January, 2, 2003 archives

i have roughly a bazillion little ideas and projects floating around. one is to figure out a good way to have ezmlm store (un)subscribe requests (and confirmations) to make it easy to track down what happened when someone got subscribed mysteriously. (actually, a lot of my little ideas involve logging and otherwise storing more information. figuring out ways to mine the collected data can often come later.)

if i'm quiet about it, will people notice the new feature on blo.gs? (i mean, besides the fact that pings work after being broken for the better part of the last week.)

the folks behind gawker and gizmodo are looking for a software/hardware engineer. too bad i'm happily employed (and wouldn't really be eager to relocate to nyc), it sounds like they're doing neat stuff.

i saw catch me if you can over the holidays, which was an enjoyable movie that was overshadowed by its brilliant opening credits. tom hanks' role was underdeveloped, jennifer garner's cameo felt tacked on, and the pretending-to-be-a-doctor-using-quotes-from-watching-television was just too clichéd. (but don't get me wrong, i did enjoy the movie—i just wish it were better. i think that's one of the defining qualities of a spielberg film.)

(side note: who the heck are these people? once upon a time, i entered all the info for this game, from the credits, but i had some problem submitting it. i still have the issue of entertainment weekly that called this one of the worst five multimedia products of 1996. i'm so proud. the next company i worked for ended up in some magazine's top-100 worst ideas list.)

meg laments the quality of some of the responses to the job posting that i linked to earlier. i always had fun going through submitted resumés, since it was easy enough to set a low threshold for when to simply toss the bad ones. longer than one page? gone. typos? gone. can't get a good sense of what the person actually did at previous jobs after fifteen seconds? gone. stupid objectives section? gone. (tip: leave out the objectives. everybody knows you're lying.)

while i've been involved with hiring some people that blindly submitted resumés, all of the (post-college) jobs i've had have been the result of various connections. (which is pretty remarkable, given how loosely connected i am.)

• international: the jhai foundation: remote it village project (thanks to various bloggers, all traceable back to danny o’brien)
• national: computer professionals for social responsibility (an international organization, strictly speaking, but us-based)
• local: the los angeles free clinic

no, i did not skip a month. i used to make my donations at the beginning of the month for the preceding month, but i decided that it makes more sense to label things for the month the donation happens.

.net messenger service isn't particularly bot-friendly. for the other major services (icq, aim, yahoo!), you can just fire off a message, but the .net system requires that you call the intended recipient before sending the message. nuts to that.

i guess quentin tarantino has come back from the dead to make kill bill. i can't decide if the trailer looks cool, or like a parody of a trailer for a quentin tarantino film.