inluminent

I don’t know about the rest of you, but if you’re a blogger, you’re likely getting spammed by PR agencies. I know I am…

And so, in celebration of that fact, and hopefully, so I can make some money off the spam I receive, while also letting everyone know what the latest stupid Press Release I got was, I’m unveiling:

Unsolicited PR

Yep. It’s stupid, but simple…

And hopefully I’ll continue to get PR spam from stupid PR companies that aren’t paying attention to how they got my damned email address…

Ugh…

I use LinkedIn to advertise open positions in my company, but, I do it for free, instead of paying for them (we also use Craigslist and the University of Texas Access website for former graduates, since we’re in Austin). All of these options are free. Craigslist and UT Access are great sources of candidates. LinkedIn can be a good source for mid-senior level candidates, but more importantly, it’s a way of advertising your company’s growth or success to your peers, colleagues and associates. When people see your job ad, they usually think something like “Great, John’s company is hiring and growing… that’s awesome!” Posting a job on LinkedIn also gets me back in touch with people I haven’t had a chance or need to talk to in a while, which is an added bonus… as a sales person, there are reasons to talk to people that might be able to bring me business or vice-versa, but I might not be as good at keeping in touch as I should be all the time.

LinkedIn redesigned their website sometime in the past 6 months, and I found myself needing to post a job listing to send to my connections on LinkedIn last week. The old design made it easy to find with a “don’t want to pay now, send your job listing to your connections” call to action ad on the job posting page. With the new design I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to post a job listing for free. So this quick guide is for all of you looking to send a free job posting on LinkedIn to your connections:

1. Login to your account.
2. In the menubar at the top click on “jobs -> post a job”. This takes to you the “Compose a job” section of the “Hiring and Recruiting” section of LinkedIn.

3. Then “compose” the job you want listed.

4. Click “Save Draft” or “Next” it doesn’t matter* (hitting “Next” will save your job posting as a draft)

*I’m assuming it doesn’t matter, you just have to then make sure you don’t actually pay for the job posting on the next page if you click “Next”

5. Click on the “Manage Jobs” tab in the “Hiring and Recruiting” section (you should be there still)

6. On the right, click on “Distribute” next to the job you just posted as a draft.

7. From there, just select your connections and send the posting. Note: You are limited to a certain number of connections, so if you have more than that limit that you want to send the job to, you might have to do these last two steps (6 and 7) a couple of times to get your job sent out to all of your connections.

One note: if you have a lot of connections that aren’t in the same city as you’re hiring, and the job requires living in that city, or relocating… make sure you note that in your job posting. There’s nothing like having to disqualify the high-quality resumes you’ll get from LInkedIn because you didn’t take time to add that piece of information to the job posting.

Hope that helps. Good luck finding the right candidate through LinkedIn.

And yes, we’re hiring a Marketing Manager at my company: UnsubCentral. If you’re interested, or know someone in Austin that might be, contact us through this Craiglist posting, or my LinkedIn profile, if we’re connected.

Thanks!

Blatantly stolen from the internet:

#11. Those who have it would be devastated if it was ever cut off.
#10. Those who have it think that those who don’t are somehow inferior.
#9. Those who don’t have it may agree that it’s neat, but think it’s not worth the fuss that those who have it make about it.
#8. Many of those who don’t have it would like to try it, a phenomenon psychologists call E-mail Envy.
#7. It’s more fun when it’s up, but this makes it hard to get any real work done.
#6. In the distant past, its only purpose was to transmit information vital to the survival of the species. Some people still think that’s the only thing it should be used for, but most folks today use it mostly for fun.
#5. If you don’t take proper precautions, it can spread viruses.
#4. If you use it too much you’ll find it becomes more and more difficult to think coherently.
#3. We attach an importance to it that is far greater than its actual size and influence warrant.
#2. If you’re not careful what you do with it, it can get you into a lot of trouble.
AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON WHY E-MAIL IS LIKE HAVING A PENIS:
#1. If you play with it too much, you can go blind.

