I snuck in an update without telling anyone. The web board has been innundated with spam and bogus users. I temporarily disabled it based on the idea that the pages on the right could take the place of it and so this is as good a time as any. So, once again, if you have a login at the web board, you have a login here too. You’ll have to email or PM me for the password. » Continue reading “Catelyn”

I have been intentionally silent, as opposed to just slacking off, and its been killing me. » Continue reading “So, I love my new job.”

I have a great voice recorder from Olympus, the DS-2000, and I am constantly running into the 8MB card limitation of not enough recording time.  The accompanying software is better than most for the Mac, so I thought I would look for a 128MB Smartmedia card, the largest capacity that was made.  Well, I went onto Pricewatch and saw nothing.  There were card readers, but no cards themselves.  This concerned me, as the voice recorder is in great condition and I’ll use it when I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to write down a lot of information.  I expect to have this device for the next ten years, if its performance keeps up.  So, I thought I would give Froogle a try.  Well, at first it was disheartening.  The cards were going for at least $100 and I was finding $80 ones as I refined my search criteria.  I’m a big fan of switches in search commands, I love the archaic idea in unix-flavored OSes.  It is so retro, its new.  Anyway, to narrow down my initial search of “smartmedia card” from 500 pages of results, I decided to “switch” out all the card readers that were coming up.  Google is great at letting you use commands for searching, something about engineers getting together is probably an appropriate comment, and I employed the minus sign “-” before the word “reader” and cut down my pages by more than half.  I still had over 200 pages and I needed to refine even further.  I thought, well, I need a 128 card, so lets put it in: “128MB smartmedia card -reader” (note: the quotes are there to show EXACTLY what I typed, not the quotes themselves.)  This was a good thing, but not enough.  I went even farther and decided to put the phrase “smartmedia card” in quotes to weed out the just “card” results that brought MMC, XD, and SD into my results.  I got it down to 21 pages and found a Smartmedia card for $25!  I feel like I saved $75 just by typing!

Just took another call here at the front desk and that makes nine calls in three hours.

Well, here I am at my last day at IKON sitting in the lobby of CompuServe/AOL and I have fielded a total of eight calls in two and a half hours.  I am so happy to see the end of this long tunnel.  I have met some really great people here at IKON, though it still baffles me that more individuals haven’t decided that the mundane tasks required by IKON management are beneath them and get a different job.  I understand that IKON’s position in an organization is less brain work and more physical routine tasks that the client isn’t interested in doing, but I would say the average age of an IKON worker is over 30 and at that age it is tough to justify making copies and sorting mail every day as a valid career choice.  IKON work is what it is, if you are doing it, you know exactly what I mean.  If you don’t, think back to your first or second job as a teenager/young adult and you’re almost there.  Other careers that predominantly involve menial tasks are justifiable because they pay well or are necessary for the function of civilization.  I’m speaking of garbage collectors, cleaning persons, and other tasks are taken by the uneducated or middle-class and lower of American society.  I do not pick this comparison lightly.  It is my view that IKON is a wonderful introduction to corporate life.  They spend time and resources making sure there are passive training materials available that generally give advice how to make the most of your professional life; both individually and group dynamics are covered and if I was 18 and fresh out of high school, these training materials would be a pleasant read for an introspective person like myself.  My proof is in the common themes that are found in these materials: time management and attendance.  You cannot benefit from these materials if you are not present at your position and you cannot be late to your position.  These rather remedial requirements are a perfect introduction to professional ethics and personal responsibility, yet are not geared to the average IKON worker who, I believe, has at least a GED-compatible education and in many cases a college degree.  My other observation about IKON worker policy is the stories I heard about yearly raises.  I experienced one raise in my 15 months with IKON and it was the coveted 3% of your salary.  This 3% is said to be the median, yet because the review happened when I had been employed for only nine of the months for the previous year, my raise was pro-rated to 2.75%.  This is a stupid policy that only benefits a bean-counter mentality and sends the wrong signal to IKON’s workers: IKON cares about the literal cents of your salary percentage compared to inflation, yet we will systematically raise your health care benefit costs exponentially with no regard for cost passed to you.  Why should you care, you ask?  The difference between a 2.75% and 3% raise is a large difference when you are only paid $10/hr and that was more than most workers I met at IKON.  I was lucky to be offered a senior position immediately, whereas several workers started below that and only after many years are above that, what I would term, minimum salary.  Anyway, despite very little opportunity for serious advancement and competitive salaries, the workers at IKON continually succeed in making their jobs fun and interesting while keeping a baffling sense of optimism overall about the future.  This is something that I appreciated and coveted during my time with IKON and wish to thank Harrington, Liebert, Frank Gates, Cardinal, and AOL employees for their example. 

I downloaded the new OmniWeb 5.5 and it rocks! » Continue reading “Update Madness”