My First Experience With Head-Hunters

I'm looking for work, and I've signed up on a plethera of websites and so I get lots of calls from placement firms . . . a.k.a. head hunters. Today I had my first encounter with these headhunters and it was wierd. Technically I'm not supposed to say who they are or who the firm they will place me with is . . . so i'll tell you exactly what he told to me about the firm I am to be placed in: it's either CBS or NBC or ABC and it's owned by GE . . . yeah, have fun unraveling that riddle.

Just for the record . . . I am not a graphic designer, or a web-designer, My specialties are administering LAMP and writing rich web-applications with scripting languages, not designing the look and feel of things. I don't have anything against designers persay, it's just that I don't have the talent for that kind of thing, my talent lies elsewhere.

So the conversation went quite well at first, we talked shop, salary, relocation benefits, regular benefits etc, and skills: he was pleased with my DHTML, AJAX, PHP, XHTML and CSS skills. Then things get interesting . . . the job requires Dreamweaver. Now I have used Dreamweaver . . . once, literally once, but it was in a production environment, so I guess that has to count for something. I conveyed this to him, and he says:

"Well it says here 'knowledge of Dreamweaver' you have knowledge, not experience but knowledge."

ok, I guess, but then it requires photoshop, which i have used . . . twice, and I tell him this and the same exact thing happens. So here we are, with my resume way over-beefed up, but it gets worse. I send him my resume (which he already has), and he proceeds to go through and edit every title on the thing to XHTML/CSS developer, as opposed to what I actually did. I tolerate this, because I did use XHTML/CSS in all these jobs, but i mean, that's really not the point.

So I'm sick of this before I've even had my telephone interview . . . and it's only a 5 month deployment. I have to question ABC, NBC or CBS (owned by GE i remind you) for choosing this type of firm, and hope that this isn't indicative of all placement firms.

Festival: Making Your Scripts Speak

I was just reading through some old issues of SysAdmin magazine, of which I am a subscriber, and I came accross a cool article entitled: "Making Your Monitoring Speak." The basic premise of this article is that this guy wrote a python script that had his servers make a phone call to his cell, and actually speak the problem to him. His script uses the festival text to speech converter, which is available for linux and OS X (it comes standard on Ubuntu . . . awesomely enough). If you have a mac, don't bother, the mac "say" program is vastly superior to festival, so just use that instead. I've been playing around with this . . . (notably because having your computer say dirty things to you is just one of those things that doesn't get old . . . ever . . . i'm seriously) . . . only with BASH and not python:


#!/bin/bash
########################################
## talktome.sh
##
## An example script using festival
########################################
SPEECH="Good morning Dave."

## on linux
echo $"SPEECH" | festival --tts

## on mac
#say $"SPEECH"

exit 0


The reason we use echo/pipe with festival, is that when festival is run with the --tts (text-to-speech) option, it can only take a text file or STDIN as it's input, whereas say takes a string as it's argument. If you want to make an audio file you can use texttowave utility that comes with festival . . . which will convert from text to wave, and then just use LAME or your favorite audio encoder to re-encode the audio if you so desire.

Enjoy!