Jonathan’s Universe

Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Not to offset my tremendous satisfaction and extreme gratitude with SEPTA and a few of its employees from my last noteworthy SEPTA experience, the other night I had a pretty bad issue with SEPTA.

For those that don’t know, the north east got slammed by major blizzard-like snow storm on December 19, 2009. I think we had almost two feet of snow and severe wind. It was not a winter wonderland. At all.

I had to go shopping at Target due to a last minute change-in-plans on a gift-exchange party. And due to my limit availability and energy due to my new job, I decided to go on Saturday. It took me about an hour and a half to get to Target when it’s normally a 15 minute ride. This wasn’t just because of the storm.

SEPTA has a track-improvement project going on right now, and because of this, regular service stops at the Woodland Avenue stop. After this point, there is a shuttle bus that takes you further. The shuttle bus took forever to arrive, and we were waiting outside in a bus shelter for at least 45 minutes. Once the shuttle arrived, we had to wait for the next trolley to come to drop of its passengers. At this point, I was debating whether or not to get on that trolley and just go home.

I should have gotten on that trolley and gone home.

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I admit, I’m usually one of the first to badmouth SEPTA when something goes wrong; tendency to strike, frequent rudeness, lateness. But I want to share a story that changed the way I look at things when it comes to SEPTA.

Yeah, they do strike a lot, a lot of their employees are kind of rude. But not all of them. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that one (possibly two) saved my financial life. It is something that I am very thankful of and this person has my eternal gratitude.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some readers might be aware of my future loss of employment due to decisions made by my employer to essentially outsource what my current responsibilities are. Obviously if a third-party company is hired to do what I do, than I am no longer required to be around. Since I was made aware of this issue (not by my employer, but my hearsay and rumors of co-workers) I have been on a job hunt.

I’ve been all over the market. I really needed to stay in the technology field, specifically PHP programming. This was for the most mandatory for me. I didn’t want to go elsewhere (let’s say retail or customer service) and then lose my spark and enthusiasm for what I have loved doing for now more than half of my life. I’ve been on Monster.com, been on CareerBuilder.com. But there was one constant issue I kept running in. They all wanted a degree-holder. No if, ands or buts about it. Unfortunately, the little piece of paper signed by an accredited institution (or rather lack of it) caused many loss of opportunities. Many potential employers wouldn’t even speak to me once they found out I didn’t have a degree. It’s not like I didn’t want to go to college.. it’s just because of a certain set of circumstances, I was prohibited from doing so.

But then recently, I started to get a little lucky. I started getting calls from recruiters about job openings and I was really excited. My first interview was with the technology division of the staffing firm  Robert Halves. It was for a contracted term for one of their clients. I really wanted to be a permanent employee, but my time was running short and this could hold me over for the term of the contract. I went in and the interview went mediocre. The guy said that he wanted URLs of my projects that I’ve done for my current employer. Only problem is that 90% of the projects I’ve done are either intranet (locally accessible only) or are password protected. I never really followed up on this. Even before I went in for the interview they had me doing lots of paperwork. Tax forms, I-9 identification, even a consultant contract. I wasn’t a fan of this.

So the journey goes on. I’m really close to giving up hope. My time is running short at my employer (January 1), and I’m literally living paycheck-to-paycheck.

But then I get a call from another recruiting firm, Workbridge Associates. They told me that they were seeking a PHP developer with exactly my skill-set for a client in the Philadelphia area. I started looking into this right away and was very excited about this. I made sure they were aware I didn’t have a degree of any sort, and they told me that’s not a big deal. They were specifically looking for some at my experience level and my age bracket. Man, this is too good to be true!

I went in to the staffing agency for the interview. It was me and like four other guys on this day (there were others on the other days too). I connected really well with the president of the client company. He reaffirmed to me that they didn’t require a degree. He said his view on that is that “some programmers start early and know programming their entire life and they know just as much as a programmer who went to school to get a degree.” That is quite the truth and I am glad that an employer actually sees it that way. Okay, this is SERIOUSLY starting to be too good to be true. Everything’s melding and meshing just perfectly. I have bad luck, this can’t be happening can it?