This isn’t my whole schedule for AdTech, but it is my plan for the conference sponsored things:

http://adtech-sf08.sched.org/johnengler

I’ll also be working our booth on the trade show floor. Look for me, if you’re there.

This is really cute:

I can’t believe a little girl that’s only 2 years and 8 months old can sing The Lord’s Prayer from start to finish so well. Just adorable.

My wife was trying to print something the other night, and she was complaining that the printer was broken. I figured out what the problem was for me, so I’m posting this in case others have the same sort of problem (the answers I found on the web weren’t all that readable, and I spent a good ten minutes reading bits and pieces of answers to piece them all together).

So, I trudged down to the office to check it out, and sure enough, it wasn’t printing.

It was giving me an odd error that I wasn’t used to… and said something to the effect of:

Error 5100: Please turn the power off on this unit and turn it back on, and if you still have problems consult the User Manual.

So, I turned it off, and then back on again, and tried to print. Same error.

So, off to Google I went (we got this printer three years ago, and I couldn’t begin to tell you where the user manual is).

I searched Google for canon pixima 1600 error 5100

And I read this results page, which looked helpful:

FixYourPrinter.com: Canon i550 Service Error 5100

And another results page that took me to a Yahoo! Answers page, which was only midly helpful.

Long story short, something was likely wrong with the printer carriage bar… or something was jammed that was causing the print head to not advance all the way across the bar like it should.

I totally believed that, knowing that I have a 3 year old that is most-likely playing with the printer from time to time when we aren’t looking.

So, I opened up the front cover, and sure enough, the print cartridges weren’t seated well, and one of them was hitting the underside of the cover about three-quarters of the way across.

So, I re-seated all of them, and then turned the printer off and on again, and did a nozzle-check print test. It printed fine. So, back to the computer to resume the print job, and viola… no more printer error.

On those other results pages, they mention things like “cleaning the carriage bar” or “checking for stuff jammed in the printer” so, if reseating your printer cartridges doesn’t work, keep looking for things that would cause the printing head carriage (the thing the print cartridges sit in) to not function properly.

Good luck.

This is a powerful video:

By the way, is everyone else consuming more and more video online, or is it just me?

Love it!

Dear Abby,

I am a 60-year-old woman who is married to a man who acts like he hates me. In public, he pretends he loves me and talks about how wonderful I am.
But in private, he shakes his finger in my face and calls me the “B” word.  He constantly tells me how ugly I am without make-up. I’ve tried everything, including a face-lift, botox treatments, and a chin tuck. I even went on a diet and lost 20 pounds.
   
He quit his job a few years ago after having an affair with a woman in his office. He hasn’t even looked for another job. We haven’t slept together since I confronted him about the affair. He denied it, of course, but everybody knew it. It was humiliating. I believe he is still messing around.
 
While we both want to sell this house, we argue constantly about when to put it on the market. The house we want will be available in a few months. My husband wants to put our house on the market now. I think we should wait a while. He has already started collecting boxes and packing up his stuff.
 
Do you think he is planning to leave me?
 
    
Signed,
Worried in NY

---

     
Dear Worried in NY:
 
I doubt it.
     
He wants to move back into the White House as much as you do.
 
Abby

I have an issues with Apple’s new MagSafe power cords. Specifically - they suck.

I have had to purchase four power cords for my MacBook Pros over the past twelve months or so… why? Because the stupid connection between the cable running up to the connector and the connector comes apart. And when you touch that connection while the connector is connected to the laptop, the damn thing shocks me. Why is that? Why does the connector shock me? Why can’t Apple make a proprietary connector that doesn’t crap out on me?

Also, the plane adaptor doesn’t seem to actually keep my laptop from losing power? Witness the phenomenon with the screenshot below:

In that screenshot, you can tell I’m watching a movie, and a “power adapter” is attached, but the battery is “Not Charging” … and the batter is at “92%” what you can’t tell is that the battery was a 100% about 30 minutes before that screenshot was taken. Why is that Apple? Why isn’t your airplane adapter actually keeping me from losing battery power?

Here’s another screenshot from the Airplane Adapter, just so you know this isn’t a one-time occurence: