redirect to http://robertpateii.com/

Hi,

now posting on http://robertpateii.com/, and i’ve mapped all old posts from here over to it also. I’ll eventually delete this blog. Bye!

Internet. Serious business.

Our cheez-it supply rarely lasts the week, and I have to force myself to eat the crackers one at a time instead of eight at a time. These cheez-its, they always recall nap time during kindergarten year in Mrs. Shoemaker’s class. That was a good year; about as good as every year. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad year, but I’m not the type of person to divide my history into emotional categories.

Judging by the frequency of posts here, I’ve either been really busy at itzbig, or given up on writing all together. It’s honestly mostly the former, and some of the latter. I’ve three other blogs that are far more idle than this one, but new habits come gradually (I suppose).

There’s a new release in the works here for us, and (typically) it’s big, real big. As always, there will be significant UI improvements. The other major part might still be considered a corporate secret at this point, but it will be public soon enough so I’ll just bite my tongue for now. Just note that it will be radical, it will be something few others can do, and we might even be the first to actually do it.

In other news, I’ve been doing tech support since I started here, and in all that time I’ve received only three actually disgruntled emails. The third one came in yesterday, and it hurt a little inside. I think I know what the problem was even though the user wouldn’t tell me, and today we fixed it. Little things like that satisfy.

Autumn colors, etc

Moments ago, I leaned back in my chair to stretch and peer out my window. I never noticed it before, but there’s a tree coated with autumn orange that I can only see at a very specific angle. I did some more peering around to verify that it is indeed the only autumn colored tree within sight. I think it’s a nice touch.

http://www.freerice.com/

I grill hotdogs on the george foreman for lunch sometimes.

html formatting

Internet-wise, crossposting first meant posting the same message across many different usenet groups. For us and all the others in the online job searching industry, crossposting means posting one job on another job board. This can happen time and time again so that by the time a candidate sees a job, he’s got to jump through a bunch of different boards (somtimes registering) to get back to the original that will actually let him apply.

We’re one of those original sites. Recruiters are pesonally logged into our network looking at our candidates’ profiles. But we’re also new to the scene, so in order to get our jobs out there we have to do a lot of crossposting. And it’s not free, of course. Crossposting is how a large subset of the industry makes its money. There’s even a handy dandy site out there that will manage a lot of your crossposting for you as a one stop shop.

What’s neat about most sites (including the one stop shop) is they all take alot of basic html tags like lists, bold, line breaks, and paragraphs. We, however, don’t support html formatting within our system (yet anyway. there are some security issues, but I think eventually we can work around them.) So in order to crosspost our 60 or so jobs a week, we have to go in first and mark them up with html.

 Now I fancy myself as an HTML/CSS hobbyist,  but I think one of the little tasks I do that drives me the craziest is formatting html en masse for all the jobs we’re crossposting. I’ll do a bold tag here, an unordered list tag here, a bunch of lists tags to replace bullets there, and then I’ll do it another seventy-nine times.

Fortuntely, though, there’s a free tool perfect for this job called html-kit. While it has a bunch of features that are way beyond my skill level, it also includes the capability to bind a combination of keys to insert text, specifically tags. So I can simply highlight that list and hit F7 and it’s wraped with unordered list tags. Very handy.

 Well, it’s 4:37pm on thanksgiving eve. I’m going to wrap up and get out of here, as soon as I figure out who’s going to check up on the india team while i’m gone.

UAT

Woo, been busy lately. And this blog is pretty low priority, especially since no one but me can read it right now anyway. But today was rocking, we’re all caught up, and it’s 5:05. So, I’m going to call this last hour easy.

We’ve got a new interface coming. It’s been on the way for awhile, but this time it’s for real. They say friday, so maybe in a few weeks! Now for some, like marketing and sales, this release will be a neat selling point since mostly just makes using our site quicker and more intuitive. But for us techies and folks on the hardware frontline, it’s a really exciting release that wedges open that door to world domination.

Which reminds me, the new [fourth] electric six album is out! And takes the name of “I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Prevents Me From Being The Master.” If the only way I could see these guys when they come town would be to give up meat for a year, I’d do it without so much as blinking. I won’t lie to you though, either you get e6 or you don’t. By the way, the website is work safe, but I wouldn’t play the music at work unless you’ve got headphones. Fire is the first album and it’s spectacular; start there. Senor Smoke is sublime, but you won’t like it unless you already get e6 because the lyrics aren’t as easily audible. Switzerland (3rd album) isn’t a complete embarrassment. And this new one seems to be unsurpassable by man.

 

edit: So, I bought a T-shirt with this image, and went to the show. The show was fantastic, and now the album’s greatness has lessened slightly with time to be more in line with the first two.

But back to my business: I’ve spent the past few days pouring out all my thoughts and irritations and future hopes into the comment boxes of the User Acceptance Testing surveys that the web design office has had us all doing on the new interface. It’s been pretty exciting, I feel like I’m actually doing some heavy contributions to our future shape, instead of my usual sense that I’m helping hold up one end of the wagon [which is still a great place to be].

If I get some time over the next few business days, I’d like to detail some of the coming features and some of my suggestions. But I’m going to head home now.

Edit:
Friday Nov 2nd: Talked this blog over with my boss and got some guidance. So now it’s public!

