TomS Words of Wisdom

I haven't posted anything newsy in quite some time. So I guess it's about due.

Pretty much all winter and spring went into getting everything ready for Spring Fest. It went off the first weekend in May. It was in many ways the best one I've run yet. But in many others this year wasn't as good as my previous ones. Afterward I was really burned out on vaulting and especially on fest management and it was really hard to get all the after fest tasks done this year. Fest next year it will be at the same place in Olympia, again on the first weekend in May.

Memorial Day weekend I went to the NW Folklife Festival in Seattle. Much fun. Good food. Big crowds. Parked in Issaquah and took the express bus in and out, which was pretty nice.

I tried to ignore my birthday in June, but my mom clued in the vaulters and they brought me cake.

At the end of June I spent a week on staff at the National Vaulting Summer Training Camp in Nebraska. It was the kind of experience I really needed to get over my burnout. It was sooo... much fun. Vaulting has so many really worthwhile young people and adults too.

Didn't really do much of the Forth.

After getting back from camp, I interviewed for a promotion and this week I was officially offered a new position as a Sr. Engineering Tech. It's mostly making the temporary special assignment that I've been doing for the year or so into a long term thing. It pays quite a bit more then my previous position and more then I made as a Transportation Engineer, but it's still less then I was making as a computer programmer before the dot-com bubble burst.

I'm skipping out on my 20 year HS reunion this coming weekend, as the air fare for the dates I could fly was over $500. I like my HS friends, but not enough to blow most of a grand for the trip by the time you include parking, reunion ticket, vacation time, etc..

Next week a local TV crew is coming out to do a segment on my vaulting club. Then it's off to eastern WA for a weekend vaulting camp. Followed by Nationals in No.Cal. in early August.

Late August will be focused on recruiting vaulters for the fall / winter and competitions in September and October.

A friend of mine had one of these in her blog. Looked cool, so here's mine.


visited 44 states (88%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or determine the next president

Could be just the thing for my Dad's aspiring 50-States marathon friends.

Chris --

I've been a very happy user of Yahoo's "My.Yahoo.com" service since
it was in it's initial beta many years ago. The last couple of
revisions have been pushing more dynamic Ajax layouts and requiring more
screen real estate. So after giving each new version an honest try, and
providing thoughtful feedback, I've opting to go back to the "Classic
My Yahoo".

Much to my disappointment the new version rolled out today (or maybe
it was yesterday) doesn't offer any "Classic My Yahoo" option. I've
filled out their feedback for telling just how much I dislike the new
version and why and asking them to contact me.

In the event I don't get them to restore access to the classic
interface, what are some other news readers that present in a
"newspaper" metaphor rather then a "e-mail" or "tree" metaphor?
Preferably ones that support some degree of rich content not just
headlines.

Thanks
Tom Sayles

http://Soot-n-Smoke.com/tsayles

I starting to get really annoyed by recruiters, like Susan K. Kichline and the Kody More I wrote about back in July, that can't keep track of who they have contacted and who they have received resumes from.

Susan initially contacted me on March 7, 2008 and I replied with a resume and an expression of interest in Seattle area positions.

On March 20 I received another, almost identical, "Dear Candidate:" e-mail message to the same e-mail address. After that near duplicate message it was obvious that Susan wasn't keeping track of who she contacted and/or not reviewing her cold contact e-mail list for duplicates. So I e-mailed her and warned her that this was a problem that made her look bad and that she and her company, EEG Recruiting, needed to fix this.

Her reply on March 26 was:

Tom:

Unfortunately, because the search is done on criteria, and not on specific names, if you do not want to receive any emails, please delete your information off of the internet job sites.

Thanks for your understanding,

Susan

On April 11 I received a third almost identical, "Dear Candidate:" e-mail message to the same e-mail address. So, on April 18 I finially got around to responding by posting the following to EEG Recruiting's "contact us" webpage, then wrote this blog entry.

"Despite a previous polite reply with the requested information and a warning about again being contacted, your agent "Susan K. Kichline" sent an identical "Dear Candidate:" e-mail message. I take this as a real sign of cluelessness on the part of your employee, and incompetence on the part of your company in not properly managing prospective candidate data. And I do not wish to work with your company now or in the future.

