I was given notice that this Friday will be my last day at this company. The notice actually came at the end of January, so it is no surprise. My company is finally closing the Japanese office. I was given the chance to transfer back to the home office or to another office in nearby Taiwan. I chose to remain here in Japan for the sake of my family.

For years the Japanese office have been a drain on capital never having reached profitability, but also it has been a source of several very big name customers in the consumer electronic space. Unfortunately with the prolonged downturn in the economy, the home office has scrutinized the various divisions within the company and has decided to lop off those unprofitable parts. I don't blame them for the decision and I have been treated more than fairly, though my experience seems to have been out of the norm.

The company tried their best to place me elsewhere in the company because I am an expatriot specifically for them, so they felt that they had an extra responsibility to at the very least to bring me back to the U.S. I simply couldn't accept though. Aside from my suspicion that I would have been laid off after two months or so back in the U.S., I have actually just gotten settled here in Japan. I bought a car and renewed my apartment lease for another two years. I'm just not at a point where I can up and move again.

I mentioned earlier that the layoffs were actually announced at the end of January, but my last day will be this Friday. The Japanese employees, for the most part (there are still a couple people like country manager and office manager still around to help with the closing), had their last day back in January. I have had my employment extended in order to handle visa transfers and to handle other things that are required for living here that were handled by the company previously.

I've been doing that for a couple weeks now and I'm just taking a little break today. I've been running all over the place for my visa. I've been to a couple interviews which I'm still waiting on. And just last Friday I found out that I'm supposed to be working on wrapping up development for one of the customers for whom we had to cancel a project on. It gives me a chance to polish my programming a little more before being hurled into unemployment, so that's a plus. But I would have much rather had this week to finish what I need to finish in terms of things that are important to me, not for some ex-customer.

So I am going to be employment-free next week. I've talked to a few recruiters and have gone to a couple interviews through them. The companies seem cool, and I'm definitely qualified for the positions that I'm seeking (Lead QA engineer, Junior developer, or FAE). I'm not worried about finding a new job. There are plenty of jobs out there for developers, but there aren't as many for QA engineers. There is no premium nor respect for QA in Japan, it is seen as an expense only and it's engineers are no more than trained monkeys, so companies end up hiring part time workers to perform QA for less than 1000 yen an hour typically. It's a little disheartening to say the least. But I'm looking for something a little more involved than button pressing.

I've got 5 and a half years of experience at this latest company. 1 of that was as a developer, just before I moved to Japan 2 years ago to help with the Japanese QA team as a technical lead which they desperately needed. After the other members of the QA team finally left after the PM mismanaged them for the last time, I was left as the sole QA engineer. I named myself QA manager and hired on two interns (at 1000 yen per hour) and trained them to do QA while I handled the customer contacts and project scheduling. I tried my best to give them some grounding in C because they could then become much more useful to my QA team and also to any future engineering job they would get. It's funny, neither of them had any computer experience when they came in, but they left able to write simple tests in C. They were really great, for the most part. Having to fire them in November due to cost cutting was tough, though.

Now I'd like to find a position that I can grow in. QA in Japan was really a dead end because of the inability to move upwards. Becoming the QA manager is like becoming the top monkey, you're still a monkey. That's why I'm looking for stuff in development if possible. I've got development experience, but that was two years ago before I moved to Japan. I'm doing my best at interviews to emphasize that most of what I did in QA was development of test cases so I'm not rusty. That's my biggest challenge in the interviews now.

I did finally receive the results of my Japanese Language Proficiency Test last weekend and I am officially a Level 2 certificate holder. There is only one more level to go and that is Native Speaker status, so I'd like to think I've come a long way, but I know there's still quite a bit to go. I'll need to update my resume...

Heh. If you've know any positions for a Japanese-speaking American who's got several years of experience in Development, QA, and Management, please drop me a line at my email address. I'd really appreciate it.

The FreeBSD bootloader does not seem to talk to my USB keyboard, so I have to sit through 10 seconds of 'devil menu' every time I boot up.

It would be nice if this were configurable, skippable, or if the loader would just talk to my USB keyboard so I could skip the menu manually.