I start calling the staffing agency every day and they give me new information about the client’s interview schedule. After about the third day, the agency tells me the client’s president really liked me and wanted to bring me back for seconds. They also liked another guy who they’d be bringing back. Not only that, but they feel 2 people aren’t enough, so they want to find at least one other guy to interview, so they hold another round of first round interviews. Now I’m starting to worry.

But here’s where stuff really starts turning against me. The public transportation system that I’d use to get to both the client and to get to the staffing agency just went on strike. Oh my god. I knew it. I have bad luck, of course it couldn’t be this easy to get a nice job. Well the good news is, a very good friend of mine took time out of his day to drive me to and from the interview. This man is my Non-Jesus personal savior!

Anyway, back to the second interviews. I made sure to schedule that I was the last on the list to get a second interview. I did this for two reason. First, my staffing agency contact could give me feedback on the other interviewees  and second, so I would be freshest in their minds when it came to decision-making time.

I went to the interview and felt like I knocked it out of the park. I was answering all the questions with the right answers. An example, “What Javascript libraries have you worked with?” my answer, “JQuery.” Their response, “That is exactly what we use.” Repeat this conversation a few times with a few different experience niches, and you have that interview. Suffice it to say, the interview went REALLY well.

But then some bad news came down the wire. I was told by my staff agency that the team that interviewed me were really excited about me and loved my resume and how I interviewed, but they had just one more interview to do. Except this interview wasn’t being done through the staffing agency. So now I’m starting to worry — this isn’t be done through the agency? My logic was that it could have been an employee looking to transfer positions or a relative of an employee. Uh ohhhhhh.

At this point, my hope dropped and the staffing agency did find me another prospective job that paid less than the initial company, but still well above what I’m making currently. They set up an appointment the next day for me to come in for an interview.

But as I am stepping on the trolley (SEPTA’s off strike at this point) I get a call back from Del, my staffing agency contact. He says “Hey, I know you’re on your way to the office for an interview with another of our clients.*dramatic pause*.. but would you be willing to cancel that interview if I give you a job offer with [prospective employer I was most hopeful about]?”

Of course, my answer was heck yes. I accepted the job where I receive a 106% salaried pay increase (relative to my current employer) and benefits. Wow, seriously? I’m a 20 year old guy making a fairly-low hourly rate at a school district, and I’m about to make a salary that many people in this economy will be envious of. Oh my God.

So essentially, that’s that. I’ve accepted a position as an associate web developer. It’s for a privately-owned company within the education sector, still I’m moving vertically. Sweet. My last day at my current employer is this coming friday, November 20, 2009. It’s going to be a sad day. I’ve spent just about every week day for 2.5 years as an employee and just about every week day for 3 years as a student. It’s going to be really tough saying goodbye, but It’s how this game goes, I guess. Many of these people have been mentors to me and I’ll likely never see them again. It’s all part of growing up, I guess.

My plans on my new salary is pretty much save, save, save. I plan to treat myself to new things very rarely. The only thing I can see treating myself to is the Droid phone that just came out, but that won’t be until my T-Mobile contract expires in march, so there’s still some time for that. I want to save up for a car so I can stop having 1-hour-eachway commutes to my new job, and change to 20-minute-each-way commutes. Additionally, I do want to start going to school next semester. I want to go to night classes at a local college and get my associates degree.

My career will have officially started as a web developer on Monday, November 23rd, 2009. I’m excited.

It’s been awhile since I posted last. Most of my life has been pretty mundane and nothing really postworthy has occured, aside from getting a few job interviews. Actually, shortly I should be hearing back about a second interview as a PHP developer for a fairly local eLearning company.

I have just recently taken advantage of a deal to get Windows 7 Professional [upgrade only] for $29.99. I bought it and spent the rest of the night downloading. By the time I woke up, the download was done. However, I discovered that it wasn’t an ISO disc image Like I had expected, rather it was an executable with a folder and two .box files. Is is kind of aggravating as I wanted an image so I can burn a few backup discs and all that. But, conveniently during my normal news perusal I found an article on Lifehacker which helped me convert the files into a bootable disc image. Dude, it’s like magic!

