I understand the context and the meaning. HR drones and many other people would be confused and/or insulted, as they would take it more as "beneath me" or "barely worth my time". It comes off like this:

"I can understand the formation of galaxies and quantum mechanics. Networking is trivial. Please do yourself a favor and hire me."

The narrative you post is extremely hard to follow and makes little sense. Let's try to decipher.

You lost your job when then dot com bubble burst and went back to school. You finished a PhD in Physics. You then found out your were sold a bill of goods about jobs of people with PhDs in Physics and there is some sort of glut.

Then you have been doing some sort of project management for DoD and NASA. Now is where things get really weird.

" I desperately want back into network equipment product management, but my networking tech skills aren't up to date."

Pulling that apart, you are talking about a job more on the business side than the technology side of the business. Technical skills are important in product management, but so is a head for business. That could be one reason that people don't "get' you -- they see that you went back to school and spent time and money on getting a PhD in Physics. You didn't go back to school to get an advanced degree in CS, EE, or a MBA. You went back for Physics and now you are trying to get into product marketing. But things get a little weirder.

"I find networking technology absolutely trivial"

I really, sincerely hope this is a typo. Finding something "trival" has considerable negative connotations to it, and if you say that to a hiring manager, they are going to think you are going to be just biding your time with their "trivial" nonsense product and looking to move onto something more interesting the moment it shows up. It would be better to say that you enjoy certain challenges or explain what you find interesting rather than saying something is "trivial".

And then finally,

"I'm more than willing to start over in network admin"

I don't see that you need to move to this, you need to concentrate and present the skills you have and exercise in program/project management and previous skills to get into some sort of networking gig. But you do need to address some rather good questions a hiring manager would have, specifically:

- Why did you get a doctorate in Physics when you were interested in product management?
- What excites you about networking and product management?

I also highly recommend that all job seekers thoroughly read and use "What Color is Your Parachute?". If nothing else, it will walk you through making a coherent case for yourself of why you want to pursue a given career, and that coherent presentation is going to make hiring managers stop running and start listening more. Right now if I was hiring a job that was responsible for setting the business direction of a networking product, I'd be worried about hiring you because your record shows you actively running from the business development aspects of your career.

Your Physics degree is certainly not worthless and should not be hidden. You can most likely take on complicated problems, decompose them at a high level, aren't afraid of the unknown, etc. Also the fact that you finished your PhD means that you can stick with something, too.

Many photographer friends I have watermark the photos they post to their Facebook accounts with their contact information. So if Facebook did indeed re-use their posted, watermarked photo, it becomes free advertising for them.

I'd file this under "the cost of doing business". Especially if you are a photographer. No one cares (and wants to pay you) until they see your work.

You want to start working freelance and you don't want to publicize how people can reach you? I'd expect a decent head shot, a phone number, a short bio and an email address. Also representative galleries of past work, as well.

You don't have to put your life story out there, but it's really not uncommon in business to have some small amount of "About Me" information posted with experience, education, sometimes martial status/number of children (especially if you are looking to photograph families/children).

If you are going to set up a social media presence, you can't just set up a page and have it sit there. It does require tending and maintenance or it looks abandoned. If you do photography, post examples of good work at a steady pace, even if it's not paying gigs. Hopefully people forward it around and you get some notice.

It sounds like you need to loosen up, or find another way of making money on the side that doesn't require social media. You can be a successful freelander without it, but you will still need to get your name out there somehow (personal networking, business networking groups, etc)

One-off boxes become a huge time sink, usually at the absolute worst possible time to do so. With two very viable options with Xen and ESX, put the time and care into setting up a stack with the nifty features you want -- redundancy options, ability to move VMs from one server to another, monitoring, out of band management, RAID, etc.

Then you can set up the little management hosts, set up a VM for each one of those "little things", and also come up with a single way of deploying your operating systems so you can punch VMs out on demand. Both Windows and Linux have ways of doing this, and you can even script VM creation, too.

VMs also let you pretty much side-step the drive issues that will plague old hardware ... that will show up at the wrong time.