No update on the DHCP issue. The machine still isn't talking to the Internet.

This weekend I downloaded the FreeBSD 5.2 .iso and tried installing it on my new used PC. I'm having some trouble with setting up the DHCP client.

The LAN card is a 3Com card that is detected properly by the FreeBSD installation script. During installation, it asks me whether the card will use IPv6 or DHCP and I choose DHCP. The script then goes off to contact the DHCP server and retrieves what appears to be an appropriate IP address. 192.168.xx.3. The router is 192.168.xx.1, and my other PC (Win2K) is 192.168.xx.2 and works fine. So the .3 IP seems to be correct.

However, when the OS boots up, I am unable to make contact with anything. I can't ping the router, much less anything on the internet.

I went through the installation again and tried to install via FTP rather than from CD. That didn't work either, though the DHCP client seemed to retrieve an appropriate IP address from the router.

Besides a network connection, I seem to have everything installed correctly. My video needs a little tweaking, but I'm not sure how much I can do with that, it's an old system.

What can I do to get DHCP working?

What happened to Search.pl and Comments.pl? They don't seem to be keeping up with the front page at all.

Yes, if everyone else jumped off a cliff I would too.

The Kingdom of the Obvious

Motto: "Prima Facie"

UN Category: Capitalist Paradise
Civil Rights: Very Good
Economy: Thriving
Political Freedoms: Excellent

Location: the West Pacific
The Kingdom of The Obvious is a tiny, economically powerful nation, remarkable for its absence of drug laws. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, intelligent population of 5 million are either ruled by a small, efficient government or a conglomerate of multinational corporations; it's difficult to tell which.

There is no government in the normal sense the word; however, a small group of community-minded individuals is effectively ruled by the Department of Commerce, with areas such as Law & Order and Religion & Spirituality receiving almost no funds by comparison. Income tax is unheard of. A large private sector is led by the Information Technology industry, followed by Cheese Exports and Basket Weaving.

Crime is a serious problem, and the police force struggles against a lack of funding and a high mortality rate. The Obvious's national animal is the dog, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its currency is the Value.

Well, I just had a rather interesting and funny conversation over AIM with a hapless job-seeker. I thought I'd post it here for your benefit (names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

[14:12] Hapless Job-Seeker: hello
[14:13] simplisales: Hello :) This is Erica from Simpli sales. How may I help you?
[14:14] Hapless Job-Seeker: i was wondering if u could check out my resume :p
[14:14] Hapless Job-Seeker: (Link: [to posted resume])
[14:14] Hapless Job-Seeker: thanx a lot
[14:15] simplisales: You know you messaged me about this before, right? :)
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: :p
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: did i?
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: its possible :p
[14:15] simplisales: And I said:
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: what was ur answer
[14:15] simplisales: [12:47] simplisales: Then why the heck are you using "u" in your resume? Do you expect companies to take you seriously?
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: ahha!
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: thanx
[14:15] simplisales: And I see that advice went straight to the pooper.
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: *looks for exscuse*
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: *cant find one*
[14:16] simplisales: ;)
[14:16] Hapless Job-Seeker: so
[14:16] simplisales: You need to brush up on your professionalism.
[14:16] Hapless Job-Seeker: no mind changing revalations then :p
[14:17] simplisales: I would also recommend reading a couple books on how to write a professional resume.
[14:18] Hapless Job-Seeker: in fact, i have decided that this is not going to get anywhere :p
[14:18] Hapless Job-Seeker: and have made a concious desicion to go and smoke lots of dope :p
[14:18] Hapless Job-Seeker: goodbye
[14:19] simplisales: Talk to you later.

Now there's a winner! ;)

---

By the way, we have filled the position advertised in my previous journal entry with someone from Slashdot. More about this later!

Slashdot ran a story about Knoppix yesterday and it piqued my interest. So I went ahead and downloaded the latest ISO and burned the CD.

I'm impressed at the automatic support of all my devices without any user input. It, as they say, "just works". All Linux installations ought to be this easy.

I have some gripes with the system, though.

