- 2024
- Sep
- 28
Salary is confidential? Your response should be thanks, but no thanks!
Some years ago, I was contacted by a company that manufactured building products, as well as electrical devices to handle said building products. This was in regards to a technician position - more of an engineering tech - at the company’s headquarters. They’re just a shade under 2 hours from me, travelling on some country roads - there’s no way I could live here and drive there.
This was kind of an odd process, we had a phone screen and an on-site interview first, and a couple weeks later they asked me to fill out some online paperwork - applications and some assessment thing. During this time period, I had been unable to find out any information about the pay rates for the position. When we got to the hot and heavy part, I asked.
You can see the recruiter’s response and our email chain in the image.
I was told the salary range was confidential, but the recruiter could advise me based on my current salary if we should continue. I provided said information.
The eagle-eyed among you will notice the recruiter never really affirmed that it would be worthwhile to continue. Just that they had reviewed it. I didn’t notice that at the time. You’ll also notice I made the mistake of not saying what it was I wanted.
Did I get offered the job? Yes. Was it worth the time? It was a little more base, but was a net loss when I factored in medical and other items that my current employer gave employees at the time. I had to turn it down.
The recruiter and interview team called me. They wanted to know what they needed to do to get me in the door. I said “it’s the money.” It’s just not worth the few cents more you offered. You know where I live, you know what I make, you know I’d be leaving everything behind and essentially starting over with a higher-skill job. Make me a real offer.
Well, that went nowhere, and that’s the last I heard from the company.
Now? If I couldn’t get an answer up front about that salary range, I’d simply thank you for your time. It’s confidential? No, it’s not, and I’m going to be running away from your company.
It taught me to get all the information up front. If someone tries to play games and hide that info? Turn around and leave. That’s all.
- 2024
- Aug
- 27
It’s interesting how old data just keeps kicking around.
How many of you remember the 2021 LinkedIn data breach?
While not really a “breach” in the traditional sense of the word, it did result in some party scraping the public data of many, many profiles - the one I had at the time included. I’ve since deleted that profile for this one, and quit using the associated email address. I don’t want to give up that email address because it’s fairly desirable and attached to some other services I can’t migrate, so I keep it around.
I check that address every so often, because I know some people that I might like to talk to - and have not for a long long time - may still have it. Much to my amusement, offshore recruiters still email it, talking about how they just found my profile on a job board I don’t use and would I like this 2 month contract job in California for $22 an hour?
However, today was a little different. I’ve received emails from a few people contacting me at that address about how they just found my profile on LinkedIn, and because I was a successful business owner, would I like to consider franchise opportunities? I received one of these today, after a long dry spell without one.
They, of course, didn’t find my profile on LinkedIn using that email address, because it hasn’t existed since 2021. That tells me that the data from the 2021 breach (and possibly the 2016/2012 breach) is still out there, and being sold as fresh, useful data.
I politely emailed this guy and said that I was sorry but he bought bad, stale data, and asked him to remove me from his list since there wasn’t a business at that address, never was, and I was not interested in starting one.
I’ve had marginal success doing this. One guy seemed really confused until I found out where he got the data, and I told him why he had that data. One got very angry with me - that’s not the way to sell yourself. Most never reply. I never hear from any of them again, so I assume they get the message - but if not, it’s on them.
I hope this guy takes the hint. If he asks for more information, I’m happy to share.
What’s the moral of the story? All those “leads” that people are trying to sell you may not be what they seem. Pay attention to what you’re buying, you may be buying the last guy’s garbage packed up all neat in a gift box!
- 2024
- Aug
- 11
I’ve added a mastodon feed to the blog.
I’ve had commenting here off for some time, mostly due to the spam problem. Flatpress is a great system, but all comment platforms, unless heavily moderated, are spam magnets.
However, I wanted a way to communicate with people that may be reading this blog. I’ve had my LinkedIn profile connected for some time, but that’s not an accessible platform for most. Mastodon, however, is.
