I personally have so much time wasted with the brief, ambigious conversations that they employ to try and engage me so that I will be a candidate for them or from the other side of the fence, trying to find potential candidates, that today I thought I’d post up a few pointers for all the recruiters out there.

Just to clarify this, these are generally the cold calling recruitment agencies who have scraped my details from one of the job sites they are subscribed to. Not the recruitment agencies I actually approach myself (and I’m sure that alot of you out there will have had experience of a few if not more of these :p).

Enjoy…

As a Candidate:

• Every client you have is not “one of the largest digital agencies in [London]” so stop keep using that tired and played term – no one is fooled.
• When you call someone PLEASE have all the facts to hand: Is it a contract or perm? Duration? What is the day rate? Whereabouts are they located? We have better things to do than waste 5 minutes on 1 minutes worth of information.
• Have our resumes to hand and please at least give them a cursory glance over so you are aware of what we do in a professional capacity.
• If I’m actively looking to change company please don’t phone me and provide details of a job at the company were I already work if you have an up to date resume which details this.
• Don’t call us because your search returned a hit for Tree Surgery in which our details appeared. If it’s not our current expertise or day job we can get a bit annoyed!
• PDF is not a dirty word – perhaps we actually applied a style to our resumes that we didn’t want you to ruin by tacking on your cover sheet and deleting of all our contact details…
• You are not working for MI6, therefore I fail to see how “is it safe to talk?” comes in to it. You keep your numbers private so if we didn’t want to talk to you we’d have just rejected the call.
• Your slice of the pie means the client pays more and we receive less, a necessary evil as you are providing a “service”. However don’t try and be our mate, because you aren’t. You are business associates. Learn to live with that.
• If we tell you how much we charge for a day rate please don’t attempt to negotiate it down as we’re not a market traders. You guys never lower your rates so why should we.

As an Employer:

• Please don’t call me with candidates I need to recruit for the company I work for, then try and poach me for another company – This is unethical and just rude. You are not a “cheeky chappy” by doing this!
• Likewise if we have a recruiting requirement “more” is not better than “less”. So please don’t just send over all the hits from your 30 second database search.
• If the candidate is unsuitable and you have been informed of this STOP KEEP SENDING THEIR RESUME OVER! :p

Now don’t get me wrong there are a lot of decent recruitment agencies out there and they are providing a good service, however these few tongue-in-cheek points above can make the business relationship a lot easier and smoother if they all just took the time to be organized and succinct.

If you have any additional points that should be added please feel free to leave them in the comments :D

However the other day I was trying to phone a client and my phone just kept disconnecting – literally the moment it actually made the connection – this continued on and off for the entire day. I initially thought it was one of the apps on my phone getting a bit too clever for itself and taking out the connection. Further investigation though discounted this. So at that point it was time to call T-Mobile Business support…

Long conversation short, it seems that T-Mobile are doing work on providing improved levels of 3G coverage over a greater area of the UK. The knock on is that you will likely get random disconnects when trying to make calls if you have 3G active.

The way around this is to turn off the 3G and just use GSM. To do this go to Tools > Settings > Phone > Network > Network mode and select GSM as opposed to Dual mode. Now that sorts out the connection drops, but the real kicker in this saga is the fact that they are doing this work all over their network for at least 2 months and Business support couldn’t confirm where exactly they were doing it (well obviously it is where I am at the moment). So no real solution, more of a work around while this goes on.

The Business support bod then went on to assure me that 3G wasn’t that important “…as it is only used for video calls…”. Yeah right – Data, hello!

If it continues I’ll be resorting to a good old letter of complaint.

Anyway, I’m back on Tiger and happy to be there, missing Spaces a bit, but missing Ruby / Rails etc more, oh well time to roll my own I suppose.

