The Great Job Search is Over!

I think yesterday was one of the best days I've had in a few weeks. I interviewed with Vonage in the morning, and they had an offer letter for me in the afternoon. The salary, culture and bene's are great. I can start there as soon as I get back from my cruise in Bermuda next week. Who could ask for anything more?

Everyone go get Vonage service and tell 'em an employee sent you!

PC Repair - Technical Writing Sample

Considering that all of my work at Verizon Wireless is proprietary property, I am intending to send a recruiter a link to this blog as a sample of my writing style. I am going to use this post to document the work that I performed on my friend's PC over the past two nights.

View in Microsoft Word.

<-- Begin Writing Sample -->

PC Repair Summary

10/23/2006 - 10/26/2006

Machine Specifications
Processor: Intel P3, 1ghz
RAM: 256MB SDRAM
Hard Drive: Western Digital 40MB
CD-ROM Drive: 12x DVD / CD-ROM
OS: Windows XP
Notes: This is a custom built PC with a very compact case.

Summary
Problem: PC would not boot into Windows.
Solution: Hard disk needed to be replaced.

Details
10/23/2006
The customer contacted me via telephone to report an error message that was appearing on her screen when she tried to boot her computer. The message stated that there was a disk boot failure and that she needed to install a system disk. My first thought was that perhaps she had accidentally left a floppy disk or a CD-ROM disk in her PC and that the computer was trying to boot from one of those disks instead of the hard drive. The customer claimed that there were no disks in the drive. I scheduled a visit to the customer's location for Monday, 10/25/2006.

10/25/2006
I booted the customer's PC and got the same results that had been reported. There were no disks in the floppy or CD-ROM drives. I re-booted the machine again in order to check the BIOS settings. The hard drive and CD-ROM drive were both being detected properly by the machine.

I used a Windows XP CD-ROM to determine if I could start the machine and repair the Windows installation if necessary. I was able the boot from the CD-ROM, however, when it got to the point where I could choose the recovery option, it failed because the machine could not read the hard drive. When it failed, it went to a C:\ prompt. From there, I tried to execute chkdsk and dir commands but kept getting errors that the disk was not valid. I shut the machine down.

The next step I took was to open the machine. I unplugged all the cords and removed the two screws from the rear of the casing. I then slid the casing off. Because the case is so small, the hard drive is located under a hinged section that houses the floppy and CD-ROM drives. I experimented with the IDE cables to see if I could get a different result, but no matter what I tried, I was unable to read the hard disk. I determined that the disk needed to be replaced. We went to the nearest Staples and purchased a 160GB Western Digital drive on sale for $79. I put the new drive into the drive casing and plugged the power and IDE cables in but did not put it into it's place under the hinged section yet.

I was able to successfully start the PC using the Windows XP CD-ROM. I used the disk to partition the new drive and install Windows. Once this was complete, I attempted to setup the old drive as a slave to the new drive. I changed the pin on the old drive and plugged in the power cable and the IDE cable. The PC booted and recognized the drive, however, the drive could not be read. I concluded that the information on the old disk drive is unrecoverable and recommended (just in case) that the customer dispose of the disk by having it physically destroyed.

At this point, it was getting late and it was time to leave the customer's site. We scheduled an appointment for Tuesday 10/26 to finish putting the PC back together and re-installing security and printer software.

10/26/2006
Arrived at the customer's site and was able to put everything back together, making sure that all the cables were carefully tucked away. On first attempt, a cable was covering the processor fan, which caused a clicking noise to occur when we started the machine. Once this was corrected, there were no further issues.

I then ran Windows Update to get the latest fixes. This process ran without incident and 57 updates were installed.

Next step was to install the security software from Verizon. I was able to go to the Verizon website and download the anti-spyware / anti-virus package and install it.

After that, I needed to install the printer software. Ran the install from the HP CD-ROM. It installed the printer drivers and photo editing software. We tested the printer by printing a picture of my keeshond.

Customer needs to obtain a copy of Microsoft Office. Once this occurs, I will return and help install the software.

My Red Chested Keeshond

Had to take some pictures of candles today so while I was at it, I got a recent pic of my red chested keeshond. Pretty wild, huh?

Randall Hansen is Right!

I really believe that career branding is important, especially in IT. There are so many students that graduate from college with degrees in computer science who have no idea about this. They are lost and struggling the way I have been for six years.

The academic people believe that the best way to teach computer science is in a general way - to introduce as many concepts to students as possible and teach them how to think. This is great and really important. However, if these students are not taught how to get specific jobs, they will not be in key places in the workforce to make this thinking work.

Instead, they will be competing with people who have gotten programming training in a specific technology. (In one of my graduate courses, I read articles labeling these people as "canned programmers.") Maybe these people were taught to memorize instead of how to think, but they key is that they know a technology well enough to talk intelligently about it and don't need (in theory) the ramp up time needed to pick up this skill and run with it that today's companies need.

I believe that the people who can think need to also get this training so that we can have the best of both worlds in today's workplace. People who can benefit a company now AND in the future. As I move onward in my career, I want to write about specific steps that I will take / have taken and what I am doing to brand myself in order to be successful in my field. I hope that others will read it who can learn from it.

