It really drives me nuts when you send someone an email listing a handful of very pertinent questions and they reply with one or two and simply ignore the rest. Not only is it annoying, it is also extremely unprofessional. If a potential client has responded to you with interest then at least give them the courtesy of a full response.

Read the email chain below. It is a job offer I received a few days ago. There’s no need to read the full job description that I have put into italics, I just left that there so show that none of what I was asking was mentioned in the original email making my questions very valid ones based on the industry he is recruiting for.

After his “extremely detailed” reply I never responded again.

Good day Mr Hoox

Is the following role of interest?

Main activities will include (but not be limited to):

Procurement

Specifying hardware & software solutions according to Client standards

IP Compliance

Assist in ensuring Information Protection compliance by adhering to Client IP standards at all times.

System Administration

Working with Aberdeen Help Desk on all aspects including:
User and group administration
Password Resets & User account management – Active Directory
2^nd / 3^rd line phone, email and desktop support for approx 200 users and 150 active PCs
Documentation
Software Licensing
IT Billing maintenance
Remote Access (ISDN/RAS/ADSL) configuration & demos
Voicemail Administration
Broadcast voicemails and emails

Hardware & Software Support

Hardware/software installations according to Client standards
Voice & Data Patching
Support of printers/faxes – including changing of toner
CD Burns
Video Conferencing and projector support for all meeting rooms
File Restores
Printer Queue management
Remedy call logging
Fault Research & Diagnosis
SecurID Cards
Citrix/Netgil Support
IPTelephony
Office Moves
Drill Rig setups

Infrastructure Support

Windows Server Support (e.g. server builds, restarting services, restores etc)
Server maintenance
Meridian configuration and limited administration for BT Exchange
Basic Network Management

Application Support

Routine application support

Advice & Consultancy

IT advice and consultancy

Projects

Assisting Aberdeen and local staff with their ongoing projects

Best regards,

[Insert Name Here]

Technical Recruitment Consultant

======================

[Company Name] Europe B.V.

Providing Global Solutions

[Address Line 1]
[Address Line 2]
the Netherlands

————————————————————————

Hi [Insert Name Here]

Thank you for the kind consideration. 4 months ago I would have jumped at it. I am still interested but I just need a short time to plan accordingly. When are you looking at filling the position? What is the rate for this position? Is it an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly rate? Is it full time or regular on/off rotations? If it is rotational can you please advise the rotation schedule and terms and conditions. You mention rig support. Is this an onshore or offshore position? Aberdeen or Netherlands?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Many thanks

Regards

Hoox

————————————————————————

Hi Hoox

Its an onshore role in NL.

Best Regards

[Insert Name Here]

So back by popular demand, and when I say popular demand I really only do mean 1 request. You see how damn accommodating I can be when I feel like it? Here you go Spoonz! This brief little encore was brought about by a pretty kewl song that seems to be making it’s way from chart to chart around the world and even seemingly into the Middle East which does surprise me a little. It is a cheeky little number by an artist who I have never heard of before (but that’s not saying much) named Katy Perry with the song, “I kissed a girl”.

How can one resist???

Enjoy!

(Click for more - Definitely NSFW)

(Most famous! Britney VS Madonna)

(hot lesbian kiss - Google Images)

(Kiss 3 by MARVEL CS)

(looking at the camera by SDImages)

(kiss 02 by mrakor)

(No Boys Allowed by SaylaMarz)

(unknown)

Since this is a one off, there are no instructions for you to follow! X

Ciao

To cut to the chase, yeah I signed up at gym. No not Jim, the CEO of the massively fattening fast food chain, I mean GYM.. of the run for an hour and get nowhere variety. Check it out on Wiki:

I will wait 5 minutes for all those that know me to get their breath back and get up off the floor. I hope you never hurt yourself.

I signed up at the gym in 4-ways, Johannesburg with a national membership since as everyone knows, I’m not a fan of staying still for very long. Already I have moved house during the week so I use the one in Centurion now. It started out great. Not bad for someone who doesn’t have a clue really. Or any will to go to the gym.

I was supposed to have school class last night but it was canceled due to unforeseen circumstances so instead of wasting that time I decided to go to the gym. It was really good. Late night gym is much better. The chicks certainly are nicer. I digress. So it’s a little busier but I still preferred it.

When I was done and walking out I suddenly encountered what is arguably the cruelest thing ever conceived. I find it difficult to discuss in writing so I will attempt to depict it in pictures.

