With a change of housemates, some wise encouragement meant the opportunity was taken to remodel one of the bedrooms at my place. My only requirement was that I could do it myself, because I'm silly like that. Here's how it unfolded:

This shot was taken before I moved in.

And this is where we started, with my lovely assistant kindly replacing the pale blue window sill with clean white.

And then some delicious brown.

Having had the luxury of being fast and loose with paint spillage, it was time to remove the old "vibrant" red carpet.

And, with the help of a couple of kind lads who received only steak and beer in return, the new underlay and warm brown carpet was put down.

And with a very welcome lady's touch, the completed bedroom is gorgeous.

This week my girlfriend's Hotmail account was compromised and everyone on her contact list sent a spam email. Naturally, this is a very upsetting and embarrassing experience. Every contact - friends, relatives, past employers and ex-boyfriends - G had emailed in the last how ever many years received an email, purportedly from her, about some foreign trading online company.

Despite my assurances that no one should ever trust what appears in the "From" line, and that billions of these sorts of emails are sent every day, there are still plenty of her contacts on the receiving end that do not have spam filters finely tuned to a several hundred per day email influx. This is evidenced by the numerous replies she received, which despite intentions, no doubt compounded the embarrassment.

The challenge I see, is how best us very computer literate folk can broach the subject of computer security to those we care about, without alienating them. I remember when G first sent me an email from her Hotmail account to my work address recently. I sighed because I knew was going to start getting spam to an account where I can't control the filtering, but certainly wasn't about to blame her for doing so. The only thing worse than being criticised for doing something you thought was a nice gesture would be not understanding why it's a problem in the first place. And prior to this event it would have been very hard for her to see that there's a problem at all.

In the short term, G has changed her account password, made sure her vacation message (aka autoresponder) is disabled, and I convinced her to empty her online contact book. From my reading, there's little she could have done to prevent this particular attack, which is a hopeless feeling. The advice I would like to give is that if you absolutely must use Hotmail (and I'd suggest that setting up a forwarding address would negate most reasons to keep a Hotmail address) that you only use the web interface to check emails that haven't been downloaded and other odd jobs. Everything else should be done through a home computer email client where you can control the security. Even in light of this incident, how do you convince someone that what they've always done, what is so easy and what "everyone else" does, is not a good idea? Worse, how do you phrase it in a way that won't seem like complicated, insurmountable trouble? "Email" to the vast majority of the Internet world is a website, and an "email client" is exclusive jargon.

For the record it appears Gmail is also not immune. Both Gmail and Hotmail push their products as complete online email solutions - indeed, they try to make them look and act like email clients! With that sort of promotion it is no wonder that people are prepared to turn their email over to them. But without requiring every user to spend the considerable time to understand the security implications of using email over the web, is this really a good idea?

Finally, here is a summary of the technical details of the attack, as far as I can gather. Note this is definitely not a captcha defeat or a from address spoof. The emails were sent from her account.

• The email subject was "Hey friend,"
• The email body was:

  Hey friend,  How are you doing recently? I'd like to introduce you a very good foreign trading online company and the website is www.ele-y100w.com It can offer you so many kinds of electronic products which you may be in need,such as laptops, gps, TV, cell phones, ps, MP3/4, motorcycles even several kinds of musical instruments and etc.. You can take some time to have a check ,there must be something you are interested in and you 'd like to purchase . The contacts:  MSN: eley100w@hotmail.com  Email: eley100w@188.com Hoping you can enjoy your shopping from that company ! Regards

• Variations of this email have been used, with only the web addresses changed.
• Gmail and Hotmail have both been affected. The Gmail attacks appear to also set the vacation message to the same content.
• Several people claiming to be very computer savvy have been affected.
• Several people claiming very strong passwords have been affected.
• A few people have claimed that they run Linux or a Mac and only access Hotmail from those computers.
• Oldest report found is June 2008, latest is November 2008.
• The attack vector is undetermined.

For some - and this may come as a shock to those for whom Sydney is synonymous with New South Wales - travelling to Sydney is akin to waxing one's genital regions. Sure, many claim it's fun, stylish, and even commonplace. And like ripping hairs out, the memory of the irritation dulls over time and you think about giving it a crack again. Each time I take the plunge however, I'm left walking like I've spent too much time in the saddle.

