July 2007

Recruiting New Managers

rmiles7721July 14, 2007Site News

One of my specific job duties is the recruiting of new managers as well as hourly associates. Sometimes it can be difficult for me to go out recruiting because at the end of the day being in the restaurant I am tired and want nothing more than to go home and relax but recruitment is a very important part of my job. My company continues to grow every year as it has for the last 57 and shows no signs of stopping. Profits are great and we are ramping up on expanding again over the next two years at a little over a 7% growth rate. Sure, that’s nowhere in the league of McDonalds or some of the bigger chains, but we surpassed all of our direct competition long ago and now we are starting to compete with the fast food chains and in order to do so we have to continue to have a great people supply chain.

My company obviously is not the only one in the world looking for new recruits. Most companies are because in the service industry either you are growing or you are stagnating and losing potential money and customers. Fish.Co.Uk is a pretty popular site with plenty of international job opportunities that you may be interested in if you are looking for work. You can set up a profile in minutes and upload your CV (resume) as well for potential employers to look at.

They have more than just job listings though. Fish.Co.Uk also provides links to Psychometric tests, recruiter profiles, tips on how to improve your CV, training and education, and even links to purchase your own business and finally go to work for yourself just as you have always dreamed. If you are in the market for a new job go check out Fish.Co.Uk

REALLY Dirty Dancing AKA The Poo Poo Dance

rmiles7721July 13, 20078Site News

Some folks dance the Mambo, the Waltz, the Jitterbug. Some like the Macerena. There are even folks that dance with the stars on TV now. I don’t dance.

Often.

Although today there was the Poo Poo Dance.

What’s that you say?

I thought you would never ask.

The Poo Poo Dance is when you are about eight miles from the house and you have to shit so bad you are driving the car in a standing position trying to squeeze your ass cheeks together so that nothing will slip when you hit that next bump. God forbid you think you have to squeeze a little fart out and get a little more than you bargained for. Ever see anyone driving while standing, aside from someone operating heavy equipment?

You run REALLY fast from the car to the house while your neighbors wonder just what the fuck it is you are doing. Then the door doesn’t want to open while you are hopping up and down and the key gets stuck in the damn lock when you try to get it back out and you finally get in the bathroom trying to run through the house with your pants around your ankles. Shit spews before you even get seated properly so as to create a mighty big splash so you don’t know if you have crapped yourself or not.

Once you finally get finished with your business you have to check your shorts for chunks and skid marks in order to assure yourself that you really didn’t crap your pants.

Ever done the Poo Poo Dance?

Me either, I was just wondering…

How to Use Odiogo With Movabletype

rmiles7721July 13, 2007Blogging, Technology

I set up an account with Odiogo quite some time ago, but even though they transpose all of my entries into audio I have never been able to find a way to integrate that into the site. It took me a little while this afternoon but I finally figured out to to do it.

  1. Set up an account with Odiogo
  2. Edit your MT template to include the following line <a href=”http://podcasts.odiogo.com/get_mp3.mp3?f=/shadowscope/Shadowscope-<$MTEntryBasename separator=”_”$>.mp3″>Listen to Audio Version</a>
  3. Replace Shadowscope with whatever blogname you have set up with the service. You can figure out the URL by going to your podcast page at http://podcasts.odiogo.com and just look at some of the file names on the page if you already have a couple of posts.

That’s about it I think. Very simple, but it was hard to figure out at first. Odiogo seems to be kind of dragging today so nothing is playing very well. It may be because it is dragging at my bandwidth. There are a couple of plugins for wordpress and some javascript for blogger at http://blog.odiogo.com that I am going to look at on Monday. I may be able to figure out something that’s not quite so kludgey to play them. The wordpress plugin uses flash and is pretty cool as is the one for the Blogger platform.


Technorati : ,

Just Atwitter…

rmiles7721July 13, 20073Blogging

Is that even a word? It is now…

For the time being I have taken the Twitter widgets off of my sidebar. They don’t interfere with the content of my site loading but they seem to be the biggest culprit in long loading times for my page and that is just irritating as hell, particularly when my sitemeter and other counters load after it does. Twitter is pretty cool and I will still use it a bit, but until they either get a bigger pipe or speed up the service I will just have to keep it off of here.

Time for me to go ahead and get ready for work. I have two managers off today so it should prove interesting to see if everyone shows up or not.