This is what I saw when I walked out the front doors of the gym:

And to all those not particularly familiar with the sign, here is a close up. I know all you Capetonians know what I’m talking about. Yeah, Primi Piatti

How can you possibly put the entrance of the world’s best pizza / pasta place opposite the entrance to a frikkin gym people? You walk up the stairs and your mind is going, “Turn left or turn right? Turn left or turn right?” And even for people like me who did manage to turn left and hit the gym and are now ravenous, resistance is futile on the way out.

This should go down in history as a modern day example of true good vs evil!

Unless you are in the industry or somehow affiliated with it, you will never truly understand what it takes to be part of aviation as a whole. There is just so much to it on so many different levels. I am only just now scratching in the dust on the peaks of Everest.

In the past I always used to refer to pilots as "glorified bus drivers" but then I quite obviously never understood a 100th of what it takes to actually become a pilot. By pilot in this context I am referring to a commercial (professional) pilot and higher. Even after I got my private pilot’s license I still kinda thought "oh this isn’t as bad as everyone makes out" and thought I was quite something. Let me tell you, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Naïve bordering on stupidity to the maximum extreme!

I have learned a whole new respect for the guys and gals taking care of our skies and everything associated with it on the ground. It’s not easy. It’s scientific, precise, so strict, and on so many levels, wrought with inherent dangers. All this put together makes it so much safer for you (and me still) the traveler, getting to where we want to or need to be in one piece. Every aspect is covered and drilled into you. If a flight is slightly delayed there’s usually been an issue that had to cleared for our safety. If the flight is a little bumpy, chill. The pilots are not God (even though some might act differently) and have no control over the weather. And if you land a bit hard on the odd occasion then just accept that out of the 100s of landing that each of these guys do monthly, they cannot predict every single circumstance 50 feet off the ground traveling at 300kph aiming at a runway that, to draw a comparison, is like you driving at 200kph into your driveway.

The past two weeks has been an absolute eye opener. I’m using the term "eye opener" extremely loosely. I really mean "sheer terror"! I am only a 1/4 of the way through the ground school lectures and already I’m battling for air. It was supposed to be 4 hours a day (9-1) for 8 weeks and I thought I was mentally prepared for it. The information came at me with such force that almost equates to a baseball bat swung full tilt in the gob which made me feel completely overwhelmed, bruised and scarred and I just wanted to crawl up and die. On completion of day two I was so shaky I must admit my mind was jumping back to projects in shitty places like Angola because that’s where I am comfortable as that’s what I know. Comfort zone / Security blanket.

Day 3 I woke up with a vengeance. To hell with all this doubt. If I had tried to study everything I know about IT that I learned over the last 10 years in a short 8 weeks I would be just as flabbergasted to say the least. Get a grip dammit! What are you going to do? Wimp out now at the first little hurdle? HELL NO!!! To quote the famous words of NASA, "Failure is NOT an option!" So now I have jumped in head first and am hitting it with everything I have.

The school was kind enough to let me sit night school as well so with the exception of two lectures I missed because night school started 2 weeks earlier, I get to sit every lecture twice and it’s not the same course material at night as during the day which makes for some variation which is nice. Different subject, different lecturer, different people. Yes that also makes for an extremely long day though starting at 9am and finishing at 10pm but it’s worth it and it’s only for 2 months and besides, I get a double whammy of 1st class lecturing. I have to keep reminding myself that A/ No one said this would be easy and B/ This is what I want and if it were easy I would get bored and would walk away looking for another challenge. I’m demented like that. What ever happened to "following the path of least resistance"?

Next time I see those chaps (and chipettes) with 3 stripes and most especially those chaps (and chipettes) with 4 stripes, they will most certainly get the respect they deserve from me. No more snide bus driver comments. And if there are any bus drivers reading this, I think you are kewl too! Respect bruv!

It’s late, I have school tomorrow, goodnight.

X

Just when I thought it couldn’t get much worse, cue MTN, the provider of a shitter wireless service than Vodacom.

Right, remember the other day I was bitching about cost versus service and was using my Vodacom connection as a benchmark? Well this is now a cost versus a sheer lack of service. At least with Vodacom there was connectivity albeit drastically slow. That was on 3G. Now I’m not saying I am changing my stance on what I said previously, I am just saying lets compare notes and take a look at this happy little MTN connection monitor:

Let me explain real quick:

HSDPA is meant to be faster than 3G. Check the Send and Receive Current. 0.0kbps. All pages are showing as Page Cannot Be Displayed and not even MSN will log on. FASTER? Try non-existent.

I think their name is extremely misleading too, “F@stlink” which is really just a corny play with the @ sign trying to be clever spelling “fast”. Rather get your service faster and then you can get cocky.

You stupid simplistic idiotic drivers. Do you have NO clue as to what lanes on a road / highway are for? If it has been that long since you bought your drivers license then allow me to help you!