Please remove my resume from your records and add my e-mail address to your do not contact list. If I receive another "Dear Candidate:" e-mail message form Susan K. Kichline or from any of your agents I will report this as e-mail abuse to your ISP and to the local authorities."

It looks like there's a real business opportunity for anyone that's wiling to bring real CRM technology to recruiting companies like EEG Recruiting who employ recruiters, like Susan K. Kichline.

Follow-up:

Within 12 hours of the initial posting, my blog post was listed as the number 2 site when searching Google on "Susan K. Kichline", and in the top 20 when searching on "EEG Recruiting".

Additional Follow-up:

I got and then sent the following replies to the website contact form posting I mentioned above.

Administrator wrote:
>
> Tom, did you use the remove link at the bottom of her email?
>

I did follow the remove link yesterday, when I decided to cut off working with your company. Before that I was willing to be contacted by Susan K. Kichline or by your company about specific jobs that might be of interest and that's why I sent a resume and information about location preferences when I was first contacted in early March.

The point is that her / your candidate tracking system is very broken! Your company and employees need to be keeping track of who they have gotten positive responses and resumes from and not be cold e-mailing the those same addresses every two to three weeks. Your failure to do so is, IMHO, a sign of real incompetence and could be considered harassment. And I do not wish to work with a company that fails to do such basic forms of due diligence.

Again please remove my resume from your records and do not contact me about available positions or opportunities.

For more information please review my "TomS Words or Wisdom" blog post on the subject and/or search Google for "Susan K. Kichline".

Is it just me, or are these folks at EEG Recruiting really just completely clueless?

The following is my Commentary giving a vision of what the process could be.

From a business process engineering point of view tasks like e-mailing the Official AVA membership list to the competition [fest] organizers should be almost automatic. Basically the fest manager / show secretary should fill out a form with all the "AVA Recognized Competition Application" information either in the Competition Management section of the members area on AmericanVaulting.org and/or in CompWeb. The website should then send the National Office Manager an e-mail and/or a "pending" list item asking him to confirm payment and approve or deny the "AVA Recognized Fest" status.
Next the website / membership database should automatically publish the event in the Calendar section of AmericanVaulting.org and send an e-mail to the AVA Competition Secretary, Vaulting World Editor, listed Judge(s) [per the application] and the Organizers confirming the approval. The e-mail to the Organizers should also include the requirements reminder / guide that the AVA Competition Secretary now sends, as well as links to fest management, publicity and sponsorship resources.
Then a few days after the close of entries the website should send the National Office Manager an e-mail and/or a "pending" list item asking you to approve the official membership list. Once he does, the website / membership database should e-mail the approved list. And CompWeb's Registration List should include a member/non-member column populated using a join with the approved list on AVA#. Based on a boolean compare with the US Citizen column CompWeb should also be able to highlight any registered participants who need pay a non-member fee.
A few days before fest, the website should send a reminder to the Organizers [and optionally to the listed Judge(s)] highlighting the "During Fest" requirements.
A few days after the fest the website(s) should: move the Calender item to a past events archive; e-mail AVA Competition Secretary the official membership list (and if in CompWeb the list / total number of non-members as computed); and e-mail a reminder to the Organizers of the "After Fest" requirements. CompWeb could also send a notice to National and any Regional Highpoint Secretaries if scoring was done in CompWeb.
This is of course the ideal, but it can serve as a vision of how this process could eventually work, and something that we can incrementally work toward.

To do the incredible,
set lofty goals,
and work in small steps,
to achieve them.

-- Tom Sayles

After 360k miles, may she rest in peace ... or more likely ... in pieces.

I read a recent article on the Rendezvous and Escape tests of ESA's ATV, Jules Verne. This got me thinking again about how I would design a shuttle replacement system. So I opened up a vector graphics program, Scribus (which I think is actually trying to be a desktop publishing program) and started jotting down my ideas. While the tools left something to be desired, the results turned our reasonably well. The biggest problem were that the text editing in Scribus seems very broken and there wasn't any for me to spell check.

Anyway I've uploaded the resulting PDF with my ideas for the Reusable Automated Space Transport and Return System [RASTRS].