What is it with IT contract agencies, they are getting so precious.

An agent called me yesterday about a position somewhere and wanted a copy of my resume and then said that he would try and find a vacant slot in his diary today to call me and further discuss the position. Well, excuse me. Bearing in mind each of his calls lasts, probably, on average 5 minutes then how many people is he chasing for how many positions. He’d probably prefer to think that they are chasing him.

On another occasion, about a month ago, an agent called and left a message on my voice mail, which I rudely ignored. The agent called back the following day and this time I answered the call and he said he wanted to talk to me about a position I’d applied to him for. Eh. I didn’t recognise his name, nor his company name and I certainly hadn’t applied for any positions since I was happy (sic) where I was. Anyway he was confused and had obviously made a note that he had called me and to chase it up, and preferring the idea that people chase him rather than him chasing them, he swung the whole thing around and convinced himself I had called him.

Apparently he had advertised a position for a media company and gotten 200 applicants and was a bit overwhelmed by all this so decided to ignore all of the applications as it was too much to comprehend and, instead, do an active search, where he found my resume. I agreed for him to put forward my resume for the position and the agent did come back a few days later stating that the company wanted to do a telephone interview. Well that rang a few bells.

I have interviewed and taken on dozens of contractors and the only time I ever gave telephone interviews was when either the candidate lived so far away that it was more convenient for both parties to have a telephone interview or where I wasn’t convinced by someone’s resume and gave a brief telephone interview to determine whether he was worth interviewing face to face. Now this company was only about 5 miles from my home so the telephone interview wasn’t for the first reason. So it must have been the second reason i.e. the guy wan’t convinced with my resume. Hmmmm… I only had about 15 years relevant experience.

I told the agent that the prospective telephone interview was almost certainly going to be a waste of time and that I wasn’t interested in doing it as the guy at the company was obviously looking for reasons not to take me on and would probably trip me up somewhere. The young agent was a bit confused by all of that and said no the company really is serious. I felt sorry for him and agreed to have the telephone interview.

Had the telephone interview and it was one of the best I ever gave, lasting 45 minutes. The agent phoned later to ask me how it went and I told him.

The following day the agent rang back with feedback and apparently the guy from the media company had told him that I was too inexperienced. Yeah, well there’s no answer to that.

When I reminded the agent that I had told him that it was going to be a waste of time that didn’t sit well with him at all and he just couldn’t get his head around this scenario. No more telephone interviews for me.

On another occasion recently, somebody already at a company and whom I had worked with a few years ago, had actually requested the agent to see if they could find me as I was a perfect fit for a postion. The agent phoned me and told me about the position, and it was a good ‘un and asked whether I was interested. Obviously I said yes, to which the agent said he’d put forward my resume that day.

I called him several days later and he was very vague about it all saying that he was going to see the client in a couple of weeks. He hadn’t put forward my resume even though it had been requested. Agent said he would call me when he had met the company 2 weeks later. Needless to say he didn’t call. He was probably annoyed that he wasn’t able to recommend relevant resumes for the client and if he had forwarded my resume then his consultancy skills were not being used at all. This was at least a month ago.

The same agent called me yesterday about a totally different position. I of course asked him about the position where my resume was requested the previous month and he had absolutley no record of it. I had as I had written all the details down.

What does all this mean. Dunno, but maybe agents, who let’s face it have no IT skills apart from understanding some acronyms, should revert to being resume forwarders rather than Human Resource decision makers. Meanwhile mayhem and chaos continues.

Quote of the day

‘If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music… and of aviation’ Tom Stoppard (1937-)

I bet Gates doesn’t like this….

Someones Vista upgrade experience

By Al Menard on Overclocker.com 22/02/07 

Let me begin this by stating that I am writing this on an un-Activated/No CD-Key/Activation-Cracked copy of Windows Vista Home Premium… at the express recommendation of, and instructed by: Microsoft Technical Support.  

Like many others, I purchased Vista the day it was released. According to the box my laptop had plenty of juice to run it (Turion64 1.6, 1280 MB RAM, 80 GB HD, Mobility Express 200M) and since I had a spare $178, I figured “Why not?” I get home and open the package (how many others out there spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to open the package ??), put the disk in my XP Pro laptop (I’ve already downloaded the UpgradeAdvisor and verified that you can upgrade from XP Pro to Home Premium) and proceed to “Upgrade” my laptop.