Lanes are to assist the flow of traffic. The more lanes there are the more it was deemed necessary based on studies recording specific flows of traffic at certain times of the day. Now I’m not sure if you were told by the guy selling you your license, but lanes are generally split into regulated categories from left to right, “slow, medium and fast” flowing vehicles respectively. If there are only two lanes then use your brains and try to figure out on your own that the left lane is still the slow lane and the right lane is still for faster and overtaking traffic.

You get where I am heading here? There is sweet F-All point on sitting in the fast lane going the same speed or slower than the vehicles to your left. You are a hazard to yourself and others and here’s why: Now think a little more. If you are used to driving on the left and overtaking on the right then surely you are more inclined to check carefully on your right before shifting over. Same applies to the left asshole. Look before you meander over to the left at your leisure because chances are that 100 cars behind you are now pissed that you are hogging the fast lane and are now overtaking you on the left.

I’m not sure if you are simply stupid or grossly inconsiderate and dwell in your delusions of grandeur.

God I don’t even know why I bother.

There are some amazing aspects about being home in South Africa. For one it’s the mild climate we experience.

Over the last 5 years I have been to places that at midday in the peak of summer we experienced temperatures that would make hell feel like a luke warm bath. 68°C in the shade while waiting for an aircraft to take off. No wonder those Arabs are an irritable bunch!

On the other scale I have also been to places where hell has frozen over and it was so damn cold that even the Eskimos buggered off and got the hell out of Dodge. -35°C not including wind chill.

So now I have to start laughing out loud when I hear people talking about, and having it broadcast on the radio, that Johannesburg is about to experience a severe cold front that is “moving in fast” and the max temperatures during the day will be a bitterly cold… wait for it…. 13°C. Yeah that’s 13°C not -13°C.

13°C? Some people would call that a mild summer’s morning in the UK

If you are not familiar with South Africa then you wont be familiar with our top notch security systems that take care to ensure your car is not stolen or broken into while in shopping malls etc. This system is known as, and goes by the term: “Car Guards”

Basically these are seemingly unpaid security guards that roam the parking lots with the intention of dissuading any would-be burglar, vandal or car thief. Sadly in South Africa this is a necessary evil and a very good initiative to help curb the crime. The only issue now is the guilt expectation to tip / pay these guys. The going rate is not a lot of money on a once off but lets just take a look at exactly how lucrative this little trade really is.

Please bear in mind that I have much better things to do with my time than to sit and monitor parking lots for years and write a thesis for a PHD so please allow me some poetic license to speculate and estimate.

Just to keep the numbers manageable let’s work on a hypothetical parking lot with 100 parking spaces. I would safely say that 4 car guards per 100 spaces is the norm, maybe 5, but we will get to that later.

Working purely on my shopping habits of late I will work on a 1 hour time frame.

Lets say of these 100 spaces:
25% stay 15 mins making 100 cars per hour (25 x 4)
25% stay 30 mins making 50 cars per hour (25 x 2)
25% stay 45 mins making 25 cars per hour (25 x 1 - leaving 25 spaces for 15 mins)
25% stay 60 mins making 25 cars per hour (25 x 1)

TOTAL : 200 cars per hour

For arguments sake, let’s say everyone gives a car guard R2.00 (which I hear is the going rate) each time they leave the parking after shopping. That’s a conservative estimate of R400 per hour making it R100 per hour per guard split amongst the 4 on duty. According to Rocky during a conversation about this car guard situation, the going rate in Cape Town can be anywhere as high as R5.00 per parking visit at night. In the same hypothetical situation that’s an estimated R1000 per hour giving each guard R250 per hour. This is a speculated salary of between R19 200 and R48 000 tax free per month (based on 8 hours x 6 days x 4 weeks) with no required training. A hat and sunscreen can be useful tools of the trade though (expense: R60 per month). One wonders if this has not become a syndicate having a few power people getting extremely rich off this unavoidable reality.

Word on the street says a beginner (baby) pilot can hope to gross R10 000 per month after spending R300 000 (for training alone) + accommodation + food + petrol.

Now there’s a toss up. Stay a pilot and be poor forever, rejoin the IT industry or join lucrative security industry as a car guard?

It sucks!

After 11 years in the IT industry I decided to put it all behind me and go through a 1/3 life crisis. 33.3 years old and I’m back at school.

This time round it’s all about flying. I’m doing my CPL (Commercial Pilots License). I only started the ground school yesterday and I already want to pull my hair out and then sit in a dark corner, bald, and cry uncontrollably while chanting, “make this bad shit go away, make this bad shit go away”.