Firstly I have disabled Spotlight from indexing ANYTHING. This seems to be a bit drastic, but it pretty much stopped 90% of my issues straight off the bat. Secondly, I have disabled anything to do with iDisk or .mac (including mail accounts). This seems to have restored the stability and calm I was used to with Tiger. I have yet (touch wood) had a single lock up or crash since doing this.

So for all of you out there still having problems try this, YMMV but it might just sort it out. Now I can get back to developing…

So I backed up all of my files (both on a network and on an external disk, this time opting for a totally fresh installation. Boy that was an eye opener. It appears that Leopard disks may not be created equal as one would assume – After this installation I went on to install XCode tools – This crapped out, my disk saying there were “issues” with the package and I need to take it back to Apple (something I will be doing next week).

OK, well that botched installation (as XCode has started to install stuff and it resulted in a VERY unstable machine), was duly wiped and yet another installation was attempted – all I can say at this point is that goodness it wasn’t Windows as those installs take days! Anyway after this installation everything seemed fine and Apple had just released the 10.5.1 update. Then the lock ups started, intermittent keyboard lock ups, programs just stopped responding (force quit wouldn’t quit them), trying to mount DMG’s or extract zips failed with all manner of errors. Bizarrely enough a reboot resolved all of these- until they started to happen again. The my iDisk started to complain, by complain I mean I noticed it wasn’t doing what it should. Finally this was just one hard reboot too many for Leopard and I got a massive corruption of the drive – it would crash as soon as it tried to load the boot loader.

So on to install number 4 (if my calculations are correct). Now during all my “fun and games” I started to notice some constants, lock ups and apps not responding, plus DMG’s failing to mount all appeared to be linked with .mac running an automatic synchronization, or iDisk having it’s own attempt at auto syncing (as it always fails now). So I have turned all of these off and all seems to be stable. For the moment at least.

Now iDisk and iSync worked perfectly until they released 10.5.1 so perhaps if the fix for the security hole in “back to my Mac” has screwed it all now. That way if none of it works no-one can connect – Problem solved.

Oh and yesterday I lost sound – It bongs on startup, Leopard is convinced I have no audio hardware. Thankfully Audio Hijack fixed that issue.

Am I pissed at all these issues? Well yes and no. Yes, as I rely on this machine to do my client work on and if it goes down it costs me revenue (and potential data loss). No, because I run a lot of bleeding edge stuff, a lot of my old apps are not confirmed as Leopard compatible and well if it annoys me that much I could go back to Tiger.

What does really piss me off is that Time Machine doesn’t support network backup if you don’t happen to have a shiny new XServer running Leopard Server….

Would I recommend you upgrade, sure go for it…If you like installing stuff :p

Now to just print this… Oh dear, it appears someone didn’t check this prior to launching it. It seems that on my HP 1022nw B/W Laserjet (a pretty common printer) the nice looking form is too big. In fact the bar codes on the prize draw entries get cut off so that makes them totally useless. So now I’m going to have to either grab the image and resize it (this is the easiest option) or try and get my Mac and printer to play “margin friendly” so I can get the whole thing altogether.

Anyway enough of this as it is starting to get rant-y :p. It’s not a real biggy but it would have been nice if someone had at least checked it once :s. Off to the printer then more BioShock :D

Those of you going on Monday – I’ll see you there.

Hopefully this will be rectified by the end of this month when according to rumor and speculation Flex 2 will be officially released. The thing I really don’t get though is why on the Flash player 8 preview page for Mactel machines it says that the universal version will be released

Adobe plans to support the new Intel-based Macs with Flash Player 9, after the initial release of the Windows and PowerPC-based Mac versions.

Come on Adobe spread the Flash player 9 love a bit further sooner rather than later. I know I can bootcamp my machine or use Parallels Desktop for Mac but I don’t want to – I’d just like a universal player and preferably on the same day that the Windows and PowerPC Mac Flash 9 players are officially released. If not it feels more and more like Mactel’s are the bastard cousins of Linux and are set to be treated in the same manner when it comes to player releases. I doubt this is the case, but you get my gist…