Mastodon is one of the twitter-likes that came out of the old Gnu Social era. It’s exactly what you think it is, a feed full of short posts by multiple people, and you can follow and interact with anyone that’s a part of the “fediverse,” a loose-linked conglomeration of various servers and people.
That’s not to say Mastodon doesn’t have it’s own issues, the originator of the system has some hangups that prevented conversations linked to other servers because he didn’t like the content, and it certainly has a very political leaning if you dive into the main feed. That’s not what I’m here for - I simply want to post my weird electronics and give people a way to go “Where did you get that thing?”
If you’d like, check it out: https://mastodon.social/@wereboar - not everything here has been mirrored there, but going forward - it will be.
Thanks for hanging out with this little pig, and I’ll see you at the hamfest!
- 2024
- Aug
- 7
Have you ever wondered what’s inside of that device?
Worry no more. With the help of Google Translate, you can finally see what’s actually inside that cheap Chinese solder pot you bought from AliExpress.
That magic “Heating Stuff” - it’s like the smoke in resistors.
- 2024
- Jul
- 29
A recruiter once told me that a company was a poor choice. They were right.
A recruiter once told me that a company (that I had asked about) was generally known in the local industry for wanting to pay substantially under market - trying to be as cagey about it as they could. His comments about the place were substantially more colorful, but that was the gist of the statements, along with a “probably not going to be worth your time.”
The person telling me this had no connection to the company, so I put the info in my files, and thought that maybe they just had a bad experience with the place.
No, they were correct - I had a few offers to interview with this place over the years, and the pay for skills desired was very poor - probably about 1/2 to 2/3 of what others were paying. I turned down the few contacts I had with a “Thank you, but there’s nothing about your offer that makes me want to pick up and move across the state.
The last contact I had with this company, the person contacting me became somewhat (not really) angry that I refused to even consider the position. To be fair, I did have an online profile that stated a range of pay I was interested in, but this also was posted with the caveat of being for local positions only. Any movement would require reassessment of those rates. When I pointed this out, the person passive-aggressive told me “Oh, ok.” That was the last time I heard from them. I’ve since taken a look at reviews on job sites, and those suggest that things have not changed - or even increased a whole lot, if at all. There’s a lot of talk on these reviews about the complete lack of awareness and organization within the company.
I appreciate that information to this day. When I’m told there’s something not right about what I’m looking at, I make a point to at least investigate the complaint on my own. Even if the complaint seems to be unfounded, I still keep that in my back pocket.
- 2024
- Jul
- 26
Creating a useful 404 page for this blog (and flatpress in general?)
When I was setting up redirects and closing pygg.xyz for the last time, I toyed with a bunch of ideas about how to properly tell the viewer that they had either reached their destination, or that the link they had was no longer valid. If someone had a link that wasn’t valid, I could simply let it go to the host’s 404 page - that’s not useful to the viewer, however.
The first option I tried was creating a simple 404 page with some information and links. That’s fine, but it’s just not the best looking thing in the world. I quickly abandoned that for a page at the end of the blog, “posted” long before any of the real posts were made. This worked, but…
Anyone that has a website of any sort knows that you’re going to get slammed by bad actors looking for entry points. In this case, those bad actors assume that since it’s a “blog,” you’re running WordPress. According to the site logs, I was getting slammed by requests for things in associated directories. There were quite a few other things as well. SQL, Oracle, SAP…all of those were common things being probed. There were even a lot of things I didn’t know what they were until I looked them up.
I set up the page at the end of the blog and checked back the next day. Exactly what you’d think happened, did. Hundreds of “views” in 24 hours, and I can guarantee you that none of those were actual people looking at that page. The view counter slowly went up with each refresh, indicating that the attacks were continuous.
This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it is in a way. If I were to let that page sit there, the site statistics would eventually show that page as being the most popular one on the blog - it would literally dwarf all other posts because it was getting hundreds of “views” a day. I didn’t want that, I want to give you things you’re interested in seeing. An error page isn’t interesting when you’re browsing the popular posts page.