However, I ran into some issues along the way during the install/upgrade. First off, I wanted to do an in-place upgrade.. meaning I don’t lose all my data and my installed programs. Turns out, since I had Windows Vista Home Premium I could upgrade to Windows 7 Professional using this disc, however I could not do an in-place upgrade, only a custom install, which results in losing all my files, install programs, settings et cetera. This was annoying, but I backed up all my data (music, pictures, et cetera) however, I’ll still have to re install all my programs again. Aggravating.

But that’s going out of order. At first, I didn’t know I couldn’t upgrade, because I had problems getting to the upgrade screen. First, I booted up from the DVD I created, however clicking the upgrade button demanded that If i want to upgrade, I have to run the CD from within the installer. Ugh, I just wasted 10 minutes in the shutdown, restart, screen navigation just to have to go back into the OS. Ugh. So it takes me 10 minutes to reboot (Vista has been taking FOREVER lately.. gosh) back to my desktop. I run the executable provided by Digital River, and I first get a splash screen.

I click “Install Windows” (exciting!)

I get a screen that says “Copying Temporary Files…” and then “Setup is Starting…” But that’s it the screen doesn’t update for about 5 minutes. I quit, and restart. Same thing, this time I wait 10 minutes. Still nothing. Then I thought “I’m being impatient, I’ll let it sit.” So while I sit watching COPS 2.0 on G4TV, I let it sit at the Setup is Starting screen. It’s still not progressing after an hour!

I turn to my good ol’ friend google and try a few queries. I found a few people with the same problem, some unresolved, some resolved but the solution seemed irrelevant (It wasn’t a problem with my harddrive or motherboard.) Then I found an article on Microsoft’s knowledgebase. It said something about “This screen is the stage Windows is checking your hardware for compatibility.” Then for some reason, a lightbulb goes off in my head. I look down and notice how my zune data cable (with no zune attached!) was plugged into my computer. Sometimes I’m in a rush in the morning before work and I don’t unplug the zune datacable, just the zune itself.

So I remove the ‘empty’ USB cable. The moment I did that that, my install screen advanced to the “Would you like to check windows update for updates before completing install?” screen. TADAA! Three hours for a damned deviceless USB cable. I honestly never even thought it would care about a cable plugged in with no device. I take it that’s probably a bug in the installer. It’s checking for hardware components and it gets stuck in loop while it waits for a device to registered. Oh well. Good job Microsoft.

So, I click through all the screens and I see the coveted “What kind of install do you want to do, young padawan?” screen. I click upgrade, because I want to keep all my stuff intact. However, I’m immediately greeted by a message saying “Windows Vista™ Home Premium cannot be upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. You can choose to install a new copy of Windows 7 Professional instead, but this is different from an upgrade, and does not keep your files, settings, and programs.” Ugh. I spent 3 hours trying to get to the upgrade screen, only to be told I can’t upgrade. Ugh. isuehfgudehgeiuhtiuehteiutahtiuerghsgihua. Okay. I’m done.

So, I reboot, again, and boot from DVD. Then I do a custom install. The install procedure was actually fairly quick. Once I was in, I liked what I saw. Everything is cleaner and faster. When idle and not running applications (called the baseline) the OS used less than a gig in RAM. While I remember Vista using one gig when idle. It’s a nice operating system.

So I take time and copy all my backed up data back to my folders… all my music and pictures and such. Sweet. There are a few annoyances I have that I’m still ironing out, for example, everytime I enter a link in internet explorer (havent had time to download firefox yet), I get a feedback sound effect. Yeah, gonna have to disable that.

All in all, it’s a pretty good operating system. I immediately switched my taskbar back to not group similar windows into one icon. It makes it quicker to get to the exact window i want. Maybe I’ll get used to the combined feature one day.