After my last trip to the Harbour City, I discovered that the only thing less navigable than Sydney is the myriad of websites wanting your money for navigating Sydney. Of course, the easy thing to do is gunk your windscreen with another electronic car doohicky and breeze through the exclusive "E-tag only" lanes. When you average a trip to Sydney once a year or so though, it's hard to justify adding $90 ($40 for the tag, $50 minimum deposit) to the trip for the privilege of joining the toll road club. It'd be like you bank saying, "Good News! We're phasing out the hassle of having to remove your card from your wallet in order to use the ATM. Introducing Barcode-On-The-Wrist!", and then requiring $90 for the privilege of wearing your bank account identification. At least the first $50 of withdrawals wouldn't come out of your account - they would have already been deducted when you first signed up!

So I took the alternative and tried to pay my tolls online. It soon became evident that this wasn't your grandmother's online payment process. I found a stack of dead-end websites offering to take my toll, but none would let me check whether I actually owed anything - all I could do was make a payment in good faith, and if there was an amount owing it would be paid. If there wasn't... my deposit would still be gratefully accepted, just in case I ever do use that particular toll road! Even the rate was unclear - there was no indication of the variation for North and South bound or the different times of the day or week. After meandering through more toll websites than "no right turns" in Sydney, I paid all that I could see I might have incurred.

In return for my patronage, a letter arrived a couple of weeks later that delighted in informing me I had briefly graced their particular stretch of toll road and neglected to pay the troll my due. At least they compensate their "admin" department well, adding a $10 charge to the toll for the taxing burden of sending an automated letter.

Next year I'm counting on pubic hair being back in fashion.

I've put a new banner in the side bar of this site. It links to a site campaigning to have the Australian government's Internet censorship plans halted. The background and justification is all there on the site, so I'm not going to repeat it here, except to say that I'm seriously concerned this story has not yet hit mainstream Australian media. Remember the uproar and public shaming of China's efforts to censor the Internet media around the Olympics? Now similar plans are being made in the lucky country and Australia's apathetic public have barely been bothered.

Way back in the dark ages of mid 2007, I wrote about what I saw as a looming period of technical enlightenment. This vision has not waned. The channels of information I have at my fingertips continue to provide me with extraordinary pieces of insight and development, time and again.

Radio has been around for some time, but only recent developments have enabled me to pick the shows that appeal to me, download them to my sunglasses, and lead a eye-wear fashion parade while I ride to work. While trend envy is an obvious side effect of my choice of lens-flipping glasses, it's also the only reason I get to listen to quality radio programs like All In The Mind on ABC Radio National and Dr Karl on Triple J.

One segment on Dr Karl the other day caught my attention. Renowned skeptic Michael Shermer was guest question answerer. One of the callers brought up the experiments conducted by Robert Jahn at the PEAR laboratory. The caller was adamant that Mr Jahn had conducted robust and objective experiments over many years that consistently showed a random signal emitted from a machine could be influenced by the thoughts of humans. While they had heard of the experiments, neither Dr Karl nor Mr Shermer were familiar enough with the work to offer much comment, beyond some general skepticism.

15 years ago that would have been that. I would have forgotten Jahn did any experiments or what their significance was. Not any more. Not only is Jahn's biography and laboratory details a web site away, more importantly the scientific papers the group produced are freely available for anyone to review. In particular, a thorough report, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, documents the findings of an experiment to see if the thoughts of humans remote to a random number generator could influence that generator.

The real power here is that there is nothing stopping me, Joe Nobody, from repeating Jahn's experiments and publishing the results to the world (perhaps even submitting to a journal that wasn't set up to document paranormal events). How positively empowering it is to think that anyone with access to an Internet enabled computer has the potential to turn scientific endeavour on its head. A repeated experiment that corroborated findings showing correlation between human thought and machine output would be simply staggering.

Incidentally, I'm not going to follow up Jahn's work, but this snippet of the paper linked above might whet someone's appetite. The numbers are the output of a random number generator with mean 100, as a participant hundreds of miles away tried to influence it with their mind high and low.

