A semi-repeat from last year, when I aimed to read one book per month, I’ve set a goal for 2010 to read fifteen books, which seems/feels a tad ambitious. These are the first eight in my pile for the year:
Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:
Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:
Two books in a week… had last January started this way, I would have been done with my 2009 reading by Valentine’s Day with room to spare. Sadly, not all books are as quick and interesting as Tom Brown’s The Wormwood Archive. Tom is a local (to my in-laws) author writing a set of structured criticisms of his home church’s rise to megachurch standing. This would probably be boring on its own, but Tom follows C.S. Lewis‘ epistolary style, and pens his thoughts as letters by or to Wormwood, as found in The Screwtape Letters.
Tom’s church underwent a transformation into a megachurch over the course of a few years. The transformation seems to have followed the methods produced by the Willow Creek Association, shifting its focus from its traditional, family-focused roots toward more contemporary, performance-driven styles of worship aimed at younger, more casaul seekers. Tom’s criticisms certainly are not the first of Willow Creek and their methods, but his hit a bit closer to home, having lived through the transition as a lay leader in a once happy, family-like congregation. Since Willow Creek’s admission a couple of years ago that they might have done it wrong, the criticisms seem more poignant.
To me, however, Tom’s criticisms of his fictionalized self are the most interesting part of the book. He characterizes his own weaknesses as possible in-roads for negative persuasion by “Wormwood” and his minions. This level of honesty and objectivity, while criticizing what has been your faith home for so many years, cannot have been the most trivial of tasks. There is a strong sense of humility, even within such an obviously critical work.
Overall, this was an excellent book, and even if you haven’t read The Screwtape Letters, it’s quite a good read.
When my wife and I bought our home, we knew that at some point, there would be semi-serious things we’d want to change about it. The yard, for instance, was a huge sore spot. If you followed me on twitter last spring, you’d know that the initial work we did involved tilling, which really sucked, and that was only for the first 1000 square feet. Of an acre.
Yeah. We hired people with really, really big machines to clear the rest.
Anyway, having (thankfully) already passed that milestone, the attention turned to the kitchen. Our stove is of normal size, but it’s primary burner is flaky to the point of useless, it has a huge exhaust fan that sticks out too far and too low. The oven has but a single rack, and no matter who I ask, there seem to be no replacement racks. So, guess what we’re replacing first? Yes, that’s right: The dishwasher.
Er, no, wait. The stove. Right, the stove.
The existing stove is on a 40A/240V, 2-pole circuit. This is about as normal as you can get for an electric range, though I seriously doubt we ever pull more than 20-25 Amps, save maybe when pre-heating the oven to broil. The new stove, of course, needs a 50 Amp circuit. I know enough about electrical wiring to know that I can probably pull off replacing the breaker myself. Buying the right one, on the other hand, well that’s another story.
My electrical panel is a standard-size Siemens panel for a 200 Amp service. I even have a couple of empty breaker bays for expansion, should I need to do so. I figured, Siemens is a well-known brand, there have to be breakers for it at Lowe’s, except that I was wrong. I phoned the family electric guru and it was suggested that I buy a Square-D breaker. It should fit.
I love the word “should”. See, the breaker does fit, but it violates electric code to mis-match your breaker. (Nice corner on the market each of these electrical companies have, you see.) While I don’t really care all that much about electric code when it comes to something that isn’t actually risky, I do care when it comes to selling my house some day. I’d prefer to not do this twice.
All of my existing breakers are either Westinghouse or Siemens. Turns out that Siemens AG licensed or something-ed their residential power generation business to Westinghouse Electric at some point, and in 1994, Westinghouse sold its electrical controls business to Eaton, who markets their home products under the name Cutler-Hammer. Which is only sold at Home Depot.
All of this, by the way, is the real reason that people spend money on electricians. Not the danger, mind you, just to avoid standing in the electrical aisle looking like an idiot until a random electrician walks by and says “You’re in the wrong store. Go to Home Depot.” and then runs away before the Lowe’s employees catch him.
