Greg In The Desert

Intel just barely made Forbes “100 Best Companies To Work For” list at number 98. I generally don’t think top-whatever lists are very useful and I would hate to think someone chooses their employment based on a list like this. Having worked for other large companies I can only say this: Intel is a huge company are there are plenty of good and bad places to work within it. There were quite a few comments made. There would have probably been more if it didn’t require Facebook.

From Hector Martinez:

I worked for Intel for 13 years and was recently laid off. I state those facts so I won’t be accused of toting the company line. While it is true that Intel expects much of their employees they also provide great opportunities to grow, as long as you are wiliing to work for them. Not everyone is going to like the pressure but this is a cutting edge company that leads their industry and not a place for those that cannot embrace the pace and the chaos the pace sometimes causes. Overall I had a great time there and would go back there if they ever chose to hire me back. Each person has a different experience even though they may be in the same place. In all those 13 years I only knew of a handful of techs or engineers that turned in their badge and walked out. I think that speaks to the ability of the company to keep talent regarless of the unrelenting pace of the factories.

From Pablo Luengas:

Vlad and Stephen are free to express themselves because, just like I, they don’t work there anymore. There is no risk of reprecautions. It’s not the same for people who are currently working there, who cannot say much because their identity in facebook will get them in trouble. Laurel’s experience -and a few others- she probabbly didn’t work directly for the fabs (factories as Intel call them), and her experience may be different for that reason. Unfortunately the great majority of people working for intel are related to the fabs and know what I’m talking about. they can corroborate what I say. When you work for intel, there is no life outside the company. if you are a process engineer, they will call you at 3am -you are not obligated to answer- but your review will reflect the “lack of cooperation” if you don’t. You are “owned” by them 24/7. I was there 87-01. Intel, keep your profit share bonus, I’ll take my life back. For my family and my own well being, I think is a great deal!!!!

An article in the LA times reports on New Mexico’s success in reducing DWI’s.

New Mexico, home to high rates of alcohol abuse and miles and miles of open road, is now ranked 25th in alcohol-related fatal crash rates and is expected to place lower when the latest rankings are compiled later this year. From 2004 to 2008, the number of DWI fatalities here dropped 35%, from 219 to 143.

The article also discusses the successes of the vehicle interlock device that requires a convicted drunk driver to blow into a device to operate their car.

I can relate first hand how well these devices work. I have a friend who is alcoholic. It amazes me how many times he has been driving drunk and didn’t get caught or kill somebody. He recently told me how he came out of a bar drunk and tried to start his car. He blew into the interlock device somewhere around 20 times and a person with him finally convicted him to stop trying.

My friend is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When he is sober he completely understand that he should not be drinking and driving and that he was too drunk to drive. When he is drunk he looses all concept of reason and tries to drive, he actually kept the interlock device installed on his vehicle even after he was no longer legally required. This is exactly the type of person the interlock device is designed for.

Interlock devices only help for those that have been convicted of drinking and driving. They don’t help for those that haven’t yet caught and I once read a statistic that one could drink and drive several hundred times before getting caught.

One reason I’ve been regularly watching the Albuquerque Craigslist is that I’m determined to one day own a Delorean. About 10 years ago I came across one for $10,000 and I regret not buying it. Although Deloreans rarely show up recently a red one appeared.

1981 Delorean LOW MILES!!!!! – $12000 (Albuquerque)

1981 DeLorean 4.3l Chevy engine conversion 200hp (almost twice stock hp) approximately $9000, Corvette pistons, cam ext. Auto trans. Fresh Interior and 28000 miles. Couple of dings on passenger door. Good tires. New door, hood, trunk struts. Sorry pics taken at night if you want more pics of interior contact me.

The craigslist ad includes a link to ebay motors. I would much rather have a Delorean in it’s original configuration, no chevy motor and I would much rather have one not painted. It’s a stainless steel body, what’s the point of painting it?

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Here’s some video I shot of President Obama’s drive to Rio Rancho High School on Thursday. It was recorded and uploaded in HD to YouTube.

The first part of the video is the drive down Loma Colorado. I couldn’t drive and film at the same time so set the camera on the dashboard. You can see the camera crews and protesters on the left. The New Mexico Independent says there were about 100 protestors.

