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MichaelCrawford

1,159 karma · joined June 22, 2013

I am the Technical Co-Founder of a Stealth-Mode Software Startup.

We expect to retain a few consultants towards the end of the year, if things go well we will hire some W-2 employees in Spring of 2016.

If you'd like to work for us, whether as a consultant or employee, please mail your dead-tree cover letter and resume to:

   Michael David Crawford
   650 NW Irving St
   Portland OR 97209-1272
   USA
We're mostly cool with remote work; that is, some of our projects must be done on site but most don't need that.

Consultants may send brochures or other marketing lit rather than their resumes. If you are a consultant, really a trifold brochure is far, far better than a resume and cover letter.

While I cannot guarantee response of any sort, to the very best of my ability I _will_ reply. If I don't think we could possibly extend you an offer, I may be able to suggest someone else who could.

I won't ask you to do any coding outside your interview. I myself regard coding challenges as unpaid labor. My decision to pursue this startup had a lot to do with my decision to boycott coding challenges.

Wish us luck: most new business fail within the first five years.

submissionscomments
MichaelCrawford··on Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore
I dont know from Cordova but a former employer bet the far on Solr without evaluating in any way. When I tried a search for solr sucks I got 600,000 hits. No one ever answered my questions on stackoverflow.
MichaelCrawford··on Ask HN: I knocked my housemate's iPad on the floor. Should I tell her?
Suppose you had to purchase her a new iPad. What would that cost?

Now suppose you didnt tell her. Even were it undamaged what would that cost you?

If we lose our self respect we have nothing.

MichaelCrawford··on Apply to jobs from different job boards with a single click
I link to the Jobs or Carers section of each company that I list at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/. Most companies post only a few of their jobs on the boards.

My Seattle and Portland area pages are most comprehensive.

I dont have a feed yet but my markup is quite simple; however the markup of most of the employer sites is a steaming pile.

MichaelCrawford··on Ask HN: Is shareware dead?
Among the problems is that "the channel" has squeezed out shareware.

The channel is the path from developer to end-user. At one time, one had to purchase hookers and blow for the distributors. In some respects the app stores are helpful but I regard them as eliminating our ability to determine our own destinies.

MichaelCrawford··on Essays about bootstrapped startups
Re you any relation to Binky Melnik? zshe's from Massachusetts, once worked at Apple and now lives in New York City.
MichaelCrawford··on Ask HN: What tech blogs, podcasts do you follow outside of HN?
Kuro5hin's alexa rank is about 300,000 also many stories have significant pagerank. One can see from google trends that k5 is a popular site to read, but the five dollar one-time troll suppression fee discourages new members.
MichaelCrawford··on Ask HN: What is best way to get clients for technical consulting?
Market Yourself: Tips for High-Tech Consultants

http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/market-yourself.html

MichaelCrawford··on Ask HN: What tech blogs, podcasts do you follow outside of HN?
http://www.kuro5hin.org/section/Diary
MichaelCrawford··on Why feminists are so annoying
I know a woman whose husband divorced her because she had a totally senseless affair with her best friend's husband.
MichaelCrawford··on I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Matlab… (2013)
Funny that. From time to time since 2008 or so I have tried to learn LaTex but always I get Lost while attempting yetbstrictly speaking failing to read the fine manual.

I was very excited to find abLaatex resume template, thats the main reason I want to use LaTex. mBut it didnt make muchnsense to me.

Its not like I cant read instructions or am unwilling to, its that the instructions for some things are so burdensome to read that I often choose to do without.

MichaelCrawford··on Ask HN: Companies That Use Take Home Projects for Interviews?
I have a hard time with whiteboards too. What works well for me but is uncommon, is to be left alone with a pencil and paper.
MichaelCrawford··on Ask HN: Companies That Use Take Home Projects for Interviews?
I have come to regard them as unpaid labor and so refuse to participate in them anymore.

My resume is truthful it would be easy to look up any of the projects I mention.

MichaelCrawford··on After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
When I got home from the hospital after the worst of my seizures, I found the instructions that were given to my mother. She was advised not to permit me to go outside unescorted.

She had put it with my stuff then never mentioned it.

Mom is actually quite an intelligent woman but sometimes she can be a little daft.

MichaelCrawford··on Archivists are racing to digitise 300 years of newspapers before they crumble
I have some newspapers that my grandmother saved from world war II. Those were quite unlike todays newspapers.
MichaelCrawford··on I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Matlab… (2013)
Why does anyone use matlab?

If I needed to solve differential equations I would use C++.

Many embedded jobs require matlab expertise. I always figured it must be cool but didnt care to buy it because comoutational physics is one of my specialties.

Then I git a look at its language. Worse than the cruel shoes.

MichaelCrawford··on After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
I have seizures in which I lose as much as a month of memory. The first one that I know about I suddenly found myself driving a car as if the universe sprang into existence that very instant.

After a while I decided that I dont have month long seizures rather I have brief seizures in which I lose a month of memory.

For this and other reasons I am concerned I have a brain tumour. That would totally suck.

MichaelCrawford··on After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories
Was that in Scotts Valley? Ive flown over that strip (as a passenger). the neighbors forced it to close, the strip is still there but there are big red Xs painted all over it. I expect its intended for use in emergencies.

