Idle State

In a flurry of less-than-idleness, I decided in the last week to visit a few web sites for Employment Agencies and Employers in the region. Most of the agencies require you to register on line which is absolutely fine - I'm a digital boy. After registering on the third site I was beginning to see red. ie. <style="face-colour: Infuriated Red"> Clearly these people do not ever actually use or test their client web sites.

I sent Clarendon Parker Support a bunch Javascript errors which were occurring while using Firefox on their site. The site does not work using Firefox, Safari or IE on my Mac. They responded indicating that I should use IE. Hello!!! McFly!!! Did you even read my email?!? Anyone who has ever worked for me would know that a response like this to an end user would be a severely career limiting move.

Firefox has 15% - 30% (it's debatable) market penetration now. Even at 15%, that's a fair amount of business to lose because you can't be bothered supporting a browser. Browser Statistics

Emirates Careers is totally broken with everything I tried to use from a Mac. It leaves a little immovable "Please wait..." popup on the screen right on top of form fields even when the page underneath has finished loading (Aaarrrgh!) The submission system becomes very confused if you update your details or CV or apply for a second job.

Etihad have quite a nice online job application system. The biggest pitfall is when applying for a job, the submission screens time-out without warning, causing all your work to be lost. If you are busy typing a fabulous answer into a field and spend a little time editing it, trying to save results in a page reload and all your work gets lost. After this happened twice, I had textedit open beside the browser so that a least the text field answers could be re-inserted quickly. Too bad for the drop down boxes though.

Qatar Petroleum career website was also totally broken for Safari, IE and Firefox on the Mac. Once again, I emailed their webmaster but QP didn't respond at all.

Qatar Foundation have a completely unusable fill-out-20-pages job application site - with mysterious terminology for various things which aren't explained on the site at all.

Most then require you trawl through unnavigable search tools to find a list of several hundred jobs of which approximately 10% are remotely relevant. (You need to make the search terms broad because the search engines are a mess).

Lastly - and this is the most heinous web site crime from all the employment sites - e-Jobsearch.com - you spend a good hour or two filling in the profile and massaging your CV into their format - and then you find out that payment is required to get them to submit it to any potential employers. What's wrong with this model?!? Everything.

In the case of Employment Agencies, once a relevant job is found, you then apply for the job at which point the employment agency may review your CV and online profile. Or may not. So much for service. It seems to me that there is a very low value add with these employment agencies - a classic case of Ritzer's McDonaldization Of Society.

With my web Zen completely depleted, it seems I'm going back to the old way of finding a job - reading the newspaper and visiting potential employees personally. Back to polling or better yet, turning up at HR offices for the companies I really want to work for. Anyway, reading the newspapers are a great way to idle away the morning.

What would be really neat is for employers and employment agencies to accept XML CVs. That would save everybody's time. Now we just need to get some agreement on the DTD...

Back to the beach.

Postscript: And on the subject of web site peeves etc, here's a few more:

Qatar Airways

• The menu bar doesn't render properly when using Firefox. User font size adjustment don't work very well. To be fair, this web site is vastly improved on what it was a year ago. I can actually use it with Firefox now.
  
• Flight stats take forever to get updated for Qatar Airways flights - more often than not well after the flight lands. What's the point?

Qatar Airways [Slightly Off Topic]
Third request and you don't honour unsubscribe requests for your advertising spam. Tsk tsk tsk.

Standard Chartered Middle East

• iBanking launches a separate window and resizes my browser. Grrrr.
  
• The navigation is not at all intuitive and generally difficult to find what I want.
  
• When doing an online transaction, the only information in the confirmation is the confirmation number itself - no information about the transaction amount, the recipient or account used. Not at all useful retrospectively.
  
• The site's certificate expired in October 2005.
  
• Lastly, messages from the bank do not change to the unread status after reading them.

HSBC Middle East
Sigh. Internet Banking opens 3(!) new windows. One redirect window, then one to tell me that it's loading another window. My browser tells me that without needing some crumby bit of javascript animation pretending it is talking to the remote server. Get rid of it.

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Neo is my name. Sleep. Eat. Run. Baths really blow. Tennis balls are fun.

Neo is a very clever dog. Not only does he pretend to write Haiku (ok - so he really just walks over my keyboard), he's also very photogenic.

He also likes to play fetch. It goes thus:

Wag tail. Human throws ball.
Run after ball.
Jump several times own height vaguely near ball. [I'm such a show off.]
Run into fence while looking for ball.
Fetch ball when ball stops bouncing.
Retreat underneath tree.
Attempt to kill ball.
Ball dead. Put ball in dog bowl with biscuits.
Eat biscuits.
Take ball to human but don't let them have it.
Human loses interest. Drop ball on their foot.
Growl until human throws ball.
[Repeat ad infinitum]

If you want to spend time idly, a Yorkie will play this game with you for a very very very long time.

Anyway - Neo's owner found this amusing quote for me from Frank and Ernest Comic Strip - since I'm now the resident ball-thrower:

If you don't mind throwing tennis balls for eternity, I do have an opening in doggie heaven for you.

Cute.

Neo loves the beach. We took him there last week. Except that when he's wet he starts to look a bit like a rat version of Davros with a docked tail.

Believe it or not, Neo has an artificial hip. He was hit by a car when he was a puppy and instead of a life with his back legs attached to a two wheeled trolley (?!?) he had some plates put in in place of part of his hips. My theory is that he also got a head injury which might explain his bizarre ball fetish. Plus the biting on the feet whenever I arrive home. Oh, and the funny noises he makes when he's asleep. Anyhoo.

Back to the beach.

I am proposing a new law for Operating System Selection.

Yet another friend asked me at the pub the other day if I would help her buy a new computer. We talked about it for a minute or two while I bandied around venerable selection criteria - such as usability, software requirements, viruses, price, the illuminated Apple logo on the top of the clamshell and so on. My friend was somewhat nonplussed.

It occurred to me that there had to be a much more didactic means of choosing a suitable OS. A selection criteria which would make all others pale into insignificance. Furthermore - the criteria must be technically sound, beyond questioning of the layman and free from FUD, marketing hype and OS wars.

So. Applying Occam's Razor a vast number of OS characteristics using the selection criteria above I arrived at a profoundly simple solution.

I present Campbell's Law Of Choosing An Operating System:

When selecting an Operating System, it shall be bundled with Vi. [But not in an "I can't uninstall it" antitrust kind of way.]

Straightforward, really.

Speaking of Vi - do you ever get in that really annoying situation where you have been using Vi for days, and then switch to Word or something similar in order to type a letter of complaint to your landlord who can't read Courier to find you yourself typing:

iDear Sir,<enter>Please replace my missing front door immediately.<esc>:y100p etc etc etc

It's annoying to say the least - that Word et al don't intercept Vi commands and simply carry out the actions. With accessibility the big issue for web sites and software these days accepting Vi commands should be part and parcel of every application. Rob Sinclair please take note - accessibility is for everyone, including Unix users.

I digress.

Now selecting an Operating System is easy. You go to the store. Pick a machine bundled with Vi. Buy it. Live happily ever after. Empirical evidence to date suggests that I am overwhelmingly more satisfied if you decide according to my law of OS Selection. I contend that this proves my law. The results are repeatable. Prove me wrong, if you dare.

In the event that you still can't decide, use Campbell's Law Of Choosing A New Computer:

When selecting a new computer, the machine shall have an illuminated apple on it.

Back to the beach.:wq

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