Matthew Botos

After watching the cult of the iPhone grow this year, I finally drank the Kool Aid today and reestablished my alpha geekdom. A new iPod seemed like a good new job reward, and the additional capabilities of the phone were just too slick to pass up.

Even with the holiday rush starting to pick up at the mall, the Apple store was still pretty efficient in ringing up quick iPod and iPhone purchases. As soon as you open the phone, it pops up graphics and instructions to dock and use iTunes to set it up and sign up or AT&T service, starting at $70 or so once you account for the conveniently omitted [cell phone tax]. Activation and transfer of my number from Verizon took just a few hours, though.

In the meantime, I loaded the phone up with my iTunes library (it just about fits) and photos. I’m a little disappointed the photo sync doesn’t support nested folders, skips over the whole folder when parts of it won’t fit, and recognizes only iPhoto albums instead of rolls. With it’s web capabilities, though, I can always just show people my live gallery.

The interface is amazing slick, and it’s very cool to have photos of all my contacts, or be able to snap a quick photo with the phone if I don’t. One other little thing that impressed me: stick the phone back in it’s dock while a song is playing, and it smoothly fades out.

After finding that even the upgraded version of Mac OS X’s FileVault hard disk encryption was incompatible with its Time Machine backup, I finally dumped it today. In the last six months, it’s given my MacBook multiple aneurysms, forced me to buy an external drive to provide temporary space while recovering it, and sent me scrambling to resurrect my files.

What I finally realized is that the only things I needed to encrypt were tax returns and credit reports with whole or partial social security numbers. I included the partial ones, because even though most credit agencies only display the last 4 digits, many of the accounts use the same number and display everything but the last 4. A good way to hunt down these files is to search file contents for the first 5 and last 4 digits, with and without dashes.

These files are easily stored in a smaller encrypted disk image created using Disk Utility, and by creating it as a sparsebundle, it’ll grow and shrink as needed. When TrueCrypt offers a Mac version, I’ll probably switch to it so the files are also directly accessible from non-Mac backup machines.

I recently upgraded my MacBook from OS X 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard and have been mostly pleased with the upgrade. The upgrade itself was simple enough, and most of the changes are subtle enhancements. A few of my favorites are the todo list in Mail, and Mail’s new ability to recognize dates in messages and create iCal appointments from them. One of the neater graphical upgrades is PhotoBooth and iChat’s new option to show you against any background.

Of course, I did have bigger reasons for upgrading: Time Machine and FileVault. Though I’m pretty handy with rsync, it’s not as clean - or reliable - as a built-in solution. Time Machine also offers a very simple interface, but the two-click setup soon brought up a FileVault issue. It Machine can’t backup older FileVault drives, so I needed to “turn FileVault off and then back on”. Or, as one would say outside of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, decrypt and re-encrypt over 30GB of data. Naturally, this takes a good bit of extra space, and more than I had, so it took some shuffling of files to an external drive for it to work.

One last oddity after that was a pause while “backing up home directory” when I logged out or restarted, which makes sense if they’re doing something based on the encrypted image once it’s unmounted. Going back in Time Machine, it turns out the only thing it exposes is the single, encrypted image file of the home directory - no individual files! Needless to say, that’s not very useful, and plenty of other people are making the same complaint. What good are slick methods of protecting and backing up your data when they won’t work together?!

I spent a lot of time on my cell phone while job hunting, and figured I’d get hit with a big bill, but the $300 email from Verizon was still a shock! You’d think after 500 overage minutes, they’d cut you a deal, but every single one is still $0.45.

After a bit of horse trading, I got them to refund 50% of the overage by signing up for the next highest plan (temporarily, of course). So if you’re thinking about looking for a job, consider bumping up your cell phone plan or getting an unlimited VOIP line.

The idea behind Leverage, a site to manage and trade gift cards, didn’t intrigue me so much as how straightforward parts of the their business model are. They acknowledge it costs money to get customers, so they’re just going to pay out that to customers cost as quasi-cash quasi-interest on the cards you register. They’re also advertising-driven (seemingly the only successful Internet business model), so they’re going to target ads based on your demographics, but they’ll actually tell you on which demographics the ads are based. It’s refreshing; hopefully more customer-dependent sites will follow suit!

One of the more interesting places I visited in Belize was La Milpa, part of the Rio Bravo preserve run by the Program For Belize. It’s an out-of-the-way field station in the middle of the rainforest, not far from another Mayan site.

Getting there involved about 2 hours of rough dirt roads from Orange Walk with our guide Vladimir, who picked us up in a pickup already sporting some groceries and a few windshield cracks. The ride passed through more typical Belizean country-side: small villages, Mennonite settlements, fields of sugarcane and rice, and finally some views of Mexican mountains just over the border.