I wrote this about two months ago and completely forgot about it. Oops. Since then, we’ve done way more to this kitchen than I had originally intended at the time. I’m certain that a future buyer will be very happy with the choices we’ve made, but really what I care about now is that the WAF is very high.
I wrote this several months ago after a particularly annoying set of calls with a “recruiter” from a local staffing firm. At the time, I was helping another team in my division interview candidates for a Senior Developer with exceptionally strong JavaScript skills. In one particular month, the same recruiter called me four or five times, each time using a different name from the same “services” firm. It is entirely possible that he actually was someone new each time, but each call sounded the same to me. Every time my response was nearly identical:
I don’t make financial decisions related to hiring, so I’m not in a position to hear about recruiting services, nor do I have any interest, but thank you anyway.
Each time, he kept talking.
Dude. I know you’re just doing your job, but you’re doing it wrong.
As a hiring manager, I have a strong personal distaste for recruiting firms and staffing agencies. I know that sometimes, these services are necessary in order to find the right candidate for a specialized position, to find a short-term whiz to save the day on a tough project, etc. I have nothing against recruiting companies that are working for me. I am, of course, notably complacent when it comes to the one time I needed a staffing firm in order to find gainful employment. That experience was incredibly painless, having met a representative from the firm at a job fair and starting work the next week.
No, this sort of experience has nothing to do with what ails me. Instead, my beef has to do with the cold calls from folks I’ll refer to as Job Sales Engineers, or JSEs for short. I absolutely will not paint them with the same brush as I do the recruiters I work with on a more regular basis inside of my company for the primary reason that the technical recruiters in the office are pretty darn good, and it would do them a serious disservice to be categorized in such a way.
So, Rant on:
Every JSE I speak to, which is currently averaging one every two weeks or so, has about 20% of the technical knowledge required to find the right candidate for a position. So, when the recruiting department posts a job saying that we’re looking for a Senior Web Developer with experience integrating a Java Applet with a JavaScript-driven user interface, and the recruiter calls and thinks that their ASP.Net candidate with the term “AJAX” on their résumé is qualified, I hang up on them. It’s not even the platform disparities that are so bothersome, it’s that they don’t know what these terms mean. Here I am, looking for someone who can sub-class a language (whose object-oriented nature is basically a hack) in their sleep, and a recruiter toddles around each word.
Yes, the irony of using an acronym to complain about someone using acronyms is not lost on me…
Every call starts with something like “I see you are looking for a web developer. I have a candidate coming out of XYZ Blue Chip Company. He’s got Struts, AJAX, HTML, XML, Oracle and SQL…” Ok first of all, why do I care that he has both Oracle and SQL experience? The syntactical differences between PL-SQL and SQL (I’m presuming SQL92 unless they’re using a new revision of an engine which supports one of the later standards) are insignificant enough for a developer who isn’t solely a database developer, that no one should ever put both of them on a skills list. I could possibly consider them individually important if you’d been responsible for writing specialized database connectivity modules. Then again, if you’re listing AJAX without mentioning JavaScript, what exactly do you mean?
Secondly, brevity is just as important on the phone as it is on a résumé! Tell me what the person DID. Say “I have a candidate who just finished a very successful cross-functional project utilizing similar technologies to the ones listed in your posting. They have a long track record of delivering quality work on time.” That might catch my attention, should I be in the position to care. Heck, I know a guy whose nickname was something like “the bugless wonder”. If you’ve got someone like him, tell me about that.
This shouldn’t even be an issue. Even the most tenacious, annoying salesperson knows that the best way to make a sale is to use an existing relationship to get you in the door and into the front of someone’s mind. Recruiters don’t do that, and if they’re trying to, they do a terrible job of crafting that initial relationship. You’re going to have to convince me to talk to you, so why not buy me a cup of coffee? You have until I finish drinking it to convince me I should ever want to pick up the phone again.
