M-Day is here

About four and a half to five hours from now, a 24' moving truck should roll up at our front door.  I will be spending the intervening time trying to box up as much of the remaining odds and ends as I can, and breaking down furniture that breaks down (which at this point basically means my desk, cymrullewes' desk, our bed, and taking the legs off the dining room table).  I will also, before too very much longer, be shutting down the last remaining computers.¹

We have phone service at the new house, we just don't have working phones there yet.  Not one of the phone jacks actually has dial tone on it, though Verizon swears our new phone number is active and connected (and it does in fact get a ringing tone when I dial it).  I anticipate having to fix the internal wiring to the jacks² myself, or have a phone tech come in and make them work.  I'll be calling Verizon myself in a little bit, after they open at 0800, to see if they'll get at least one jack working for free.

(They can give us overlapping phone service here and at the new house.  I completely fail to see why they can't give us overlapping DSL service as well, but they say they have to have two days' downtime to make the switchover.  I interpret this as another manifestation of Telcos Still Don't Really "Get" Data Services.)

[1]  As I write, only babylon5, minbar, nijo and yama are still up.  Of those, yama is the router and firewall, and nijo is the primary nameserver, so I can't really shut them down yet.  And minbar?  Dude, minbar is the NFS server.  I shut that down now, there's no tunes!

[2]  The owners of the house apparently had at least three phone lines coming into the house, and it appears the Verizon tech hooked up the line on the one remaining available pair (of the normal four) not connected to any of the existing jacks.  That, or the inside wiring is just completely fubared.

Latest recruiter to blow smoke up my ass

"Having most of these skills makes you a good match for the role," says the recruiter who emailed me this morning.  What role?  "Senior-Principal Device Driver Software Engineer."  Uh ... OK, what skills?

• Six or more years writing device drivers for Ethernet switches
• Hands-on proficiency in layer 2/layer 3 switching
• Familiarity with MCP854x processors
• Experience with writing drivers for large Ethernet Switch FPGA's [sic] or ASIC's [sic], including writing shim APIs
• Ability to troubleshoot complex routing/MPLS/L2/L3 problems and debug protocol and data-path problems
• Skilled in C, RTOS VxWorks and Tornado
• Familiar with IXIA and Smartbits

Needless to say, I have NONE of the above experience, although there are a small handful of keywords in common.  OK, I have some proficiency in C, and I've poked around and fixed bugs in a couple of pre-existing device drivers ... but, really, that's the extent of the overlap between my skillset and what he's looking for.

I wonder if any of these headhunters whose idea of matching skillsets consists of doing a search for a few poorly-chosen keywords, followed by either not actually reading the resulting resume hits or being unable to understand the big words in them, have ever considered what it does to their credibility to constantly waste people's time with positions for which they are obviously totally unsuited.  Those of us who have a good idea of what our actual skill sets and experience really are don't appreciate having smoke blown up our asses.

Maybe this is how incompetent boobs like Mike Brown end up in charge of FEMA.  Or, for that matter, how incompetent boobs like George W. Bush end up at the helm of the three or four corporations he rode into the ground before moving on to bigger and better failures.

Moving blues

I've been up and down the stairs far too many times already today.  My knees ache and my left foot hurts.  And it's not nearly over yet.

Break-time revelations

Or, "Who said breast implants are bad for you?"

"My breast implants saved my life."

"Honey, trust me, if your man doesn't like your boobs the way they grew, there's always another man who does."

"No, I'm serious.  I didn't say they saved my relationship.  I said they saved my LIFE."

(You heard it here first.  Unless you're on the NEDoD list.)