Apple and Planned Obsolescence

The story so far; We purchased the iPad 1 when it first came out(May 25, 2010 to be exact and bought the most expensive model too...$1049.00 after the extended support and tax! Because I was trying to future-proof the purchase...nice.) We have a second generation Apple TV and were planning on giving them both to my mother-in-law so she would have a simple method for email, web and games. Also, with our Apple ID and Photo Stream, she gets our pictures automatically too. But with iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, we can set up shared Photo Streams, which will be better for a couple of reasons. One, so we don't have to leave her with our password(App updates) and so she won't have to get all 4 blurry shots and 1 good one. And just in case I take any inappropriate photos, like naked bicycle day in San Francisco...old fat guys and their weenies...funny to post on Facebook, but not so much so for Mom.

So the problem; iPad 1 is already obsolete and won't be getting iOS 6. And I just updated Apple TV which killed Photo Stream. The published solution is to open Settings-->iCloud on your iOS device and accept the new terms that will pop up. But the new terms aren't popping up and I suspect that they won't on the iPad since it won't be getting iOS 6. And the solution I suspect, is to upgrade our iPhones, but because the maps issue has not been ironed out, we have been holding off.

So because we have iPhones(version 4) we will probably be able to solve this once we upgrade.

BUT, if Mom had only bought an iPad and Apple TV she would now be out of luck! Now for older folks who are retired and have a fixed income, rushing out to buy the latest iPad at 1G a pop is a lot of money. And no way am I jailbreaking it.

Hopefully, they will fix this soon, but in the meantime I submitted a bug report and encourage anyone who also has this problem to do likewise:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

UPDATES:

October 1, 2012 - Created a new Apple ID for Mom. Had to login via iTunes to activate the account to work on Apple TV. Also had to login with that same account for iCloud services on her account on my MacBook to accept the new terms of service. Not sure if it would all work if I had logged into iTunes on the iPad and iCloud on iPad. Now we have to upgrade to iOS 6 and Mountain Lion on our Macs to use the shared Photo Stream feature. Mom is all set now that the Apple TV and the iPad are using her new ID.

Also, upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 6 to set up a shared Photo Stream. While it's not as convenient as having just one Photo Stream, having the extra control never is. (Grammar note: While 'is' is not a preposition, and it is pretty well accepted that my use of it here is ok...I still cringe a little.)


October 2, 2012 - So the shared photo streams work only on devices that support them. For some reason I thought that if the ID we used for Mom was the one we shared our Photo Stream with, they would just show up in her Photo Stream. Not the case. On the Apple TV the photos show up, but on the iPad with iOS 5 they do not. You can't tell me that to implement this on a piece of hardware as simple as a slightly older than 2 years old tablet is too difficult. So our work around without buying her the latest iPad, will be to periodically login to her account on my laptop to allow the shared Photo Stream photos to import to her native ID Photo Stream. So she will have duplicates on the Apple TV(one for her Photo Stream and one for the shared Photo Stream) and all the photos on the iPad. She hasn't been using the Apple TV at all anyway, so we might not leave that with her. We will start introducing her to it like we did with the iPad and see how it goes. She uses the iPad daily for games, but never looks at her email. Probably better that way...I would love to not be a slave to email.

Talentburst - Recruiter spammers

I keep getting emails from Talentburst about positions I am neither interested in or qualified for(DBA 6 month contract in MA?)...a total of 14 in the last 6 months(and rising.) I did reply to the first one earlier this year and received no response. When I received the same email a couple of weeks ago, I went to their site(www.talentburst.com) and found the only email listed on their contact page as sales@talentburst.com and info@talentburst.com as a mailto link on every page. So I emailed them asking if Naveen Sharma was for real and of course received no response. Coincidentally the email address they are sending these to is my Monster email alias, and the founders of Talentburst all came from Monster.

Also they list 5 offices(CA, MA, Singapore, India and Canada) yet they only have one phone number with a 508 area code.

The whole thing seems fishy to me, and then when I did a search I found this site which confirmed my belief that they are spammers.

http://recruiter.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/dear-spamming-recruiter-really-does-this-ever-work/

And this:

http://lists.lugod.org/pipermail/vox-jobs/2011-September/001212.html


So here are the Talentburst recruiters I have received spam from:

Naveen Sharma naveen.sharma@talentburst.com
Neha Sharma neha.sharma@talentburst.com
Mukesh Sangwan mukesh.sangwan@talentburst.com
Bijoy Deb bijoy.deb@talentburst.com
Vinay Dabas vinay.dabas@talentburst.com


In my opinion these guys are not legit. I am posting this so anyone searching for information on Talentburst will hopefully find this and avoid dealing with them.