The second part of the video shows the presidents cadillac one and the following motorcade driving up Northern Blvd. The Lowes parking lot gave a great vantage point. In retrospect I should have walked down and filmed from the corner of Northern Blvd and Loma Colorado.

For some reason strangers always come up and talk to me and a several people asked me why we were all watching. Many were pissed that they couldn’t drive down Northern Blvd.

baltolover272 has posted a video of Presidnet Obama leaving the high school.

KRQE has Obama’s address on YouTube as well.

I get over 150 comment spams a month and I have been using the highly effective akismet anti spam plug-in, which has identified 99% of the incoming spam. I’ve been getting some odd comment spam lately. All the comment has is a link to Google and a link to Yahoo. Perhaps they spammers scripts aren’t configured or they are testing for vulnerabilities. Because of this and site CPU optimization efforts, I thought I would try to keep spammer from even getting the opportunity to make a comment.

The first thing I stared doing was to turn off comments on posts which get the most spam. The “10 Interesting Links” posts are very popular with spammers, I assume due to the keyword density of the posts. There are also some very old posts which get spam comments. I turned off comments for those posts as I see comment spam appear but as soon as I do it seems there’s someone who makes a legitimate comment. With a small site such as mine, I would prefer to encourage comments where ever possible.

I started using the WP-Ban plug-in which allows me to ban IP addresses. This is a tool I wield carefully. I investigate IP addressees that I can see a pattern in the spam comments from. I do a whois check for that IP range and depending on where they IP is from.

I was surprised to find all most all of the comments are from a single network: Ripe Networks of Amsterdam. That doesn’t mean the spam is coming from Amsterdam, the IP itself is for some other country. Germany or Russia or somewhere not in the US. I then add the first two numbers of the IP address and wild card the last two.

In the last month that I’ve added IP addresses to the Ban plugin, It’s blocked about 160 IP addresses, most more than once (one 94 times). The Ban plugin allows me to include a custom message where I clearly state that the IP was banned due to spam and that they can contact me at my email address if it’s a mistake.

Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen on YouTube. Trailer to be shown during the Superbowl and reason enough to watch it.

Apple has all of the Superbowl theatrical movie trailers on their website.

Agh! For some reason my AppleTV keeps syncing content that I specifically told it not to sync. And is has stuff synced that should have been deleted some time ago. I add a new podcast, it shows up in iTunes.

Yes, I have it set to only sync “Selected podcasts” yet it continues to sync ones that I don’t have checked. Even If I play them on the AppleTV they won’t auto delete.

It’s taken me a long time to complete what now seems pretty simple. I can finally call the pocket door kit install done. Instead of going with a prebuilt frame that can be had at Home Depot, I went with a Johnson Hardware Universal Pocket Door Frame Kit. One reason I didn’t go with the prebuilt frame is because it looks like it’s not something I could take into the house and install by myself. The Johnson kit comes in a box and in pieces which were easy to install by myself.

I’m not sure how much the Home Depot prebuilt kit is, but the Johnson Hardware kit was $60 through Ace Hardware’s online site.

Next up, the electrical

I have the need to publish category specific feeds for various reason. For example, I publish feeds from just the “Home” category to houseblogs.net, so they don’t get a lot of non-houseblogging related items. I use Yahoo pipes to create a new rss feed with just this category information.

The pipe was pretty simple to make. I use my RSS feed as the source, filter based on the item.category XML item and use the output as the new rss feed. I have published this pipe and can be viewed at this link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ZuZMORNV3BG_9SduLe2fWQ.

Steve Jobs pretty much said that a 3G iPhone will come eventually. That shouldn’t be a surprise. TheStreet is the one saying that it will be in the first quarter of 2008. I’m 100% sure it will be here in the next 5 years, within the next 9 months is a little less certain.

Navigadget says that Apple will add GPS hardware in the first quarter of 2008

The reason behind this rumor is the fact that Apple has been in touch with Broadcom’s Global Locate unit to supply chips for the phone. Global Locate, which was recently acquired by Broadcom, makes assisted GPS chips that use a combination of GPS satellites and cellular network signals to get a location fix. A-GPS will improve what’s a called TTFF, even making it possible to get acquire correct position indoors

I’m not holding me breath for either. What I am still waiting for is a minimum 16 GB of memory. I will keep my money until then.