no longer exist in three years. Almost enough to make me check for the men in the white lab coats, they must be around somewhere - I'd like the happy pills now please, nurse, the last dose seems to be wearing off.

So why do we do it? Why don't I simply deal directly with the companies? Or at the very least, only deal with recruiters I like and trust - individually?

The answer, like the answer to the old question about profits on a loss-making company, is simple - VOLUME!!

I can't possibly hope to match the number of companies I get submitted to if I only go the direct route. Granted, a much higher percentage of the companies I do contact will be interested. But I won't hit nearly as many. They can hit so many more than I can, in fact, that as crazy as it seems, I'm actually much better off trusting these nutcases.

It's like nuclear power vs. a wood stove. I can cut wood, place it in the stove, and burn it; I get a fair amount of energy from that, enough to boil water for a meal. And it's pretty efficient, in my terms; I cut one piece of wood (OK, more likely two or three, but that's not the point) and I get a direct return from all of it. I put in three logs, I get the heat I need, job finished.

The nuke plant, on the other hand, is woefully inefficient, from this point of view. I put in say 400 grams of Pu238; when the reaction is completed, I pull out probably 399.99999 g of nearly pure Pu238. The remaining mass is converted to energy; enough energy to boil a thousand dinners, and irradiate every earthworm for fifty meters for good measure. From the standpoint of useful material vs. wasted effort, the logs were much more efficient; but I only cooked one meal.

So what happens next? I've already replaced the job search process with faceless people I will almost certainly never meet; efficiency is out the window, in the sense that 99% of the companies that now get my resume won't have any use for it other than bird cage lining. That remaining 1%, though, is ever so much larger than the amount of companies I could have hoped to contact. So what comes next?

Will my boss be one day replaced by a faceless person on the other end of a fiber optic cable who manages 1000 admins? Instead of going to a grocery store and selecting the items I need, will I put out a general notice that I need groceries - and get a thousand pre-made lists that the various creators guess might fit my needs?

Send me a thousand random guesses, and let's see how it turns out... <SEG>

12:00 PM Greetings. There's a long post up for Monday with lots of rambling thoughts on irrelevant ideas. My normal fare, in other words.

Did I mention I hate sitting on the phone waiting for other people? Don't they realize how important I am? <SEG> Still, I suppose I should be grateful that's it's moving at all. Sigh.

For a sign of just how insane I am, let's look at the playlist for the stereo today... hmm... eclectic, to say the least. Rage Against the Machine. Then there's the soundtrack from the Matrix; lots of techno, no lyrics, a good "working" CD. Followed by the soundtrack from the Thomas Crown Affair; mostly instrumental Jazz, plus some lighter piano & bells kind of stuff, and a good recording of "Sinnerman" by Nina Simone. A little light rock after that, mostly eighties, and Beethoven's Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth thrown in for good measure. Oh yeah - add in "Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell II", some Wierd Al, selections from the "South Park" soundtrack (there's actually some funny stuff in there; the show mostly annoys me, but some the songs are hilarious) and Vanessa Mae, an interesting CD of hard-rock violin. All playing randomly, so that I just listened to Meatloaf (Life is a Lemon (and I want my money back)), followed with Beethoven's Seventh, then Rage Against the Machine (Wake Up), Lita Ford (Kiss Me Deadly), and currently spinning out of the speakers is Vanessa-Mae (Tequila Mockingbird). Next on the playlist is Nine Inch Nails (Head Like a Hole). And people wonder how I got this way...

Today was spent on the phone. My ear hurts.

10:30 AM And it STILL hurts. Geez. Lots of time spent on the phone yesterday.

One funny thing happened yesterday; I got a phone call (there it is again!) from a recruiter who called himself "Demonspawn." Yup, a reader who is also a recruiter. Hi Demonspawn! <G>

Enough of that. Time for some technical details.

I spent part of yesterday and this morning working on some older computers for Keri's office; nothing fancy, just some hard drive swapping and RAM upgrades to some old 486 and Pentium computers. No, it wouldn't normally have been worth the cost of the upgrades; in this case, though, all the parts came from the church's boneyard, so the cost was $0. And the machines being upgraded are sufficiently low priority that it's not worth replacing the machines. In exchange for the work - maybe three hours, all told - I picked up a free machine, a 200 Mhz OverDrive machine with 24 MB of RAM. It's in a full tower, an older AT box, with an acceptable video card, a total of 2 GB of disk space, and no CD-ROM drive. One of those old dual-slot floppy drives, with 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 drives in one bay. The machine's in good shape, it used to be a server with some SCSI drives that aren't in the box any longer. I'm going to add an extra network card and it's going to replace DORA, my firewall box, so that I can use DORA as a Linux workstation.

There's three things that have to be accomplished to do this; first, I have to get Linux installed on this new box. Then I have to reconfigure the security on it, and make sure it will do everything I want it to. Finally, I have to remove Dora and put the new machine in its place. There's some complication to all this, because my Cable provider chacks MAC addresses. So I need the network card from DORA, but at the same time I don't want the loss of downtime. I think I have another card of the same type - it's an old 3COM 3c590 - so I can use that to install and then replace the cards when I make the switch. No big deal.

The other problem is that the new machine has no CD-ROM. I don't want to add one; when's it ever going to need one? I don't even know if I have a spare anywhere. So this is going to be my first attempt at an FTP installation. I have a cable modem with very few people on my "neighborhood," so it shouldn't be too horribly slow, and it's a new expererience for me - I've always had a CD available. Time to troll through Brian's site and see if I can find his report on it. Since I'll be using his report, I doubt I'll make one of my own unless I find something seriously different with mine.

Next question - distro. My favorite is Mandrake, but in this case it's not really necessary; the processor is an OverDrive, which if I remember correctly means 386 chipset rather than 586, and besides, this box is never going to do anything fancy; the kernel, a firewall, and maybe some experimentation with Apache and Sendmail. RedHat? Slackware? Debian? SuSe? Shoot, if it's an FTP it could be anything; I don't have to rely on my current crop of CDs.

Oh, yes, and another detail; someone pointed out that I don't have a list of my machines. True. At Zanova, my machines - other than my main workstation - changed so frequently that there was little means of keeping track. Right now, though, I have three machines, with a fourth in the works.

• DORA - Cyrix P166, 92MB of RAM, 6.4 GB hard drive, 8x CD-ROM, SoundBlaster, Trident 64V video card. Soon to be rebuilt and name changed.
• PIXEL - Keri's machine. A Gateway G6-266, 266 Mhz PII, 10 GB Maxtor HD, 5x DVD-ROM, and built-in video and audio, both more than Good Enough for normal use and DVDs. Also houses an internal ZIP drive and our X10 light controller.
• PLUTO - The new box mentioned above. Will replace DORA as the firewall.
• MINERVA - My main workstation. Currently non-existent, but that's what my machine is always named. Heinlein fans will notice a trend. <SEG>

Hmm. New wrinkle. What I'd REALLY like to do to build this new box is boot to a floppy, load a minimal kernel, log in via TELNET, rather than console, and go to work on the real install. That could be tricky. Might have to see what I can do. Later.