ten-seven

You're not an employee, and they're a private company. It's a catch-22 situation. They'd probably tell you if you were an employee and option holder. Such information might be held as company proprietary information, and as a non-employee, you're not entitled to know. I know how this sounds, but they apparently have a tight disclosure policy.

It's been done, in several different forms. It depends on your political leaning how you manage to do it. His politics is evident from other writings. Using the name "watchdog" gives it an air of legitimacy it may not, or ever, deserve.

Podcasting isn't failing. It's not meeting some people's expectations, but it's not failing. FTA I too get news from a podcast, since my commute may not take me through the next hourly update. With a little effort (and an AutoHotKey script) I get my iPod charged, and it's ready to go when I am. I also get the weekly Maximum PC podcast (rant on, Gordon!).

I don't care much for video podcasts, since I'm driving.

Some corporations made hefty investments in big iron. That doesn't make them economically viable today. I still believe that performance, energy conservation, space utilization, HVAC optimization, etc., etc. are reasons for updating to the latest hardware and the operating systems that they run. From a strictly hardware standpoint, the old stuff gets hairy to manage and maintain.

You can keep driving that 1979 AMC Matador, and you can keep rebuilding the engine, and patching the rust holes. But after you've spent thousands on the upkeep, you could have bought a new car that gets better gas mileage and won't strand you on the freeway half-way to work on a rainy morning. Any corporation that didn't look to the future, is the corporation where you'll find the dinosaurs. And that doesn't say much for corporations like State Farm.

We have a concept we call our "Bus Number." It's the number of people that know how to do what you do, or have been briefed on what you're doing, so that if you're run over by a bus, they can pick up what you're doing. It's a grim concept, but it highlights another point: what happens during the startup period should a key person fall ill, or die? Good documentation could save the shop and make sure your dream lives, at least for a while longer.

Still, this is a deal killer.

I recently got a "splatter-gram" email from a friend of my father, also slamming Advanta. Sorry, but I'm smelling a pattern here, and it makes me skeptical that something is going on targeting Advanta. It's likely what they're doing is legal and quite common, even it doesn't make people happy.

Further, using any type of "rewards" card hammers the retailers. The "reward" comes out of the transaction, as do transaction fees. The end result is higher prices to cover the rewards. Your reward isn't the result of generosity, it comes out of your own wallet ultimately.

Ha! good one!

cadalac FTW!

Back when I was coding a lot, there were two editors, vi and one other that came with the Unix variant we had. The other "visual" editor had an annoying tendency to convert multiple spaces to tabs if it was able to. This broke formatting and messed up make files. It sparked a holy war against those who "maintained" code with that editor, calling for those people to use vi and stop breaking things.

I wish my former employer was willing outsource services. While the customer base grew from two to twenty, the staff size trippled, the IT staff eventually doubled.

It takes strategy and vision to outsource and manage the IT house. But, you've got to hold on to somebody to run the outsourced IT shop and hold them to your standards and keep them on your strategic course. An IT project manager of sorts.

And while it takes money (expense instead of payroll and training), be prepared to spend it. IT isn't something you try to afford, it's something you can't afford not to do right.

If you find yourself working in an IT shop where every smart solution (keeping to the strategy) is too expensive, look around and consider getting out. They're on the path to bungle it.

Challenging? The problem is getting the entire entity legally registered. It takes more than a weekend, apparently.

That said, the barriers to starting a business in the US are not unreasonable. Having read "The World is Flat (2.0)" and recalling the hurdles encountered in other parts of the world, The US is pretty good, but not the best, and far from the worst. No place in the world, though, allows it to be done in a weekend.

Not too young for that. I actually used BBS software, sort of, to run a UUCP node at home and receive low-volume mailing list digests.

Lots of people are Jacks of All Trades, but masters of none. Take, for example, the Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen movie franchise. Everybody had skills and roles to play. It wasn't possible for one person to be in all places all the time, nor was it possible for a single person to perform each job.

This blogger...lots of attitude, but doesn't sound like a team player. Attitude will take you only so far.

Stick with the headhunter. The company that engaged them expects to work with them. It seems odd that they'd also post the position on their own jobs page. It's possible they weren't getting any responses, so they added the head hunter.