Anything Mac is a joke for data center operations since they considered the XServe. You shouldn't need to go to the colo just to power-cycle something, ever. Hardware failure will get anyone (a dead drive or a bad DIMM can ruin anyone's day), but if it doesn't have IPMI/iLO/whatever you call your out-of-band management tool, it shouldn't be used for any infrastructure service at all. You want to have a mac mini set up as a user terminal to check email or whatnot, fine. But don't stick NTP or DNS on hardware that you can't full control elsewhere.

I'm mobile!

A guy did this in our office for a while. I think eventually the difficulties of finding a place to keep the 5th wheel trailer in an urban environment ended the experiment. Companies (and residential neighbors, zoning laws, HOAs) might all grow objections to having a semi-permanent resident around.

If you kept it truly mobile, though, and kept the trailer in trailer-safe places, it could be awesome for a while.

You should try plugging the coax into an antenna, and you can get all the free channels (and probably sub-channels of the free stuff) in HD. There are a lot of DIY designs out there using very basic materials (lumber, tinfoil, coat hangers, wire), or you can spend well under $100 for a pretty decent pre-made antenna setup where you literally have to just make the cable connections.

Check out antennapoint.com to see where your nearest transmitters are and what you can get from your home. You might be pleasantly surprised. Most places you'll get the major networks and a few independents, plus PBS. In my area we get something like 20+ channels of programming in HD using an OTA antenna I built myself. We supplement with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, DVDs from our library, etc.

Truth be told, a lot of what is on cable nowadays is low-budget "reality" crap. IMHO the only bright spots are on HBO, and I'm not shelling out money for a cable subscription plus HBO on top of that. I can wait for DVDs. The networks and PBS actually still do quite a OK job with scripted stuff and science/educational programming.

Then set in the west.

There's nothing for anyone to gain, no follow-up, no repercussions, etc.

Move on.

We pick up broadcast TV using a HDTV antenna I built myself. (google GH10 antenna plans, or try some of the cheaper/easier ones depending on how far you are from the tower). We have been TiVo fans since 2001. Although yes, it is (gasp) paying for something, we got the lifetime subscription option so no monthly bills. It hooks up to Netflix and Amazon (although not Prime Instant .... grrr).

We get series we want to watch through amazon that download to the TiVo like magic. Although we (gasp) pay for them, it's vastly cheaper than what we used to pay for cable. We also got the amazon visa card an fund some of the subscriptions through amazon points (we do pay it off every month, too)

We have also been picking up a lot of dvds (especially the kids shows) at the library, which is a double bonus because you don't have to pay for them and also they go back to the library so you don't have to watch Dora Saves the Mermaids a billion times (unless it's on Netflix)

Biggest gripe: No Game of Thrones streaming on Amazon (cue The Oatmeal).

I also do thank the FCC for requiring local broadcast of all NFL games for the local team ... even the ones on the money grubbing NFL network or ESPN.

And in the Facebook, block them

I can only hope ... rather than having to block every request for space chicken or karma wars or castle food growers or whatnot

It's not like it's on the front page of the New York Times or anything.

First off, you have two different lifespans and innovation rates at work. Today's cars can last 15 years without a major repair (think 150-175K miles), and likely many of them will see 20 years and still be in relatively good working order (250K miles). In contrast, smartphones didn't exist 15 or 20 years ago in anything remotely resembling their current incantation. I can only imagine what they will look like in another 15 or 20 years. But it's entirely possible that if I bought a car today, I (or my children, or someone else who I sold it to) will be driving it in 15 years. That's something on the order of 5-7 generations of improvements and enhancements to smartphones. Tying a smartphone to an automobile beyond very simple interfaces (headphone jack) ties an anchor on the smartphone market when it's innovating at a pretty fast clip -- designers of smartphones would by necessity need to keep compatibility with 5-7 year old cars, which may tie them into old standards that could mean keeping things around that add bulkiness, cost and take away space for other features. Think: floppy drive, parallel port, serial port, VGA connections.

I also don't want Apple near anything that's supposed to last as long as a car. Their business model is heavily dependent on rapid turnover, rapid innovation, agile response to market demands and the ability to cut off legacy technology on their whim (PowerPC vs Intel, different display and interconnect technologies, killing of the XServe, etc). This has been demonstrated to be a fantastic business model for the business they are in, but it's in marked contrast to the automotive space, where people tend to put things like safety, reliability and longevity higher up on the list than the latest shiny thing. And they get really pissed when something breaks in an otherwise perfectly running automobile and there's no way to fix it because the part is unavailable.

