Danté's Inferno

Recap of Article from eWeek

This is a short response and input into an article I was reading on this blog from eWeek. The article addresses a bit about how unemployment for senior IT workers is affecting their lives. One thing that the article does not address is those of us very, very experienced IT workers are working in jobs that do not take advantage of our experience. In other words, we’ve taken jobs way below our professional level, just to have a job!

My Story of Under Employment

For example, on Victoria Weekend of 2007 I was sent by Sun Canada to babysit a Sun Cluster Upgrade in Halifax, NS. Nice gig, very friendly and competent Solaris team but unfortunately we had horrible weather. I knew contracts were exceedingly scarce so I squirreled away as much money as I could to help weather the storm. Most of the work I did for Sun was in Sun Cluster Implementation, but I also did many high end server (e15K, e25K) installs and configuration. Also, I’m a PRINCE2 Certified Practitioner and ITIL expert (not certified) this allowed me to fill 2 positions for each contract and made my rates very competitive.

When the work STOPPED!

I flew home to Cleveland via Pearson and there was absolutely nothing. The firms I sub-through had absolutely nothing. There wasn’t even any low dollar work, there was nothing! This is the thing that those outside of IT don’t understand. Since IT relies so heavily on financing/leasing high dollar equipment and staff, when credit ran out, customers stopped buying. The didn’t slow down, they stopped; the work stopped, sales stopped.

How I became Under-Employed

Fortunately, or unfortunately for me (depends on where I’m at day-to-day) I had already interviewed with a local manufacturing company in Cleveland. I was looking for work where I didn’t have to travel in order to ‘try to save the marriage’ kind of thing. I really dumbed down my resume and really dumbed down/downplayed my abilities in the face-to-face interviews. I totally expected to not get an offer from them. But, I was wrong, an offer came in and I took the job. I took the job because there was nothing else, no pipeline of backlogged work. No freelance work. No sub-contracting work through large, established, credible firms. Nothing!

My ‘plan’ was to ride out the stoppage at my under-employed job for 6-7 months. I figured that would be long enough. We’d have a new administration in Washington; change was coming. But I was wrong. Here I am 2 1/2 years later, under-employed.

What is under-employed?

I’m not really talking about wages here. Although they are $30k less than I made in 1991 and my employer asked for one month’s pay last year, but it’s more than wages. It’s problem solving skills that aren’t used. It’s advise I could give that could make this IT department better, that I can’t give due to my junior position. The junior positions hold no credibility here. Or anywhere actually. You don’t have access to VP’s/Directors where you’ve been positioned for the past 10 years. I usually reported to CxO level personnel at my customers, now I don’t even know who that person is!

I was just reading CanonBlogger.com’s guest article on PhotoFocus.com. In the article he says that one can get better, but taking fewer pictures! Here’s the link Become a Better Photographer by Taking Fewer Shots. I think they’re onto something.

Last weekend I had a long discussion with one of the sales/makeup associates at Sephora.Com. She and I were talking about shooting with film v. shooting digital. I think in many ways, that experience leads to fewer shots, with more high quality shots! This was actually her point and it got me thinking that she was onto something, just like this blog article!

At the end of summer I was taking a few portraits at a my wife’s aunt’s funeral. One of the ‘models’ commented “Are we done already?” to which my wife replied, “He doesn’t need to take 300 shots to get one that’s only kind-of good!” Thanks wife

I haven’t had time to post those, but will add them to the article this week.

Ciao, Danté

But here’s some photos, anyway:

The Technology for Scanning

I”m running Ubuntu 9.04 64-amd and have installed the Open Source Scanning tool, sane and the front-end xsane. I have an older Epson Perfection 1660 Photo scanner. It’s connected via USB to the computer. When Ubuntu sees this device using something like lsusb it configures the epson-sane backend for this scanner to function properly. The only thing I can’t get to work properly is scanning Fuji negatives! Kodak and Agfa negatives are fine, but there seems to be a trick to using the scanner when you have Fuji negatives. There’s some really funky workaround that I found somewhere but haven’t tried.

The photos

I wanted to scan in these photos that I took with my Canon A-1 with Fuji 100 film and using a Tokina zoom lens. I really like that lens and camera. I’ve dropped it off the car, in the ocean, had it banged around the boat like crazy and had no problems with it (except for the Tokina getting jammed into the camera, but that’s another story).

Hurricane Ivan

These photos were taken on the beach at Sunset. If I’m not mistaken, these were taken 3 days before Hurrican Ivan wreaked havoc on Fort Walton and vicinity. They workers were boarding up our room while we were packing to vacate the premisis! I don’t think our room survived, but I haven’t been back either.

Hurricane Charlie

Earlier in the summer, I was working at Raymond James in St. Petersburg and got chased out of there by Hurricane Charlie!!! Not a good summer for Floridians.

Anyway, here are the photos, if the WPG2 Wordpres plugin is cooporating

Weekend Activity

Over the weekend, since I was too busy to work on the “Black Friday” project, I grabbed my camera, a 200mm zoom lens and a polarizing filter to try and get some decent shots of a Christmas Window Display where my next door neighbor works. I think he may have actually made these displays. He’s very creative.

My plan was to photograph the displays at one of the local furniture stores in Lakewood. There was ample sunlight (extremely rare here on the North Coast) so I thought this would be a good time to try to figure out if I’m using the Polarizing Filter correctly and if there’s any affect in normal sunlight. We are at Latitude 41N so the sun is at a steep angle this time of year and that has a contributing affect on the photo quality.

In Post Processing below, I chose the ICC profile for Sunlight and that seemed to bring the truest colours out of the RAW data.

Here are the shots after the jump:

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Well, it’s Sunday afternoon and its been a pretty sleepless week. I was up pretty much all night Friday to Saturday morning working on a move of Stellent Contribution Server from inside our DMZ to outside (internal to company only). Wasn’t much to do, but I had to transfer 350G between the DMZ and the new servers and there’s a 100mb/sec link in there somewhere, so it takes 4ever to run. Started for real at 13:45 on Friday and the transfer completed at 06:15 Saturday. Just had some miscellaneous cleanup to do on Saturday.

Sunday Events

Joanie had to get up at 04:00 Sunday morning to drive to Detroit (150 miles) to go to work. She’s laying over in Anchorage tonight where its 11 degrees. Then to Tampa where its 75 degrees so she had to have clothes for 2 extremely different climates.

The Dogs

I got up at 9:00 and fed the dogs, then tried to go to Melt for Sunday Brunch. But, I didn’t get there until 11:15 and they were packed, so I went over to Panera which is new in Lakewood and got a cup of Cappuccino and a Cinnamon Role. Not bad!

Igloo is getting really old, poor guy. I took him to Gone To The Dogs for a self service bath. He is dribbling on himself when he’s asleep and his skin is quite uncomfortable. He hated his bath, but Shanon (GTTD Manager) was really sweet and helpful and he really liked her help! Thanks Shanon!

Dexter is supposed to go get groomed tomorrow, but I can’t remember what time (09:00???) and Vickie isn’t answering her phone today. Here’s Dexter working on my SVO Mustang.

IMG_0744

More after the jump:

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