Tyler Nichols Weblog

It’s been a long haul getting this site going. The project ran into several problems on the development side. Still a few outstanding bugs, but should be able to work through them. This is one site in a series of 22 total dining sites (22 other states).  There is still a fair amount of work to be done to the UI, so this should probably be considered a soft launch.

Dine Out Massachusetts is a dining guide offering listings of Massachusetts Restaurants   categorized by city and cuisine, featuring maps, directions, menu’s (for restaurants who participate) and user created restaurant reviews. I will probably be adding more functionality as time goes on.

Pop on over and take a look at dineoutmassachusetts.com !

One of my gripes when I switched to using a Mac full time was that I could never get my mouse to track fast enough. After some searching, I found a solution online.

1. Open a Terminal Window
2. Type the following: defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling your_mouse_speed
3. Replace “your_mouse_speed” with your new setting. The maximum mouse speed on mac desktops is 3.0 (when maxed out in system preferences). I changed my speed to 5.0 and it was noticeably better on my 24″ screen.

   So my final setting is: defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling 5.0

Well I sent a t-shirt off to Jeremy AKA Shoemoney and he was kind enough to do a blog post about it. In case you didn’t know, Jeremy is a successful web publisher, Technorati Top 100 blogger and the creator of AuctionAds.com

I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since my last post. Lot’s of stuff has been happening. Expect some new posts shortly.

So, I recently took part in the Vonage IPO under their direct purchase plan they offered to their “loyal” customers. I purchased 200 shares of VG at $17 per share. Since the IPO, the stock has tumbled to it’s current range of $8.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why Vonage was so willing to allocate shares to their customers. Wall Street wanted nothing to do with the IPO, so they (Vonage) took advantage of it’s customer base to prop up the stock offering. I feel like I have been used and scammed.

There are no fewer than 10 Class action lawsuits regarding the Vonage IPO. I plan on researching them and taking part in one.

I will be cancelling my service soon and advising friends and family who have Vonage to do the same.

Vonage will IPO today on the NYSE under the symbol VG. Through a directed share program, Vonage gave it’s customers the ability to buy the stock at it’s IPO price, which last night was priced at $17. I made a conditional offer to buy 500 shares, but was only allocated 200. We’ll see what happens today. It’s kind of exciting for me as I haven’t paid attention to IPO’s since the days when I worked at Internet startups such as Open Market and CMGi.

I have been a vonage customer now for 4 years. The service is OK, but not great. But for $15 a month, how can you go wrong.

Photo: Brian Boyd

According the to The Inquirer, the Xbox 360 has been sucessfully hacked. The hack will allow you to play Xtreme backup copies of xbox and Xbox 360 games. The hack however, involves flashing your hard drive, which is a risky proposition. You have a good chance of rendering your drive unusable. You can read more about it here

Eweek published an article yesterday about the negative effects of Google’s “Big Daddy” rollout. In the article, Larry Page is quoted as saying the issue has caught Google by surprise and they have a team investigating what happened.

I can speak from my own experience. I have a few sites which have dropped from 1000’s of pages indexed down to only a few. One site dropped to only having it’s index page listed. What’s interesting to me is that Google hasn’t come out before now to tell us their index is “broken”. Most of us in the SEO community have known something was broken with the Big Daddy rollout for awhile now.

Lack of Storage? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has recently stated in an interview that Google faces a massive machine crisis, saying they are running out of storage. Not sure how a company with the resources of Google can have a machine shortage. Perhaps they were trying to purge some spam and duplicate content from their index in to free up much needed storage. Perhaps the pruning went too far, deleting quality pages and sites.

I hate headhunters. The ones I have dealt with have all been talentless hacks that don’t even understand the technology business that they serve. If I had a nickel for every occasion I wasted my time with a headhunter, I’d be rich. This post is about a encounter with a particular headhunter at Winter Wyman, a technical staffing firm in Massachusetts.

About four months ago, I was thinking of leaving the position I was at, so I started putting out some feelers and sent out some resumes. It was during that time that I was contacted by a woman at Winter Wyman. I won’t name her, but she is a Prinicipal Consultant for the Information Design and Delivery Group there.

So she contacts me and says she’s seen my resume and has a few positions that would be a good fit for me. She had a few SEO positions to fill and asked me to send my resume to her in word format. So I did.

A few days later, I got an email back from her critiquing my resume, and suggesting that I re-write it. I made the changes she suggested and sent it back to her. Amazingly, she sent it back to me again, requesting that I make more changes. This went on for several revisions. I didnt want a resume coach, I wanted her to get me an interview. At one point I mentioned that my resume has served me well over the 16 years that I have worked in technology. To this she answered back that she has been in this business a long time and she knows what she’s doing, or something to that effect. We finally arrive at a resume that she is happy with, incorporating all of her suggested changes. We speak and says she’ll be back to me shortly.

Then, I dont hear back from her for a week. So I email her and leave her a voicemail. Another week goes by, and I haven’t gotten any response back. Yet another week goes by and still nothing. So I email her and give her a leave a voicemail again. Are you seeing the pattern here? Another few weeks go by, no response. After all the hassle of re-writing my resume for this idiot, she never follows up. So I chalk it up to yet another bad experience with Headhunters. You’d think I’d learn by now….. I figured she had left Winter Wyman, which would explain not having the courtesy to return my multiple messages.

Last week this moron sends me an email saying one of her colleagues passed on my resume to her and she has some exciting positions available. What an idiot. It was like the movie groundhog day. She contacts me like we have never talked before. So I send a response back, reminding her that that she never followed up with me before and that because of my previous experience, I have no interest in dealing with Winter Wyman and most definately not with her.

She must have remembered me at that point and emails me back in an arrogant manner saying that my reaction to her was a “strange one” and that she offered her resume tips to me “free of charge” based on her years of experience blah blah blah… I explain to her that my unhappiness was not with the changes, but the fact that after I took the time to incorporate those changes into my resume, she never returned my emails and phone calls.

At the end of our recent email exchange she mentions that she is “happy” to be a resource for me in the future. For a laugh, I email back asking her to send me the details of what she has for open positions.

That was ten days ago and no response. I hate headhunters.

This blog is now being hosted at A Small Orange. I host most of my sites with hostgator, but I wanted to play around with Ruby on Rails, which ASO offers with their hosting. I also wanted to move some of my sites around to different IP’s for SEO purposes. So far so good, although I was in the middle of a large post last night when they performed some server maitenance. After I hit the publish button, the site went down. Needless to say, the long post I had just written was gone. Nooooooooo!

Oh Well.