The following is a shotgun blast of heady information. A veritable roller coaster of kept-me-busy adventures.  Hurray life!

So as the career I’ve had for nigh on 16 years whittled its way down into the last four weeks I had a lot of wrapping up to do, not to mention a huge convention I had to plan and execute as the last act. On top of all that I was furiously looking for a new job in an attempt to have something lined up that would begin  when the old one was fading out. Oh, and there was those final projects and final exams to close out the Computer Science degree.

All that was ramrodded into a three week span. I then spent the last two weeks unconscious (not really, but it sounds good).

Ok. We’re all caught up. So what’s good in life?

Graduation
One degree down. It’s been a busy two years. Here’s where I toot my own horn. A full Bachelors of Science degree in two years, while working full time, and with kids in tow (OK, wife gets mad props for making this all happen).  Screen shotty says it all.

I nailed this semester like a cheap college tart, and closed everything out on a solid note.

Why stop there. I’m carrying the momentum right into Graduate level courses this summer. This one I’ll take a little slower to better enjoy the classes, but in four more years I’ll have a Masters. All this self investment paid off. The plan was to eventually be able to apply this programming degree. So welcome to…

The Job

My new employer. As cheesy as it sounds, as one door closed another one opened. I’m genuinely excited about having the chance to put all that education and hard work to use, and learn some real programming (and all the processes that go into it in the real world). On June 15th the new adventure begins!

Then There Was The Cat

In between I’m taking some deserved downtime. The plan was to take a few day trips per week with the family. However, two days into my ‘vacation’ my cat decides to go car hunting.

Now you have to understand, we don’ t live right on the road. In fact, we’re almost a full two acres away from any road. This was our least expensive cat (the others’ medical bills could fund a small country). So sometime in morning Took (the cat) got hit by a vehicle. So Took, with an open fracture of his front right leg (at the elbow) drags himself the two plus acres to our house, vaults a four foot fence, climbs the front porch steps and squeeze through the cat door. He then promptly collapses at the foot of the stairs and starts meowing. That’s how I found him.

The next four weeks he has to stay in this pen while we nurse him back to health. Looks like it’ll be an exciting STAYCATION! YEA!!!!!!!

So after the leg heals (had to blow two pins through the joint, so it’ll never be quite the same, but better than no leg), then it’ll be back into the vets to get his mouth fixed, which is pretty banged up given that it must have kissed a fender or undercarriage at speed.

Despite it all, the cat still is a bull moose and managed to force his way out of the cage at 3:00am.

The Garden

It grows.

Self explanatory. This plot was mostly used as bait to keep the kids occupied while the real work was done in the big garden.

Corn, squash, lettuce, cucumbers, potatoes, melons, tomatoes – you name it. It’s coming! The majority of the work here is all owed to Cari who is indefatigable when it comes to growing things.

Look Up

It’s the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Drive out to a dark, remote spot and enjoy the best light show the universe has to offer.

Even better for $15 pick up a Galileoscope! It’ll be the awesomest, most compact and portable telescope you’ve ever owned (barring you being a regular Astronomy enthusiast). I’ve purchased two, one for myself and one to use with the kids. It comes as a kit you assemble. The resolving power on it is pretty wicked. Mount it on a camera tripod and you’ve got a recipe for one fantastic evening (until it gets too cold, too many mosquitoes, or the guy starring at you from the edge of the woods gets too creepy). Either way I’ll wager it beats the crap out of most everyone’s usual evening routine. So give it a shot.

Somewhere out there is a machine.

This machine’s purpose is to churn out fully formed programmers with three to five years experience.

I have deduced this based on the abundance of want-ads that look for nothing less than programmers with three to five years of experience.

Really, it seems to work like this:

Step 1: Graduate with IT degree.

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Three to five years experience – finally employable.

I’m a fairly security-minded and skeptical person. I understand the risks involved in posting resumes on things like Monster, Dice, etc, and to be wary once emails started coming in.

Today I received an email from Delany, Byczinski & Potamkin that their recruiting service had a great job that matched my resume. However, the email was written poorly enough to be a base Nigerian phishing scam. Before clicking any links I tapped into the internet and did a little research.

The feedback sitting out there is a bit staggering. It appears that Delany, Byczinski & Potamkin is another link in a chain of scam recruiting companies that elicit money from job seekers with the promise of good placement. This is but one link in a chain of (the same?) companies called:

CAN Inc.
McKenzie Scott
ITS
DPB (Delany, Byczinski & Potamkin)
Executive Search
Management Recruiting
Care Transition

that take thousands of dollars from you (often stuck on a credit or debit card) promise lofty job positions and don’t deliver. Moreover they don’t attack just by email but through phone calls and even personal interviews?!

What alarms me is I’m not a young kid just graduating college (for the first time). I’ve been in the workforce for over a decade and never heard of these scams before. I listen to a lot of tech and tech-security minded podcasts and never heard this issue raised before. I know a lot of IT people in the field and never heard of them talk about this before.

The number of testimonials from people on the web that have been taken by these people seems high once you know what to look for.

So my question now remains – why does this topic seem so well buried? Especially an in economy where money is tight and jobs are extremely valued is no one waving a giant, huge, enormous warning flag about this?

There’s obviously a larger story here. It’ll be interesting to see how it unravels.