A little over a month and a half ago there was a personal reason to raise a beer in celebration. This blog reached its first birthday!

Most popular posts:

Getting the eeepc synaptic pad to work with Fedora 12: this recently became the “best seller” on the site. I guess there are a lot of fedora netbook users out there that really want the full functionality of their touch pad. And I don't blame a single one of them. ;)

pxe-network boot virtualbox -pt 2:I can't take all the credit for this one. I was working on some PXE stuff for work and wanted to see if I could use VirtualBox as a testing tool. And when I read the blog I saw that there were some steps that were assumed that the reader knew about. So I just took it upon me as a good techie to fill in the perceived void.

Getting all installed software, and their versions, on Debian/Ubuntu pt 2: Now with Threads!: Like the syaptic pad post, this one hasn't been up there very long. But it's had a fair amount of viewers to it. I guess singing up for the Perl Ironman
challenge paid off a little bit.

Flash Turtorial: Hello World: OK Really?!?! This should not have been viewed as much as it was. I shouldn't have been the first person to blog about using a button in flash for extreme beginners. Flash is very graphically oriented, having a text "Hello World" just seemed stupid to me.

Some lessons I've learned over the year:
t's amazing how much setting up SEO “stuff” can really draw traffic to one's site. I wish I learned that lesson much sooner than I did. Oh well, better late than never. And it really does seem to me that people prefer blogs that have been properly edited. Or at least I would like to think that I'm keeping readers longer because my grammar isn't as bad as when I started writing.

Some unexpected things:
No I didn't earn any money, mostly because I didn't try. But what did happen is that I got contacted for a job interview. Ironically enough it was the post “how NOT to get a job interview”
that the recruiter saw and got interested in me. Even though this happened months ago, I still chuckle a little every time I think about it.

The email from John telling me that my code for PS3 trophies no longer worked. Granted it's not the best reason to receive an email, but all things considered it was nice of him to let me know that it no longer worked. John, if you're reading this, thanks!

PoisenBit's 4 comments. I appreciate all the information that he left, and I can't help but be in awe at the enthusiasm with which he did it.

And no accomplishment post would be complete without the most important part, the “Thank You's".

OJ – for motivating me to start this journey. Thanks Bro!
Kelsey – for having the patience to help me become a better writer, even if it's just for a blog. Thanks Goofy Girl!

In my search for my first job after graduating college, I applied to any job that I was remotely capable of doing, whether because I'd done the job in the past, or the skill set sounded very similar to what I was doing at PSU. And for all of December I was applying for jobs and not getting any kind of response for my efforts. So like any human being I became frustrated, Probably more so than I should have been, but regardless, I was frustrated.

So when applying for jobs, I let that frustration out in some of my online application questions.

Do you consider yourself an expert in Linux?
“No. Even though I've been playing with it for over ten years and I am consonantly being challenged by it. All the new features that come out with each kernel version just keep things new and interesting. Linux itself is a moving target, and I feel the only people that can call themselves linux experts are the kernel developers. Everyone else is intermediate, including me.”

And of course this little nugget of pure angst:

Please read the job description below and tell us why you are a great fit for this position.
“Although I am a recent college graduate. And I know that in this bad economy that there are better qualified people for this job I can offer a couple of things that they can't. Because the other people might be better qualified, they will also be better qualified for other jobs once the job market improves, thus anyone you hire will probably leave sooner as opposed to later. I on the other hand have a lot of growing to do, and finding an environment that allows me to do such would be beneficial to everyone. I can attain the same level of skill as these other candidates, but I will also do it for cheaper ( as I have little experience now) and will probably stay longer because I need to build up the time to build up the experience.”

Both of these questions came from two different job opportunities, and I'm sure you are just as surprised as I am to hear that neither of these companies have contacted me. Which is kind of sad in a way because if one of them did, I would know that THAT company is one worth working and toiling for because it at least has some semblance of a sense of humor. Alas, no love for the little angry wanna-be worker bee.

On the positive side, I have received a job offer from one company. So the hard work is done. I'm going to ask for some time to finish up what current interviews I have left, and see if any more job offers roll in before deciding which job to take.

UPDATE: Never tell the CEO of a social networking company that social-networking is "nothing more than self-aggrandizement and is just a fad".

Sorry, today's post will not contain anything technical. The past two weeks I've been busy studying for my last finals, of which I passed. :) As well as packing and moving from Portland to San Francisco. Because of all the craziness that life has bestowed upon me recently I won't be able to post anything geeky this week. But there is a silver lining to this, I'll post something worth while next week.

Also, I've decided to change my format slightly, I will be posting twice a month, instead of weekly, from now on. I'm doing this in the hopes in reducing the timeline of posting, that I can produce technical posts of higher quality, which I'm sure everyone would appreciate.

See you all next week.

Surprise blog posting... YEAH!!!

While just checking out my stats for webpage views. I noticed a very interesting thing. My post about converting Gentoo to Funtoo has been viewed 204 times. While that is very cool (at least to me), oddly enough the vast majority of those numbers are from day, 192 visits in one day to be precise, and my referral stats haven't changed a bit.

So this leads me to draw two conclusions: 1) Google got attached by evil code gremlins, who wanted to play with my head and make me think I have more readers than I really do. OR 2) Someone really liked my article, and posted it somewhere in such a way that a referral was not able to get marked. But this would mean that 192 people really did visit my site in day.

Regardless, I prefer to go with the second case. And would like to thank all the people who made this odd accomplishment possible(that means YOU!). I give you my gratitude. Thank you.

And of course, if anybody reading this has ideas on how this happened, I'm all eyes.