Imagine if you had a perfectly running 7 year old car and you couldn't upgrade your phone because it wouldn't work with your car, and it was the device that played music, was your nav device and performed some other functions? A phone upgrade would end up costing you tens of thousands of dollars, and that's pretty ridiculous.

Also, from the article:

"most of the auto companies that offer more than a car stereo want to lock you into their interface and services"

Is he unfamiliar with Apple's approach to doing business?

If it's a single disk (e.g. in a compute only server), then treat it like toilet paper. Know it's going to be replaced, how to replace it, and have spares on hand. Inform all people who use these servers that data on the server is being treated as throw-away at all times, and to never, ever expect data to survive a reboot -- and when the hard drive fails, you *might* be able to recover some data. It goes without saying that you also need to be able to re-provision the system with a common image, as well.

If people can't deal with that, then it's time to get into RAID, decent backups, NAS, SAN and other technologies that require additional cost and care to purchase and maintain but that are designed to guard against disk failures bringing down critical systems.

You should also make sure you understand your drive replacement procedure (as well as your consumers). Are you keeping a stack of spares and self-servicing, or are you paying a vendor to provide n-hour service?

We monitor all of the "screen time" our kids get. Phones, computer, TV, DS and Leapsters can be played with or watched for a while (usually about one hour a day). We also don't allow screen time before lunch and make sure they also have physical activity, read books, play games (card, board, puzzles), Legos, ride bikes, go to the park, go outside (sledding, swingset, bubbles, hula hoop) and do organized lessons (dancing, swimming). We also take family vacations at a lake where we do swimming, fishing, canoeing, tubing, hiking and other outdoor stuff. Last year I think they went four days without TV. Sometimes they whine that they want to watch something else but once they get involved in something new they generally forget about it.

We'd never just park them with a tablet and let them "learn" that way. They still have a lot of real-world stuff to figure out before they can spend significant time in electronic land.

But the teacher tells the parents flat out that she doesn't respond to email. Why? Her job is to teach my daughter and twenty or so other kids. Not sit behind a screen and answer parent's emails and make blog entries. I think it's fantastic -- she's really dedicated to her work, and it shows. She will send an email if there's something important coming home that we really need to know about. It's typically short and to the point, because she has lesson plans to work on, papers to grade and other stuff to deal with. I can also imagine that by being upfront about her email policy, it likely cuts down on a lot of BS mail that parents would send. Not to mention a bunch of unsolicited advice -- imagine having 30-40 people telling you how to do your job.

But the district is by no means a bunch of Luddites. The district has a listserv and web pages. The principal and superintendent send weekly emails, as well as community updates. The kids have access to computers in the classroom, and they are working on getting iPads in all the classrooms (they currently have to rotate them). Technology is well-integrated to support the actual educational mission of the school. As I've visited the higher grades for one thing or another, there are ample computer resources available, and the district has wifi in all the schools. So it's there, and it seems that they have thought seriously about how to use that technology to get the job done.

As for bringing home papers, working on them, then bringing them back -- there's a big lesson about responsibility in there. Kids are very tactile and oriented towards things -- so the paper has a meaning. It's the same reason we give an allowance in cash and why they teach counting with things instead of numbers on a board only.

There is also the finance question, too. Given that the private sector is slowly dragging itself out of the last economic downturn, the public sector is lagging the public sector by a couple years. Our district is facing a $3M shortfall this year, so spending of any kind is being severely impacted. Groups like the PTA and some other educational foundations in the town have been doing a fantastic job with technology donations, but it's highly likely that teachers will be laid off and classroom sizes will rise again. We already have athletic fees, bus fees, numerous fundraisers and other ways of extracting money for the school already. And we are in a town that's relatively well off, where property values haven't been slaughtered too badly -- there are towns in far more dire situations. We still have some art, drama and elective classes left.

So add that all up and yeah, schools aren't going to go out and spend big money on new and unproven stuff. They will make what they have access to last longer, and do what they can to get the kids educated. I'm proud of the work they do, as they accomplish a lot with what they have, and they seem to have good leadership, too.