Another thing I wanted to mention was an issue i had with DIgsby. I love digsby, it’s awesome. It’s the first thing I downloaded (yeah yeah, shoulda gotten Firefox first, oh well). However, apparently there’s this issue with Digsby when using a brand new account on Windows 7. Basically, it’s not detecting full screen applications right, so as a result, Diggsby is incorrectly hiding IM windows. To fix this, go to your preferences, and make sure to uncheck “Hide IM windows when full screen window is active.” This will fix this. From what I understand, this glitch only occurs when the windows account is brand new. How new is defined, I’m not sure. The guide  I read said “about 1 hour.” But there you go.

Over the next couple days I’ll be going through and experimenting and optimizing it to my needs and comfort.

So, since last tuesday, my phone has been malfunctioning… and has gotten worse since.

Not all the time, but often when I open my phone, my screen gets all distorted. The distortions also very from time to time. Sometimes there’s no image at all, sometimes it’s just white, sometimes it’s my home screen’s background with no icons or anything and also sometimes I see bars and lines. Also, hitting a button doesn’t seem to fix it. It usually “fixes itself” somewhere between 20 seconds-2 minutes. Last night it did not. It displayed a white screen for 5 minutes. I turned it off, turned it back on, the keypad lit up, but not the screen.. it was black (not even lit up from what I observed).

Since it is getting progressively worse, and it’s doing other silly things like turning off randomly, I’ve decided to do something about it. Originally, on wednesday, I went to the T-Mobile store by my work. The lady said that my phone model is known to have issues and she said “it’s possessed.” She said that my warranty expired and that because the phone is buggy, I “really should upgrade.” Sadly there are a few things that prevent me from doing this. I’m not yet in my “upgrade period,” which means I do not qualify for an upgrade discount, only a partial. I’m not going to to shell out $80 (at least) plus an $18 upgrade fee (wtf?). Additionally, I really want to get out of T-Mobile. They’re expensive, twitter access is unreliable, I can’t use YouMail, service sucks and is consistent, and often their customer support has thick heavy accents.. if I upgrade, I extend my contract another 2 years.. and I want an iPhone come march.

Last night I put an insurance claim. It cost me $25.00 to have a new one sent to me. The lady said my phone would be here “by tomorrow” [now today]. I’ve been sitting here all day waiting for it since i have to sign for it, and I have other things to do. Also, I never got tracking/claim information emailed to me like she said I would. Which makes me think she made a typo in my email address.

Ugh. Hurry up fedex/UPS/whatever… I have stuff to do!

Could someone please tell the celebrities to STOP dying?

Ed McMahon
March 6, 1923 – June 23, 2009, Collection of health difficulties
I never had the pleasure of knowing you since by the time I got old enough to appreciate people, you were already out of the show-biz. Recently you were a spokesman for a few products and that’s sadly all I will ever know of you. It’s a shame that’s all it was. Rest in peace, Ed

Farah Fawcett
February 2, 1947 – June 25, 2009, Cancer
You were in the movie Man of The House, which is one of the very first movies I remember watching growing up. I’ve seen that movie at least 150 times. You’ve had a long battle with cancer and you are very brave. You’ve always had a charming smile on your face — and I know you still do. Rest in peace, Farah.

Michael Jackson
August 29,  1958 – June 25 2009, Cause of death currently unknown
Another one of my early childhood movie memories was Free Willy. While you were not an actor in the movie, you were pretty much the soundtrack. I remember watching it for the first time like it was yesterday.. I was very young (4 years old maybe?) and watching it with my mom. Many of things have changed in the last decade in your life, but you are no longer in pain. Rest in peace, Michael.

Billy Mays
July 20, 1958 – June 28, 2009, Apparent heart disease
I’m now sad to admit that I didn’t like your commercials that much. But honestly, I don’t think it was because of you. I think it was because they were over-played by networks which made them so annoying… plus, most of my viewing was done when I was not old enough to buy any of your products anyway. But that doesn’t matter. You loved what you did and you had a very recognizable voice which made you a powerful spokesman. Paid advertising will never be the same. Rest in peace, Billy.