Careful, though, I can drop a cup of coffee in seconds, so talk fast.
This usually manifests itself in an obvious data-mining of LinkedIn without regard for the appropriate person to call. I’m sure many sales folks do things like this as well. They need to find any “in” and I can’t entirely knock the tactic in theory. In practice, though, it’s a waste of my time to talk to you, so don’t call me. That’s why my LinkedIn contact settings explicitly say “Please do not contact me on behalf of recruiting or third-party services for my company.” READ IT!
On top of that, I’m not the development manager. Nuance is a publically traded software company with thousands of employees. We have more than one division. There isn’t one “development manager”. I mean, I’m flattered that you think someone of my tenure could run such a vast empire of developers across several countries, but seriously? Flattery won’t make me want to listen to you, it just tells me you didn’t do your homework.
Besides, Nuance has an entire recruiting staff of its own to do the dirty workawesome task of finding candidates for open jobs — the “hiring managers” are only called that because they have positions to be filled, and get involved in the process once candidates are selected. Our recruiters do a pretty solid job at finding leads once they fully grok the position, which only adds to my annoyance that independent recruiters call me directly to try to get a foot in the door here.
Since writing this several months back, I’m down to about one call every six to eight weeks, which is tolerable. One of our in-house recruiters told me to transfer said calls right to him. Ever since I think they figured out that my easy out makes me a bad mark.
This is perfectly fine by me.
Image courtesy of us (design studio)’s Human Chicken project
I’ve been working on Jesus For President since early October, having received it for my birthday a couple of weeks beforehand from my dad. My initial impression was something along the lines of “wow, this book sure looks cool!”, and while that impression surely stuck for the next few hundred pages, it was merely a sub-text for a book filled with in-your-face analyses of Judeo-Christian history and sharp challenges as to what true discipleship means as a follower of Christ.
The authors, Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, walk through the socio-political history of God’s Word(s) from Genesis to Revelation, and use it as a framework for discussing discipleship in the present tense. I spent much of the book thinking I’d approached parts of my life woefully backwards, and other parts of the book thinking “this is what I was raised to think – why does it feel so new?”.
Shane and Chris spin an excellent yarn here, and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in digging deeper into their walk with/for Christ. There is a lot more to say about this book, but my words would not do it justice. I do think, however, that I may read it again in a few months as a refresher.
Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:
I have got to try this. It’s minimal and really, really smart.
I tried this with Swiss Miss No Sugar Added powdered cocoa and Bigelow’s Mint tea in a bag to see if you could get any results with cheap (or free, since it was from the office) materials. You know what? It was actually really tasty. I’m going to have to give Early Grey a shot next!
I’m perilously behind on my goal of reading a book a month this year. This one almost feels like a cop-out, but really, I read (almost all the way) through this entire 200 page book in an afternoon over Thanksgiving weekend. Admittedly, I skipped a chapter that I couldn’t care less about, but we’ll count it anyway.
Jay Rossier’s Living With Chickens gives a great overview on raising these creatures, be they for food (meat), food (eggs) or fun (as pets). I can’t imagine folks keeping them as pets, but as I start to think more and more about living sustainably, I feel a draw towards raising a small flock for a regular supply of eggs. I even looked at some interesting coop designs over at Backyard Chickens. It looks like fun to raise chickens!
On the other hand, it also looks like a TON of work. I have a toddler. Gosh, that’s enough work by itself, and I’m in the office 50+ hours per week! Maybe the chickens will wait a few years.
I’m 3/4 of the way through the book I really should be posting about, Jesus For President, which my dad sent me for my birthday this year. I’ll probably write way too much about it when the time comes, so until then…
The public is never wrong. When people don’t respond to what you do, they’re telling you something loud and clear. You’re just not listening.
~ Fifty Cent
As silly as this might sound, this is from a really great post over at copyblogger.
