Category Archives: Life

09/23/06

Sometimes you just get luckly…

Decided to finally make the jump to HDTV. Lots of reasons really (quality up, prices lower, etc). Did all my research, and narrowed it down to the Sony KDS-55A2000 55″ SXRD rear projection set.

Did a lot of price shopping:

On Amazon: $2,500
On Crutchfield: $3,000
At Magnolia: $2,700
On Best Buy’s website: $3,000
At the Best Buy down the street from my house: $2,000 <--- Woah! Turns out the CompUSA around the corner was going out of business, and had a huge blowout sale on the 55" Sony (but not the 50 or 60") so Best Buy with their price match guarantee was actually selling it BELOW COST. The 55" was actually $500 cheaper then the 50". Sale ended that day. I bought one (duh). Then I saved another $100 by agreeing to upgrade to HD cable with Comcast which I was going to do anyways. So anyone want a Sony 32" Trinitron on the cheap? Nice solid wood entertainment center cabinet too.

09/19/06

No more head-hunters please.

Usually when I’m talking about head-hunters I’m either ranting or making fun of them… or in some cases both.

But this post isn’t about that. This post is about something simple. If your company is interested in me, then contact me yourself. Do not under any circumstances use a head-hunter. I won’t talk to them.

You’d be surprised how many head-hunters call me with statements like, “My client has specifically asked me to contact you about an opportunity with them. I can’t tell you who they are, but trust me they’re great. Please send me your resume so I can give it to them to start the process.”

Now occasionally (once) they’re being honest. But most of the time, they’re full of shit since this is one of the oldest ploys in the book to get your resume in their system so they can call you every 6 months about “great opportunites” which suck.

So instead of paying a head-hunter 30% to call me and setup an interview… just contact me yourself.

02/1/06

Well that was painless…

Just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.0.1.  It was almost too easy.  Cool.

Anyways, today was just like most any other day.  Meetings, coding, fixing bugs… all that good stuff.  Earlier in the week, our company offically “launched” and started sending out press releases and all that sorta thing.  We even made slashdot.  Of course, the response wasn’t that great, but oh well… they don’t really understand what we’re doing, but that’s pretty standard for slash.

Anyways, you can check us out in all (well some) of our glory at the Innovation Station at the RSA Security Conference in San Jose later this month.

01/8/06

Wow, spammy

So lately, I’ve been really annoyed with the amount of spam I get. After various custom filters + SpamAssassin, I still get around 100 spams/day (of which about 20% finds it’s way into my inbox and the remaining 80% into my spambox which I have to check for false positives). Pretty painful.

So yesterday I splitted things up to figure out where my spam is coming from (or rather to). I’ve figured out that roughly 2/3rds of my spam comes from my two pobox.com accounts. About 3/12ths comes via my speakeasy.net address (which I’ve never used in my life, which is pretty odd) and the final 1/12th is via my synfin.net address. Checking out the anti-spam settings on my pobox.com account shows that they have *blocked* over 7700 spams in the last month. HOLY CRAP!

At that point, it was painfully obvious that after 10 years, I need to retire my pobox.com addresses. Just way too much spam is coming through and theres just no way to block it all even with agressive filters. So I’ve decided to migrate all my mailing lists to my gmail account (synfinatic) and retire my pobox.com address in favor of synfin.net (aturner or aaron… haven’t really decided yet. aturner gets under 10 spams/day and aaron is spam-free, but people can’t seem to spell synfin or aaron which seems like a bad combination).

Gmail seems to have pretty decent spam filtering, since most days I don’t get any spam in my inbox. But frankly, I’ve never been a big fan of webmail systems, and gmail isn’t much better then others IMHO. Oh well, either way, it’s Taps for aturner@pobox.com.