I’m getting to the age that famous people I’ve grown up knowing are dying. It’s sad.

My employer (which has remained nameless, thus far) has chosen to go ahead and dissolve the physical position (and by extension, my employment) of web developer.

A certain high-powered person has made the decision to sub-contract a company (for now, nameless) to take care of the work for them. Completely. This will obviously render the posistion of staff web developer completely pointless, which is why I will be shown the door.

I think it’s a pretty dangerous thing when you start empowering third-party entities to control your assets, which is exactly what my employer is doing.

The way I found out about this master genius plan is what really gets me. I was sitting at work minding my own business when a teacher I know asked me “Hey, so I heard they are taking the web-site away from you. What happened?” — you see, this guy likes to joke around, so I didn’t take it seriously. Then a teacher came into my office asking for A/V help. I told her I could not help her since “I’m just the web guy.” Her response was, “oh are you that new web guy they just hired?”… my response.. “just hired? new? I’ve been here.. for 2 years.” At this point I knew something fishy was going on.

Apparently, this huge decision was made by one man, who then proceeded to petition for approval from the board of directors…. and because this man is among the most powerful persons with the company, he has inherent leeway with things he wants to do. Assuming the board is comprised of people that aren’t up to par with today’s technology, which does not enable them to make informed decisions about something as severe as this. Does the company not realize they are forfeiting majority control of their biggest public relations asset? Whenever they want something done, they have to submit that and it’ll get done “when it get done.” They won’t have things instantly done when and how they want. Anytime the director of public information had something for me, it was up within minutes. If it was something more involved, it was up within a day. I surely hope this company knows they are in for.

What also ticks me off is now this explains why they kept blocking my projects. I had a project in place that could have theoretically saved the company quite a bit of money per year. I already had the stuff started off, but the implementation of it would’ve required policy change in each building within the organization — which is more work than its worth if they knew for a while they were planning on getting rid of my work. Which is exactly what they are doing. Everything that I have worked on will be meeting the recycling bin and go down the drain.

When I took this job, the website was a barren waste land. I turned it around and developed a brand new innovative content management system specifically for the district. I took the liberty of setting up a testing/development environment server to take care of the development/code changes before they get rolled to the production public server — something that was never down before — something that known of the previous web developers knew/bothered to do. I fixed up errors and the “growing pains” that occured with moving the website to a new server that was due to shotty code written by the first group of web masters. All by myself. What do I get? Nothing. Not even benefits. No paid time off. Just crappy treatment from my co-workers and continous obstacles that are placed to prevent me from doing what I need to do.

I should have honestly figured this out sooner. The company is not taking my employment seriously, because I made myself into an expendable asset by not fighting for what I deserve. I work full-time hours for this company, but they insist on having me officially labeled as a part time employer, which legally means they have less responsibilities — they don’t have to give me benefits or any honors and treatment they give to full time employees. You remember the black mold issue and how long it took them to fix that.. and how much office-political bull crap I had to put up with just for THEM, my employer to deal with a severe health concern in the workplace. Seriously, they knew about the incident before I was an employee here, and I sent my own  requests in (filed them with the building administrator’s secretary) Obviously, I was not important to them, but I should have figured this out back then. But I guess hindsight is always 20/20.

As for my timeline — I have no idea. They still need someone to maintain the website right now. The contract is not finalized, and it will take a bit of time for them to construct the new webpage. But see, any new enhancements I make will all be done in vain… as by the time it’s implemented the system will be erased from existence. I was working on a YouTube-style video system  that would’ve been very innovative for my company’s website.. but now I don’t see the point in exerting myself. But hey, it’s their company. Whatever the hell they want.

See this is what happens when companies choose the easy way out of things and make it someone else’s problem. The little people get screwed.. while the big people get six figure salaries and sport cars can sit back. Niccceeee.

Wow, It’s been a while.

I’ve been extremely busy the last couple weeks.