La Milpa itself is really just a clearing in the forest, with thatched roof cabanas, a central dining hall, and their new eco-friendly dorm up the hill. It has the makings to draw an interesting community of visitors, though being the off-season, my Dad and I were the only ones there at the time.

That did mean that we had our own tour guide the whole time. We did morning and afternoon hikes, learning a good bit about the variety of plants and animals and their numerous defense mechanisms. Touring the La Milpa Mayan site was an interesting contrast to Lamanai, in that it’s largely unexcavated and still very much a part of the jungle. And if you forgot it for even a moment, the mosquitos were quick to remind you!

Aside from the hikes and meals, life at La Milpa was as laid back as elsewhere in Belize. There was plenty of time to read, swing in a hammock, or chase the butterflies and turkeys around camp with a camera. Their resident cat set a fine example by lounging in the sun instead of chasing after the numerous birds.

Nighttime was also a treat; the sun sets quickly close to the equator, and then the stars come out. All the stars. I got the same sense of awe I experienced years ago in the Rocky Mountains, looking up from a campground and being able to see dimmer stars and the diffuse band of the Milky Way. We also attempted a night safari drive, and while we didn’t see any jaguars, we did get some smaller treats: a tree frog and a big beetle.

I’m pleased to announce that 4 weeks of job hunting is over, and I’ve accepted a new job with Icon Clinical, a global provider of clinical trial development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. My new role will include leading efforts to institute agile scrum methods and deploy a global service oriented architecture. I’ll be doing similar software work, but taking on a larger role in a smaller team and getting a nice increase in pay.

In my seven and a half year career with Lockheed Martin, I’ve been fortunate to make key contributions to a variety of satellite programs, research and development efforts, and social software systems. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with the many smart and talented people of Lockheed Martin on challenging problems. Ultimately, though, I have found that my accomplishments have not led to the career growth I desire, and finally got smart enough to look around for other opportunities.

I have been blogging about my job hunt, but have kept the entries unpublished until now:

Read more about my job hunt

A few HR-isms I previously mocked actually became key as I decided on my next job:

Total Value of Compensation began as attempt to get people to look past the (depressingly) average salaries and consider their other benefits. In addition to making me realize what health insurance really costs, it showed me that there really is more to the iceberg than base salary. When it came down to comparing offers, I tallied up salary, bonus, 401(k), pension, insurance, and total days off to get an overall dollar figure for compensation.

Work-Life Balance is another bit of corporate double-speak: work hard, but don’t totally burn out. For me, this came down to weighing what a company offered versus what they expected. High pay, but long days and little vacation? No thanks.

Grab Hold of Your Career is perhaps the best one: you control your destiny, and it may very well lie beyond the walls of your current employer, though they probably won’t tell you that part!

I’ve been impressed with how fast some of my job interviews and offers have gone, but I’m realizing this speed comes from largely self-serving interests. Hiring companies want to put the first offer in your hand, but not leave it there long enough to be outbid or let you get other offers for comparison. Recruiters want you to take the first decent offer so they’re assured of their commission; the fraction of a fraction they might get from you negotioting for more isn’t worth the risk to them.

And in the middle of all this is you. You want to move onto a new, exciting, more lucrative job as soon as possible, but also to pick the right opportunity and not sell yourself short. The stress and flurry of activity of a job hunt tend to be a distraction, though, so you have to remember to be your own advocate to meet your own goals.

For as many trains as I’ve taken in traveling in London and Italy, I’ve never taken one domestically until my job hunt. This came courtesy of a professional services position, integrating big software packages for big companies. New York city was their nearest office, and the closes place to meet up with one of the voices on the phone.

It was straightforward enough to book an Amtrak ticket online and catch the hour and twenty minute train to New York’s Penn Station. There was a healthy crowd, so I was happy to settle into a window seat and watch the world go by while plugged into my iPod and running through job-related thoughts as a background process.

In New York, I met my recruiter at the train station, and went through reconciling how I had pictured him based on his voice with his true appearance, as I did with many people at the recent MCES conference. We walked up 7th Ave and the parade of Fashion Avenue, which had the same palpable bustling energy of people I felt in the station.

There was less of a virtual-physical presence disconnect with the hiring manager, and we spent about an hour talking, unfortunately not having enough time to grab dinner. One of the things that impressed me about him and a few other folks I’ve dealt with in the process is their genuine desire not just to hire someone, but to hire someone with a good mutual fit. I still had my doubts about that, but resolved to give it some thought as I grabbed a sandwich and the train home.

I ultimately passed on the position, but it made for an new kind of trip and certainly more exciting Monday night that usual!