The first is that Knoppix doesn't make it obvious how to complete the Linux installation. I understand that Knoppix is designed to be a distro on disk, but such a distribution is only a stepping stone to actually putting the OS on the disk for permanent installation. Why, then, doesn't Knoppix have an option under the Knoppix menu to prep and install the OS to the hard drive?

Another complaint is the lack of device control. Specifically I cannot figure out how to adjust the mouse sensitivity. The mouse pointer for my USB mouse flies across the screen at the slightest touch, and I can't figure out where the mouse applet lives. There doesn't seem to be any consolidated device control area, so I'm sure I just haven't hunted enough for the right applet. I would really like it if the device settings were all in a easily accessible and obvious place.

A very small thing I noticed and thought strange was that the KDE 'Start' button isn't activated by the Windows key.

I really don't like transparent system menus. I guess some people like it, so I don't begrudge them that. I just want to know how to turn it off. Where is this setting? It sure as hell isn't in the Desktop settings applet.

Why is the documentation so lacking? There seems to be a concerted effort to put the least amount of effort into writing the help documentation. I started Frozen Bubble, which I think is a game, and it hung when I selected the 1-player mode. So I clicked the 'X' and...nothing. So I right click Frozen Bubble in the task bar and select Close and...nothing. Now I'm stumped. It seems to me that the OS should realize that the application isn't terminating and do what it can to shut down the process, ideally it would prompt the user before it sent the final kill signal. There was simply no response from the application or any acknowledgement from the OS that the application was hanging.

Then I remembered, hey, this is Unix. There's got to be some manual way to kill processes. So I opened up bash and tried to figure out a way to kill the hanging process. The kill command needs a process number, so how do I get a process number? bash help doesn't help. This is where my documentation complaint really started to kick in. Why wouldn't the bash 'help kill' documentation have a pointer to whatever the command was to list running procs? I'm not asking for a hyperlinked set of docs, just a simple 'Also see: WHATEVER THE COMMAND IS TO GET THE PROC LIST'. Finally I found Kkill in the application menu (of all places) which proceeded to kill the game of Mahjongg I had to minimize to get to the hanging Frozen Bubble.

In general, I get the feeling of a very good OS from Knoppix, but it lacks the polish of Windows 2000/XP or MacOS. I'd like to get to know it more when I have more time. I really want to figure out what the attraction is to this OS. Windows has come such a long way since the nightmare days of Win98. Windows 2000 and XP are approaching the point of perfection from a user perspective and stability standpoint.

Is it my preconceived notions of how smoothly and comfortably an OS should work that turns me off every time I boot Linux?

I am watching CNN and a London-based reporter is spending a month with an Ethiopian village to document the life of a starving people. He is large in size, probably 250 pounds or so and taller than most of the Ethiopians he lives with.

He wants to discover for himself the reasons behind the famine and starvation.

On his first day he accompanies his host family to the 'church' which is nothing more than a small clearing with seats out in the open. Upon his arrival several of the congregation become possessed with fear. They spring out of their seats and shake all over, dancing around like people possessed in voodoo rituals. They scream and cry out at his large appearance. One old village leader sums up for me the primary problem of this village's starvation which isn't simply lack of food. He stands before the congregation and proclaims loudly that he "heard that the man eats other humans". The problem is lack of education and a culture based on superstition.

So everyone ought to know who won the Franchise Wars. You know, where Sylvester Stallone gets treated to dinner in San Angeles by the evil Dr. Cocteau.

Wrong. Not Taco Bell. Pizza Hut. It was the weirdest thing. I was watching the lips say Taco Bell, but the words were Pizza Hut. Even the sign outside the restaurant said Pizza Hut. In fact, every single Taco Bell artifact was relabeled with the Pizza Hut logo.

It seems Tricon has gone and changed the outcome of the Franchise Wars on us.

I expect that KFC wins the Franchise Wars a few years from now...

I think the time has finally come to admit that I need help.

Not in the "I'm insane" way (though some of my friends would argue that ;) but in the "This business has grown too big for my britches" sort of way. The fact is that I need one of you sysadmin/programmer gurus to take me, a marketing/sales person, under your wing and grind out all these nifty little things to help me run my business better.

