I just stumbled across this job posting at Coding Horror.  Go read it then come back.

His post very closely follows my philosophy of hiring.  I didn’t know I had one until about a year ago when a former employee asked me how I hired people.  After giving it some thought my answer was that I look for attitude and aptitude.  What this really means is that I don’t need to necessarily have a new hire understand the systems and languages that we work with, but I do need to feel comfortable that they will work well with the team and that they are excited to learn new technologies.

Some of my hires: Name – where they came from – what they worked on

Chris – worked at a Babbages software store – Advanced Revelation, Gupta, VB 4+ systems

Vlad – Soviet immigrant who was a structural engineer in the Ukraine previously – VB 5+ systems

Joe – freelance web designer and keyboardist in a band – NET based systems with real-time communications.

None of those guys knew the programming environment they were going to work with when they were hired.  They all learned it because they had the aptitude, and they fit into the teams because of their attitude.  In fact, two of the three are still at the original company that I hired them into, many years later.

Of course, if a person comes to interview and they are currently working on a technology that we use, I will put them in front of a computer with a simple task to perform, such as write a single form app that does some calculation – and I’ll provide the calculation!  I have knocked out several people with this test.  If you walk into the office and claim to be able to write code in VB.NET, I’m going to put you in front of a system and make sure you can do it!

Anyway, that’s my two cents.

Count to yourself:

One Mississippi
Two Mississippi
Three Mississippi
Four Mississippi
Five Mississippi

That’s how long it takes for Vista to open a command prompt (cmd.exe) when linked to a shortcut key (ctrl-alt-C).  Trying it with other keystrokes doesn’t change the time it takes.  This is on a Thinkpad T60 with 3 gig of RAM and a dual core processor that is lightly loaded at the time of the tests.

When I tried this on a copy of Windows Server 2003 that is running under Virtual PC on my laptop it was instant.

Back in Vista, clicking on the Orb then the "Command Prompt" shortcut link is practically instant.  How far we’ve come that using a keyboard to launch a program is actually slower than using the mouse!

Heh.  Just copying a file to a usb thumb drive…

This happened last week and I thought after all the negative blogs and podcasts Apple wouldn’t do it again.

Sure enough, I found this update notice on my Vista machine:

I don’t want Safari, most people on Windows don’t want Safari, and trying to trick people into installing it does not help your brand.  It’s an idiotic move by someone in marketing who thinks that this way maybe they can get "market share", which will involve irritating a lot of users and IT support personnel when stuff quits working.

I guess the only way to stop this from happening is to uninstall iTunes and QuickTime.  No great loss since I moved to a Zune 80 with its music subscription.

I’m just sitting here doing some bookkeeping and billing a customer.  In order to get paid by this customer, we *must* include their full PO number on the invoice.

The PO number is, get this, TWENTY SIX digits long!  Even better, there are eleven zero’s in a row between what might be considered a vendor identifier and PO method, and what looks to be the actual PO number of another three digits.  So it appears that they feel they felt they needed 14 digits for the total PO number over time.

Um, folks, no one, and I mean no one in the history of the planet is going to need a PO number that goes into the trillions.

But hey, at least I found something that QuickBooks can’t handle out of the box.  Maybe I should submit a bug report.

Last week I had to travel to West Palm Beach to do a few days of training for a client.  I had originally planned on staying at a Days Inn on 45th St. in West Palm Beach.  When I told my client where I was staying, the reaction was "Whoa!  Under no circumstances should you stay there unless you want to buy crack and have your car stolen."  At first I wrote this off to hyperbole, but he even went to the point to say that if I couldn’t find a different place to stay, he would find something.  He was very committed to making sure I survived the night to showed up and train the next day!

I promptly made reservations at a Holiday Inn Express (I was training the next morning, so I had to be super smart!), and tried to cancel my reservation at the Days Inn.  While I expected to be dinged for perhaps a one night stay (this was happening at 5pm), they told us that they would be charging my credit card for all three nights originally scheduled.  It turns out, that when you do a search on their web site, they give you a price that is completely non refundable, and no indication that there are more expensive rates without that restriction (or so they say – I haven’t been back to price out a room at Days Inn, and never will again).

So, lesson learned.  Don’t do business with Days Inn.

But!  This gets better in a very cool way.  I reserved three nights at the Holiday Inn Express.  I arrived Monday night, and then as it turned out, I ended up leaving late on Wednesday, at which point we were into the third night of the stay.  I checked out at about 6pm and fully expected to pay for that third day.  Nope, no charge for it. 

Can you guess where I’m staying this week as a write this, and next week?  And the week after that in Chicago? Of course you can.  And it doesn’t rhyme with Plays Rin.

This is an email I sent to the feedback address that amazon provides for Kindle owners:

My story: I had been long wanting an e-Reader, and was drawn to the Sony one; However, the Sony was lacking a lot of features, and I was worried about the longevity of their e-book store. When Amazon announced the Kindle, I was very excited!

After now having it for a few weeks, I’m more excited than ever!

Here are a couple of thoughts for you:

1) You are already taking a lot of flack for the cover. In my case, the Kindle stays in the cover properly, but the elastic band is already stretched. This is a design that needs to be fixed. In the perfect world, perhaps something with a clasp will be made available. I don’t have a problem buying a new cover (I’d rather not spend the money, but I will), you just need to come out with something better, ASAP

2) There should be a way to organize content a bit. For example, on my Kindle I have two main types of books – personal reading and technical reading. I would like to be able to easily tag books with a type, and then filter on that type. I would also like to be able to mark a book as read and then have it not show when browsing except when I explicitly want to see items that I’ve read. You could argue that read books should be removed from the device, but given that currently memory isn’t a problem I would rather leave them in my “library” and just not see them.

3) Finally, regarding the actual design – it’s not as bad as many people make it out to be. The keyboard is workable. The large buttons do make it hard to pick up at times, but I’ve just made it a habit to “lock” it when I put it down, thus rendering it safe and easy to pick back up. I would like to see more contrast on the screen itself, but I know that is a limitation of the e-ink technology. Perhaps you can help drive advancement of it through a large volume of sales.

Thanks for listening! – Eric.

Overall I’m very happy with the Kindle, and I have to say that having a bunch of books on hand without needing to rifle through my library is pretty cool.  A few minutes ago I decided I needed to pick up a book on SQL Server Reporting Services 2005, and within two minutes I had purchased it and had it downloaded onto the Kindle.  Very cool, and very bad for retail book stores (and shipping companies).

On February 2nd, 2008, the South Florida Code Camp 2008 will be held in Miramar, Florida.  This will be my first time speaking at this Code Camp.  I spoke in Tampa last year.  CRM sessions don’t draw too many people, but the ones that are at the session are really interested in what you have to say.

My session is "Programming against MS Dynamics CRM Web Services" and will be right after lunch at 1:20pm.

If you live in Florida, or will be around the area, sign up for Code Camp and come join us.  Even if CRM isn’t your bag, there are dozens of other sessions, none of which have anything to do with CRM!

See you there! – Eric.

These are Phil Plait’s choices for the top 10 astronomy pics of 2007.  Definitely an eye opening page to visit.  Visit his blog at http://www.badastronomy.com/.  Lots of good stuff.