The (wonderful?) world of data entry

Yesterday I became a bag lady in New York City. Well, not really. I was carrying a big brown paper shopping bag in New York City. In it were a significant number of surveys from PETA enthusiasts expressing their love for little woodland creatures and the wonderful-ness of the people in PETA.

My mission is to type the names and addresses of these misguided souls (most of them fixed income seniors living in Florida) into a database so that they can be sent more twisted propaganda from this radical organization. Now, don't get me wrong - I like animals too (as you can tell from the fur piled from wall to ceiling in my apartment from my zoo.) BUT the people in PETA are just a little bit over the top. Oh, well. They were wacky enough to fill out the survey. Let the mailings commence!

Now, compared to all the other side jobs one can work, this deal is pretty sweet. I sit in front of my computer and type fast. I'm good at that. Only problem is that it takes 1,000 entries to make a meager $36. After roughly 4 1/2 hours of typing, I have completed a whopping 707 entries.

So, it's not a get rich quick scheme, but hey, money is money... Maybe I'll get faster...

One Red Paperclip...

How is it that I don't come up with ideas like this??

Bowling - Progress at Last!!

First, I would like to thank Tony, webmaster of BU for the excellent usability advice he sent me about my site. I should have known these things, but I think I was too close to the project to notice. It's always hard to expose yourself to the critical eye of others, but the results are so worth it.

Okay, I promised interesting articles, and I'm afraid that I'm not going to deliver today. Sorry. It's my blog.

I have been struggling since I started bowling again last fall. At that time, I was bowling games that were in the 60's. Yeah - not 600 series - a game with a score of 60... Like you get when you're 5 years old.

I'm left handed, but I think I have some of my dad's ambidextrious genes. When I had tendonitis in my left hand while I was in college, I was able to switch to my right hand to finish the season. (Illegal for a sanctioned league, but it was just for fun anyway...) I did far better right handed than left handed and probably should have stayed that way. I was effortlessly shooting games that were between 150 and 200 and even bowled a 226.

I stopped bowling when I started getting into competitive drum corps because I had too much on my plate. When I came back to it, I decided to switch back to my left hand because:

• My left hand is stronger.
• I'm left handed at everything else in the world (I think!)
• Every once in a while, I would get confused about where to put my feet. That doesn't happen when I stick with the left hand.

I finished the season with an average of 115. Not bad, considering I started at 60. But this season started three weeks ago, and it didn't look like improvement was coming.. In my first 6 games, I was averaging less than 110.

Today, I got my first glimmer of hope! I bowled a 159, 106 (doh!), and 179!!!! My team (which includes my father who has given up on trying to outwardly give me advice) even took all seven points!

So, my point, and there is a point, is that I want to write down the things I did today that I think helped me the most.

• I put a piece of tape in my thumb hole. My dad has been constantly commenting that I drop the ball... The tape made the ball feel better - I had more control.
• I concentrated on not bending forward. I think this is a HUGE problem of mine and I think that it also contributes to the ball dropping problem. It's like I have to always tell myself that the ball needs to get to the line before my shoulders.
• I worked on lining the inside of my elbow with my mark. I read something on the Internet that had an off-handed comment about the inside of the elbow pointing at the snack bar being a bad thing, and I realized that I never thought about that before.

So, there may be a glimmer of hope for my bowling, yet! Maybe my dad and my brother didn't steal all the talent where that's concerned after all..

It helps me - sorry to bore the rest of you!

CSS is fun!

Maybe this proves how outdated my web skills are, but I've recently discovered CSS and it is freaking awesome! Especially when you use Dreamweaver to create the stylesheet because you don't have to know what all the settings are yourself.

Besides being this wonderful thing that's supposed to help folks separate church and state (that's my analogy for content and style - clever, huh?), it also has helped me to do things visually that frankly would take me 1,000 years to figure out in HTML (and thus, I wouldn't have attempted!).

Thank you CSS and Dreamweaver! Maybe I will now be inspired to read that CSS book I bought 6 years ago (assuming it's not all outdated!)

The start of (yet another) blog!

Okay, so first a new website and then a new blog? What's up with that? Well, if Bill Gates and Wil Wheaton can have their own presence on the web, why can't I? Besides, I need something to do w/ all that pent up unemployed time to prove (perhaps to myself) that I am capable of figuring out technology...

Why Blogger, you ask? Well, I've tried LiveJournal and SoulCast and both are fine sites, but I find that Blogger is easily customizable to my own site's template. And I think that a consistant look and feel is important. It looks a little strange right now, but I will work on making it look prettier - I promise.

I call my blog Red Kees Craze, mostly because I needed to put a title into Blogger. I named it after my crazy keeshond named Helmut. Besides being crazy, he's started to develop some reddish, rusty colored fur, making him very odd for a keeshond and absolutely un-showable. (Not that it matters - we wanted a pet dog, not a show dog.) For those who might not know, the correct way to pronounce keeshond is "cayz-hund" (making Kees rhyme with Craze for my "catchy" title!). Do I pronounce it this way around my friends? Admittedly, no. For the sake of simplicity, I say "keesh-ond," making it sound something like the way it's spelled. So, it seems that Helmut is not allowed in the dog show and I would be shunned by "true" Keeshond enthusiasts, too.

My goal is to find interesting subjects to write about so that people will want to read my blog and comment on it. So, if by some strange chance, you are reading this, thank you and please if you like it, send your friends to me!