Apart from Jahn's work, a couple of other snippets of information that have blown my mind recently:

1) Researches at the University of Washington planted electrodes on individual neurons in the motor cortex of monkey brains and connected them via a computer to muscles in the monkey's wrist. They then temporarily paralysed the normal signal path that controlled the monkey's wrist and found that within a couple of weeks the monkeys had learnt to deftly control their wrist with the artificial nerve path. The computer simply counted the frequency of pulses occurring in the monitored neurons and translated that to electrical signals to the muscles. The ramifications for enabling movement in paraplegics are striking. Link.

2) A team from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory in Switzerland successfully demonstrated a method of deciphering the faint electromagnetic radiation emitted from the cord that connects a regular keyboard to computer. From up to 20 metres away they could determine the keys pressed on the keyboard, which suggests there's some appreciation to be given to the seemingly benign amount of radiation our regular activities generate. Link.

3) A horse got its head stuck in a tree. NSFW. Link.

No you're not imaging it - this is one of the longest periods I've gone without more than a few words posted to this here blog. More evidence that blog activity is inversely proportional to actual life activity. I didn't plan it, things have just been going well for me recently. My priorities have shifted and I'm enjoying finding a new equilibrium, shared with someone I care about.

But never fear! The geek within still burns strong. And the geek within has finally managed to take the gloves off, put some real money aside, and dive into the sharemarket. What an enormously energetic introduction to share trading! What follows is my impression of the events of the last few months, from the perspective of a first time trader.

Amazing how a lick of paint can change the mood of a place.

The front door:

I'm happy to report that the front of the house is done. The light at the end of the tunnel is well in sight now. The photos are a poor substitute to actually looking at it (particularly the after photo, which I'm struggling to find the right light for) but it's great to look back and see the difference.

I've just finished hacking up a very small program I should have written years ago. It turns out the ability to reverse engineer an NTLM HTTP proxy authentication message is still useful, and thus, NTLMMessageDecoder is here.

All it does is automate the deconstruction of the three NTLM message types as described here and elsewhere. It takes the base64 encoded version of the NTLM message (as it appears in the HTTP header) on standard input and spits out the results on standard output.

The source code is included (under the Creative Commons license), as well as a pre-built version for Intel Macs. To build your own version, just run make. Note that big endian architectures will need to edit the ltohl and ltohs functions (in main.c) to swap the endianess. Since I also built this on my Powerbook, here's an example of functions that will do the job:

short ltohs(short in) { return ((in&0xFF) << 8) | ((in&0xFF00) >> 8); }
long ltohl(long in) { return ((in&0xFF) << 24) | ((in&0xFF00) << 8) |
                             ((in&0xFF0000) >> 8) | ((in&0xFF000000) >> 24); }

I welcome modification submissions (detecting endianess, better formatting, NTLM improvements, etc.) and will publish your work, with attributions, under the same license if you like.

With all the hoopla surrounding standards for excessive alcohol consumption, perhaps we've neglected the hardest hit.

Spare a thought for the pentailed treeshrew, which spends two hours a night suckling on nature's beer source - flower buds of the Bertam Palm.

Researchers from Germany's Bayreuth University reckon these little rodent like creatures are hitting the buds hard - hard enough to get your average human drunk - but are stumped by the animal's ability to appear sober. Well be stumped no more. As a slightly above average alcohol consumer, I can assure you that a well trained body will sedate the effects of alcohol, making getting pissed just that bit harder.

Mark my words, it won't be long before we see pentailed treeshrews leaving the palm buds where they hang and turning to the guarana and bull urine of the alcopop tree. I can assure you that when this catastrophe nears, I'll be grabbing a case, jumping on a train and leaving to rock out with the raging rodents of the Malaysian rainforest.

The Apple iPhone 3G was released here a couple of weeks ago. I've held out a long time getting a modern phone and the iPhone ticks many of the boxes I've been waiting for. Though as I've waited this long, I'm happy to watch how the costs settle and pick the best option for me. The selected carriers have been slow to announce pricing, but now that it's out, I see that it really isn't all that attractive.