Here's what I'm looking for:
Absolute Requirements

First of all, you must be located in or near San Jose, CA. Yes, I know that there are many qualified techies in other places than San Jose. However, the fact of the matter is that our servers are in San Jose, and these servers will be your babies to take care of, both hardware-wise and software-wise. That means you need to be able to run into the datacenter and fix them.

Secondly, you must be willing to carry a pager and get pages from people who need reboots, kernel recompiles, etc. The vast majority of our customers do not page, but when they do, we need to be there and jump on it within 10-15 minutes. Technically, you will be on-call 24/7, but you won't be awakened much in the middle of the night -- perhaps only once or twice a month. As you deploy more APC remote reboot ports and a console server for us, you'll empower our customers to fix their own problems and drop that number down to 0.

You need to be a UNIX guru, but you need not stick up your nose at Windows, either. Again, the vast majority of our customers are running Linux or FreeBSD, but we do have the odd Windows server here and there. You don't have to love Windows; you just have to not whine about having to administer it every once in a while. ;)

You must know PHP and be willing to spend a good part of your time programming systems in it. This is an absolute requirement.

So, in summary:
* You must be located in San Jose, be able to drive to the datacenter, and meet the following criteria:
* Be an excellent UNIX systems administrator. Be prepared to administer mostly Red Hat systems, with a few FreeBSD and Windows systems thrown in for good measure.
* We'll buy you a pager or pay your cell phone bill. In return, you agree that you will be on call. Yes, you may get awakened in the middle of the night a couple times a month. But it won't be that often, and with your help, we're going to drop that down to an absolute minimum.
* Know PHP, shell scripting, and Perl. PHP and BASH scripting are a must.
* Be interested in web hosting. We'll give you a free dedicated server or two for you to play with, or we'll colo your boxes for free. (Yay for job benefits!)
* Be prepared to take a leadership role within the company. As the owner of the company, I will be taking your suggestions on how to improve processes. You must be able to step up and say "Hey, this needs to be fixed," get my approval, and run with it. You will "be your own boss" as much as you can; with only one person to report to, it will be your decision that goes.

Salary is still to be determined. Please state what you're looking for; since we're a startup on a budget, please be reasonable. Your job benefits will include a free cell phone and free dedicated boxes or colo space. It will not include traditional benefits such as health care.

This is a part-time, contract opportunity. I expect 10-20 hours a week to start and I fully expect this to be a full-time position within 6-12 months. This position is ideal for someone looking to break into the industry who may not have tons of experience but who is willing to learn and enjoy the benefits of having only one person to report to.

Right now, you will be working from home. Again, in the next 12 months, I will be looking for office space. We have big plans to expand -- this is your chance to be the technical leader of this expansion.

Please send your resume and salary requirements (for a contract of 40-80 hours per month) to erica@simpli.biz. I will be interviewing in person over the next 2-3 weeks.

Thank you!

I can't imagine a worse wine.

Nah, that's a lie. I've had worse.

At 13% alcohol content, it really makes watching the MTV Music Awards bearable.

Justin Timberlake won Male Artist of the Year? Did I drink too much, die, and wake up in Hell?

Lots new since then.

Most obviously, I've had my account unbanned.

Good grief, it's been a month since I've written here? Wow. I've been really busy. :)

Snopes.com has an interesting article up about LA County banning the use of the terms "Master/Slave" by its vendors (most commonly denoting hard drive arrangements.) A pretty fascinating read on how far political correctness has gone.

I've submitted it to Slashdot. We'll see what happens. ;)

Update: My third accepted story! Yay. :)

The subject of electronic voting machines and ways to stop political parties from buying votes brings up several interesting questions.

What would you do in the following hypothetical situation?

-- As you're walking in to the polling place, a stranger pulls you aside. The stranger says, "I'll pay you $20 to vote for the Democrat candidate in this election."

What would you do if you had already planned on voting for the Democrat? Would you take the money anyway?