First off, the most recent thing. My dad had a pretty bad fall on Sunday. He fell about 22 feet off of a tree (doing maintenance). He ended up shattering a vertebrae and fracturing another. The possibility of him being paralyzed was very, very real. Luckily the doctors and nurses at Christiana Hospital took good care of him, and the surgery was a success. He will walk again! For the next couple months he will need a back brace to give his back some support while walking. If he does well these next couple days walking around the hospital, he won’t even need a wheel chair… which is good because the apartment he will be living in is not handicapped-friendly. There is an elevator but you still need to go up (or down) one flight of steps to get to it. It’s silly.

Also, in the hospital rooms they had these computer touch screens (running a modified version of linux!!) which allowed you to watch TV, go on the internet and watch a movie pay-per-view/comcast-on-demand style. The TV feature took signal straight from a standard coaxial cable (from what I could tell). The internet was a standard ethernet connection, but I couldn’t use this feature, because you had to plug in a USB keyboard, and I think the USB slot was broken since it didn’t work. The movies.. well.. meh. You were allowed one free movie if you filled out a survey about your stay. So I did that (for my dad! ) and I selected to watch Hancock, since I hadn’t seen that in a while. The quality of the movie was horrendous. There were lines through the picture — old VHS tape quality; this was still watchable though. The sound was even worse. Even at full 100% (40% audio on the TV feature was really loud) it sounded like they were whispering. About 30 minutes into the movie, I got bored and fell asleep. Oh well, it was free.

The project at work I’ve been working on for the past couple weeks is getting some nice opinions about it. I made this web application that allows authorized users (school board, senior officers, their secretaries, etc) to post documents and reports that are normally submitted to the district monthly. For example, a personnel report, finance & budget report, et cetera. The system is pretty cool and due to the sensitivity of some of these documents, I made sure the security was tight, too.

At the moment, I’m updating my work development server to the most recent release of Debian. I started the update process via remote SSH, which was kind of stupid. I don’t like performing big system-wide updates remotely. Last time I updated (from debian 4 to debian 5) remotely, it was updating the ethernet drivers, which broke the connection I had.. so I had a halfway updated operating system. It wasn’t pretty. Thank God it’s linux. If it was windows, the hard disk would be permanently corrupted or something (hint hint, Microsoft!).

That’s really about it. I’ll try to update more often, I’ve just been busy with helping my parent’s move and such.

I decided I’m going to craft a 3D representation of my apartment, so I can easily visualize how much space I am going to have with furniture and decide what I need and what I can fit. I’m using google sketchup, simply because I can.

Here is a work in progress. Included is a stock model of a love seat. I need to get a measurement of my parent’s loveseat to simulate space usage better. Also, I didn’t get measurements of my room yet, which would be to the left.

Immediately to your right when you walk in as a closet. In the kitchen (which is the room to the right)  the blocked off portion represents what space is not available because of the kitchen appliances.

I just added a new plugin; wanted to see how it works. At the end of every post it links you to possibly similar posts. Honestly, I kind of hate the idea (in a good way) because I find myself opening like 20 tabs linking to a trail of “related posts” on other websites. I hope you will do the same.

Oh yes, and Christmas passed. Bah Humbug, I still can’t move in to my apartment. If it’s not ready by tomorrow, I’m going to throw a temper tantrum. In their main office if i have to.

As for presents, I’m satsified. I honestly didn’t expect nor want much. We’re all going through some rough times, so I wouldn’t dare press my luck. I got a few old xbox games (some I know are great, like Psy-Ops and Half life 2) also, a gamer chair.. which is basically this little chair with speakers in the headrest, and you can send audio wireless from your TV/device to the chair. It’s pretty nifty and comfortable too. I’m just afraid I’m going to plop on it wrong and rip the fabric.

So if I don’t find a letter in my mailbox by like 1400, I’m taking the trolly to Philadelphia and I’m going to make a scene at their office. As annoying and possibly immature as this would be, I have little choice now. This situation has become urgent as I’m running out of time and simply I’m paying rent on a unit I cannot stay in, so all my money is going to waste.