Sheep Guarding Llama

It really looks like winter is here now that it is March. We got blasted yesterday and now there is six inches or so of snow everywhere. I resolved to spend the day indoors enjoying the no-snowness of the inside of my house.

I got my interview in Warren, New Jersey scheduled for Wednesday morning. I am going to be in Ithaca all day on Tuesday and then will drive to New Jersey that night and crash at a hotel so that I am fresh for the interview. The interview will probably be over around noon and I will be able to head back home. I should be back around 7:00 or so if everything goes to plan. Thursday is both the Microsoft and the Symantec shows in Rochester so I plan to keep myself very busy that week.

Dominica and I haven’t really made a decision yet about how we feel about the position in New Jersey. It is tough because to some degree it is important for us to have a good feel for our own opinion on a contract before I go through all of the effort of driving down to someplace seven hours away, staying in a hotel, interviewing for hours, taking time off, etc. but it almost doesn’t pay to even really consider the possibility because it is really so unlikely that I will ever get any particular position. And even if I do get it it is unlikely that it will last for very long. Contracts just don’t last like they used to when I was younger. Companies are always looking for places to cut corners and contractors are easy targets. People often hire contractors because they don’t have the necessary expertise for a project that they want to do and often that means that they haven’t thought it through very well and they are not very likely to have the expertise to use the project after the contractors are gone. So it really makes it kind of pointless.

To make contracting even more weird lots of companies hire contractors with the expectation that if they like them that they will hire them full time. This sounds great until you think about the fact that contracting is a profession not just something that people do who can’t get jobs. Professional contractors (the most serious of which are often referred to as IT whores) seldom have any interest in being full time, regular employees. Contracting is different that regular work. It has different challenges and different rewards. The pay is higher but the stability and benefits are almost always non-existant. The demands are more but the environment is ever changing. It is extremely challenging but it is fun. It requires a lot of flexibility. Full time workers have more traditional needs. People looking to be hired full time by a company seldom make good contractors. They don’t understand the dynamics of the situation, they aren’t happy because they didn’t get the job that they wanted and they are often motivated differently. So companies that attempt to hire perm employees through the contract process often get either bad contractors or bad regular workers. Few people are good at both and happy with both. Often the people looking for perm never get to be perm because they are bad at contracting and the company doesn’t see them do what they do best. And contract workers generally don’t accept perm positions leaving the company having invested a lot of time in what they feel must be a good screening process only to find out that contractors are not motivated by the promise of a perm position and that the whole process has been a waste. It is basically a game that is played by big companies because in this market there are lots of “wanna be” perm workers who are out of work and will take whatever they can get. This is bad because they try contract work. Then companies hire thinking that they must be getting these people because, obviously, big corporations are only made out of perm workers.

You can always tell when this situation is going on because they will always say things like “six month to perm” as if “to perm” is some kind of enticement to make me willing to work a job that I normally would have turned down because it was temporary. But the reality is that the project is six months. At the end of six months they need to either make an offer for perm (which I am not interested in) or make an offer to extend the project (which we will see) or just acknowledge the fact that they asked for a six month contract and got it. The first day on that job a real contractor is going to be letting everyone that he or she deals with regularly know that they are available in exactly 182.5 days and often jobs could be lined up months in advance. Contracts are called contracts because they have set details in them. It is very frustrating working as a contractor at a firm that uses contractors because it doesn’t have a solid grasp on its hiring process.

Dad came over at 4:00 and we got our regular Friday fish fry at the Omega. My birthday present from Dominica arrived today and dad brought that along with him. A Nikon Nikkor DX 55-200mm lens for my new camera. How I have the entire range that I had had with my older Nikon analogue camera again with the new digital. Earlier today dad had stopped by to drop off the new processor for the server that SGL runs on as well. My plan is to be working on that project tonight. We will see whether or not I manage to get to it. It would be nice to get it done though. Friday nights are the perfect time for this type of project because you have the entire weekend in case anything goes wrong. I don’t anticipate any problems but there is always ample opportunity for disaster. I am swapping out the entire motherboard/processor combination so there is a lot changing on the server.

The server is going to be down part of the weekend so don’t panic if the site comes and goes while I am working on it. Stayed tuned. I hope to be back to normal by Monday. But these things are always risky so be prepared for anything.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Dominica is back on her usual schedule today. I was up early this morning because dad was picking me up at 8:00 so that we could go up to the city and run some errands. We wanted to get moving early so that we would be back for Oreo. Dominica leaves the house a little after 10:00 so we had a couple of hours.

