I was chatting with a recruiter from New York City, and he told me that in the past 12 years, this has been the worst market for IT hiring that he has ever seen.  I can believe it.  I have been without a job for several months now, and have come frustratingly close to scoring some really good positions, only to be edged out by minutiae.

I applied for a Senior C# developer position at a well-known energy exploration company.  The process started in November, and it took a while before they would even consent to interview me.  They were very interested in my resume, and invited me for an interview.  I thought I had totally bombed the interview - I drove home despondently.  But the intervening recruiter told me that they have rave reviews for me and were very interested and they wanted me back for a second interview.  This gave me a little bit of hope.  So for my second interview I dressed to the nines, I was spot on with every question they flung at me.  I was friendly, funny and fantastic.  There was no way I could have blown this.  But then I got no response for a week from the recruiter.  So I called to ask what was going on.  She told me that they decided to pass on me because I didn't knowa WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) yet and they decided to go with the two other candidates where were "already approved" by the HR department.  This truly sucked because I thought we had a genuine rapport, and I still think I would have been the best candidate for that position.

And I trudge onward...

Thank you, patient readers, for indulging my long absence.  I will be adding some new articles shortly, including nifty tricks you can teach Subsonic to do, more C# .NET Interop magic, more news from people with similar DNA, and perhaps some revelations on audio processing, IMVU and search engine strategies for your blog.

I was interested to see how people are finding this blog.  It appears to be a common practice for IT recruiters to google prospective developers.  Many people are finding this blog by my name "Chris Velazquez", as well as the misspelling "Chris Velasquez".  In fact, a google search on just "Velazquez" shows this web site in the top 100 results, despite the more obvious relevance of Spanish painter Diego Velazquez, congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, and the fact that Velazquez is quite a common name in the Spanish-speaking world.

There seems to be some interest in C# dictionary of delegates, an alternative to using a switch statement.  While this isn't an earth-shattering revelation, several programmers have picked up on this technique, and I am beginning to use it more frequently in certain parts of my own code.

As expected, many IE7 users want to use BugMeNot to bypass mandatory registration.  And also as expected, people are having problems trying to get MS Office and Excel to work seamlessly with their C# code.  Surprisingly, the image of my daughter holding balloon with static cling in her hair is becoming a hit on the search engines.

I'll be fertilizing this blog with my mental droppings shortly.  Stay tuned!

 

Get it at microsoft.com.

Read about it at eWeek.

News from people with similar DNA

The week after next I'm going to have a visit with my sister, Tracy Velazquez.  She's coming to Houston for some conference and of course will spend some time in Boerne with us.  Yes, this is the Tracy Velazquez that ran for Congress in 2004.  I was the one to blame for her campaign web site, including the blogging software.  So I must confess that I'm not the first person in the family to have started blogging.  If you visit the archive of her site, you'll see that her sense of humor is similar to mine, once again proving indisputably that we have similar DNA.  Alas, she lost that election, even though she's "hot".

My son, Tony (11), recently advanced from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts at the Blue and Gold banquet held at the Boerne Convention Center.  I was unable to get any decent photos with my cheesy cell phone camera.  I did, however, get a picture of the most beautiful, talented, creative and intelligent girl in the world.  That would be my own daughter, of course, Aria (7).  She is pictured here demonstrating the effect of static electricity from balloons on one's hair.

No respect

Last night, Tony told me he had found the perfect song for me.  It's called "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton, and you can listen online or buy the MP3.  I tell you, I get no respect.

My swag's in the mail

Erin from ActiveState referenced my blog earlier this week, and she got a creative marketing idea from my Nutty Warnings blog entry. I pinged her back, teased her a little, and got a free T-shirt!  I love geek swag.  The last time I was this happy was when I won the puzzler from SoftArtisans (using a Perl script, heh heh) and received a free SoftArtisans T-shirt and a license for ExcelWriter, which I am still using in production today!  Actually I was more excited about the T-shirt, because for a few hundred dollars anyone can license their software!

I've raised the white flag.  I've had it with hosting e-mail.  I just purchased an e-mail hosting plan from GoDaddy, and I'm in the process of moving all the e-mail accounts.  And instructing customers on how to change their Outlook settings for the new system.  Hopefully, I can get everyone moved over in the next couple of weeks.

The sordid tale of the tar-baby from hell begins about four years ago, when I was having problems with the ISP that was hosting my e-mail service.  As things happened, I came upon an open-source mail server called Lumisoft that was written in C# and was able to handle SMTP relays, POP3 inboxes, and had a cute WinForms UI for administration.  It must have been the macho call of the wild - I can do this!  I grabbed an old computer, wiped it clean, installed Windows 2000 Pro on it and set up the mail server.  I had initially intended to use it for just my own purposes, and my wife and I used it for our e-mail.  But as things progressed, I started getting calls from customers who were getting angry that their ISPs weren't filtering their spam and letting e-mail viruses get through.  So I picked up SpamAssassin, and wrote a couple Perl scripts (shoutout: using ActiveState ActivePerl) that would comb the mail looking for spam to tag and also tossing out anything executable.  These Perl scripts were fired off by a little C# Windows Service I wrote in a half-hour.  And I'm happy to say I haven't had a single e-mail virus in Outlook in four years.  But things quickly deteorated.  To summarize:

• Network downtime - my ISP doesn't answer the phone on Sundays, so when do you think it goes down?
• Security Breach - a slacker at my ISP had a null VPN password, allowing a Japanese spammer to hijack my mail server as his own personal SMTP relay.
• Spam - causing an increasing burden on the old 450 MHz Pentium II.
• Abandoned E-mail Accounts - piling up the spam and filling up the disk
• Disgruntled Customers - I always know when the mail goes down, oh, I hear about it!
• Clueless Customers - who sign up for all sorts of online crap and wonder why they have so much spam!
• Hardware Issues - Ugh

I've had it up to here, and now I'm putting POSTAL to pasture. (Yes, I named the computer "POSTAL" as a joke.  Ha ha, just serious.)  I can get 100 POP3 e-mail accounts from GoDaddy for just $30 a year, and it comes with a webmail interface.  The admin interface is a pain in the rear, but I'm sure they can do a better job with uptime than I can.  I will miss having a bottomless e-mail account that users could send 100 MB files to, but the need for that has decreased as well.  At least I won't be wasting any more time on this.

This is better than going postal.  Don't you think?

Curious as it sounds, Microsoft's open source lab has published an article on how to install and configure PostgreSQL on a Windows Server system.  This is very interesting, considering how PostgreSQL can be considered a competitor to Microsoft's own SQL Server 2005.

For those of you not familiar with PostgreSQL, it is an open-source, industrial-strength relational database with most of the features you'd find in a mature database server.  It has triggers, stored procedures and views, and can handle a variety of stored procedure languages, including Java, PHP and Ruby.  On the client side, PostgreSQL ships with both OLEDB and a .NET data providers.  One of the fascinating features of PostgreSQL is its ability to have inherited tables.  I can see where this could dovetail with OR mappings for subclasses.

I did an overhaul on the look of my blog because I had an actual visitor from the outside world.  I feel like Sally Field winning the Oscar: "you like me, right now, you really like me!"  If figured I'd give it an extra touch of CSS geekiness.  I hope you like it.

Apparently, Internet Explorer doesn't like it very well.  If you scroll down the page, the size of the DIV elements changes for some entries when you use either the scroll bar or the mouse wheel.  This is just plain bad.  I know that MSIE 6.0 had this problem, but they still haven't fixed it yet?  What's up with that?

Here is what it is supposed to look like:

And when MSIE 7.0 messes up it looks like this:

Notice how the space is too wide and the subject title is stuck in the margin.  Scroll one more notch and it's OK again.  Send this one back!

BTW, the blog looks just fine in Firefox.

I just came across an article from Jakob Nielson's UseIt.com web site concerning Weblog Usability.  I figure I should go ahead and take the test and see how my own blog stacks against the ideals of the guru.

Top Ten Design Mistakes in Weblogs:

1. No Author Biographies - Not guilty

I have my real name and some real info about myself in the "What's this?" box to the right.  If you visit my home page, you can even download my resume.

2. No Author Photo - Not guilty (anymore)

Yes, I have posted an unflattering, but honest picture of myself.  I do have a nice picture of myself that was taken at my wedding by a professional photographer almost 17 years ago.  I don't think I can really use that, though.

3. Nondescript Posting Titles - Not guilty

I just barely squeaked by on this.  I try to title each blurb accurately, and when I'm in a playful mood I may throw in a double entrendre, such as "Nutty Warnings".  Some titles are lame, I admit it.  I throw myself on the mercy of the court on this count.

4. Links Don't Say Where They Go - Not guilty

This is classic Web 101 fare.  Search engines look for this; SEO depends on it.

5. Classic Hits are Buried - Guilty

The dasBlog software doesn't lend itself to breadcrumb navigation, and I have been too busy/lazy/apathetic to do anything to about it.  I don't have any real "hits" because I have so few readers that it probably doesn't matter.  I'll get off with probation on this.

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation - Not guilty

I do add categories to each blog entry, honest, officer!  Once again, I'm at the mercy of dasBlog on this one because it show categories in a linear fashion instead of a hit-based or frequency-based heuristic.

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency - Guilty

I have not made a serious attempt to publish regularly, even though I can write quickly.  As they say in the Holy Grail, "I'm getting better".

8. Mixing Topics - Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

The fertile crevices of my brain are aching to explode with information to tell the world.  While I do try to keep the topics programming-related, I suffer from ADD of the fingers.  What was I writing about, now?

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss - Hung Jury

I have deliberately refrained from including profanity and NSFW content from my blog.  So I get a silver arrow point for that.  Some people might be offended by my cheeky humor and unabashed assessments.  If that's the case, then they have a problem with my personality.  One of my criteria for accepting a new position is that I can get at least a chuckle during the job interview.  If my boss has no sense of humor, chances are he will melt down or blow up during a difficult situation, which will make my own life miserable.  So I guess in a way you can say that I am writing proactively in self-defense.  Yeah, that's it.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service - Not guilty

Oh, c'mon!  You can't spring the $7 a year it costs to have your own domain name?  Personally, I'm helping fund Bob Parsons' kids' college education.  But let's not go there.

The Verdict

Cleared on six counts, found guilty of burying the evidence, negligent publishing, and crossing the center line of my weblog.  I am hereby put on probation and required to attend a defensive blogging class as well as blogger sensitivity training.

Now, how well will YOUR blog stand up?

 "I'm vahtching you"