Friday, December 17, 2004

Help Wanted
IT Consulting company in Boston area seeks an individual experienced in IT support and administration. To qualify, you must meet the following requirements:

  • You know how to fight the vulnerablilities of today's PCs with well-chosen tools, manual edits, as well as practices and procedures honed over time. Your years of hands-on experience battling spam, spyware, and viruses have brought you to the point where you stare up in the heavens and shout "Sweet mother of God, what do I have to do to get some peace, buy a friggin Mac!?"
  • You have enough knowledge of Microsoft Exchange to despise its very existence.
  • You possess the communications skills to deal with a variety of clients ranging from those with perennial PC Magazine renewals whose ask arcane questions ("Should I get the 15 inch with XGA or the 14 inch with SXGA") to those who shouldn't be within a 1000 miles of a computer ("I've deleted 5 programs and still get out of memory errors").
  • When working to revive a 5-year old Win98 PII in the client's 9th floor headquarters, you instinctively look to see whether the windows in the office open.
  • You have paid your dues handling cabling issues under users' desks. On at least one occasion you have had to stop, turn off your flashlight and cry softly.
  • You enjoy activities such as router configuration, DNS troubleshooting, and scripting not because the work is fun but because these tasks can be done in solitude where there is no one standing nearby asking questions, always with the questions!

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Flags
We are like flags. Each tailored and considered, designed to represent something unique
But when you stand in a room where they all shout together, the colors are beautiful but each one seems trivial.
We always build our next step against some unknowable absolute. It is unlikely you'll make a mark in history or humanity. You can only find what's in you and push it out to the world.

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Every year I can count on my friend Margaret to send a funny, usually off-color, birthday card. This year's card said, "Happy Birthday to a man who can still put it up and keep it up there". Open the card and there's a toilet with the lid raised.
Funny card, but these days I resonate more with the hand-made cards my kids give me. Aly presented me with her card on my birthday complete with stickers and her unique lettering. Lately her passion has been to practice her lettering by copying words from source she can find - magazines, newpapers, fliers in the mail, whatever.
I have to say I was a little surprised when I opened my card and read this...