We started off with breakfast at the Omega. Big surprise. Then we drove up to Greece so that dad could get a haircut. He has been going to the same barber right down the street from his old office at building 23 at Kodak for years. Dad dropped me off at building 28 – the Theater on the Ridge – so that I could head back to the ESL bank branch that is located in the back of the building. I haven’t been to that particular branch of the bank in forever. I used to go to that building all of the time because the basement used to house the Kodak Camera Club of which I am a member and I took classes there and used to use the darkrooms and labs extensively. Oh those were good times. It is very sad going in there now. The whole place is just kind of a memorial to times past.

In the upstairs lobby of building 28 there is a display that was put up back when I was taking photography classes there. I would guess that the display is probably from 1993 or maybe even earlier. One part of the display is aerial photography of Kodak Park talking about how it is the world’s largest manufacturing facility (once upon a time) and how many employees work inside of the park (well, worked inside of the park), etc. Another section of the display was touting Kodak’s awesome (ok, whatever) Advantix system that was going to revolutionize picture taking. Of course, Advantix was a joke. Just an attempt to get people who didn’t pay attention to the technical details to pay higher prices for lower quality and fewer features. Advantix was cancelled a year or so ago. So the display actually managed to outlive the product. How sad.

I walked down from building 28 to the barber shop where dad was getting his hair cut. The walk was very depressing. This used to be the center of Rochester. Unbelievable manufacturing, research, technology but now it looks like an old, run down factory like you would find in the older sections of Utica or Binghamton. It isn’t kept up and the place is mostly empty. You can see how the place used to be awesome, once upon a time, but now is just a shadow of its former self.

I finally got to meet dad’s barber after all of these years. I never even knew exactly where the shop was until today. After his haircut dad and I went over to Home Depot right down the road. We got a motion detector that is going to be installed into the server room. Every datacenter has a motion detector for the lights so I felt that we needed to have one too.

Coming through Avon we realized that we were hungry and I pointed out that I hadn’t been to Tom Wahl’s in quite some time. So we swung into Avon and got a quick lunch on the way home.

It was only 11:30 by the time we got back to Geneseo and, once again, Oreo was snug in the bed and very happy that I got home so promptly. He doesn’t seem to mind us being gone in the mornings at all. He sleeps so soundly in the mornings that I think he barely notices when we are or are not around.

I spent the day working on projects around the house. Work projects not house projects. I got a lot done. Originally we had thought that I was going to have to be in New Jersey today for an interview but that ended up not getting scheduled as we had thought and we aren’t very likely to know any more about it until tomorrow. Hopefully we will know something tomorrow. At least this way I will have clean dress shirts to wear. Dominica took them all into the cleaners yesterday morning and they will be ready for me to pick them up on Monday.

Dominica went to Walmart and did some shopping on her way home. She picked up a Walmart pizza for me. I cooked that when she got home and we relaxed in the living room eating pizza and watching an episode of Remington Steele. After all of this time we are only barely halfway through the first season. What a good bargain that show turned out to be.

We didn’t end up going to bed until almost 1:00 in the morning. I have no idea how that happened.

Once again, I am a few days behind. It has been a crazy week.

Everyone needs a great web site to go to to start the day off right so check out Stuff On My Cat for lots of feline hilarity.

I was awake at 3:30 this morning and couldn’t really get back to sleep at all. I tend to have this problem whenever I know that I really need to get up for something. I wake up terribly early and can’t sleep. This is why I hate alarm clocks.

I had to leave the house at 8:00 this morning to get down to Dansville for a 9:00 meeting. It was a short meeting but went well. I was home just a little while after Dominica left to go to work so Oreo was barely alone today. He was still snuggled in our bed when I got home.

Dad came over at 12:30 and we got lunch. He didn’t sleep all night so we were both pretty tired.

Dominica had to get up and go to work early this morning because she is getting some special training and they shifted her schedule by an hour. So she will be coming home at 9:00 tonight instead of at 10:00.

I decided to go out for “Boy’s Night” tonight. I left the house a little after 6:00. I tried to get out earlier than that but everytime I attempt to leave the house Oreo ends up needing my attention for half an hour at least. I finally made it out the door and drove up to the South Wedge to meet the guys. The Wedge is one of my favourite parts of the city. It has the most “city” feel of any part of Rochester, I think. It is really close to downtown but not quite close enough that you figure out how small downtown is and it isn’t a slum. There are lots of restaurants and shops but traffic isn’t so horrible. Easy access to lots of stuff.

We had a good time. Went to two spots in the Wedge and ended up at Beale St. getting a fish fry. I left just after 9:00 so Min and I should get home at almost exactly the same time.

I pulled into the garage before Min even had a chance to leave the front hall. We were both really tired today and decided that we were just going to go to bed. We were in bed before 10:00! Boy this being thirty thing is tough!