Updates:

July 17, 2012 - Just got another one for "Automation QA Engineer (Native Chinese Language" from Bijoy Deb

July 26, 2012 - "Finance Feed quality/tools Engineer" from Naveen Sharma

August 6, 2012 - "Service Engineer ;Sunnyvale,CA ; YAHOO ID-:14054" from Naveen Sharma

August 14, 2012 - "Data Product Support ; Sunnyvale,CA ; YAHOO ID-:14231" from Naveen Sharma

August 16, 2012 - "Senior Software Engineer ;Sunnyvale,CA ; YAHOO Job ID-: 14320" from Naveen Sharma

August 17, 2012 - "Sr. Build/Release Engineer ;Santa Clara,CA ; YAHOO Job ID-: 14344" from Naveen Sharma

August 22, 2012 - "Backend Development ;Santa Clara,CA ; YAHOO ID-: 14340" from Naveen Sharma

September 4, 2012 - "Requirement for Linux Engineer (RHEL Porting) at Sunnyvale, CA" from Vinay Dabas

September 11, 2012 - "Requirement for Unix / Linux Engineer at San Francisco, CA" from Vinay Dabas -- This is a position I used to hold (and the previous is close as well), so they aren't as egregious as the others but because of all the other emails from Talentburst, this ends up flagged as spam...EXACTLY why recruiters shouldn't blast out the other emails!)

Update September 14, 2012:

I guess Naveen Sharma jumped ship and is now at Artech Information Systems, another one that uses the same tactics.

Naveen Sharma Naveen_Sharma@artechinfo.com

September 14, 2012 - "Unix/Linux Administrator ;Santa Clara, CA ;Yahoo ID-:14446" from Naveen Sharma

San Francisco

I'm now in San Francisco, CA. My hands on skills are atrophied, so finding the right position is going to take some time. In the meantime, I am looking for a patent office* job so I can focus on personal and career development without becoming consumed; along the lines of a 40 hour work week in a position that I am overqualified for, so that I can focus on building my skill set and also develop some side projects I have been working on.

Of course I am always open to new opportunities, so if you have one that you think might pique my interest and/or can benefit from my background, please let me know.



*While I am no Einstein, I agree with the logic of working in a position that doesn't consume all my energy, creative or otherwise.

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/early3.htm:

"Finally he got a position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. It was "a kind of salvation," he said. The regular salary and the stimulating work evaluating patent claims freed Einstein. He now had time to devote his thought to the most basic problems of physics of his time, and began to publish scientific papers."

Sample network diagram

Super simple sample of an OmniGraffle network diagram

Back in CA

Well, after a 2 year hiatus in TX attending to family matters, I am back in SoCal! My wife and I made the best of El Paso, but there is nothing like being back home in California.

I am aggressively searching for work, so I will be posting much more until I find something. I enjoyed Facebook for a while, it was a great link to all our friends while we were in the desert. But due to privacy issues and a general boredom with the site, I have migrated to Google+. I still have my account open, but not for long. I intend on sending everyone a message that they can find me on Google+ and then pull the plug. I haven't tried Diaspora yet, but it is on the todo list.

Peace

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I highly recommend this book if you find yourself on a tech project that involves software engineering, managing one or wondering why the hell your product has not been launched yet. This book was first published in 1975 so the technology references are rather outdated.

I first read this book in 2005 and was surprised that many of the mistakes made some 30 years prior were being made all over again on the projects I was involved with at my employer at the time. Actually quite disheartened to the point that it was clear we were on a death march if things didn't change drastically.

If you aren't into or don't have the time to read the book, you can find a decent summary at WikiPedia.

The full quote featured in the title is as follows:

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

--George Santayana, The Life of Reason (Great Books in Philosophy)

Free Will

"How--how did I get here?"
"It would take another Earthling to explain it to you,
Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event
is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved
or avoided. I am a Tralfamdorian, seeing all time as you
might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all
time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or
explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and
you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."
"You sound to me as though you don't believe in free will," said Billy Pilgrim.
--
"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings,"said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was
meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets
in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, page 82.