We are getting into one of my favorite months out of the year, October. It’s the beginning of autumn in earnest and it also has one of my favorite holidays, Halloween. While Halloween has traditionally been about celebrating the macabre, today it is mostly about a lot of fun and children losing their minds from…
The Cloud and the Death of Professional IT
The cloud is really killing information technology jobs and consolidating the more lucrative ones in the hands of a few large data centers. The cloud has made a lot of System Administrator and Engineer job go by the wayside. What used to be very technically complex has been reduced to simplicity by large cloud providers…
Professional Double Standards
I am writing this blog posting out of real and palpable frustration. Employers expect us to behave professionally at all times from the interview process through potential employment and beyond. However, rarely is the same professional courtesy returned. This morning I was supposed to have a technical telephone interview and it never materialized. I waited…
Information Technology Recruiters
This blog posting is going to come off as somewhat prejudicial but it represents my frustrating experience. I put my resume up on Indeed and it seems like it’s hit the radar of every Indian IT recruiter out in cyberspace. Not one single solitary time has an Indian recruiter ever netted me so much as…
Spectacles of Ancient Rome and Modern America
I cannot help but see strong parallels between Ancient Rome and Modern America along the lines of the notorious spectacle. For those unfamiliar, Ancient Rome, under the leadership of emperors like Commodus and Caligula, held brutal gladiator competitions which featured violence and killing. Ostensibly, the masses watching these spectacles were cheering on the death of…
A Public Housing Option
Housing instability and insecurity is a major problem for America. We can no longer pretend that, in the wealthiest nation in history, there are people that live on the streets in tents and campers. Some of America’s homeless are not even fortunate enough to have those and end up sleeping on the streets without even…
American Horror Story
I realize that America Horror Story is not the newest show out there, nevertheless, it is new to me. All I can really say is, “Wow! Why haven’t I discovered this before?” I am currently on Season 2, Asylum. To say that this season is creepy is to vastly understate it. I think it’s probably…
The Purge as Social Commentary
For those of my readers that are unfamiliar, The Purge is both a movie franchise and a TV show created by James DeMonaco. The basic premise of the story revolves around one night a year where all crime, including murder, is legal. However certain members of the ruling party, the “New Founding Fathers of America,”…
An Observation About America
I have recently begun to notice America starting to resemble Brazil. For those unfamiliar, Brazil has extreme income inequality. In major cities like Sao Paulo, there are parts that are called favelas. In Portuguese, the word favela, roughly translates to slum or shanty towns. The favelas represent Brazil’s desperately poor underclass. I am starting to…
Microsoft Outlook and Spam
So I discovered today that Microsoft’s Outlook Web Email service labels messages composed in plain text as spam and continues to do so even if the recipient has specifically marked the message as not being spam. Additionally, the plain text email message has been signed with Domain Keys, the sender domain has a proper SPF…