My mechanic called yesterday. My car is finished and it’s going to run me $541. Damn. I suppose it could be worse. I am going to try and get out of my stores at some point this morning and go by to pick it up if the wife isn’t busy. It may just have to wait until this afternoon. I didn’t get out of my meeting until 5:30 yesterday afternoon and by then they had been closed for awhile.

Boring Days Are Not Always Bad…

rmiles7721July 12, 2007Parenting/Family

I was all set to come home and do a bunch of writing but it’s just not happening tonight. I am pretty tired and thing I am going to get a good night’s sleep tonight. A couple of drinks certainly helped me along the way to being ready to hit the sack. They damn sure relaxed me anyway.

For a first day back at work it was rather uneventful. Most of my folks showed up for work, on time even. I had one manager off today, so I spent the majority of the day in her store although I had to visit all three in order to put together the end of week paperwork that they should have all done yesterday.

It was meeting day, being Thursday, so I didn’t get home from work until almost six this evening after making a brief stop at the grocery store. The wife had invited friends over for supper and they arrived shortly after the time I got home.

We had a pretty nice dinner consisting of home-made Fajitas. My tomatoes have been ripening lately and with all the rain we’ve had the last few days they are looking really nice. I only have one Bell Pepper plant this year, and it’s not doing so well because of the dry spell we went through. The banana and jabenero peppers are looking great though. Pretty soon I will be able to start making salsa again. I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about preserving and canning, so I just freeze the shit. It keeps for awhile and it’s not like I am trying to store several years worth at a time.

Anyway, the wife made Margaritas to go with dinner. They were pretty good although she and her friend said they tasted funny. They seemed fine by me, but I only had one and then had a bourbon and Coke after. Can’t drink much on a work night, so that was all for today.

The wife made our reservations for Helen the weekend of October 12th-14th. I still don’t know if I am going to manage to get the weekend off, but the wife will be there at least. We are staying in a cabin this year. Right now the manager has set aside a couple of cabins and something like five rooms aside for us as well, all in the same general area. The rates are pretty damn good as well. There are more details over at V-Man’s site. I had my next vacation all set up to be on the original date we had agreed upon for Helen in September but then the boy had to go off and join the Marine Corps. Damned inconvenient kids. 🙂

I suppose that’s about it tonight. Nothing profound or particularly gruesome and not even a single paid post for the evening. How fucking boring. Maybe I can dredge something up later. If it’s anything like last night I will be awakened around 2am by a small child crawling into bed and be up for an hour or so before I can get back to sleep for that final hour before the alarm sounds.

Digital Picture Frames

rmiles7721July 11, 20072Technology

One thing that I think is really cool that I have not had the opportunity to purchase is a digital picture frame like the ones over at Digital Framez. I toyed with the idea awhile back of making one myself using a linux based PC and a touch screen but it is pretty cost prohibitive just for a few photos. I did use my 3Com Audrey for the same thing for awhile, but it certainly doesn’t even look like a picture in a frame. Some of the digital photo frames over there are just really sharp.

Check this one out for instance,

469140-6.jpg

it’s a ten inch frame with remote and includes a 256 meg SD card to put your photos on. It includes a 5 in 1 card reader in case you have a different photo card you want to use, a USB post, infrared remote, stereo audio output for earphones or speakers, a built-in speaker and will play back jpegs as well as mpeg movies. There are a few different styles to choose from. This thing is pretty cool for just under $200. I might be able to put something together for $200 but it certainly wouldn’t have as many features or look nearly as nice. The next time you are looking for digital frames then one place you might want to shop is Digital Framez.

New Take on Spam

rmiles7721July 11, 20074Uncategorized

Just got this one via email. Same old schtick with a new twist:


Dear Friend,

I am John England, an Army contractor attached to the US Army corps of engineers in Iraq. The reason why I’m explaining my findings to you are to seek for your assistance to enable you contributes immensely to the actualization of my dream.

On the 30th day of June 2007, I and my group of men under my supervision were alerted on the need of some urgent reconstruction works in Haifa Street, a long thoroughfare of high-rise buildings built and occupied by Saddam Hussein when he was alive here in Baghdad. Immediately we proceeded to the site and as we commence work to our utmost surprise we discovered a huge underground bunker in one of the buildings.

Upon investigation of the bunker to our surprise we discovered one very lager box safely hidden and sealed together with numerous other boxes filled with different item, However I was attracted to the large box which was the only sealed box of them all, I told my men to open the box in order to find out the contents and when they were opened to our amazement the boxes contained US Dollars which amounted to $46M after time was taken to count them in bundles and rolls.