Job/Technology Fairs/Conferences

So I went to innotech technology expo and then to the Austin-American Statesman job fair. I’ve been to a job fair before, but never experienced the inside of the booth at one. It was a great change of pace and I had a good time, but I was trying to grow a beard and I felt like I ought to shave it for both. So I did. But it’s been about two weeks now, and my beard is doing just fine, thanks for asking.

The History of

My career at itzbig started on 8-15-07.

Actually, it started about three or four weeks prior. I’ll just say that in the job search, no means no, but silence means maybe! This is especially true in small to medium size companies.

My initial impression was one of awe. I was really going to work for a true blue startup company. Throughout college I’d always lived in a quiet horror of going into the machine of a big multinational corporation. I knew it could happen because I wouldn’t say no to one. I like to give everyone a chance, and I knew my dislike of them was a little irrational. (Just a little. I’m sure at some point I’ll start a rant on how giant corporations break the free economy, and thus freedom.)

But I had lucked out! By the grace of God, and the McCombs Business School Alumni Job Board, I’d found my way into my own little start up company. Just in time, too. Things started gearing up even faster after I arrived.

Not quite right after I arrived, though. There was definitely a calm before the storm. I was staying busy learning all the tasks that my predecessor had been taking care of, and adding about fifteen or twenty jobs a week into the system.

Then after about a month, on a Thursday, my boss tells me he’s got about 300 jobs queued up in his inbox. I guess the sales guys started trying or something, but my jaw dropped. I’m pretty sure he cackled.

Maybe he didn’t, but regardless, by Tuesday we had three temps from one of the local temp services that use our network.

It was kind of rocky there at first. They sent us some people interested exclusively in data entry, when the job actually requires about 80% data analysis and the rest as data entry. So after a few days, getting caught up on the entry, we basically had 2 people who could only do the five minute job data entry job waiting on 2 people to do the thirty minute data analysis job. And that 2nd person was me, who often gets called away from analysis for tech support or other details.

But one of the data entry only people was called away to her true passion, flower arranging. And they replaced her with another data entry only person. I kept her busy with data entry for most of the week, but the last few days I had her try the analysis. She kept getting real frustrated with it and didn’t seem to enjoy it at all. She didn’t come back on Monday, though I think that might have been of her own will.

Next we got Theresa, who immediately took to the data Analysis along with Martina, who’d been doing it since the third day. With them focusing on data analysis and Anna dedicated to data entry, we finally got production running steady. I still jump in to pick up any slack, but mostly now my time with production is spent breezing over the job files sent to me by Gino for jobs we don’t support and for nasty surprises.

Tech support also keeps me busy, since I’m the single tier 1 support operator. It comes somewhat naturally, though, since I’ve always made myself available as a helper for the online games I’ve played in the past.

Gino: Gino’s been a great recent addition to our team. He took over for my boss the task of managing the incoming jobs from success managers and passing them off to me. He’s the contact point for all the sales team and success managers, so I can focus on working with the temps to get everything into the system. Since my boss was doing it before him, it frees up a big chunk of his time which lately he seems to be spending on developing automated accurate reporting tools between our SQL server and Excel.

And most recently (today) we hired an intern on from UT. Today’s her first day, so I gave her my “Production Walkthrough” and let her rip. We’ll see how it stands up to real use by someone new.

Why

My boss sent me this “hughtrain” pdf originally. He enjoys the writer’s “blogcard” cartoon blog called gaping void. I found it humorous and insightful at times, but a lot of misses and even some blatant repeats turned me off of it. That said, the guy has some good ideas, and the pdf he wrote for changethis makes some good points.

For instance, the list of “How to have smarter conversations” begins on page 23. The fourth entry is:

Start a blog.

Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, and people pay attention. Say something dumb, and youʼre ignored. We big media folk just canʼt seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to discern between smart and dumb. It makes it easier to extend this to the rest of oneʼs business.

All of a sudden I realized there might exist personal reasons to blog, regardless if anyone else will ever read it or not.

Time spent writing is at least counts for good writing practice, which always pays off.

And I need something work related but wildly different to alt-tab to when the job descriptions start running together.

I hate blogs

Historically, I’ve scoffed at blogs and their bloggers. “If you want me to know so much about your daily life, just tell me the story when I see you or call you next.” I still feel like this to a great extent. I don’t approve of the break in social interaction that blogging can cause. I don’t read my best friend’s blog because I want to have something to talk about, not read something he broadcasts to everyone in the world like an news bulletin.

But blogging has developed, and there are more reasons to blog, and for me to tolerate them. In short: news bulletins! The key here is that some blogs tell me something I don’t know, want to know, couldn’t learn in a more convenient way, and isn’t personal.

The other reason I never liked blogs is because I’ve always had a fondness for working in raw html, and so I had a tendency to be snobbish about people with websites more popular than mine that they didn’t even build themselves. This is just plain foolish. Society functions because of specialization. It’s better that those good at coding code for those good at writing, so those good at writing have more time to put out good writing to entertain the coders. And even on a personal level, better I blog with WordPress and use the time saved to read my shiny new Head First: HTML book than to spend hours trying to code my own website that ends up looking horrible and is so big a time sink to update that I just stop updating all together (true story).