The other day I had two interviews for two different positions with two different groups of two interviewers through two agents at the same (one) company. The first interview was at 10.30 and the second interview at 11.30. If that ain’t a recipe for disaster I don’t know what is.

The first interview went OK. I got on with the two interviewers well and I think just about every bit of software experience they were after I had. The second interview was a bit brutal. I was asked a load of questions on HP Quality Center and Test Director which I know I answered OK as I have been using TD for about 8 years. But the interviewers body language was as if I had got all the answers wrong. He was either being very thorough or was trying to convince himself that I didn’t know TD.

Somebody I know works for that company and he was asked about me and he let me know that he’d given me a great reference. Maybe it was too good.  Not sure about these positions, if I’m offered them, as if I accept one and turn the other down then sooner or later I’m gonna bump into the people I turned down. What happens if one offers me the position and the other doesn’t? Again I’m gonna bump into those guys that thought I wasn’t suitable and then wonder why somebody else thought I was suitable.

There is also a terrible atmosphere on this site as the company have recently decided to outsource all of their IT to Asia, trasnferring all of their IT staff to the outsourcing company as well. I don’t suppose there’s much chance of an Asian IT company being able to afford European wage levels so I assume they’ll all be gotten rid of. And the beauty of that is that the transferred staff won’t get any redundancy from the Asian company as they’ll only have worked for them for about 10 minutes. As for their previous employers, they’ll have got away with shafting all of their IT staff.

I got a Neil Young Live in Japan 2001 DVD the other day. Looks like a bootleg going by the cover and the first shots look like they were taken by somebody with a mobile camera from the back of the hall, though the sound is fine. Most of the rest of the film appears to be pro-shot on stage so I reckon this is a TV concert film that someone is selling. This was for sale on Amazon and I’m not sure it should be.

I then had a look to see if they were selling any Led Zeppelin DVD’s and they were. I managed to get a double DVD of a concert in Seattle in 1977 and also a double DVD of one of the Knebworth shows in 1979. I bet this must drive Jimmy Page up the wall.

My spam email daily count has recently increased to about 500 messages daily.

I was getting a spam email every minute one day last week so I contacted my ISP and they showed me how to tweak the settings on their email server so that I could get it automatically rejected at the server rather than it being delivered to me. I was also able to see all filtered spam which the ISP keeps for a few weeks and on the day when the spam increased I had 2000 of the critters. Dunno what I did to suddenly get noticed like that though.

I was trying to figure out a way of playing music on the PC, which is in the study, and get it heard in the living room. I did try the iPod with an FM transmitter and played that through the stereo receiver but the iPod would need to be constantly no further than a foot from the receiver for it to play back OK. If someone picks up the iPod then music is replaced with static. Also as it would be FM there is the usual squashed sound and tracks played back on an iPod aren’t segued so its track 1, followed by a couple of seconds of silence followed by the next track. Not quite seemless.

Next I tried a 30 foot mini jack extension cable from the PC so that I could then plug in the PC’s sub-woofer and satellite speakers into that. I would then be playing the music directly from iTunes which would elimate the FM squashed sound problem and you would get the tracks to segue together. What sounded great in the study didn’t sound so good in a much bigger living room. The bass, even with a sub-woofer was weak, there was plenty of top end from the iddy-biddy satellite speakers but there was no middle range.

Next I tried the mini-jack extension cable with another mini-jack extension cable to get it to reach the stereo and connected that cable to the stereo with a phono cable and that worked well. I kick start the music from iTunes with the sound up high and I can then control the volume locally on the stereo. If I create a big enough playlist I’ll be able to get hours worth of music played without interference (Until Windows crashes. He-he. Ed).

I started playing Call Of Duty 4 again the other day after a break of several months.

The last time I had played I’d got stuck. This time I restarted the level and got passed the stuck bit. In fact I eventually got right to the end. What a great game it is too. I didn’t like Call Of Duty 3 much but version 4 is as good as Call Of Duty 2.

I read that the Windows Update version of XP’s SP3, which I had successfully installed, is a bit light compared to the full ISO image version, not that I have noticed anything different with my smaller version yet. I downloaded the ISO image and blew that onto a CD and ran it on the XP machine, which already had the Windows Update version of SP3 on it.

The setup for the disk version of SP3 didn’t seem to notice, or mind, that the XP machine already had the cutdown version of SP3 on it and installed itself without any problems, I think. Now at that point I would have thought that XP would be in pretty good shape so I ran a registry checking program on it. That found 31 problem which I let the software fix. I then ran a different registry checking program and that found a further 59 problems which I let that software fix. Hmmm….

Search strings used to find this blog:

1. With Vista will my PC stall every now and then just like the Apple Mac?
2. Is it true that the SQAForums are the training ground for some very confused testers? 
3. If I put 6 different hit counters on my blog is there any chance they will all show the same number of hits?
4. In the race against piracy how come nobody ever has a go at the warez newgroups?
5. Do people have meetings to strangle the life out of any chance of progress and instead preserve the status quo?
6. In 10 years time after massive amounts of cross web page database pollination will personal data have any value at all or will all checkboxes be checked for everybody?