Finally having some free time being the holidays and that im done with school, I have the freedom to mess around with all the stuff I have been meaning to do. I saw this article on digg about a tutorial to miniaturize pictures in photoshop, and tested it out. What do you think of the results. Its really easy to do this yourself, it took 5 minutes and looks pretty legit!

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Merry Christmas from all of us at Tech and Tonic, and from my family to yours!  Hope you are having an awesome holiday!

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Serif=good. Sans Serif=bad.Every newspaper and magazine as well as most books are printed in Serif font. They use it to help their readers’ eyes connect with letters on a page. Serif fonts have letters with little feet that helps the eye literally finish seeing the letter. Your job is to give your ad every chance of being read and being acted on. Always insist on serif type for all your ads.

p.s. Send Six Apart an e-mail asking for serif font on our blogs!

Now that I’m done with school, im focusing on my job search full time. Ive found its really hard to decide on what career path to pursue knowing that you need to get 2 years of relevant experience to allow you to move into a successful position. I’m still going to stay at KPBS as an IT Admin through January, but I need to find a full time position somewhere soon.

One thing I have noticed is that every job wants you to have a couple years of experience…bringing to mind the fact that I’m trying to get the job in order to gain experience in the first place! Its a Catch 22 never ending cycle in that I can’t get a job without experience, but I can’t get experience without a job! WTF! They sure dont prepare you for this in school when a counselor is blowing smoke up your ass telling you about walking into a position making 60k year right out of school.

Anyway, the main reason for this post, is because of a recent experience I just had in the job search. I was contacted about a position as a Global Messaging Operations Specialist (GMOS) at a company called SMS.AC. Now, before I go into my experience with this company, let me tell you what I found out by doing a little internet research, in addition to my own previous personal experience with them.

A quick Google search brought up a this link. Apparently they don’t have the greatest reputation in the blogging community. Another interesting review of the service brought up this link. To quote from the article,

“Funnily enough if you rearrange the letters [of sms.ac] you get ‘SCAMS’.”

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So you can imagine my interest when I was contacted by one of their corporate recruiters. Not to mention that in the past I had been charged by my cell phone provider for an Instant Messaging service that I was not using. After doing some research and arguing with Sprint, I found out that this company allows people to send messages to my phone from their account on their website, and I am charged to receive them, something like $.50 per message!

So all negative connotations aside, I was hesitant to check out this job. Regardless, I decided to attend their information session. I’m pretty limited as to what I can say about the experience, due to the fact that I signed a Non Disclosure agreement before going into the session, but I can say a few general things about the experience. They hire based on compatibility with the companies “revolutionary” corporate culture. No cubes, no hierarchy, no politics. Appealing in a work place, I must say. But when I found out NO technical aspects of the job, something seemed fishy. No one could answer what exactly the job requirements were, and what skillset was needed to fill the position. I assumed as a Global Messaging Operations Specialist, I would need to have some network administration skills, experience with network monitoring, implementation, and troubleshooting. But…apparently not.

The next morning, I was contacted by the recruiter again, and asked to commit to beginning their grueling interview process. He asked “did you have a great time last night?” ” Yea, I replied, except that all I learned about was how awesome it is to work here, I really have no clue as to what the job I would be doing is”, and unfortunately all he could do was reiterate that it is so awesome to work there because of their culture.
Well, awesome corporate culture doesn’t sign my paychecks. I told him im looking for a more technical career and a way to put my 5 years of getting an Information Systems degree to good use. I dont think that a flashy office and overblown title will make me feel successful, and make me feel that all my hard work has paid off. Plus, I really took to heart some advice my boss Dave gave me…”go with your gut feeling. If something doesn’t feel right about it for some reason, its probably true.”

So, its back to the drawing board, looking for a job. I know something will come up soon, its just hard to sit back and relax through the holidays knowing that I need to plan out the rest of my life….but at least ill be doing it at a respectable company.

I hate sudoku for the following reasons:

1. It is really, really stupid. Who has time to sit around rearranging numbers in a box? Its like a rubics cube for idiots.
2. If you mess up, and you are using a pen, you are screwed. Unless you have white out. But even then, it leaves an annoying mark in the box and screws up the rest of the puzzle.
3. They are really hard. Sara is evan a math person who sees numbers everywhere like she is in the matrix. That is why she can do the puzzles. I cant figure them out at all.
4. Sudoku sucks.
5. I hate it.
6. At first i thought you just had to write the numbers 1 through 9 in each box to solve the puzzle. I completed one of the difficult puzzles in about 2 minutes using this method. Then i found out that you also have to have them across each row and column. This made sudoku a little harder, and more stupid.
7. How the hell do people make these? Normally I can figure out one box, but then realize that the person that created the puzzle must have messed up because none of the other boxes work out right. There are a lot of errors in these puzzles, making them a complete waste of time.
8. There are a lot of websites that offer online sudoku puzzles. These are all completely stupid and MUST be avoided at any cost. Why? They are a complete waste of time. Computers should be used for real work, like blogging about awesome topics, NOT wasting time doing retarded puzzles like sudoku.
9. Sudoku is a stupid word. What does sudoku mean anyway? I’ll tell you. I looked it up at a translation website, and the actual Japanese translation is “Waste of Time”.

I hope you have learned something from this public service announcement regarding Sudoku. Thank you.