I wonder if the IT industry will have me back. I wonder if I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew. Why do those other smart ass pricks in the class just GET IT!??? Why can’t I be one of “those” that just frikkin GET IT???

It’s been a while since I have felt this ridiculously stupid. Humbling. I may as well be reading hieroglyphics off the Rosetta Stone!… “Oh that’s a pretty picture, I wonder what the f*ck it means!!!”

Here’s to tomorrow being better!

Hip Hip!

I am getting distinctly pissed off with the services that South African residents receive. My latest gripe is the Cost vs. Service that you receive for internet and cell phone usage. It really is a joke. It’s just not very funny.

Ok I will agree that South Africa mobile / cell phone technology is of world standards or better but I’m afraid it all gets let down with the service that is provided. God it does my head in.

(Click for more bitching)

I have a Vodafone (Vodacom) mobile modem that I hook up to my laptop for internet connectivity by using Vodacom data bundles. It is supposed to be capable of HSDPA but I have never gotten a connection better than 3G and even then it is ridiculously slow. Put the speed of service aside for a minute and think about the costs. Fucking ludicrous. R88 for 75MB up to R1989 for 10GB. And there’s a bigger catch. They all expire within 30 days. So in order to save money you have to buy huge bundles but then use them up fast and then buy another huge bundle. You are getting screwed again and again. I had a 500MB bundle and then I got a message stating that it expired and I have forfeited 135MB. I’m sorry I was away in Thailand and never paid for roaming it seems.

I know I am quoting mobile technology but looking around, I see that landline rates are not a hell of a lot better. You see the big specials of R89 per month for ADSL connections. Check the fine print “** Based on a 128K connection with a 1GB cap limit and excludes landline rental”. What is this capped limit bullshit? The internet is virtual. You are not buying anything physical, you are buying positive and negatives, on and offs, lights and darks, IT’S DIGITAL so why put a cap on it. Besides at 128K how much do they possibly think you can download???

I feel an international comparison is valid here. In the UK I had unlimited, UNCAPPED 8MBPS (16X faster than your average 512KBPS connection here) internet access for £39 (R585) and what’s more, that included line rental and all local and national calls were FREE. We basically paid our £39 and never got a phone bill but could very well have hosted an internet cafe. The rates in the rest of Europe and the USA are pretty similar.

I already hear some of the over-patriotic-accepting-complacent-led-by-the-nose South Africans mumbling, “Well then go back to the UK if you think it’s so much better there” but that isn’t going to help the situation here now is it? Wake up and realise that your are being screwed!

The problem is with the infrastructure. It is still sole owned. 1 single service provider. In the rest of the world it is called a monopoly and unfair trading conditions. Ask Bill Gates when he was getting whipped by the courts just because his marketing and development teams were better than Netscape. This country is getting shafted by it’s own people and we sit around and accept it while they get super rich and greater the divide between the wealthy and the average. What is Telkom paying some fat government official to keep the monopoly in power and fuck the consumer? Mobile, landline, whatever, no matter what, it all goes over Telkom copper cabling (even mobile towers connect to this infamous grid). One call I made that I checked up on came to R28 for 6 minutes. Are they smoking pot or are we as the consumer for just accepting this?

Mobile technology on the surface seems as though it’s not a monopoly since there are multiple service providers. Are there really? They all load share across towers but try calling “cross-network” and see how that hits your account. It seems providers like Virgin Mobile don’t even have their own infrastructure but instead blatantly piggy back off all the others. You can test this theory by simply buying a Virgin SIM card and check what signal your phone connects to. The last time I had a Virgin card my calls kept dropping as it force changed providers from MTN to Vodacom to Cell-C. And then take a look at the prices and how similar they are. They try to make themselves look different by offering different packages for different prices but it’s also for different amounts that you receive. However you look at it, it’s all price watching that going on and thus removing ANY notion of competition and hence fucking the consumer again!

Now even at these ridiculous over-inflated costs, the service is indirectly proportional. Try make a call. The amount of times I dial a number and get the irritating “beep beep beep” and have to redial about 3 or 4 times before it connects just drives me bananas. Since I have only just returned I and been asking people that I have been with if it’s just me and if there’s something wrong with my phone only to be told, “Oh relax man, that’s normal these days”. Complacency. Getting used to and accepting the shit will just keep the shit getting worse. The fucked up apartheid South Africa never changed by having 30 million disadvantaged black individuals sitting on their asses and moaning but accepting the regime.

Even now I am trying to upload credit so that I can even use this shit service and only to get the message on my phone, “The service is temporarily unavailable. Try again later”. The prosecution rests for now. But wait, this is the first in a series of shit rants that are on the way about this place. God it’s good to be home!