So in order to justify a new phone purchase, I decided to do a little research into my current mobile phone habits. Knowing how and when I use my current phone places me in a much more informed position when comparing the available options. Fortunately, Virgin Mobile provide a detailed call history to browse. Unfortunately however, with so much data easily available, I got a little carried away with the analysis.

What follows turns out to be a real-world tutorial on using Excel, Python and R to extract meaning from a table of data.

I honestly thought this was a unique quirk, and never thought to share the experience. But there's something extraordinary about discovering that others share some unusual practice you've developed.

You see, I often replay embarrassing moments from my life in my head (I have a few to choose from), and without warning, one of the words from the replayed conversation, or what I should have said, or even a "fuck" or "dickhead" will come bursting out of my mouth. And not in a whisper. Enough to shock me into consciousness and quickly look around to see if I've alarmed anyone.

It turns out I'm not alone. A lonely post on Ask Metafilter has prompted a lengthy series of comments, as people corroborate the behaviour. Although there have been some attempts at on-the-spot classification (an "oooooom" moment, or an "Audio-compunctive Ejaculation"), I'm yet to see evidence it is explicitly recognised in psychology.

My classic episode is recalling the time I was drinking with a mate that had recently been married, and thought it would be appropriate to ask him whether he knew I and his wife once "got together". Out it comes: "Dickhead!".

Or the time a friend of the girl's bed I was sleeping in walked into her room and I tried to hide under the covers: "Fuggenin!".

And that's enough of that, or I'll be twitching and blurting nonsense curses all night.

To my surprise, Southern Cross Ten did respond to my earlier complaint about their story on a device that uses water to improve fuel efficiency. Commendation to them for following the issue up and taking the time to respond in full.

Commendation reduced for missing the point.

The letter I received did address what I thought was a breach of the Code of Practice in presenting factual material accurately. Apparently the code requires accuracy only in presentation of factual material. They claim the story was an expression of opinion and thus slides conveniently underneath the accuracy requirement. In my opinion, that's a fine line!

The clincher though was the rebuttal to my claim that by broadcasting the story the network had promoted the business.

The purpose of the story was to tell viewers about a newsworthy product. Network TEN did not endorse or vouch for that product and care was taken to ensure the story reported the claims and opinions of its creators.

One might wonder why a television news show chose a backyard product, strangely missing from every other mainstream media channel, as a "newsworthy" story. But the larger problem here, as I see it, is the admission of irresponsibility in selecting articles for broadcast - there is no suggestion that the broadcasters realise that by broadcasting a news story they are implicitly promoting and validating the content. In fact, the injudicious manner is quite evident.

The letter concludes by thanking me for the fifth time, and suggesting that if I have "strong concerns about the authenticity of the product" that I'm welcome to contact the manufacturers. A website link is included. A colleague suggested a fitting analogy to this suggestion: imagine if a television station decided to air a story on the business opportunity offered by a Nigerian banker, who only required your bank details and a small deposit to guarantee tens of thousands of dollars income per week. Would it seem right that broadcasting the story is ethical, because it's only the opinion of the Nigerian banker that you'll receive tens of thousands of dollars? And what if I had "strong concerns about the authenticity" of the banker's claims? Why wouldn't I just take those concerns up with the banker themselves?

There will always be scammers in the world, and they don't give a hoot whether any particular person thinks they're scammers. The best way to deal with them is to ignore them, and certainly not to give them prime time exposure on free-to-air television!

Ok, I get it. There's a target market for a news feed that is a stones throw from Today Tonight's trashy tabloid material. Ten News are welcome to sprinkle their television news show with updates on who has had a baby lately, or how many firefighters it took to get Snoogles down from the tree this time. There's a significant audience who enjoy their news service delivered that way.

There's a chance however, that there would be some in this audience that would be easily misled. If you're watching trash, then there's some expectation that truths may be bent in the pursuit of sensationalism. In the nightly news bulletin however, I think there is some expectation of integrity.

