My employer, Corillian Corporation, has a few openings, including one for an employee to work on the IT Department's Help Desk. Maybe you'd be interested, or maybe someone you know would fit the bill?

Corillian is a Portland, Oregon-area software company, and IMHO it's a pretty darn nice place to work. Great challenges, great opportunity, and great people.

The IT Help Desk job is an entry-level or early-career position, working in the corporate IT department. The employee in this position acts as the point person for the company's internal help desk. Managing requests for service and basic Windows computer and network troubleshooting are the primary day-to-day job tasks. Excellent customer service skills and a customer-oriented, confident, on-your-game personality are critical. The company is looking for someone who can hit the ground running from a customer-service standpoint.

If you or someone you know is interested, time is of the essence - So email or call me and I will put you in touch with the hiring manager. My email is greg@greghughes.net and my office phone is 503-629-3771.

QA and Software Developer Positions: I am told that Corillian is also looking for QA and Software Engineers, so if you are what a leading-edge software company would consider a top performer in either of those areas, email or call me about those positions, too, and I will make sure you are put in touch with the right people. It'll be competitive, I can tell you that, so be prepared, but don't hold back.

Note: This post is my own, and is not a communication by or for my employer. I am just trying to make people aware of some opportunities that I happen to know about. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that if you get hired, depending on the position they might spot me a small bonus that would probably pay for a nice lunch or dinner for you and me. But don't count on it - and the help desk job reports under me in the organizational scheme, so I am not eligible for any bonus on that position. Phew! 

Nikon has announced that their cool new D2X digital SLR camera will be available on February 25th, and that it will sell for a "suggested" street price of $4999.00. Hook up a GPS device to record location data. Transmit data via WiFi. Remote control the camera. Instant-on and fast shutter response time of 37ms - great improvements for low-lag operation. Flash sync at 1/250th of a second. Awesome metering. Fast continuous shooting. All nice stuff.

But there's one thing that will keep me from even considering buying this camera. And it's not the price.

It's this bit of info, gleaned from the fine print in the spec sheet:

• Approx. 1.5x focal length in 35mm [135] format equivalent

Argh, no! I have to say, I was pretty darned surprised to find this hidden in the back of the specs list, especially since they are marketing the D2X as being capable of "5fps continuous shooting mode full size or 8fps in a 6.8MP cropped mode." Turns out the "cropped mode" means a 2x multiplier over 35mm equivalent, as opposed to non-cropped mode, which has a 1.5x multiplier.

Very sneaky. Very sucky.

At 12.4 megapixels and $5000, someone tell me why in the world camera manufacturers can't put a chip in the thing that will make it act like a real 35mm camera from the field-of-view/coverage perspective. I'd take lower effective resolution (say 8 megapixels or so?) and no multiplier at this point.

Believe it or not, to someone who was a film photographer for several years, this actually matters to me. Nothing aggravates me more about digital SLR cameras than an image that has a telephoto-style crop and a short-lens depth of field. I hate that. I have a D70 that does that. Don't get me wrong, for $1000 I like the D70 just fine. It's a consumer-grade camera, and sure I'd like it a heck of a lot more if it had a chip that would use the lens the way it was built to be used. But this camera is more than the D70 can dream of being.

So, if I am going to pay five times the cost for a better camera, put in a full-sized chip that uses the full field the lens was built to cover. Seriously.

Hey Nikon - Just so you know, I was actually ready to seriously consider spending $5000 on your new camera - but now I guess I'll just wait. Again.

John Pultorak decided to build a real, working replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer - the ones that were used in the actual Apollo spacecraft.

"This report describes my successful project to build a working reproduction of the 1964 prototype for the Block I Apollo Guidance Computer. The AGC is the flight computer for the Apollo moon landings, with one unit in the command module and one in the LEM.

"I built it in my basement. It took me 4 years."

What a great project. Building one of these looks to provide useful insight into the entire computer system, from top to bottom and beginning to end.

This is the computer that got the first people to the moon and back. And you can make one yourself. Now that's cool.

(via engadget.com)

"Louis is here with the weather..."

The painful, awful, terrible weather.

"Maybe Louis, you can tell us what we can expect for the rest of the week..."

If you're ever having one of those days where you feel like the clumsiest person on the face of the planet, just click the link above, and find comfort in the fact that someone, somewhere has almost certainly had a harder day than you.

(I recall my time in journalism school, which is almost certainly where this tape came from, and it could be brutal at times. Broadcast news performance is an art, and artists are few and far between).

The other day I decided to change to using passphrases instead of single passwords on my Windows accounts. Aside from the minor headache of having to remember I made the change at all, it's been a good thing.

That is, until today.

This afternoon I decided re-enable my wireless sync with my Exchange server on my Windows Mobile 2003 smart phone (Audiovox 5600). I had disabled it when I changed the password the other day, with plans to set it back up when I had time. So I went to enter the new passphrase on the mobile device, but no workie... Apparently, while Windows and Outlook and Exchange-HTTPS and pretty much everything else in the Windows world supports passphrases that include spaces, not so on Windows Mobile 2003.

Apparently you simply can't enter spaces in the password box on the smart phone.

So, I have a choice to make: I can either change back to using passwords in order to allow my Windows Mobile device to sync with Exchange (one step forward, two steps back), or I can stay with passphrases and leave my Windows Mobile device crippled (don't even get me started on that one).

Needless to say, I am not very happy with either option...

Anyone have a solution? Am I missing something here? Seems to me when you create a password interface, you'd support what the back end system allows you to use?

National Geographic: Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy

"Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal..."

Makes me uncomfortable when I think about it for more than ten seconds. Anyone else feel the same?