I settled on a compromise. I took a static snapshot of the 404 page from “View Source,” cleaned it up to remove anything that’s not going to update, and made it the “Not Found” page. It looks almost like a blog page and has all of the sidebar widgets for navigation. This gives the viewer plenty of explanation as to why they are there, and what is available to them if they want to continue. This seems like the best choice - I’m not polluting the site with fake views, and a viewer who arrives there by accident has plenty of ways to find other content while landing on a familiar looking page.
Of course, as I read that page, it will change. Some of the things I write just don’t make any sense, and as I run across other situations those need to be addressed. In all, I think it’s a good place to land if someone does happen to find a broken link.
Maybe I’ll sit down sometime and analyze the WordPress script kiddies’ requests and create a special page for them that sends them to some weird government org. Probably not, they can sit on the 404 page just like everyone else.
- 2024
- Jul
- 26
Fun with Chrome?
I’ve been messing with various ideas for where pygg.xyz should go after it’s hosting plan expired. I finally settled on just having it redirect to the top level of Projects, with any errors going to the 404 page at the very end of this blog. This was done with redirects set in the domain registrar’s control panel.
The 404 page will get it’s own post. Stay tuned
DNS takes a while to propagate through the system, so I waited a while. Flushed the DNS resolver cache. Firefox and other browsers said no problem, here’s your site!
Chrome? Doesn’t work.
Did you know chrome has it’s own resolver cache, and even clearing that seems to have issues? I didn’t either.
You can’t get to that resolver cache unless you know the magic words. Put chrome://net-internals/#dns into the URL bar of Chrome and you’ll get to a simple text page where you can look up a named site and see it’s address, and/or clear the cache. Chromium browsers should follow this convention, but YMMV.
I cleared this cache on one machine, and my site started resolving. Another machine, and no luck. There seems to be differences between Chrome versions. That issue may cause some problems for people who have some very old links to this blog, but most of those should be gone by this point.
The moral of the story? There are more things to clear than you think there are, and even that may not work.
There was also some general crap going on with the redirects on the host. I cleaned those up and standardized them with my other domains, you shouldn’t have any issues getting here from there - but Chrome is still Chrome, and Chrome does what it wants.
- 2024
- Jun
- 25
Remember Geocities?
If you don’t, geocities was an early “personal web space” host that allowed you to create a simple page. They ranged from fan sites to personal ramblings, with some information and everything else in-between. I collected a lot of useful things off those pages, including stuff like pre-made plugins for software, links to companies of interest, and images of otherwise unobtainable things.
These sites were more often than not characterized by garish backgrounds, flashy things, more fonts than you knew existed, sound and music blaring out of your speakers, and all of the Under Construction GIFs that your machine could possibly handle without melting your video card.
I used mine as a holder for links that I could hit with my BlackBerry, among other things.
But, in 2009, Yahoo! decided they wanted to discontinue the service - 10s of thousands of web pages, full of information from the old internet, would suddenly vanish - and it would have if not for the efforts of companies like geocities.ws, among others. There were many projects to collect as much of this data as possible. Personally, I think Yahoo! really did a big F*** YOU to the internet by not handing over the archives - or at least keeping it static. It’s not like their draconian TOS didn’t give them the right to do whatever they wanted with your data.
Regardless, I found my site in the .ws archives and claimed it by having them send email to the (at the time) existing yahoo address of the same name. It’s been a few things over the years, but right now it’s a quick-link to this place, with a few preview images.
While there’s nothing on that site you haven’t seen before if you’ve been browsing the wereboar pages, it’s still there just in case. Why not, it’s a small free space to host something. If you had a geocities webpage at some point, there’s a chance it in the geocities.ws archive. If you have some way of claiming it, like the yahoo address associated with it, you may as well do so. Time to relive the old internet, party like it’s 1999, and use at much comic sans as you can!
My current geocities page
The Projects From the Bottom Drawer preview page.
(no epilepsy inducing flashing images or synth-pop that blows your speakers out, I promise - and I won’t even open your CD tray.)
I wonder if I should put a hit counter on it?
If you’d like a copy of the entire archive as retrieved by ArchiveTeam as the place was shutting down, you can find it on that site by the bay…the one where the skull and crossbones fly. Search for “Geocities” and select the one that claims it’s patched - the other one has issues and won’t complete. The files are fairly well looked after, so you shouldn’t have any issues retrieving it. It’s almost 700GB, so make sure you have room for it, and the 1TB of uncompressed data.
- 2024
- Jun
- 12
pygg.xyz, the former home for this blog, is nearing it’s end.
Hosting for pygg.xyz, as well as email and SSL services, have expired. I’ve set permanent redirects so that any pygg.xyz link should send you to the wereboar.com page of the same name if it exists, or the top level of Projects if you’ve not asked for anything special. There may be a couple of (very old) broken links, but those will take you to the blog’s 404 page with information on how to find what you want to see.
Those redirects may not always work, I’m investigating that but I don’t see any immediate resolution.
You can go to the top level of Projects to see the newest stuff, or you can go to the popular posts page to see everything on Projects from the Bottom Drawer.
I used to host this blog on pygg.xyz, but rapidly found out that .xyz domains have little trust in the Internet world. This affected both my ability to present things to you, and send email reliably using that domain.
Last year, I decided to see what was available - and for some reason, wereboar.com - a very old domain - was available. The former owners, a web design shop and later, some sort of graphics design shop, had let it go. I picked it up and moved everything here, because who doesn’t like lycanthropes? It’s been much easier to get email through secured systems with a .com domain, so here I stay.
My original domain, pygg.xyz, has been live all this time, but was a simple redirect to here. However, the end is nigh and the hosting for the domain ends on July 4th, 2024. The domain is still there and good for another 7 or so years, but the hosting will be gone.
Right now, there’s a parking page indicating that it’s 410, and to come here instead.
If you have any pygg.xyz bookmarks, now is the time to move them. Most should still work if you change pygg.xyz to wereboar.com, but if you can’t find what you need then check the popular posts or sitemap, available from the main blog page.
It will probably redirect here again, but I’m not sure what I want to do with it. It’s for sale, if you are interested, and it’s pretty cheap. Contact me with the LinkedIn links on the main wereboar landing page.
Until then, it will at least resolve to something. Where does the future lie? Who knows, but I’m sure it’s full of strange electronics and oddball projects.
I hope you’ll come along for the journey.
- 2024
- Jun
- 6
Don’t stay at toxic workplaces.
A recent LinkedIn post talked about a manager style the author calls the “Up your own butt” boss. You can read that post here: https://www.linkedin … edium=member_desktop. You may need to log in to see it.
A position I held several years ago had a direct manager that fit this bill. Everything good was “We,” everything bad was “you.” Blame would be shifted, even if he was at fault.
Shortly before I left, he stormed into a shared technician office and started berating us about someone charging time - in this case, weeks - to overhead. (Overhead at this company was a charge number that you could use when you were just doing general tasks that had no direct charge. Things like setting up new equipment, cleaning an area, etc.) He was going to find out who did this, they were going to be disciplined. Possibly even fired.
He knew very well it was him doing it. He was having a house built at the time, and would go spend hours on site harassing the builders.
He should have been fired for that, as this was weeks of time he did nothing and lied about it. There were other incidents that he should have been fired for, including destroying expensive equipment from negligence.
Unfortunately, it was endemic to the entire company. His manager - the chief engineer - had a severe god complex. He was incapable of looking at something and going “Good work men, you did a great job!” Instead, he would go “I’m a great man, look at what I did.”
I learned very quickly not to go to this man with ideas, he would discount them immediately, and then implement them under his own name.
It was a terribly toxic place and almost drove me to alcoholism. I’m not proud of that, but I got out with the help of a good friend. Bless you Lance, I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.