Another, similar one:

-- Let's say you had no interest in the election whatsoever, but you were registered to vote. A stranger knocks on your door and says "I'll pay you $20 to vote for the Democrat candidate in the next election."

Would this convince you to vote?
Would it convince you to vote for the Democratic candidate?

These are just hypothetical questions. Answers, comments, flames, and wandering diatribes are welcomed, as always. :)

In the course of running a business, I've learned that one or two small mistakes can often ensure that your business doesn't do as well as it should (or could). It's amazing how much people talk on the Internet, and moreso than that, it's amazing how easy it is to be negative about things.

Slashdot has many great examples of this... just look at any TiVo article and you'll see three classic "disses" that are mentioned every time someone says "TiVo":

1) Who cares. I have a VCR. I don't see a need to pay a monthly subscription for a VCR, either.

2) Monthly subscriptions are the tool of the DEVIL!!! (Of course, I don't think paying monthly for Internet access is evil... just paying for TiVo monthly. And I've neglected to do my research and find out that you can pay for a lifetime subscription to negate all those oh-so-horrific monthly fees.)

3) Dude, I have like this 1337 setup that runs MythTV on Linux and it is so infinitely better than a TiVo. (Never mind that I have to have a keyboard and mouse by my TV and therefore I look like a complete geek... because see, this $500 PC here also runs MAME and therefore ALSO replaces a $99 Playstation!! OMG 1337!!!!11)

Riiiight.

99% of these types of respondents have never even used a TiVo, but they can't help being negative about it regardless. (Grr.)

Anyway, I'm getting offtopic. What this journal entry is about is a couple of mistakes Simpli has made and how they've helped to shape us as a company.

The first (and most major one) was a guy who leased a dedicated server from us, promptly moved all of his domains over without testing them, and broke everything. He emailed us from his Yahoo account stating that his server was broken and what-an-awful-server-we-had-given-him. Little did I realize that he had a reply-to set up on his emails that forwarded back to his main mail account... the one that was on his dedicated server, and, thus, was broken!

Well, after several hours of our non-responses (since they had gotten lost because of his reply-to settings), the guy writes a nasty message about Simpli on a message board. A customer of ours sees the message and points me to it, at which point my mouth promptly drops open because I realize that this guy hasn't gotten a single reply we had sent to him the entire day.

His mistake? Setting up the server without testing it. Sending us email from an account that had a reply-to that went back to the broken server (he didn't mention what domain names he tried to move over, so I didn't have any idea that that was broken, or that his reply-to was going back to the broken server.)

Our mistake? Not calling him.

What we learned: Now we promptly call all customers who are having problems with our services (which is surprisingly few people; we've never had someone who had the major issues this guy had). Since this guy left, we've beefed up support so nothing slips through the cracks. We're implementing a helpdesk system to better track requests, and we will be hiring again soon (more details on that later) because we need people to cover a few more hours so we have a true 24x7 support staff.

And we gave that guy a full refund.

Fast-forward to today. I was reading FortKnox's latest journal entry (by the way, the 2nd Slashdot Photo Contest is up again), and what do I see but a post from a guy who is unhappy that we haven't replied to his sales inquiry.

"Oh, sh*t", I think. "Here we go again." Sure enough, his hasn't been replied to. Sure, it was a bit offbeat and required some research on our end, but the fact was that I'd answered some doozies this month, and I'm not sure why that one slipped through the cracks.

What I learned (since I'm the one who responds to sales requests): I decided to get those sales inquiries out of my inbox and in to their own special little email folder, called (unsurprisingly) !sales inquiries. (I use the ! at the beginning to denote important email folders so they are placed first in the folder list.) I glance through them. We've received 17 sales inquiries through our contact form this month, and his is the only one I haven't replied to. Damn.

The good news is that with these filed safely away in their own folder, I can now easily glance at them and figure out who hasn't been replied to. Although we've probably lost him as a customer, the good news is that this probably won't happen again.

This has been an incredibly long journal entry, even by my standards! I guess I just needed to get that out there. Go forth and post comments... (oh, and vote in the Slashdot photo contest!)