Which is why, after catching a story on Ten's late news one night, I'm very concerned about the blithe approach to informing the world that is being demonstrated. I faxed the following complaint through:

Towards the end of the news segment was a story about two men who have created a device, attached to their car, which when filled with water, would use the separated hydrogen and oxygen gases to improve fuel efficiency by 20%. Mention was made about their offer to install the device for some fee.

The device and associated installation business is quite clearly, to anyone familiar with physics, chemistry, car mechanics, current scams, or enough common sense, a con. The two men features in the article are without any doubt in my mind, contributors to a global scam to convince people to pay them for a product which simply cannot work (specifically, extraction of hydrogen and oxygen from water requires more energy than it makes available).

I fear, by broadcasting the story, Channel Ten is validating their scam and exposing many people to deception. Further, by promoting provably false statements, Channel Ten are promoting ignorance in their audience.

Apparently, by my faxing the complaint by the official channels and referring to the relevant Code of Conduct, the station is required to respond.

Sure enough, a few days later a letter arrived in the post:

Thank you for your recent letter regarding TEN Late News with Sports Tonight.

As your complaint relates to programming broadcast on a Network Ten affiliate station run by Southern Cross Broadcasting, I have forwarded your letter to their representative, Mr Barry Daley, who will respond to you directly.

That letter was dated 13th June, 2008. I'm yet to hear from Southern Cross and suspect they'd be keen to ignore it. A retraction now would be embarrassing and untimely, so I can only hope some extra thought is given to the integrity of the news stories that make it to broadcast news. It's bad enough that people are so deluded by the petrol price conspiracies that I get 50 copies of that ridiculous email about boycotting a particular petrol vendor forwarded to me, but if seemingly reputable outlets start backing the "car running on water" nonsense, it wont be long before there's a thousand emails and campaigns doing the rounds about beating the oil companies with a water device.

Some people aren't predisposed to doing their own thinking. That gives those that are a lot of work to do. Further, anytime one in a position of influence abuses their position, the pain for the rest increases.

I'd estimate there's about 60 hours of painting left to do on my house. Given that it is dark or dewy before and after work, I need approximately 5 weekends worth of painting to get it finished. When you take out soccer on Saturday and Sunday, it starts to become painfully clear why a rainy day puts an awful spanner in the works. A rainy Saturday can easily spoil the weekend, setting back the painting task by a week. And there's no guarantee the following week will be available for painting.

In the theme of the good work over at GraphJam the following relationship occurred to me as I find myself recovering after another week of rain.

It's also my first chance to play with iWork Numbers!

What did you do to celebrate the impending Olympic games back in 2000? Fly a flag? Paint yourself green and yellow? Nothing at all? Aussies aren't known for their outward patriotism, but if it were an event, I think the Americans would have some stiff competition.

Check out this fella, who's demonstrating his excitement for the Chinese games by sticking pins in his head. More than a few though. More like 2008 of them. In the Olympic colours no less. Beats Syd, Olly and Shithead any day, methinks.

The Americans however, will not be out done in creating new entries for Guinness and his big book. This shy lass would probably serve well as a mascot representing dedication and plentifulness. Though, sporting a pair of 9kg breasts might mean "Ms Mounds" is not the best icon of good health and agility.

Praise be to the boundary pushers, whatever their motivation may be.

This is part two of a two part series starting here. This post will actually address the content I intended to write about, before I got side-tracked by some weird bread roll story.

Here are some of the examples of the kind of out-of-touch arrogance I've seen in my recent experience with recruiters. Keep in mind that I have applied with these particular recruiters because employers of interest to me have decided to do their recruiting through their services:

Example One

Gemteq have decided that two chest baring female models are indicative of the service they provide. What better way to illustrative that you're all show and no substance? Gemteq are also superficial enough to adopt the title "Executive" while clearly "specialising" in a wide variety of generic, decidedly non-executive "temp" positions in call centres, retail and sales. Their "specialist" divisions in "IT&T Technical" have not however, managed to design a homepage without a massive ERROR frame in prime focus position.

