A Case of Stolen Identity

Not to be confused with "stolen identity" in the more literal identity theft use of hte phrase, but rather the stolen identity that is my job description. Allow me to tell you the quick little story:

I was hired by my current DC employer to continue to do e-learning along with some drupal work. I couldn't have been more excited.

Once I arrived, it appeared that there was nothing to work on. Most of the projects went on hold.

A couple of days later my boss sat me down to cast his vision where I would not be writing much code but rather I would be working on networking and setting up servers for project management and showing them how to use that equipment (snore... but maybe this is just to fill in the down time.)

Then the VP in this part of the company dropped by my office and asked if I did any "Classic ASP" to which I replied, "Sure. But nobody has done serious ASP development in... what... 5 years, 10 years?" Ends up there are elements of the government that still have Classic ASP (not .NET) sites running and those projects need to get updated.

Jump to week 2 with 107 hours under my belt (do the math... in a reasonable world that number should be under 80 for less than 2 weeks) and realize that I am still on this project and working with no end in site in Classic ASP.

Now, today, I am back in the original (new) office entering all of my time. My new boss greets me like it is my first day ("Hi! Welcome to our company!" ... this is supposed to be humor as if to say "Who are you again? You are never here." ... but that isn't my choice either.) He sits down with me and starts to chat about stuff he wants me to work on soon (more server stuff, no Flash stuff, more LMS stuff.) In walks the VP that put me over to that Classic ASP project in the other location. This turns into a discussion / argument where my boss is wanted to get me back in the office to focus on building new servers while the VP wants me working on the Classic ASP stuff so that the contract client wants to hire us for more work going forward. Yikes!

My boss says, "Well, I would like to get him back here and working on the stuff that we hired him to do."

Enter: the issue of identity theft. He wants to get me back there to work on stuff "that we hired him to do" yet, none of the stuff he wants me to do has anything to do with the stuff that was discussed with me when I was interviewed. My professional identity has been completely hijacked!

What are the lessons for me, from this:

1. Don't leave skills in your resume that you don't want to do.
2. If you are being hired to do a certain job, ask the obvious questions, like...
   "So, I can expect to actually do 'multimedia development' right?"
   
3. If your new employer completely switches your job title on you, then do market research and be sure they are paying you appropriately for the new responsibilities.

These are my lessons.

My mac can fix anything

So as many of you may now know, I am recent convert from the Windows world to the mac world and so far so good. I have loaded it up with quite a bit of software and as well with parallels so I can run Vista inside OS X, and this seems to be working for me quite well. At this point I am having less of an excuse to even boot up my other computers since the mac seems to out-perform my other equipment (even though my other equipment is equal to it in power, and in some cases, like ram, is more equipt than the mac.)

Even with all of these wonderful suprises, recently I came across a feature on the mac that completely floored me! I was checking my email and fiddling with the settings of the email list view to see what other sorting columns I could display and lo-and-behold there was the command to end all other commands. The Barack Obama of commands!

"Restore Natural Order"!

Never once under my Windows email solution did it offer to fix the state of the universe. I really need to get a hold of Congress and tell them that my mac can fix this whole economy thing. In a single click I can boost the paychecks of teachers, bring peace to the Middle East, put parents back in charge of their homes, reduce the influence of Hollywood on society and ensure that politicians be held to their word (or at least to the earliest version of their word.)

I am affraid to press the the command, because with great power comes great responsibility, and I am not sure that all of that change all at once would actually be well-received or even comfortable. But sometimes you have to do your duty and click that thing to make things right again. I've made up my mind. I am going to go ahead and press. Here we go!?

...ah....

I don't think anything changed. A few things got moved around a little bit, but my email is still in disarray, not to mention the economy and the Middle East. Actually, it "fixed" a bunch of stuff that wasn't really broken. Man! What a mess. I guess it ends up that this, like Obama, isn't the answer to these problems. Oh well. Ends up I will have to personally get involved if I want to straighten out the economy, the Middle East, or my email. What a disappointment. I thought for sure, if I just selected this option, stuff would be better. Hmmm?

Maybe I am wrong. Add a comment and tell me if your world got a whole lot better when I clicked the command?

Vistified

Check this out: http://mojaveexperiment.com/

After you watch the intro video all of the videos in the background are available for additional viewing. Funny stuff!

As a related side note, the other day I finally fiddled with my laptop and took a look at what was loading at the start. The cool thing was that windows logs in vista show you the gap between the core load time and the remainder of load time caused by other software appending itself to the startup process. For example, once I pulled all of the iTunes/iPod related stuff from the startup, the laptop booted twice as fast. When I pulled some Adobe stuff out, turned off MS SQL Server on boot up (as a developer it is nice to have it when I need it, but I can click it to start it and don’t need it running all of the time) and pulled a few other offending apps out of the startup, my boot time went from 4 minutes to 1min 30sec. There is more I can do but I haven’t done it yet.

That is clearly an issue with Vista, being able to start a bunch of stuff at boot time. They let people hook into that process, which in some cases is critical (for example, you would want SQL Server to have started on boot up even if you are not logged in if you are running a server.) So technically it is a feature of the system to allow software to do that… BUT it makes no sense that software like, ObjectDock (which creates that mac like docking taskbar for Windows) has to load before delivering the desktop in general.

The smart next move for Microsoft was creating an option for loading services AFTER boot, which means that even though I am starting to fiddle, like open a browser or check my email, the OS can continue to load services. Interestingly enough, my home PC since Vista, Service Pack 1, hasn’t continued to exhibit any buggy behavior. I would say it is the most solid windows OS so far.

So... I am happy to see that Microsoft is finally doing something about the ad campaign leveraged against it by Apple. I have no problems with the Apple ads (I think they are hilarious) or Apple Corp (I like their products well enough having invested, to date, about $800 in iPod devices not to mention the money invested in iTunes downloads.) So this isn't about Apple bashing. It is about seperating the "marketing experience" from the real experience, and I think that will begin to happen now for Vista.

Long time coming.