Two hours later (!) I’ve got a fully functional Windows Vista laptop… sort of; it seems kinda sluggish… actually, it’s performance just sucks to be honest.

I live with the Vista “upgrade” for about two weeks before I decide that a fresh install is in order to hopefully allow Vista to perform up to its promises. I reboot with the Vista DVD in the drive, go through the beginning of the install process again until I reach the spot where you choose “Upgrade” or “Fresh Install”. I chose “Fresh Install” instead of “Upgrade” this time, entering my CD Key and proceed to wait 45 minutes or so for the install to complete. Hooray !!! I have a Vista laptop that actually performs… sorta better than before, but it’s still not as fast as XP Pro was, but it’s OK.

Now…here comes the fun part:

I click on the taskbar icon to “Activate Vista”, I follow the prompts, click the Activate button and Vista promptly kicks back an error that the CD Key I have provided is for an upgrade of Vista ONLY. As I have installed this as a “Fresh Install”, my CD Key was not valid !! (Just wait…this gets better).

I decide for the first time in my life I’ll call Microsoft Customer Service – I figured that this has probably happened hundreds of times already and I’ll be on the phone 10 minutes at most. After 45 minutes of wading through various Tier 1 techs that have all asked me the same questions 10 times each, I get transferred to a customer service manager who seems to speak slightly better English and may have a clue as to how to help me.

I explain (for the fifth time) what I’ve done to reach this point – he promptly tells me that you cannot upgrade to Vista Home Premium from Windows XP- that the installer will not let you do so (!?!?!?!?) and that the upgrade DVD will not let you complete a fresh install (!?!?!?!?). At this point I ask him how I have managed to reach this point if neither of those possibilities are able to occur (even though it is their software that has allowed me to do so); he replies that the only fix I have for my predicament is to reinstall XP Home and then reupgrade.

I politely tell him that since I have recently moved I do not have the foggiest idea as to the location of said XP disk and inquire as to whether there is ANY other way to fix this. The forthcoming reply rather shocked me I must say – The Customer Service Manager told me that I could either borrow an XP Home disk from a friend (isn’t that software piracy ??) or look online for one of the many Vista Activation cracks to bypass Vista Activation completely, and specifically mentioned “TimerLock” (um… hey, HE told me to do it !!). Well, I followed his instructions.

I did a little bit of searching on Google and came up with information on the “Timerlock” crack. I downloaded and installed TimerLock and now have a quasi-legal fully functional version of Vista Home Premium (I HAVE a legal CD-Key – even if Vista doesn’t like it).

I would like to make it very clear that I tried to do this the right way before I resorted to the guerrilla method, I DID stay with the correct version of Vista that I had purchased (the DVD will allow you to install ANY version of Vista) and I do not advocate the use or distribution of pirated software.

It truly surprised me that not only was Microsoft Technical Support not able to help me with my problem correctly, but actually suggested an illegal method to do so. I’m extremely disappointed not only in Vista, but in Microsoft as a company for allowing such behavior to occur.

(How come Microsoft technical support even knows how to crack Vista? Why is the user technical support department even looking in that direction. The only people at Microsoft that should know about that stuff is their anti-piracy department, or am I being naive. Anyway now I know that to use a cracked version of Vista all I have to do is get Timerlock. Thanks Microsoft. Ed)

Quote of the day

‘A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to’ Granville Hicks (1901-1982)

Installed Coldfusion MX7 on Vista successfully.

It even started up but that is the limit of my testing. Dreamweaver 8 also installed OK and ran. Macromedia Fireworks installed but an odd Vista message was displayed stating that due to an incompatibility during the install process that the color system was changing to Vista Home Basic, from Home Premium. Interesting.  

Microsoft Expressions, a Dreamweaver like app, needless to say installed ok. And Apache 2.2.4 said it installed OK but was lying. I was displayed at least one message stating that there was an error.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition which went on OK but does come with some baggage called SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. The installation of that came a cropper and gave out some messages about compatibility and stopped installing though staying within the setup process.

There were some patches to download. Downloaded the first 35mb patch (you call a 35mb file a patch? Ed) but it got stuck and abandoned the install and then displayed a message that there was another SQL Server installation running.

True, that was the original install of SQL Server which when it realised that patches were needed helpfully paused the install so that the patches could be downloaded and installed. They never tested that that’s for sure. Exited out of the SQL Server setup reran the first patch which went OK and then downloaded the second patch which was also installed OK.

Quote of the day

‘The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining’ John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)