Example Two

Every recruiter has their own version of the spiel about why their particular questionnaire is original and important, and how it better enables them to understand the candidate. After the third or fourth, it becomes clear that the questionnaires allow recruiters with zero specific domain knowledge of the technical aptitude indicators in a particular industry to perform vague pattern matching and check-boxing of hand-waving attitudes to work. I felt like a brain-dead monkey answering questions such as:

List your Australian Standards knowledge.
I've worked hard to memorise AS 2697-1990. Can I have a job manufacturing car jumper leads, over and over?

Internet skill and experience (include email).
What? You want to know my emailing experience?

Software development skills (for each language show competency level, use while studying or commercially and duration of part-time and full-time usage).
Well, for the C language there was 2.5 hours per night at a mediocre level but then 3 hours per day part-time at an excellent level, and then 2.5 years of use while studying, then full time for 6 months at a professional level. Then there's C++, Pascal, Objective-C, C#, Java...

What motivates you in your present position?
Nothing! I've resigned!

Describe some external factors that had a major impact on your career to date?
The price of coal has risen so my career has serviced a lot of coal mines? A friend suggested that perhaps the intention was to extract an admission that personal matters would cause me to skip work or something. Who really knows?

Power systems experience (please indicate voltage worked with)
Lots of 650 volt stuff but there's no way I'll ever understand that crazy 660 volt world.

PLC programming (include PLC brands)
Siemens. Please don't put me somewhere where they use Mitsubishi, my head will surely explode with the differences.

List application programs that you have strong commercial experience using
That's going to take some listing...

Example Three

A representative from AllStaff invited me in for an interview not, as he explained, to take up much of my time but just to get to know me to better present me to clients. This might have been a commendable aim, had he he allowed me to get a word in edgeways between him repeating how special his recruitment service was, how exclusive their clients are, and how since 1978 he's never not been given a position he has interviewed for. His success he explained, was regardless of the number of candidates going for the position, because he had taught himself how to sell himself. I wondered briefly what dimwits would employ such a shallow, technically vacuous, arrogant and time-wasting buffoon, and then simply resolved to never pursue a career where he had influence.

Example Four

Sometimes I wonder whether recruiters are finding me a job, or selling me penis enlargement pills.

Did you know that over 70% of vacancies are not advertised!?

This is the hidden job market, where if the right
person came along the employer would hire them.
With a few minutes of typing now, MACRO can help
you tap into this hidden market - for free!

Did you know that 78% of statistics are made up? Macro were full of this scammy sales pitch crap.

Example Five

Living in Newcastle, I applied for a job situated in Newcastle, and the recruiter, a representative from Manpower Professional, who have an office in Newcastle, called to confirm that I could meet him for a pre-application meeting at 8:30am on Monday morning in Woy Woy, over an hour's drive away. He succumbed to my hesitation, admitting that he could use my 6 page Manpower questionnaire to put my case forward for the position to gauge interest before requiring that I travel to Woy Woy.

This went nowhere until a couple of weeks later he called again to say that the company had put the process on hold temporarily, but were now keen to proceed. He again asked that I suggest a time for our meeting, and even offered to meet almost 10 minutes closer (still an hour away). I hesitated again, saying I'd contacted the company a while back and never heard anything, and that I had all but accepted a role already. He immediately changed tack, asking what my chosen company were offering. I indicated the rough salary on offer and he let out a little chortle, explaining that that was far too low and what he has to offer is far greater. The figure he suggested was indeed, far above anything I'd come across in some three months of investigation. So I asked him to send the job description through for me to review.

The requirements stipulated that "Tertiary Engineering Qualifications are desirable", "Minimum 3 years experience in project related disciplines" is necessary and that "Electrical design experience" is desirable. In other words, Mr Manpower is suggesting that the company is willing to pay far more than other roles I'm going for, for someone who is far less qualified than me. After months of dealing with recruiters, my bullshit detector was well and truly primed and I politely told Manpower man that things didn't quite add up. I'm yet to hear back.

Epilogue

Ultimately I am glad to be done actively communicating with recruiters. Most interaction events left me feeling dirty. There were exceptions - I met some genuine people who went out of their way for me.