I understand he didnt set the trim, which adjusts the balance of the plane for the distribution of passenger weight.

MichaelCrawford··on Was HG Wells the first to think of the atom bomb?
I dont know but I do know that chemival weapons were used in ancient times, typically burning bitumen.
MichaelCrawford··on The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)
That only works for add-ons that know about the add-on bar deprecation.

The seo add on that didnt work has over one million installs yet firefox totally borked it.

MichaelCrawford··on Why feminists are so annoying
In the united states, it is unlawful for employers to discriminate for reasons of age against people over forty. Even so, software engineers become unemployable in their late thirties.

I am fifty-one.

Also in the united states, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against the mentally ill, as well as those who are simply perceived as mentally ill.

I have quite sever bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. I link to my essays "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" and "My Deepest Fear" at the top of every single page of my website, including my resume:

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-...

"My Deepest Fear" concerns my vividly paranoid visual hallucinations. The specific reason I work as a coder rather than as a physicist is that I still write good code when I am hallucinating. I first realized that to be the case in 1988, I wrote LwSD in 2003 and now I can't get a job.

How often do discussions of diversity include the mentally ill or the middle-aged?

Among my deepest concerns is that I see many younger engineers - startup founders are the worst, as well as the people who they employ - making many of the same stupid mistake I did when I was their age, or the mistakes of my young colleagues.

My aim these days is to find a job where I can teach the children not to fuck up. Unfortunately I cannot get a job because all the young people think I am incapable of writing code.

I did the storage and firewire for a wireless audio recorder that won a technical academy award.

MichaelCrawford··on Why feminists are so annoying
Ever gone through a divorce?
MichaelCrawford··on Why feminists are so annoying
I lived in Truro, Nova Scotia when two mounties, both men, were wed in Yarmouth, both wearing their red serge dress uniforms.

Most of the wedding guests were also mounties, also in red serge.

They made headlines all over the country for weeks; there was an outpouring of support.

My maternal grandfather was a surgeon in the US Army Air Force Medical Corps during World War II.

He committed suicide in a spectacular way in July 1948, after he was arrested for what at the time was the felony of sodomy. Being quite wealthy, he posted $10,000.00 bail withing the hour - 1948 dollars - then later that day was found dead in a rented rowboat in a lake outside Spokane, Washington.

He made headlines all over the pacific northwest because he totally stymied the medical examiner with the cause of his death. Eventually they somehow figured out that he overdosed with insulin.

My grandmother initiated a legal action to have my grandfather's death ruled a suicide. I don't know how that turned out because my mother refuses to discuss it, she was told he had a heart attack.

I at time puzzle over whether I should initiate a legal action to have it declared a murder.

MichaelCrawford··on Argentinean programmer's house raided after he found a security breach
Every starving writer just loves to hear about it when a fan appreciates his work.
MichaelCrawford··on Argentinean programmer's house raided after he found a security breach
Have a read of the parent post that mine is a reply to.
MichaelCrawford··on The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)
I was eventually able to find the ui that lists add-ons.

To restore the add-on bar, I had to install another add-on.

Im not real clear why firefox thought it was a good idea to remove the add-on bar without asking any of the people who use it, but the outcry was something like what is going on right now with reddit.

MichaelCrawford··on The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)
I dont want extra copies of my information that I dont know about.

Some of the work I do I keep encrypted. My problem with OS X in general is information leakage, there are logs and caches all over creation.

Its not enough for me to disable indexing of a folder or filesystem; I am concerned spotlight will index leaked information.

Admittedly osx is a poor choice for my work, openbsd would be better but i dont like neckbeardsbeither.

MichaelCrawford··on The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)
LOLcats.

The very first thing I do when I set up a new OSX install is to completely disable spotlight.

MichaelCrawford··on The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)
A few days ago I installed a pagerank/alexa add-on in TenFourFox on my Mom's iMac. It's a backport of FireFox for powerpc Mac OS 10.4

It installed OK, I relaunched tenfourfox then couldn't figure out where the add-on's UI. When I clicked the Add-Ons icon in the "Pile of Elephant Droppings" menu I could not find anything.

Knowing that Firefox is always screwing up UI that works well for me I spent a half hour or so trying to find the Add-On's UI. Eventually I figured it must be in the status bar, which was disabled, so I spent another hour or so trying to figure out how to enable the status bar.

Then I found some jackass firefox developer who, in response to a public outcry from others said simply "The Add-On bar has been deprecated."

By who? I certainly didn't deprecate it; it worked really well for me.

MichaelCrawford··on Startup idea (need you opinion)
http://www.warplife.com/jobs/food/

Note the dates; I didnt just hijack your idea.

If you want to work together I would welcome it.

I think its a great idea, however a common problem I find is that some people dont use the internet, not because they cant but because they dont want to.

That obstacle can be overcome, for example by advertising on radio or in print, direct mail to publicly- or charitably-funded employment agencies and the like.

MichaelCrawford··on Craig Newmark Did Not Donate to EFF
Im notvsyre I follow your argument.

Yes I too have found good work through craigslist, but cl is far less effective than were the yellow pages in the phonebook.

Many companies never pay to advertise open positions, instead they post them on their own websites, then do not understand why no one applies.

I have received the greatest enthusiasm from residents of san luis obispo, california. there is lots of tech there but before my index no one knew how to find it.

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