I however instructed them to keep this in high secrecy so that we can have the money to our selves, they all agreed to the plan, I wisely took the decision for us to share the money between our selves right there in the room to avoid suspicion in moving the very large box and that led me to having US$10.2 Million (US$10,200,000) as my own share of the money after which I concealed it in one box and decided to get the money out of the country but first I hid the money in a safe and untraceable location.

I am now in desperate need of a “Reliable and Trustworthy” person like you who would receive, secure and protect these boxes containing the US Dollars for me up on till my assignment elapses here. I cannot leave the boxes here in Iraq like most of my men have foolishly done due to many reasons one of which is because Iraq is getting unsafe and dangerous everyday and a full blown civil war among Shiites and Sunni Iraqis may start any moment. I assure and promise to give you 14% of this fund,

however feel free to negotiate what you wish to have as your percentage in this deal.

Please assure me of your keeping this topmost secret within you so that my job would not be jeopardized. Kindly get back to me through my personal e-mail: johnnniengland@yahoo.co.uk

My Sincere regards,

John England

Asshats

Around 200 Emails Later…

rmiles7721July 11, 2007Travel

Damn. Although I have kept up somewhat, answered a few comments and emails for the most part I have spent the week ignoring them and enjoying myself. I’ve just gone through the list of emails, spam track-backs, comments, etc…What a job. Now I can get some stuff taken care of.

Have to go out shortly and return the rental car as well. The wife ran to Carrollton for awhile and is supposed to call me later and let me know when to meet.

Hopefully my car will be out of the shop today or tomorrow as well. It did end up being the starter, but I also asked him to go ahead and give me an oil change and tune-up as well. Now I just need to get the air fixed. Maybe in the next couple of weeks I can get that done. Riding in a car with no air sucks.

Vacation Time…

rmiles7721July 11, 2007Parenting/Family

One of the things that I have really learned to appreciate over the last few years at my job is the limited time that I get with my family. During the normal course of the year my days off rotate so that one week I have two and the next week I get one day off. Since they normally fall during the middle of the week that still doesn’t give me much time to spend with the rest of them except during summer break. It makes me really appreciate the time that I do get to spend with my wife and kids on vacations and those rare weekends off that much more.

One of the things that we really used to enjoy doing was to get together with another teacher friend of my wife’s and her husband and children. We would go over to their house and cook out and then shoot pool for a couple of hours. We had a pool table in the house when I was a child and I always loved getting together as a family and relaxing together over the pool table.

We haven’t completely finished our basement yet, but depending on if I get promoted again this year and move or not, I am considering getting a pool table. My sponsor of this post, Boston Tables, has a really nice selection of pool tables shown at their web site like the one pictured below.

What is really funny is that as soon as I started browsing through the page the wife got up and came over and wanted to know how much they were. She enjoys shooting a game of billiards as much as I do. As a matter of fact in college we were both considered non-traditional students but even being older than other students doesn’t exempt you from the physical education requirements, so she took stuff like Pool and Billiards and I took a Camping class. At least it was stuff we enjoyed. Could have been underwater basket weaving 101.

Anyhow, the prices over at Boston Tables are pretty competitive and they also carry other stuff too, like Poker Tables, Bar Stools, and one of my favorites, Home Theater seating. I really need to take a look at their stuff and do a write-up on it for my tech blog. Anyone that’s hung out her longer than a year or two knows I am very much into HTPC setups and home-brew Tivos, so setting up a home theater in the back room of my basement would be really cool.

Now that I have wandered completely off the subject of Pool Tables it’s about time to stop while I am ahead. There is one over there that I have my eye one though, an 8′ Nantucket Walnut Pool Table for just under $1600. It’s pretty sharp and would fit nicely in my basement.

Starting Out On a Good Foot?

rmiles7721July 11, 2007Site News

These people should take a lesson or two from Shadowscope & his lovely bride. They have been happily married for quite some time now and are just the sweetest couple. This bride is already on depressants on the wedding day and attacking her husband with a shoe?

“While the guests were enjoying the wedding reception downstairs, the newlyweds engaged in a fight-like situation in their hotel room that later ended in bride striking her new groom with heel of her stiletto shoe. Police arrested 33-year-old Teresa Brown in the couple’s hotel room for attacking his 40-year-old groom Mark Allerton. According to her attorney, Brown had been on antidepressants and drinking at the time of the incident. “

Come on girl, give him at least a one month grace period. Then you can start to beat his ass.