Additionally, I think there is a very real, very specific need for a recruiting service: if a company is on the lookout for new talent, but is not in the position to maintain an active human resources search for a unspecified role, then employing the services of the right recruiter could well be a very smart move. It is the recruiter's role then to scan the field of job seekers, keeping an eye out for good matches on motivation, background, general ability and desires. Rather than matching on specific skills or experience, which can be completely satisfied by a plain old job advertisement, a recruiter can bring to a company's attention the kind of talent that may simply "fit". That sort of job placement is much harder to do with a traditional job advertisement, and seems to me to be the real role of a recruiting service.

In applying for engineering jobs over the last couple of months I've given my details to no less than 20 recruiters[1]. I've never dealt with recruiters before, and the experience has been eye opening.

To understand the motivation of a recruiter, it is worth considering how their role casts employees and employers into positions they are not used to. It has come to my attention that it is more illustrative to consider a recruiter as a provisioner of goods rather than a service provider. A recruiter provides a service only in the same sense that a bakery provides specialist access to bread. In the tricky world of recruiting however, the good is people like me. A recruiter works to sell me to an employer, who pays the recruiter for the acquisition.

It's not hard to see why an employer would shop at a recruiter - acquiring humans goods is a really tough task. Attracting talent a hit and miss affair, interviews are notoriously ineffectual at evaluating suitability, and vacancy advertising is expensive. Given that companies only function if people do good work, it is clear why sensible employers would consider going to the expert suppliers of human goods.

That leaves the relationship between recruiters and employees like me. Evidently I understand the need for recruiters. In fact, for me, the recruiter is providing a service for free! I only need to present my case for employability to a recruiter and then kick up the hells and relax, while the recruiter scans the job market, evaluates their network and finds a great match for me.

Except that's not how it works at all.

Fundamentally I am a bread roll at a bakery. If the bakery has a thousand customers who pay x dollars for looking for a hearty white roll, they are going to sell the hearty white rolls that have the 5 ticks of approval and are cheap to store. If the bakery has another roll also worth x dollars, that tends to be picky about who consumes it, it makes no business sense at all to work to sell that roll when there's a stack of hearty white rolls that sell for the same price. Even if the bakery finds a customer looking for that other roll, the one with the sesame seeds on top, there's only a certain amount of bending over backwards the baker is going to do to sell the roll. If that roll digs its crusty feet in, the baker has easier and more lucrative hearty white rolls to go on and sell.

So what's a person like me - a crusty sesame seed roll - to do? I want to get sold, and being of able mind and body, I put myself on the market. As already established, the consumers shop at bakeries, and it is to bakeries I go. Not every bakery knows the specifics of the sesame seeds on my roll, so for them to be able to sell me they need me to enter the poly-unsaturated fat content breakdown, or my seed chewability, or my resistance to oat bacteria, into their product register.

Up to this point the market forces are working - I'm a crusty, picky roll presenting myself on the shelves of the bakeries that the discerning customers shop at. Imagine however, that there are about equal number bakeries to customers. Suddenly each bakery is jealously protective of its customers. Suddenly the possibility of a crusty sesame seed roll being sold relies entirely on being available at the right bakery. Further, that roll needs to make sure it is completely devoted to offering itself to every bakery, has low on-going costs, and is easy to sell. Otherwise, if the bakery wants to make money, it will work hard at selling that which is modestly suitable and easy to move.

The analogy provides the background to my process of realisation in visiting recruiters. In recruiters we have a business selling a good. Their expertise lies in the selling of that good, not in the way that good is constructed. Recruiters are faced with a good that talks, that knows about its target market, that could in fact, communicate on a practical level with its customers. And therein lies my frustration with recruiters - in general I have found that they:

• Jealously guard their clients
• • Sure, without that exclusive relationship I'd be less motivated to sign up with recruiters, but the secrecy means I'm wasting time signing up with recruiters that may well have nothing that interests me.
• Have no expertise (or have tried and failed) in the work their candidates do.
• • I think the ideal role for recruiter would be as a mediator between me as an engineer and the human resource elements of the employer. The general lack of appreciation for the work an engineer does however, means most recruiters are entirely committed to salesmanship, rather than mediation.
• Push clients and candidates to make a sale rather than satisfy both.
• • Every recruiter had their own spiel about how special they were for working to satisfy employer and employee. Every recruiter that found a company willing to see me also bugged and pestered me to pursue that course without consideration of my own desires. The recruiter only gets paid if they place me, and that is therefore their primary concern.
• Consider themselves special for having contact with employers that any in-touch employee is already aware of.
• • Given their were maybe 10 high potential employers on my radar, and many more recruiters, I quickly become sick of each recruiter telling me how special they were to have direct links to company X. Despite how special that recruiter feels, I still need to sign up with every one just to get my resume in front of a wide variety of companies.
• Consider that their own particular generic, lengthy candidate questionnaire warrants full attention.
• • These questionnaires take time. A lot of time. That would be a mild frustration if it weren't for the fact that I'd already spent considerable time on my own resume and cover letters, and that the questionnaires invariably are vague and unintelligent.

Typically enough, this post has taken a path I did not plan. I'l save the original impetus for part two of this post, and conclude by saying that from meetings with 20-something recruiters, I had about 8 job interviews. 5 of those I set up myself through contacts in the industry. During this time my referees have been contacted zero times.

[1] While I'm doing a recap, it's worthwhile actually listing the recruiters I can find details of:

• Hays
• Hayden Recruitment
• Hudson
• EMA
• WorkPac
• Hunter Industrial Recruitment
• Davidson
• Macro Recruitment
• BSI People
• Personnel Concept
• Calibrate Recruitment
• Nizza
• AllStaff
• Manpower Professional
• Agile Consulting
• Forsythes
• Gemteq
• Executive Talent International
• Avantia
• Connect Personnel
• Interlogic

By some cosmically coincidental path, I recently stumbled across the blog of Marieke Hardy. The particulars of my journey there are lost amongst the feverish information consumption I partake in after my evening scotch, but the point is I've found a voice that engages me and a personality that somehow, I feel I identify with. Marieke can be heard regularly on JJJ radio, the radio station that also happens to represent a voice I cling to as a rare, consistent, genuine and intelligent beacon in amongst the petty clichés of mainstream media. I think that strangely appropriate combination of interests is the reason I'm not afraid to say, at 26 years of age, that I have a 14 year-old crush on Marieke.

I compare it to the crush of 14 year old not because I think it is immature, but because I think it is based entirely on ideals and not on personal connection. I've never met the lady, she's never heard of me, but I'm attracted to the way that she lays bare her identity to be consumed by those that are willing. Her candid, funny, unashamedly nerdy writing captures me in a unique way. Ultimately, this is the kind of writing I aspire to.

I see Marieke blithely lay out phrases like "You may even come a little in your pants", and surround it by considered expressions such as "Why not pick up a novel and ... become so engrossed in Carson McCullers' searingly dry prose" and compare it to my own stunted, emotionless efforts. When I write "the particulars of my journey there are lost amongst the feverish information consumption I partake in after my evening scotch" I feel it is conceited and contrived.

This blog is creative outlet I enjoy (it's contrasts well with the rigour of my primary passion, engineering), but I especially like that I get to look up to the unpolished writing of others and learn. Have a go at this gem:

Breaking a sweat is boring as fuck, but good for the brain. If you're able to balance William Boyd on the LED display thing or whatever the hell it is trying to convince you you're cycling through the Parisian streets, you are doubling the awesomeness pulsating through your receptors. That's right, cerebrovascular affairs are my specialty subject.

PS. Marieke's blog is anonymous, so just imagine that I said "Ms Fits" every time you thought you saw "Marieke".
PPS. I've been on a rather inspiring date tonight, hence the embarrassingly romantic post tonight.

Natural languages evolve without much consideration giving to logical consistency. Really, it's surprisingly that there are not more situations where the language we use corners us into lexical traps. Perhaps as we've grown with a developing language, we subconsciously accept that there is ambiguity in everything we say and that is why communication usually generates and relies on a relationship between deliverer and receiver.

Ambiguity had had no master however, until this gem came to light:

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher

That it has existed as a Wikipedia page for six months so far, with many edits along the way, leads me to believe that it is a phrase with some persistence, assumably in linguistics circles. Those linguists ay? Had they had other pursuits, we'd all be had. Hadn't we?